Canadian Psycho

Although moving pictures had been around since the 19th Century, sound did not accompany them until the late 1920s. Today, we expect a movie to be a full audio-visual experience. The soundtrack can decide the effectiveness of a scene; good choices can amplify the emotions of the moment, whereas bad ones just seem silly. It was in keeping this in mind that, in The Hours, I was seriously surprised by the soundtrack as Laura's story carries out. It felt like at any moment, the film was going to turn psycho. Was she going to stab somebody trying to make the cake? Was she going to crash the car? The music keeps the tension high with all of her scenes.

In fact, all of her scenes' music reminded me of this scene in Kill Bill:

Here, we have a lady with an eye patch whistling as she walks into a hospital. As she enters the restroom, the music starts to pick up behind her. As she gets dressed, the music becomes more intense. As she fills a syringe with a strange red substance, the horns blast. She walks out of the restroom, now donning a stereotypical nurses' outfit, no longer whistling, but the music plays on. A storm is brewing outdoors, as she looks in on some patient's room. Thanks to the music, we know she is no ordinary nurse. Despite the facade (and eerie red cross eye patch) she wears, she is actually there to do something very sinister. Of course, it is revealed she is there to assassinate the patient who she used to work with, but that is irrelevant. The music sets up the scene perfectly; something is amiss with eye patch lady.

As we watch through The Hours, we can see what the dramatic music is building towards. Instead of some freaky moment where Laura murders her husband or harms Richard or anything, she is progressing towards the point where she tries to kill herself. But, the intense music follows her even after she doesn't go through with it. When she returns to talk with Clarissa about Richard's death, the music returns as she gives her monologue about why she left. Even though she had acted out the craziness all that time ago, she had never fully escaped it, signified by the way everything seemed just... off about her, in both her first and last scenes. Behind her facade of an ordinary housewife lives a deeply unhappy woman, and our main clue is the music behind it. Sound raises powerful emotions, and the music in The Hours suitably piqued mine in severely bizarre ways.

The Center of the Universe (Is Not in London)

In Mrs. Dalloway, we constantly see characters make assumptions about each other. Clarissa says she can judge the character of a person just by looking at them; Peter frequently claims to know by feel Clarissa's intentions; and the first time we even see Septimus he is freaking out because he thinks everybody is looking at him. This isn't inherently a bad thing; it can sometimes be used for good. Clarissa's gut feelings about people are usually confirmed by her friends (Peter says something to the extent that she was always a good judge of character). Peter has known Clarissa for a long time, and even if he is not right he can still push Clarissa to do better in a situation. But it's troublesome when these assumptions directly drive people's feelings and actions.

Let's take a look at the scene between Clarissa and Miss Kilman when Elizabeth and Miss K are getting ready to go to the Army and Navy Stores. We already know Clarissa has built up a whole backlog of feeling against Miss Kilman, that she more or less hated the very idea of her. I can't find the passage now, but I think Clarissa even said at one point that she thought Miss Kilman wore her mackintosh to flaunt her poorness and make Clarissa feel bad (at another point Miss Kilman defends it, saying, "First, it was cheap; second, she was over forty, and did not, after all, dress to please" (120)). That's pretty ridiculous, though; how can you assume something so simple as clothing is meant as an attack on you?

But, Clarissa is able to dispel her assumptions. We see as Miss Kilman is starting to leave that Clarissa can see through them: "Odd it was, as Miss Kilman stood there ..., how, second by second, the idea of her diminished, how hatred .. crumbled, how she lost her malignity, became second by second merely Miss Kilman, in a mackintosh, whom Heaven knows Clarissa would have liked to help" (123). In fact, the dichotomy between the idea of Miss Kilman and the woman herself was so great that Clarissa laughed. However, we have a problem here. Miss Kilman could not see what was happening in Clarissa's head, and assumed the worst. She thought Clarissa was insulting her: "Ugly, clumsy, Clarissa Dalloway had laughed at her for being that" (125). Now, why would she go and assume something like that? Why is it that whenever somebody does something, people assume it's intended to make a point to them? That just seems narcissistic to me.

What's worse is that several characters do it. Besides Clarissa and Miss Kilman, Septimus thinks everybody is watching him and closing in in the car scene. On the other hand, Lucrezia is afraid those people "closing in" will hear when he talks about killing himself or other dreadful things. Elizabeth does it too, and not even in a negative way. Waiting for the bus, she just assumes people would compare her to other things, saying, "And already, even as she stood there, in her very well cut clothes, it was beginning.... People were beginning to compare her to poplar trees, early dawn, hyacinths, fawns, running water, and garden lilies, and it made her life a burden to her" (131). Can't people be left to ignore her in peace? There's absolutely no reason that everybody must be thinking about her.

Don't get me wrong, I do this too. I have no idea why, but in public I'm always afraid of what people are thinking about me, or judging me for. I know that in all likelihood they're just thinking about the weather, or their day, or how everybody is thinking about them, but I can't get over myself and let it go. I wish I could though...

More than Human

Food for thought: is Mrs. Dalloway about the manifestation of ideas?

We all know that an object and the idea it represents are intrinsically separate. A word is just a bunch of symbols and sounds that come together to form the idea of an apple, or a chair, or whatever. Multiple languages couldn't exist if there wasn't some abstraction between saying a word and thinking about an idea. As it stands, we never see ideas in real life. Besides the obvious point that ideas are something you have in your head, we never look at an apple and say, "Clearly, this is the perfect apple. It represents all apples. All other apples are just derived from this one." The idea of the apple cannot transcend its earthly vessel.

(so what is it then?)

Yet, in Mrs. Dalloway, we see this all the time. Take Clarissa. Her very job is to be the idea of Mrs. Richard Dalloway; whatever she thinks, whoever she is, doesn't matter. What matters is what others think about her, how they see her and what she does. We looked at the ways several different people thought about Clarissa; it's important to realize that that legitimately comprised Clarissa, at least in her role as Mrs. Dalloway.

Further, with the whole episode surrounding the car, nobody knows for sure who is inside. Nobody could tell you with undeniable proof it was the Queen, or the Prime Minister, or anybody; it was unknown. But, really, it didn't matter. More important than the specific figure inside the car was the idea of importance that surrounded it. The people that saw it together formed its importance, by thinking it was important. Pretty circuitous, right? But if they had just ignored the car, regardless of who was inside, it wouldn't have mattered. Similarly, it could have been nobody of importance inside, but if they had still gone gaga it would've still been seen as important. What really was important was how everybody thought about it; the idea that it was important made it important.

Clarissa points out the way her ideas about Miss Kilman manifested into something beyond the person on page 12: "For it was not her one hated but the idea of her, which undoubtedly had gathered in to itself a great deal that was not Miss Kilman." What Miss Kilman stood for, what she symbolized beyond just a person, ended up dominating Clarissa's interpretation of Miss Kilman and what she did. When she finally gets herself to look at Miss Kilman simply, as another person, she laughs at how differently she had built her up to be (and Miss Kilman's idea of Clarissa was laughing at her for being ugly...). When the idea was broken, the absurdity of the situation made Clarissa burst out laughing. Ideas hold sway over everything.

Perhaps Mrs. Dalloway is representative of the way we interact with ideas instead of objects, or ideas instead of people. But, what's important is that ideas are fighting to be able to show themselves, and when we let them possess something, we lose its actual meaning.