A couple weeks ago I saw Villeneuve’s Dune II in IMAX. I was at a huge Regal Cinemas multiplex in Anchorage; I think it was the 8pm showing. One day later, at 4pm, I was in Juneau, wandering around town with nothing to do, and saw that a little arts theater called “Gold Town” was showing Perfect Days, directed by Wim Winders, in thirty minutes.
I hustled over, bought my ticket, and sat down, arriving just a couple minutes into the start of the film. The theater was very small—especially with the memory of the previous night’s IMAX grandeur still fresh in my mind. It could hold maybe forty people, and the screen was, estimating generously, 15ft. across. There were around ten older folks there with me, quietly crunching on their $2 bags of popcorn.
Perfect Days follows Hirayama, a public toilet cleaner in Tokyo. He’s older—40s or 50s—and lives alone, spending his days watering his plants, going to work, eating at a small underground restaurant, bathing, reading, listening to his cassettes, and taking photos of the sun-splattered tree he sits across from as he eats lunch in a park. There isn’t much plot beyond all of these little things. At one point his neice runs away from home and stays with him for a while, and at another he meets the dying ex-husband of the bar-owner he (seemingly) has a crush on. Other than that, though, it’s just a handful of normal, quotidian, “perfect” days.
Dune II, on the other hand…what could be more plot-heavy? The film is nearly three hours long, yet still manages to feel rushed. So much plot compressed into so little time on a big, big screen. In this long-awaited sequel, we see Paul (Timmy Chalamet!) make his gradual ascension to messiah-figure of Arrakis, and ultimately marry Princess Irulian (Florence Pugh), leaving Chani (Zendaya) behind. Of course a lot more happens, but this isn’t a Dune synopsis.
I walked out of Dune: Part Two disappointed that I had paid extra for the IMAX ticket, and also disappointed by the film as a whole. The acting and writing felt, at times, mediocre, which, for such a budget, is surprising! Mediocre in the way that the acting and writing in TV live action adaptations feels: hollowed out, false, banal. What had even happened, what had even been said? It was also quite painful to watch because I thought over and over to the ongoing genocide in Gaza. For whom are these things entertainment, and for whom are they reality? And the next thought: how many of the probably two or three-hundred person audience gave this any thought at all?
Walking out of Perfect Days, —no, within the first ten minutes of Perfect Days—I couldn’t stop thinking that this movie was doing something emotionally, in this “shabby” theater, that Dune did not and maybe could not do.
There’s a guy I used to follow on twitter who thought (it was his PhD thesis it seemed, so maybe more than “thought”) that all sci-fi is inherently conservative. I disagree; there’s so much speculative/fantasy/sci-fi narrative that isn’t just escapism or techno-fascist futurism, and actually helps us understand (see) reality better. Think afrofuturism, think Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler. HOWEVER: Dune II almost makes me think twitter guy was onto something. This LARB article about modern fascists’ perennial fascination with Dune supports, to an extent, these misgivings.
I don’t think Dune: Part Two works to clarify reality, and I think Perfect Days does exactly that, in its own small way.
When I was a kid, my mom would take my sister and I when she went to clean houses. She wasn’t a professional house-cleaner, she just did a few houses a week, paid in cash. Coming from this other side of the cleaning/janitorial professions—one so looked down upon in, so commonly seen as lowly or dirtying—that, of course, made Perfect Days resonate more with me. There’s a spectacular scene where a kid is lost, crying out for his mother in one of the bathrooms. Hirayama finds him, takes his hand, and leads him around the park, asking him about where his parents are. Eventually they find the mother, who’s rolling a stroller, and she grabs the little boy, chides him, and then immediately pulls out a wet wipe and wipes off the boy’s hand where Hirayama held it. She casts a single glance back, then walks off. The boy, though, turns and waves, and Hirayama, who’s been very neutral this whole time, smiles, then laughs.
This and so many other little moments spoke to me during the film. And again, Wenders and the team managed it without a Dune: Part Two budget (190m vs. 14m)! Without the IMAX cameras, fancy soundtrack, gargantuan SFX, etc. etc.! Who would have thought that filmmaking can be more than its technical elements, than an equation where bigger screen + fancier camera + well-loved plot + pretty actors = highest emotion, thrill, enjoyment, pleasure?
*******
Anyway, I’m back to reading The Black Jacobins, and I hope that this time around I’ll finish the book—only about 150 pages left! I’d like to write something about it when I finish, at least a review, but maybe something more—anything to get the material to stick. This weekend there’s a 24-hour, round-the-clock zine making event happening that I’m hoping to write something about embodiedness for (and also hoping to get far too caffeinated and stay up all night frantically trying to remember how to use a Risograph). And lastly, part one of the Onyx Coffee Lab series should be out soon. Still not sure how polished/unpolished I want to release things on here, but feeling more and more that I should just put things out and think about polishing later. Isn’t that how serializations used to work?
