On Carol and the Trailer for Anomalisa

Tonight before a screening of Carol, I saw a trailer for the new Charlie Kaufman film, Anomalisa. 


Like all of Kaufman’s films, it is concerned with BIG QUESTIONS. The trailer begins with a character saying:

“What is it to be human? What is it to ache? What is it to be alive?”

I’m deeply interested in these questions. To be clear, I want to see this film. It appeals to my romantic sensibilities when the protagonist says in voiceover, “Remember, there is someone out there for everyone,” even though I don’t believe that’s true in any kind of cosmic sense. 

When the protagonist says to a woman, “I think you’re extraordinary,” and she asks, “Why?” and he replies, “I don’t know yet, it’s just obvious to me that you are,” I get that. I often can’t articulate what makes a person extraordinary to me. I can try but the truth eludes language, no matter how strongly I feel it to be true. 

But as intrigued as I am by this film, I’m also frustrated by it. Here’s the poster I saw for it outside the theater:

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I haven’t seen this kind of critical adulation for a film since Boyhood. Essential. Transcendent. Perfect. One critic quoted on the poster says that the film changed his life. And not for the first time I find myself asking, why is it that the films that are hailed as the most transcendent, the most profound and life-changing and universal in their meaning, usually focus on the lives of white men?

One thing I loved about Carol is the way that men, both narratively and visually, are relegated to the background; they are out of focus. Men have power in society, and they and the cultural expectations surrounding how women relate to them create obstacles for the two women at the story’s center, but it is a film that flips the narrative dynamics of so many films. One scene takes place in the photo office at the New York Times, and even though Rooney Mara’s character Therese is relegated to being a secretary in the department as men argue and make decisions about which photos to use, the men are indistinct, inconsequential to the story. It’s Therese the story cares about, the camera cares about, we care about.

And I wonder, can’t a film like this be every bit as “universal” as Anomalisa or Boyhood or whatever epic of white male experience that is showered with praise for the transcendent way it taps into some universal truths about human experience?

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At one point in Carol, a character says to Therese (I’m paraphrasing from memory), “We’re attracted to some people and not others, we don’t know why.” And it seemed to me like an echo of the same truth that I heard in the Anomalisa trailer: “I think you’re extraordinary.” “Why?” “I don’t know yet, it’s just obvious to me that you are.” 

At another point in Carol, a character, watching a film from the projection booth for the sixth time and jotting down notes, says he’s charting the corollary between what the characters say and what they actually feel. And this is so often the problem in movies–certainly it’s a problem for the main characters in Carol, restricted as they are by society–and so often it’s the problem in life. Not knowing quite what to say or how to say it, how to say what we mean and mean what we say and at the same time not mislead others and not cause them undue suffering; how to connect, how to be close, how to be true.

One of my favorite moments in the film occurs when Therese, uncertain about quite who Carol is or what Carol wants from her, tentatively says, “I want to ask you things, but I’m not sure you want me to,” and Carol responds, almost desperately, “Ask me things.” My heart ached. Oh, how we sometimes yearn to fully know and be known by a particular person. To be explored by their language and to explore them with our language.

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And later, Therese, holding a phone that Carol was on the other end of but now the line has gone dead. She stands there, holding the phone, repeating “I miss you, I miss you.” It comes out as automatically as an exhalation. There have been times when it’s been like that for me, times when I’ve caught myself saying “I miss you” to an empty room, because the language, the feeling, needed somewhere to go.