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An Insurrection of Feeling

I had the opportunity to see Brit Marling, creatrix and star of the the cinematic novel The OA, in conversation with E. Alex Jung as part of Vulture fest last weekend. It was phenomenal to see Brit interviewed by someone who understands her work and doesn’t feel the need to back her into a manic pixie dream corner about the more esoteric and charismatic aspects of her creative output. **This piece contains moderate spoilers about season 1**

A preoccupation with the unseen.

Jung started out by asking Brit about what seemed like unintentional spiritual content-- unintentional because her interest lies, according to her, in the unseen. Whether one uses science or spiritual practice to approach the unseen seems, to her, secondary to the curiosity that leads to an engagement with unknowing. The tension between science and spirituality as methods of investigation rather than beliefs to take on blind faith is a huge aspect of Marling’s entire body of work, from movies like Another Earth and I, Origins to The Sound of My Voice and most recently and thoroughly, The OA. Part of what might enrage people about the endings of Marling’s stories is the refusal to give a definitive version of what “actually” happened. In doing this, she said she hopes to point to something “viscerally true.”

Love it or hate it, that visceral quality to the OA, to it’s embracing of radical sincerity, is palpable. During the conversation, Jung showed some clips from The OA he’d cued up for the talk. It was wild to me that even though I’ve seen the climactic cafeteria scene upwards of 20 times, it still gave me chills for the duration of its being on screen. For some people, that felt sense is one of cringing, that raw feeling of needing to move away from the stimulus. Through some body-based meditation practices I’ve learned to lean into the cringe, to not shy away from it. And I think, in that space created and held by a work like The OA, I feel myself connect with that truth that lies outside of the binary did this happen or not? “Who could be so bold as to say that they know?” said Marling.

This reminds me of Keats’ concept of “negative capability.” -- that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason -- I learned this term before I started practicing Buddhism, in the context of a poetry workshop. We needed, as poets, Anne Waldman taught us, to be able to entertain entirely contradictory ideas without succumbing to the need to grasp for solidity. Because life is not, in fact solid. It is in constant flux. The dance between mystery and rationality is dynamic and constant and if we choose to engage it actively, we can navigate this great strange experience of being embodied. “Quantum physics is our best stab at the foundation of what’s going on but eventually every model becomes a fable,” Marling said.

An Insurrection of Feeling

When asked how she would describe the show in a pitch meeting, we all laughed, and then Brit said: “A traumatized girl returns to the suburbs and stirs up an insurrection of feeling - permission to move bodies in weird, uncomfortable and cathartic ways.” She spoke of wanting to craft an antidote to cinematic violence, and the 5 movements become such a curative force in a very material way in the narrative of The OA. “Is there a way to be in your body, and move with the body, that could be awkward but could also serve as a kind of connective tissue between the people doing it?” Story so often acts as such a cohering factor, but language so often causes us to collapse possibility into solidity. Movement, she said tapped into something much more visceral. Where a story can be a bridge between subjectivities, language as a technology still always leaves something out. Something about the way a traumatized woman came into an intuitive sense of the body driven by desire for escape provided a much more instant hit of feeling.

Marling described Phyllis as a tiger protecting her cubs, and I remembered the book Waking the Tiger, which is a groundbreaking book on trauma by Peter Levine, which explores the idea of trauma being trapped in the body because the same fight flight or freeze impulse that impacts animals under threat of death happens to humans but when we have no natural way to discharge it, it becomes lodged, and we become fixated. We circle around the trauma, drawing similar events into our life as a way to give ourselves a chance to finally discharge that energy in the body. So, a traumatized woman, through the magic of guardian angels or intuition or some kind of magic of place develops a language of movement that not only allows her to escape harm but is a gift she can give, a permission to a group of floundering young boys limited by society’s conceptions of what masculinity has to mean.

The human mind has a beautiful capacity for storytelling. It’s how we make sense of the world. The key, I think, as a meditator and a creative person, is to know when our mind is telling a story that we have naturalized and are living inside of. That way we can become more flexible with the stories we choose. As one of my favorite teachers, the Venerable Robina Courtin says, choose the stories that help you connect with other people and that help you build character. And if we can bridge the subjectivities of enough people through this technology of storytelling, we can, as Marling puts it, tell our way out of cultural trauma, like Scheherazade.

At the end of the conversation Jung and Marling joked that the event, on a Sunday morning, was a bit like church. I think we could all probably use such a sanctuary-- a place where we can investigate the things considered unseen or intangible but which we know provide the very foundations of our lives. Not to the exclusion of the seen and the known, but as a dynamic and unexpected, visceral dance.

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