You know what it's like when you're 15 or 16 years old - it's tough, you hate everybody, everybody (you think) hates you, you get weird and momentary crushes and imagine endless ways to escape from where you are. Or maybe that was just me.
Back in the late 1970s BBC2 used to show foreign films (with subtitles! On a Saturday night! Now everything is a grim variation on the Murdoch press - quiz shows and action movies and sports) - films such as Angi Vera, The Lacemaker, Messidor, The Year of the Hare and - yes, The Indians Are Still Far Away. In those days I had an unreasonable crush on Isabelle Huppert (I lived in the countryside and didn't get to meet many people - or indeed any people - or indeed real people) and in this film she plays a character, Jenny, who lives with her Grandmother. (Bear with me. I haven't seen this film since about 1978 but it still sticks in my mind.) Jenny finds modern life trivial and irritating and western consumerist society to be unremittingly grim - yes, we know. It is still is. Nothing much has changed really except the ability to kid myself it's bearable... Anyway, she is very attracted to the (American) Indian way of life which (perhaps romantically) she sees as more authentic than being, say, a wage slave. So she goes into a wood in the winter and freezes to death - just like the Indians did when they felt life was not worth living. It seems naive now - the Indians hunted the buffalo almost to the point of extinction (I read this somewhere - if it isn't true just let me know) so the idea of humans living in perfect harmony with nature is just generally bull****. But the film did affect me a lot - this theme (western society as decadent, capitalism as soulless) was common in films such as Messidor and Year of the Hare made around the same time. But what can you do? I must confess I did seriously consider Jenny's plan to kill myself in a similar way, but I didn't like the idea of waking up with severe frostbite and having to have my hands and feet amputated. Perhaps drinking alcohol would help or would it just arrest the process? God knows. In the words of Dorothy Parker: Might as well live.
Back in the late 1970s BBC2 used to show foreign films (with subtitles! On a Saturday night! Now everything is a grim variation on the Murdoch press - quiz shows and action movies and sports) - films such as Angi Vera, The Lacemaker, Messidor, The Year of the Hare and - yes, The Indians Are Still Far Away. In those days I had an unreasonable crush on Isabelle Huppert (I lived in the countryside and didn't get to meet many people - or indeed any people - or indeed real people) and in this film she plays a character, Jenny, who lives with her Grandmother. (Bear with me. I haven't seen this film since about 1978 but it still sticks in my mind.) Jenny finds modern life trivial and irritating and western consumerist society to be unremittingly grim - yes, we know. It is still is. Nothing much has changed really except the ability to kid myself it's bearable... Anyway, she is very attracted to the (American) Indian way of life which (perhaps romantically) she sees as more authentic than being, say, a wage slave. So she goes into a wood in the winter and freezes to death - just like the Indians did when they felt life was not worth living. It seems naive now - the Indians hunted the buffalo almost to the point of extinction (I read this somewhere - if it isn't true just let me know) so the idea of humans living in perfect harmony with nature is just generally bull****. But the film did affect me a lot - this theme (western society as decadent, capitalism as soulless) was common in films such as Messidor and Year of the Hare made around the same time. But what can you do? I must confess I did seriously consider Jenny's plan to kill myself in a similar way, but I didn't like the idea of waking up with severe frostbite and having to have my hands and feet amputated. Perhaps drinking alcohol would help or would it just arrest the process? God knows. In the words of Dorothy Parker: Might as well live.
