The Question of U

Amelia K on how Aftersun and Dogtooth are about going home.

A place can hate you and a place can love you. It is not always clear which is more dangerous. You stagnate, in the loved place; you have to leave it, at least once, before you become it. You languish, in the hated place, and you have to leave it before it becomes you. You can and often do go back, but you are not the same and the place is not the same, of course. Sometimes you shrug off the place and sometimes you don’t. But to define yourself by the lack of it is to simultaneously acknowledge its power. Having moved 500 miles from my hometown and our abuser, my son and I return sparingly, and with trepidation, even as we sigh over the unparalleled Appalachian Mountains, the falls, the caves, the boundless fields of wildflowers that don’t seem to grow anywhere else. Even the abandoned coal mines carry their own beauty, so desolate they can’t be anything other than holy, carrying the echoes of birds or angels calling calling calling out your name. The feeling in my chest—a physical feeling, both languorous and clamoring—on I-64 is one I can only access on that road. Welcome, it says. Weaken, it means. It’s a different person who left that place and it’s a different person who enters it.

I carry the place I came from, quite literally, in my blood; I had lead poisoning, constant ear infections, scarlet fever, and Lyme disease, and still suffer from various nutritional deficiencies as a result of childhood poverty. This is all so commonplace in my hometown of <500 people that it bores and embarrasses me to list it, though it may seem exceptional to people who have not dealt with, or encountered, this particular facet of poverty. Everyone has emphysema, ear problems, diabetes, heart disease, anemia, cavities. A family friend recently got her first iPhone; another just got rid of her outhouse. My siblings and I are evenly split with GEDs and diplomas, with four having the former and four the latter. Nobody needs to complete high school where I’m from; so and so’s daddy owns a towing/mechanic/logging/plumbing place that will hire you to work under the table, or you sell Tupperware/Avon/candles or file papers and take calls so you won’t have to wake up at 5 am for a bus that may or may not come, and you’ll have money that might be enough to take the sadness out of your parents’ eyes when you ask for a new pair of Levi’s, a brand new pair, not your cousin’s, even if she only wore them once.

The 90s were a transitional era in my hometown’s life; the town itself was intended as a way station for coal miners, not a place to live. It later pivoted away from the mines, and toward its apple orchards, as a source of income, when people began moving in and coal began moving out, a non-re-new-a-ble-re-source, we chanted in science class, that means it won’t ever come back, and it never did. The very last of the mines closed when I was a preteen, so I grew up with fires below me and apples above me, a thousand hands reaching out and a thousand hands coming up empty. If you’ve ever picked your own fruit at an orchard, you’ve probably felt what I call the Eve impulse: an urge to pick a fruit that, for whatever reason, is suddenly the only fruit you’ve ever wanted, despite its location or size, it’s that one and none other, you’d rather go home empty than be without it. I always wanted to be that for somebody, that awful temptation, that sweet knowledge, but have never managed to be shaped in a way that warrants that kind of love, so don't know if I believe in it anymore.

Blue in palette and tone, Aftersun is heavy on haunting and light on plot. It follows an 11-year-old girl, Sophie, and her 31-year-old father, Calum, on vacation in Turkey. Calum loves his daughter; he does not love himself. He is tired in body and mind. He asserts and immediately relinquishes control. He vacillates between presence and absence, can’t fully commit to either. He needs a playback of his own actions to make sense of them. He is always in the midst of mourning Sophie. He is most illuminated in the dark, cannot be understood in the light, squinting and restless in his soul’s shape. He is reaching for an apple he cannot hope to grasp, an apple that will feed Sophie and shine him back whole. Children lose things, like diving masks, and adults lose things, like patience and selves, and neither has any idea of the value of what they’ve lost until they need to put it on.

I remember making a colossal effort to watch Dogtooth shortly after it came out, as it was something of a cinematic double dare in my town, like Hostel and 8mm before it. No theaters were playing it, and I was unable to cajole my then-boyfriend into driving me nearly 4 hours away to an art house theater, so I watched online streams of varying, muddy quality over and over until I felt like I had seen it all. It was notable among my friend group mostly because some of the sex was not simulated, and happens between characters who play siblings. There is a very deep sense of discomfort during these scenes, as the film itself feels like a collection of very invasive home movies. Indeed, a home movie of this type would not be unusual in the setting of this film, which follows a couple raising their three adult children (two women, one man) in a physically and emotionally walled-off world. The children are given tapes every morning of vocabulary words, which we know to have incorrect definitions. They believe that airplanes fall into their yard, play endurance games, and compete for stickers. The father hires a woman, Christina, to have sex with his son; he later beats her with a VCR, after she lends American movies to the eldest daughter, who quotes them after being forced to have sex with her brother. The children believe that to leave the home, they have to lose a dogtooth and wait for it to grow back; at the end, The Eldest (her name is not given, if she even has one) knocks out her own dogtooth and leaves. The film is notable, to me, for how quiet it feels, as if it's holding its breath. For what?

For the first few years of my son's life he loved to press my mom's watch face to his ear, to hear the intricate ticking she could not. One of my favorite memories of all time is of him signing the word friend to her for the first time after she lent him her watch. She didn't say or sign a word; the situation didn't call for it. That’s right, she might have said, or: good job or hey friend or any number of beautiful things that would not have made the memory any less precious. But it’s the awareness that hung in the air that makes it special to me, that my son knew how to say it to her in a way she could not mistake or misread or miss at all. It was undeniable, intentional, exactly the right shape and sound. What signs do we miss when we say them out loud? When The Eldest grabbed a brick, she said something so loud it could have never fit through her lips, hence the need for a new mouth; when Sophie settles her feet on Calum’s rug, her love echoes backward through time.

I’m a rube with a little taste, in the words of my favorite chef, always have been, and the disparity between who I am (partially college educated, comically bisexual, one of those unwed teenage mothers wearing the very fabric of society as a thong in the late '00s) and who I was supposed to be (married at 16, forever the preacher's daughter, sensible ambitions, aka none) still evokes a lot of needless guilt. But I owe a debt to where I’m from, and, like my other debts, I’ll never pay it, wouldn’t even know where to start. Diamonds don’t come from coal, l learned that early, and I want to warn everyone who looks at me with interest of that fact. That there’s something bleak and endless inside of me, something my dad recognized when he nicknamed me Wolf, something I recognized when I held a knife to the throat of a self I couldn't bear to bury after all. I both contain and exceed where I’m from and what I love, confined to the shape of my town but twitching under the pin that puts it on the map. I’m a lot of things but I’m not home, not yet, and no amount of pressure will ever make me shine, no matter what angle I’m held at, no matter what light is thrown on me.

Calum rounding a corner to dance forever in the dark; the Eldest’s mouth splitting open like a bad fruit; I think that, simple and devastating as it sounds, Aftersun and Dogtooth are about going home, and I want to go home, a place that does not exist and must be created. I want to go back to a town that never used or needed coal, where nobody ever lost somebody they loved to a dangerous job or flash flood or plain old hunger, where my ex never laid a hand on us, my best friend lives forever with flowers in her hair, my son bursts to life under the Perseids, my Papa is holding him tight, his hand on his perfect face. My mom is signing Prince songs as fast as her hands can carry her, we’re laughing in my dad’s truck bed, waving to everyone, we know them all, our friends our family our world. Everyone everywhere is full, so much clean water we could waste a glass if we wanted to. I want to go home and I want you to go home too, whatever that looks like for you, whatever you have to do to find it, blood on your hands from where you cut the past out, that’s okay, I’ll know you by your scars in the dark, where the only way to see is to touch, the only way to hear the music is to not say a word.

The Dirt: “Which way do I turn when I'm feeling lost? / If I sell my soul, now what will it cost?”