Friday, September 12, 2008

Center of the World

A few years back, Wayne Wang made the film with this title, which I found surprisingly out of character. As a woman, I found it difficult to watch -- horribly icky yet brilliant at the same time. It had the certain mark of a good film: it stayed with me for a long time and has become part of that collection (admittedly rather extensive in my case) of films that represent how I reference the world. It's part of the human condition, of course, that we are all the centers of the universe to our own selves (how else to explain the explosion of blogs, for example!?) It's fundamental to our survival as a species. But we are also social creatures and despite how much we might try to kid ourselves, we just weren't designed, for example, to sleep alone. How to make it past that self-centeredness to the sweet synergy that lies beyond, well, that's really the question. It requires a blind leap of faith, a launching into the void...

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