Isolation

So look, I’m way behind in my Oscar viewing, and there are some nominees that just don’t interest me. And I don’t actually know what all the nominees are, when you get right down to it, about. But I watched If I Had Legs I’d Kick You the other day, and after I got over my shakes, I got deep into thinking about how isolated Linda was. I mean, no one was there for her. Even though she had to steal what time alone she had, she was still completely isolated in a way that doesn’t often get explored in movies. And then I watched Elio with my daughter, and then I started thinking.

It’s not as though there are no communities in the movies I’ve watched thus far. There are a lot of them. Fan communities, actual families, found families, neighbourhoods. But either they aren’t enough or they are in some way being destroyed. The people in these movies are lost, abandoned, attacked. They are trapped or pushed away. Someone, somewhere, doesn’t want them to have what they seek, or else they themselves have pulled away from it.

Sinners shows a community. But it’s a community in peril. There are parallel forces working to destroy it—the natural and the supernatural. The villain may think he’s building a community, may think that’s his goal, but he’s destroying one that was already there to do it. And I mean, they’d already had to fight like hell to create what they had. These were people who had survived so much, and when the movie ends, what are they left with?

Oh, it’s not all unhappy endings. Rumi and Elio have the advantage of being in family movies. But they both spend much of their respective family movies alone, sure that they’re never going to find anyone who really cares about them for themselves. Elio has lost his parents; Rumi’s situation is even more complicated than that. But even though they are both surrounded by people, they are both alone in ways that form the basis of their respective movies.

Guillermo del Toro has always explored isolation, and Frankenstein is an obvious tool for that. But his version of the story heightens things. Victor is alone. The creature, obviously, is alone. Elizabeth is alone. And in theory they could help one another, but in practice the way they are alone prevents them from reaching out. Victor is trapped in his obsession, and his inability to act outside it—especially, Gods forbid, take responsibility for his actions—brings everything to its inevitable conclusion.

Various of the shorts that I’ve seen. A swimmer who survives the Holocaust. A poor boy and a girl who cries pearls. A man who can only envision a life after he retires. An entire society where kissing is punishable by death. These are people who are alone. Even the animated short I didn’t much care for has a tree trying to make a connection.

And A Perfect Neighbor shows us the consequences of what isolation can lead to. You don’t reject your community. You don’t shut yourself off. If you reject community, you trap yourself. There is no community without people, and you can’t limit people by Us and Them. There is no Them. There is only Us, and I think the Academy might be trying to make that point with this year’s nominees. Or perhaps it’s the point that filmmakers are trying to get across and the Academy is merely swept along with it.