 From Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Screenshot: YouTube)
Today: Zito Madu, a journalist and author of The Minotaur at Calle Lanza; and Miles Klee, author of the novel Ivyland and culture writer at Rolling Stone.
Issue No. 165Insomnia Film Festival
Zito Madu The Mall Pulls You In
Miles Klee
Insomnia Film FestivalWhen I tell someone that I have insomnia, the usual response is to ask if I’ve tried some obvious remedy, and since I don’t want to be rude with them because they’re only trying to be helpful, I have to say that yes, I have tried sleeping pills. I have tried exercising myself to exhaustion, and no, it’s not because of my phone or noise, and yes, it’s been like this for as long as I can remember, and well, it’s not necessarily chronic, though one time I went four days without sleep and then passed out for almost a full day. It comes in waves and for no real reason, and I have to endure and let it pass on its own and yes, it is exhausting—I can’t sleep but that doesn’t mean that I’m not tired, I’m actually quite tired, physically and mentally, and bouts of insomnia mean I’ll go through life as a near-zombie for however long it lasts. It was especially bad in college. My freshman year particularly. The dorms at University of Detroit Mercy were segregated into all-male and all-female floors—odd floors for boys, even for girls. I first lived on the third floor, and then on the fifth with most of my male friends. The girl I was in love with at the time lived on the sixth. By then I had stopped fighting the insomnia, since nothing seemed to work. I accepted it and tried to find ways to pass the time until sleep came. At first, when the internet was still full of adventure and blogs, I would be up late at night looking for new music. Then I tried reading in those hours, but at that level of mental exhaustion, deep concentration is impossible. I tried going on walks, but the danger was that I’d be so tired that sometimes my memory would skip forward, I’d have lost 10-15 minutes or even hours. It’s different from the trance that people experience when driving, where you fall into a sort of autopilot mode and then snap out of it some minutes later. This is more like when you’re watching a movie and decide to skip ten minutes ahead, except in this case I’m one of the characters in the movie who finds himself in a whole new scene and looks around wondering how on earth they got here, and what happened. The solution for me then was to watch movies. I would go to the student center in the middle of campus and sit with my laptop watching movies until the first few students appeared, going to their morning classes. I didn’t watch mindless movies, they’ve never been my taste. I watched well-made movies that I loved over and over. Some movies, after so many times rewatching them, would naturally lose their shine. But a few were eternally, consistently helpful to pass the time and entertaining. The movie that I watched the most in college was The Godfather. I downloaded it on every laptop that I had through college. There’s nothing that I can say about that movie and how good it is that hasn’t been said a million times before. What I will say is that it has a great structure of quiet interludes and then explosive action that always helped jolt me back into the moment. What was also lovely back then was that sometimes, when the girl I was seeing woke up in the middle of the night, she would come out to the student center and fall asleep on me while I tried to explain the greatness of The Godfather to her like a true film bro. There was also Sword of the Stranger, an action anime movie that came out in 2007. I love this movie so much that I’ve made almost all of my close friends watch it with me. It’s set in the Sengoku period in Japan, and is about a wandering samurai, Nanashi, who suddenly finds himself taking care of a young boy, Kotaru, and his dog, Tobimaru, who are being pursued by Ming Chinese warriors.  Still from Sword of the Stranger Nanashi and Kotaru have a tense relationship, because the boy finds it hard to trust anyone (for good reason); Nanashi is also dealing with his own trauma from the terrible things he did in the past, and his identity as an outsider. There are so many different moral, ethical, and political problems that give the movie its depth, but above all of that is that the animation, by Studio Bones, is exceptional. The final fight between the Chinese warrior Luo-Lang and Nanashi is so spectacular that no matter how tired I was, my brain would always leap into attention for those last few minutes. The Boy and the Beast by Studio Chizu is about a boy living on the streets of Tokyo after his mother’s death, seemingly abandoned by his father; one day he is approached by this beastly bear creature, a warrior, who is in need of a disciple in order to succeed the current grandmaster of the beast kingdom. The two of them bicker and fight, the beast is a terrible teacher while the boy is a terrible adopted son. They’re too similar to one another in personality. I’ve watched it countless times since 2015. But the movie that’s seen me through the most through sleepless nights is Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, a murder mystery by Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Aman has been killed and buried near the Anatolian town of Keskin by two brothers; one is considered the “idiot” brother and the other, who had an affair with the dead man’s wife, is the true father of the man’s child. The dead man was killed in a fight after learning the truth. The film follows the police chief, his second in command, a prosecutor, the town’s doctor, a handful of other officers and soldiers, and the two suspects as they’re dragged from one area to another, over the course of a long night, looking for the dead man’s grave. One of my favorite things about Ceylan’s films is that they’re slow. Not much happens. What really drives the movie is dialogue. The characters are sitting around, standing around, having dinner in a village, or stuck in the car, and all they’re doing is talking about everything from morality to how many times is normal to pee in the middle of the night. The great achievement of this high/low balance is that the stakes build up slowly, through the smallest of exchanges. Murder, justice, infidelity, what is good and not, who is good and who is not; the revelations regarding the crime and what it says about everyone involved develop organically, and inexorably, around the search to find a body. At one point, after having failed to find the body in a certain place, they decide to go to the village of Ceceli. The police chief is fed up with the criminals, convinced they’re pretending not to know where the body is in order to mock everyone, and attacks the man whom he believes to be guilty. The doctor takes a look at the killer’s injuries, and when the suspect asks for a cigarette, the doctor reaches for one and puts it to the man’s lips. The police chief stands up and tells the doctor not to give it to him. “Look, if you want a cigarette,” the chief says to his suspect, “first you have to earn it. Nothing comes for free anymore. Look at the prosecutor. The guy studied law, he’s worked. He can smoke and he can give people hell. Why? Because he’s earned it. What have you done? Made idiots of us. No, none of that. No more free cigarettes.” Then the movie returns to its slowness — the driving around winding roads and banal conversations — which makes one feel, as an insomniac, that you’ve been transported across the world to be with this cast of sleepless characters, to reckon with yourself and the world, and to pass the night slowly with them in the darkness of Anatolia.
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The Mall Pulls You In Screenshot: YouTube My mom tells me the mall nearest my hometown in New Jersey, long past its prime and emptied out, is due to close for good. Of course she is the one to inform me—my dad always hated the mall, its maddening geometry and hiveish activity, the sense of recycled air and idle waste. But I often wangled my mom into taking me when I was young, and no matter what I convinced her to buy in the course of a spin around the complex, I knew that on our way out we’d stop at Burger King for cup sodas. A “cup soda” is a fountain soda, but it seemed ridiculous to call them that. They were cup sodas. In any case, I was a Coke fiend, she drank Diet, and we agreed that bottles and cans of the stuff are awful in comparison to what jets from the machine, over plenty of ice—you really had to emphasize how much ice you wanted, causing the server to appear a little puzzled, since many customers want less ice. Besides, who are these weirdos going to Burger King and ordering only sodas? Did they not notice the vending machines right outside? Then you were out the exit, into the parking lot. It was rare to get a close parking spot at a popular mall in New Jersey, so the walk to the car stretched on to eternity. Often the weather had changed while you’d been inside; my current fantasy has it raining lightly. And it was while walking through the columns of cars, quietly sipping a cup soda, thinking of my new shirt or jeans or CD, that I began to remember the walk into the mall, an hour or two before, the anticipation of what you might get and the absolute certainty that you would later have this time-warp trance, the pleasure of the cold fizzy drink in your hand, a sense of retracing your steps and the fleeting day. When you left the mall, something was finished, and everything that happened inside had happened too quickly. An experience of the mall had slipped through my fingers again, our ritual complete. How else can I convey that the mall was about the parking lot? The great desert of asphalt in which the oasis of commerce sat. I have never stopped being amazed that the first time my parents let my younger brother carry his own money (a $20 bill from our grandmother), they gave it to him as we got out of the car at the mall, securing it in his tiny pocket, and found at the mall entrance that he’d managed, somehow, to lose it somewhere in the lot. The money never saw a store. He was distraught, our parents annoyed, and I was pretending it wasn’t funny, but all of us were impressed by the Bermuda Triangle of the parking lot. It could swallow money up. On a scorching day it felt as if you might sink it into it yourself. The atmosphere above it became wavy with hot fumes, like gravity bent backward.
I had occasion, more recently, to shop at a mall, after a bus drove away with
all my clothes. Or not all, but most of my favorites. I’d forgotten to claim them from the curbside luggage area at the end of a mind-numbing trip. I could expound here on how infuriating it was that the bus company declined to help me recover my clothes, and sort of pretended they’d never existed, and basically claimed that there were no definitive answers to obvious questions like, “Well, where did the bus go after it stopped at my destination?” or “What do you do with unclaimed luggage?” But that’s really beside the point—namely, that I was facing the possibility of wearing traveled-in clothes for the span of a week-long vacation. (An experience I would have again soon enough.) My lovely host came up with the idea of buying new clothes at a nearby mall—before going in she liked to get rather stoned and pretend she was on a secret mission, like sitting in every Brookstone massage chair. And, to my surprise, after we got high in a parking lot more sensibly compact than the one in New Jersey, I found some good, nice, sensibly priced clearance clothes that met both temporary and future needs. Exiting, it occurred to me that the parking lot in New Jersey had been no bigger than the one here in California, it had just seemed bigger, because I had been smaller. Today I’m faced with parking garages, dystopian stacks wormed through by ramps, visions of an M.C. Escher. In Los Angeles it’s either that or strip-mall parking with half as many spaces as there are stores. I’ll never recapture that wild aura of the sprawling lot, not even if I go back to the dead mall in Livingston, New Jersey, where South Orange Avenue crosses Eisenhower Parkway. Pictures of this mall online don’t seem familiar. There’s video, though, of the state police landing a helicopter in the lot, and it seems this used to happen about once a year, at Community Safety Day, which in 2015 featured a meet-and-greet with Batman (complete with Batmobile) as well as a mobile crime scene unit. Not too shabby. I get that you are not supposed to wax rhapsodic about parking lots, which is a punchline in the top-flight Coen brothers film A Serious Man, but it’s a fantastic riff in part because the guy admiring the lot has a point. Even the large amusement parks didn’t boast the scope of that mall parking lot, since the objects you walked up to were so much larger than what you were walking out of. This mall, as I recall, was instead dwarfed by the ground and the sky, a sky that in its usual gray was like a second, paler parking lot hanging over us. The flat world itself had been shelved between the two. The mall had two levels, also. I don’t know why, as a child, I thought in these parallels and symmetries, like nothing could exist without reflection. My sister said this thing about my mom, a thing I’d known but never figured out how to say. The thing is this: she knows the value of silence. There is a way, alone with her in the car, that travel falls quiet. The mall parking lot maybe matters because it marked the edge of the drive, this tranquil fifteen minutes when nobody had to talk, and the scenery, however drab, filled our minds. I didn’t appreciate it back then, or did but didn’t recognize it, how this taught me that each human has thoughts of their own that they want to get peacefully lost in now and then—lost like I have been in the Glendale Galleria, because I find the Americana too touristy, not serious enough about shopping.  Screenshot: YouTube Driving home alone and silent, as my mom prepared me to do, I will notice how late it’s become, the sun angled low with me squinting through it. If I’ve planned any other errands, one by one they are struck from the list. Not important, not essential. Surely not as oddly exciting and repellent as the mall, which I will need another excuse to visit at some date in the future. I have seen signs for the brands that are moving in this month or the next, the enormous construction panels that promise renovations of great and terrible mystery. I’m not even curious, merely pleased that the mall imagines it can change itself, adapt to another age, when all of us understand it’s not designed to, that it is its own graveyard: a future parking lot. And at last, now, it makes sense to me… the shops can’t just be just spread around. They must be packed together. That’s what my dad, a financial writer, felt so keenly: the compression of capital into this white-and-chrome temple, a public square with no public and no square. It’s where Santa sits, where youth is wasted, where the dull American aesthetic is received. I’m now prone to his phobia, as if the mall doors are about to be barricaded shut from the outside. I might be trapped. Or I’ve simply forgotten how to get past these windows and walls, back out to the parking lot—okay, the parking garage—where I will have to aim my keys about and repeatedly hit the lock button in hopes of hearing my dinged-up car honk its horn, to call me to it, urge me toward escape.
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