I’ve been ruminating as of late on the potential that a piece of art has to skip and ripple across the outstretched water of one’s life. I recently had the good fortune to see Pedro Almodóvar’s 1999 film, All About My Mother, which thoughtfully explores and monumentalizes this concept. In the film’s opening act, we are met with a great tragedy. Manuela, a nurse who oversees organ transplants, takes her son Esteban, an aspiring writer, to see a production of A Streetcar Named Desire for his 17th birthday, a play she once performed in with a community theater and whereby she met Esteban’s other parent, Lola. Following the performance, Esteban chases after a taxi in the hopes of getting the lead actresses’ autographs but is instead horrifically clipped and killed by a passing car in what appears to be an instant. Manuela soon approves the organ transfer of her son’s heart and resigns from her job, redirecting herself on a path to Barcelona in search of Lola. 

Through a series of chance interactions and meetings of fate, Manuela soon finds herself crossing paths once again with the two actresses in the taxi on the night of her son’s 17th birthday. She begins to work for them as an assistant and unexpectedly performs as an understudy one night, which leads to a fiery and paranoiac confrontation in which Manuela is accused of being akin to Eve Harrington. Manuela finally admits to the thread connecting them all: that they were all together the night her son died; that she was drawn to them, to this play, once again, for a reason. “A Streetcar Named Desire has marked my life,” Manuela explains. 

What interests me is that the appearance, and perhaps emergence, of the importance of this play in Manuela’s life serves as some kind of intuitive path-maker. Each interaction with Streetcar results in a fortuitous unfolding for Manuela, bringing with it changes that are both awe-inspiring, meaning-making, and catastrophic: marriage, birth, separation, death, community. It struck me how essential art can be in allowing us to create our own mythologies, in allowing us to make sense of the chaotic unfoldings of our own lives.

I began to think of the films that have reverberated across my own path. There are admittedly too many, for reasons and occurrences both large and small, to fully get into here, as I almost feel my entire life has been shaped by my interaction with art in all its various forms. But what I’ve found most precious and hard to put down is the connection one can form to a person, an artist, who lived in a different time, who will never know what life is like in this current time, but who somehow reaches into something universal and human inside of us. Somehow they can reach down inside of us and say, “I know what it’s like to be a bit like you.”

This is not something to be taken lightly or to be ignored. In fact, it can save one’s life to find the people that speak to them in this way. There have been countless artistic shepherds who have found me when I needed them and continued to find me when said need resurfaced years later: Arthur Russell, John Ashbery, Fiona Apple, Sufjan Stevens, Louise Glück, Franz Kafka, to name a few. It is my hope to explore the context in which some of these artists, some movies and shows and plays and books, have provided meaning throughout my life in some coming posts, or perhaps even just to explore the memory of one specific artistic experience during one specific time in my life. This series will hopefully be an invitation for self-examination, but anyone who stumbles across this is welcome to look-see.