GOING NOWHERE: Voyage and Experience in Quarantine

alone in a room; The Girlfriend Experience

Sudden, desperate, life-affirming hugs occupy the close of two films I watched early on in the shutdown. 

They tell the truth; we live alone, we die alone, but we can grab onto another person, and we radically embrace our closed path.

Voyage to Italy (Viaggio in Italia),1954, chronicles a married couple close to demise.  Sanders and Bergman are middle-aged and wedded for years. They set out to escape each other, on a trip along Italy's coast.  Scenes vacillate from pitted alienation of the two in a car and the couple roaming in and out of each other's immediate space; always an arm or two apart at cocktail parties. 

Scenes inside the car consist of dead spaces in between conversation, resentful glances and an uncanny way for a couple  to instigate forward motion as the metal confines them.  Time feels thick and air outside the windows teases of freedom.

There is a sudden air of exploration as, once in Italy, they  (primarily she, in solo outings) wander off-road sites; gazing at petrified faces from Pompeii and other victims of history and time.    In the scenes of the couple bickering in crisis there was a lack of truly seeing or hearing one another; every action seemed bent on reactive emotions.  Here, at Pompeii, among tombs of dead, the act of looking stirs a radical shift of consciousness.
The traveling couple meets eyes, but of the dead, not of each other.  The stare disturbs some veneer that separates the face and the heart.  The dead are not just immobile but petrified; frozen at the time in which they entered death. A look of recognition and warning bores through the visiting pair.

The Girlfriend Experience, 2009, details the experience of simulated lifestyle and love that capital can afford.  The experience is of a moment in time; the bubble of the early aughts; a surge about to burst, and performed intimacy, leading to a larger performative experience of personality and love and the confusion regarding which is more material. 

  The looks in TGE are not quite of shared recognition but of the attempt to perform it, or  the desperate hope to find it. 

Misplaced faith in belief systems is at the crux of Sanders and Bergman's marital crisis. Is monogamy and lifelong love still something to believe in midcentury? Figures and numbers populate the value system of TGE. "You know how I am about my numbers", which is that she can no longer discern the distinction between real and performed value, between real meaning and pure narrative concoction.  Escort Chelsea (Sasha Grey)'s belief system is comparable to the zodiac, wherein her emotional ties and patterns are reinforced and validated by correlating numbers (numerology meets astrology, described as personology by Chelsea).  Her love ideals and career goals are lofty and seemingly spiritual, yet on both sides her relationships lack an actualization.  There is physical togetherness but the touches are dispassionate; as calculated as the moves of the traders and entreperneurs she beds.  To Chelsea, numbers and dates hold the potential of connection that seems lacking in her; pupils distilled, gaze slightly askew.  Her eyes sit idle, as if on a separate person.  The unstable value of numbers and signs is  evident here as in the bulk of her clientele; all suffering the financial fallout of 2008-2009.  

 Just as their eyes' immersion into scenes of history shock and free Bergman and Sanders' characters from their inability to connect, the eyes of Chelsea tell a story of disconnect and the consistent attempt to break through into real connection, though her life is also constructed around the work of performing connection when it is not there.

These films testify that all that remains in this world that is real and worthwhile is the moment of sudden expression through physical contact, be it naked skin on skin, or clothed tightly grasped hug, to break through our walls that alienate us from feeling and seeing one another.

Voyage to Italy Finale: Bergman and Sanders embrace at last, in a crowd

TGE 's final performed sex act-  a meaningful near naked embrace of two lonely players