I’m sick and bedridden. Here are some movies I’m thinking about
I’m sick. I don’t get sick very often. Like my mother before me I often push myself into a hardcore routine of work and play and more work and eventually my body just says “yo, take a chill pill, bro”. I was bed-ridden starting yesterday. The cool thing about watching movies is that it’s a totally physically null act. You just have to sit – or in my case – lay there. It got me thinking about movies that are about this feeling I have right now. General weakness, grogginess, helplessness, self-pity, physical fragility. All that great stuff. It’s a very specific feeling, and if I may say so in my most privileged point of view, a feeling that lends itself to romanticism. Not meaning love specifically but romantic sort of like how eating beef stew is romantic or huddling around a fire for warmth. It’s the idea of feeling like you’re in a movie or a painting or a piece of music or something. I count this feeling as one of the perks of being sick in bed.
Phantom Thread (2017)
So last night I was looking for something to watch and I saw Phantom Thread as an option. I love that movie, and I actually haven’t seen it since it first came out in late 2017. I’ve thought about it a lot since then and my friend, Hilgers, and I talk about it often. Phantom Thread is the most romantic movie about being sick ever made, and indeed one of the most romantic movies ever made period. What struck me last night watching it was how hilarious it is. I was laughing out loud every ten minutes. Something about the poshness of the 50s aesthetic and culture combined with the frankness of the two main characters makes for very surprising and indeed quite rich humor. The story of Phantom Thread’s conception is a fun one. Paul Thomas Anderson was sick in bed and being cared for by his lovely longtime partner, Maya Rudolph. He was watching gothic romance films on TCM like Hitchcock’s Rebecca, and it occurred to him when struck by a particularly tender look in his lover’s eyes that maybe she’d like to keep him like that. Phantom Thread is the perfect companion, in my opinion, to my favorite PTA film, Punch-Drunk Love. Punch-Drunk is about falling in love, and Phantom Thread is about living with it. Miranda July wrote a great essay about Punch-Drunk Love for the criterion release in which she talks about her believe that the relationship that blossoms in Punch-Drunk Love won’t always be smooth sailing. As July puts it, “You can sort of see this in Lena’s eyes—she loves Barry, but she’s no fool. Sometimes it’s going to be a nightmare having this guy around.” Phantom Thread is one of the best movies about the day-in-day-out of a long-term relationship – specifically a long-term relationship with an artist. It probes the question of compatibility of obsession and love. And ultimately, Phantom Thread is the most sophisticatedly fucked-up movie ever made. But the ending, in all its fucked-up-ness and beauty, stands as one of the great resolutions of a love story. Being venerable is an important part of love and living with someone. Maybe the most important. That’s what Phantom Thread is about.
So then I started thinking about other movies that are about this specific feeling – being bedridden, vulnerable, yadda yadda I already explained all that. You know what I’m talking about. Everyone does. We experience it from the moment we first get sick and are cared for by our mother. And indeed, when sick and bedridden as adults, we’re transported back emotionally to that time, that helpless yet strangely idealic time.
Cries and Whispers (and others)
I think Ingmar Bergman must have been sick a lot. In many of his movies, people are sick, bedridden, or at least should be in bed. The most notable of these is Cries and Whispers, which might be Bergman’s best film. The film sees Harriet Andersson, the incredibly mysteriously extraordinarily beautiful star of Bergman’s previous Summer with Monika and Through a Glass Darkly, rendered sweaty, soggy and sick in bed with a horrible terminal illness. It occurs to me that Cries and Whispers, like Phantom Thread, kind of taps into what I said earlier about sickness bringing us back to our childhood dependance on our mother. Once we fly the coup, we’re either shit out of luck or we find another loved one to fill the maternal void. And no, I’m not getting all Freudian on you. I’m just saying it’s interesting that both PTA and Bergman put a lot of emphasis on maternal figures in their films, specifically in the scenes of bedridden-ness. Both films actually include really amazing scenes of unassuming supernatural occurrences. Daniel Day Lewis’ character is visited somewhat casually by the ghost of his dead mother, and the climax of Cries and Whispers is among the greatest scenes of the supernatural ever put on celluloid.
Bergman also depicted bedriddenness in The Silence, where in a contrast between the two main characters, sisters who have strange unspoken sexual attraction for each other that manifests itself in scorn, one sister is sick in bed while the other goes about town and hooks up with a nice stranger. Yeah I know, that sentence was a lot. You should just see the movie. It’s really great.
And then of course there’s the very artistically romantic story of how Bergman came up with Persona which is one of the greatest pieces of art ever made by a huma being. The story goes that Bergman was sick and delirious to the point of hospitalization, and that while in the hospital he composed the screenplay of Persona from his fever-induced delusions and dreams. Watching Persona one can understand this. The film is, perhaps more than any other film, and definitely more than any film made up to that time, the true definition of a cinematic fever dream.
The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
What are some other movies about being sick? Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums springs to mind, although that one is a little different for reasons that are hard to go into without spoiling the whole thing. It does probe interesting emotional and familial dynamics similar to Phantom Thread and Cries and Whispers, having to do with how one’s loved one treats one differently in leu of sickness. The Royal Tenenbaums can in a way be seen plot-wise as the inverse of Phantom Thread. If you’ve seen both films then you know what I mean. Or maybe you don’t. I’m aware I can be very hard to understand sometimes, but hey I’m sick so give me a break! See what I did there? It’s meta.
Notorious (1946)
Hitchcock’s Notorious, which I really need to re-watch, includes many many minutes of poor Ingrid Bergman being ill and bedridden. There’s a sinisterness in this film’s sickness that is absent from the aforementioned movies. Or at least not near as strong. We know in the case of Ingrid Bergman in Notorious that her illness is anything but natural. Then again, the same could be said of Phantom Thread. I need to re-watch Notorious. The first time I watched it I think I was expecting something a lot more bombastic. I realize now that Hitchcock was being a lot more subtle in that movie and I need to give him credit for that. My grandpa really likes Notorious and so does Francois Truffaut. Or did. There’s a funny story in the Hitchcock/Truffaut book where Hitchcock tells Truffaut about how he basically predicted uranium bombs and was unknowingly watched by the FBI for months because unbeknownced to anyone else, the government had just started work on the Manhattan project. Yadda yadda yadda, blah blah blah blah. I thought it was interesting, okay?
Mank (2020)
The last movie I thought of was a very recent film, David Fincher’s Mank. Mank came out just a couple months ago and I really enjoyed it. It’s interesting with some Netflix movies how rewatchable they are. Like there’s a distinct pleasure for me in watching say The Meyerwitz Stories: New and Selected that would be different if it was a theatrical movie. Mank features lots of scenes of Gary Oldman as the titular character laying in bed all sweaty and shit whilst writing the script that would become Citizen Kane. I was worried about Mank because it’s clearly a very old-timey styled movie and generally I don’t like it when modern films try to pass themselves off as classic or old. Especially the fact that it’s Fincher – who is always at the cutting edge and seems the least sentimental of his generation about the sacrifice of the old ways for the digital new.
But somehow, mainly I believe through the script and the acting, the film sidesteps any annoyance that could’ve come off as gimmickry and proves a really enjoyable movie that as I said, lends itself greatly to pleasurable re-watch. It’s on Netflix now and forever so feel free to go watch it! And whenever you see Gary Oldman stuck in that bed, I hope you think of poor old me stuck in bed with no present mother or devious lover to aid me. Just kidding. That’s weird. But I do thank you for reading all my ramblings if you’ve made it all the way to the end. I’m going to try to sleep now. Wish me luck and indeed stay safe everyone. You don’t want to end up like me. Just ask Daniel-Day Lewis, Harriet Andersson, and Ingrid Bergman. It may be romantic, but it sure as heck ain’t fun.
