Welcome to Letters From the Knot. This is a free newsletter, primarily built as an outlet for a fiction writing project I’m working on. On the weeks I’m not publishing fiction, though, I’ll be sending something a bit more freeform and personal. This is one of those.
Ahh December! It’s dark all the time and raining! Everyone at work is burnt out! You’re skint! December this year has felt like a time to just keep our heads down, try to ignore the capitalist melee of xmas shopping, and enjoy the little things. We’ve been going to the same pub basically three times a week because it’s the only place too small to take xmas party bookings. We’ve been eating loads of curries and my partner has started drinking beetroot lattes (a drink machine engineered to wind up tory Dads across the country).
We’ve also been watching a lot of films. The combination of the cold and dark and constant rolling hangovers make it feel like the right time to sit completely still and watch movies. Our recent viewing diet has been a combo of some moderately high brow stuff (May December, Past Lives) with some mediocre horror (Attachment, Mother May I?) and then there was one weird evening where we watched Pretty Woman and X-Men 2 back-to-back with a Nandos.
The one film that really got under my skin, though, was A Hidden Life, the Terrence Malick film from 2019 about a conscientious objector in Austria during the second world war. It’s three hours long, and there’s not a lot of dialogue, and large portions of it are just long sequences of moody farmyard labour carried out in silence. In some senses, it’s a tough sell (and indeed, my partner lost the will about halfway through), but it really got me. It’s full of sweeping shots of the Austrian countryside and has a beautiful score, but it doesn’t romanticise the war, or portray many of the major political events too directly. It’s intentionally very human, following the lives of a single family in a remote village while the war and the holocaust happen off screen, in another world. The story is simple - an Austrian farmer refuses to swear loyalty to Hitler, and the bureaucratic Nazi machine slowly exerts pressure on him to do so, forcing him to make increasingly ruinous choices.
I think it spoke to me so much because it seems so timely. There’s a sequence early on in which a local drunken bigot, emboldened by the political headwinds, rants about the scourge of incoming immigrants to the other gathered drinkers. The chilling thing about the scene is the fact that nobody feels able to challenge him for fear of being exposed. The opinions are not only out in the open, but mainstream, and incontestable. The language is eerily similar to that currently being used by the UK government to demonise refugees and asylum seekers, and to the language used by Israeli officials to dehumanise the Palestinian people as a pretext to mass murder. As in the film, these are not fringe opinions, but the dominant discourse, state sanctioned declarations of hate.
A Hidden Life is a film about quiet resistance. The title is taken from this quote from George Elliot’s Middlemarch*:
“..for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
The film aims to draw attention to forms of resistance that, however futile and self-defeating they may seem on the surface, still matter. It aims to show that there is still power in those small and personal forms of resistance, even if they’re confined to the home, or to the heart, or just a person’s sense of self. To resist something, even quietly, even at that small level, still has immense power.
It’s easy to feel defeatist at the moment, with increasingly right wing governments coming to power across the world, and a genocide taking place in plain sight. In my day job, working for a race equity charity, every week involves resisting or responding to the attacks of anti-woke ministers and endlessly remaking the case for this sort of work to happen in the first place.
After months and years of feeling like the world is on a path you don’t agree with, it’s tempting to give up. So deep is the malaise, that it’s easy to dismiss protest as pointless, and even to stop talking about these things, reasoning that you’re in an echo chamber anyway so what’s the point? Over the past few months, this sense of powerlessness has seemed especially intense where, because of the demands of life and my partners disability, we’ve been even less able to physically show up at marches, or to make ourselves counted.
But this film reframed it for me. It’s so important to resist, however small or initially futile that resistance may feel. Of course we should all be writing to our MPs, and protesting if we can, and using our platforms if we have them, and arguing with people over Christmas dinner, no matter how much it ruins the vibes. But even if you can’t do any of these things, if all you’re able to do is hold on to your sense of who you are, and to resist in your heart, then that still matters. It’s vital to keep that feeling alive so that, when the moment does come for you to make a choice about something, you know where you stand.
Cultural indigestion
Some other bits of cultural intake.
Watching - I wanted to start with a shout out to the erotic thriller, a genre that feels all but dead these days. Adding to our varied diet of films over the past few weeks, we revisited Fatal Attraction, a sometimes problematic but always tense and sexy portrayal of infidelity and jealousy. It stands up to, be honest, even if Michael Douglass does get off a bit lightly. We also watched Don’t Look Now, the 70s sort-of-horror film about a grieving couple in Venice that is just so so good. I group it in here because, while I’m not sure the term erotic thriller quite applies, it does have one of the only good sex scenes ever filmed.
Reading - I’ve just finished Yellowface by Rebecca F. Kuang - a lot of it is really good, and the central premise is an interesting one. It tells the story of a white author taking credit for the manuscript of her Asian American friend. The manuscript is about Chinese history and Yellowface explores the race dynamics around the publishing of the book. It’s at its most effective in the bits where it exposes the lengths publishers will go to make the author’s race ambiguous to boost sales, but it sort of goes of a cliff in the final act with a quite bizarre and unsatisfying ending. There are also a lot of detailed passages explaining the minutiae of the publishing industry that, even for someone currently trying to get a novel published, were very tedious.
(*As much as I loved the film, the Middlemarch quote was relatively triggering because it reminded me of the time I tired to read the whole book in about a day before an exam and had a low key mental breakdown and basically forgot the entire plot and almost failed the exam. Still, I’m told it’s a cracking read.)
Love Terrence Malick!! Tree of life is one of my top 10