So, it is 2:45 a.m., and I am experiencing one of my frequent bouts of insomnia. A bit too foggy due to the bizarre combination of being wired and exhausted to write an eloquent post. Still, while reading J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians in bed before succombing to sleeplessness, I was struck by this quote

Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.

(Which, incidentally, reminds me of another favorite quote of mine, from Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion :

“I was happy but happy is an adult world. You don’t have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you.”

So, all this pondering on pain, happiness, life, and adulthood, led me to. . . of course, documentary:

1) The two best documentaries I’ve seen recently have been on suicide. First, the film EXIT , which just opened at Film Forum, takes a meditative, understated look at assisted suicide in Switzerland, following the final days of several people as they seek to be put out of the misery that has overtaken their lives.

The depth of that misery, that so overshadows the innate, almost unshakeable impulse to live, is also explored in Eric Steel’s THE BRIDGE . The film has been getting a fair amount of press lately, — this Indiewire exchange is quite good so I won’t add my own analysis to the pot. However, I will say I think it is an incredibly important one, which seeks to illuminate a subject far too long taboo in the visual media. A few years ago, I read NOONDAY DEMON by Andrew Solomon, a memoir about depression. There is one description to which my mind often returns — that of Soloman, a rich and accomplished intellectual — lying prostate, paralyzed with emotional pain, in his bathtub. A middle-aged man with no impulse to move or to live, who had to be pulled out of the bath by his father. I believe it was in this same book (though possibly I am conflating this with something else I read about depression and suicide) in which the author writes that to commit suicide one needs to both 1) want to die and 2) want to KILL. There are many people who have one impulse or the other, but to be able to have such aggression toward one’s own self takes a particular person. As we seen in Steel’s film, these are people who have not jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge on an impulse, but rather who have been obsessed with the idea of offing themselves for long periods of time; whose psyches are overtaken by the will to die and kill, to exit life. Life and death are not binaries; many who live walk with death inside them at all times. To understand and explore what death is can be one of the most illuminating explorations of living that exists.

One of the most moving films I saw on the festival circuit recently was EXIT. There is a lackluster new article in the Times today about it — as I predicted, the American critics hate it. Which is fast becoming a surefire sign of a film’s brilliance.

The film, which is about a company that aids the elderly and the irrevocably ill on their path to death, is a stunningly evocative documentary masterpiece that invokes the icy genius of Michael Haneke. As expected, subtlety and nuance continue to be qualities that escape the American film scene’s radar.

Stephen Holden’s review, which uses shockingly appropriate adjectives such as “stodgy”, “somber”, and “inescapably grim” to describe a film about assisted suicide, tells us this much about the film: nothing.

EXIT: THE RIGHT TO DIE is directed by Fernand Melgar and released by First Run/Icarus Films and is currently playing at Film Forum.

It’s no surprise that David Lynch, the Academy Award-nominated director of ELEPHANT MAN, WILD AT HEART, BLUE VELVET, and MULHOLLAND DRIVE, (and one of my all time favorite filmmakers), would experiment not just with film as a medium but also try to play with various forms of distribution as well. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Lynch has begun a campaign of self-distribution for his latest film, INLAND EMPIRE, which is apparently one of his most experimental pieces yet. Shot on a modest (by Hollywood standards) SONY PD-150, the film deals with the loss of identity, among other things, and stars Laura Dern.