A fucking shithole of a city

Worst font on the worst promotional poster ever

I wrote before about a movie drawn from the shambles of a human face. Here is a movie where the tone is set immediately by the city, and the city, in a sense, determines all that follows. In Bruges seems to be marketed as a comedy-action, with Colin Farrell, but it is really neither action nor comedy, unless the comedy you're thinking of is Dante's Divine Comedy.

There is, indeed, something epic about In Bruges - epic not in our common meaning of grand or memorable (see: "That was epic, dude!"), for it is above all a most intimate observation of a few private lives, of men who are invisible to the crowds around them. Rather it is epic in the traditional sense of showing us a complete world, down to the smallest detail. Bruges is "the most perfectly preserved medieval city in Europe," and as one character says, too bad it's in Belgium but then again if it was somewhere good it would be overrun with tourists. I have no idea if the real Bruges is anything like the one in the film, but if it is, then it may be one of the most singularly miraculous places on Earth: a shockingly beautiful and poetic town that manages to stay off the radar, roamed mostly by its own residents across cobbled streets or otherwise the ubiquitous canals that seem to run under the old buildings, suspending them on water.

No wonder no one knows anything about the city, since in the film it is shot as if from an ancient time. In one of their first sightseeing forays, a character remarks to another that this particular church used to be a hospital in the 1100s. Strange to think of a hospital, a place singly focused on keeping people alive, now empty after almost 1000 years of disuse, all those mortal concerns long gone. And so it is with the rest of the film. The movie is about hitmen, but deeply ethical hitmen, and it is fitting for their line of work that absolutely no action is without its appropriate consequence in the movie. No person drawn into the world of the hitmen is incidental; people are drawn into Bruges, or drawn back into Bruges, but none leave, and all their decisions and actions wind back and back in concentric circles. In this sense fate becomes a guarantee; if you kill a man, or hit a Canadian, or insult a dwarf, or flirt with a girl on a movie set, their lives will become intertwined with yours and every consequence you expect to happen will, must happen. Somehow this sense of inevitability and enclosure is palpable in the way the houses line up in Bruges, their flat, triangular faces forming an impenetrable wall. Bruges is a Petri dish for all human karma.

The characters know this, or learn this, and become ever carefuller with their words and gestures. In one of the many remarkable sequences of the movie, a hitman is about to launch himself off of a high tower - but before he does, he sprinkles coins to the ground below, to alert the strangers passing beneath to clear a space for his death. It is a delicate act that betrays such a powerful sense of responsibility, such an overwhelming awareness that things go on, they always go on, that even something as personal (and, in this case, selfless) as suicide can nevertheless begin a progression of hurt and sadness that may have no end. Even though he is about to die, he knows that it is so easy to rend the fabric of other lives, that the world is a small, closed space, where nothing ever goes unanswered. And so he does his best to make the smallest possible splash.

I am trying to describe as much of the film's beauty as possible without "giving away stuff," which I find a terrible line to walk because the two really having nothing to do with one another. I mentioned that every life that becomes involved in the story becomes central - there is no reprieve or escape. Through the movie, the hitmen collect images, friends, enemies, lovers, architecture, impressions, art. In the last scene, as a character is carted off to a hospital in Bruges (yes), all of these people come back, in a sequence that, like the city itself, appears out of a dream. They are ordinary people: a Hollywood actor, a hotelkeep, a drug dealer, a small-time hustler, but in this sequence, surrounded by the lit-up buildings of night-time Bruges, they become archetypal, medieval, fantastical: a dwarf, a one-eyed villian, a beautiful girl, a pregnant Mary. (I had decided to call her "Mary" because of her beauty, her innocence and goodness, her pregnancy, and only this moment realized that her name actually is Marie in the film. Nothing is accidental.)

In voice-over, the wounded hitman says he would rather go to hell than stay in Bruges, and then decides that hell is maybe exactly Bruges. He says this as we see a shot of his totally hot girlfriend, sobbing as she tries to reach him, and we wonder at his comment. Surely he has seen worse in his life, surely Bruges is not so bad. Surely this girl has given him more happiness than he has had in a long time. But Bruges represents a closed world, and a fatal symptom of such a place is that one can never hope to leave. Every thought, every gesture you make resonates with all the air in the world and changes it, so that it is different from before, and you must eventually breathe again that changed air. This is responsibility, and inevitability, and therefore burden. Hell doesn't have to be filled with burning coals or devils with whips to be hell; hell is hell simply because it is a place from which you know you will never escape.

In the here and now

Sometimes the most obvious observations are the most startling. Have you noticed, for instance, that our daily lives are entirely ruled by our idea of past and future? We are always thinking about what we will do, what we will become, either this afternoon, or tomorrow, or sometime down the vague road before us. And what we do do is mostly determined by the past: by the habits we have built up. By the identities that we associate with ourselves, or simply by the sheer weight and bulk of all our past years, which easily steamroll over the millisecond that we call the present moment.

Laziness is often equated with apathy, indifference, irresponsibility - but I would like to suggest a different source, which is being caught squarely between the terrorizing forces of past and future. In all our moments of apathy, of stasis, when we lie in bed for half an hour after waking, or when we stay one more year in a job, a place, we know deep down is not quite right for us - what is happening but that we are fixed in the hold of two essentially fictitious times? The momentum of our past stasis carries us over and continues its hold on us because we are overwhelmed by the uncertainty of what might come next.

But if a moment only becomes "past" when we look back on it, is there ever such a thing as a "past moment," or a "past time"? Or were they actually just "present" moments, in the same way our future is just a different "present"? Maybe our lives don't resemble a tiny point moving through a sea of "was" and "will be", like so:

pppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppp!ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff

where "p" are past moments, and "f" are future moments, and that "!" is the only point that we really know and control. Maybe, instead, our lives are a series of presents, like so:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

But even the phrase "series of presents" is misleading, because it suggests a chronology, that some presents come before or after others - which is really impossible, because aren't all presents "now"? Doesn't every one of them happen at the exact same time (that is, "now"), and therefore it is paradoxical to say that there are future and past "presents"? Aren't all present moments simultaneous, or - perhaps even more radically - could we then say that there is only one Present moment, one now that encapsulates the whole of your life?

We normally think of ourselves as moving from point A to point Z, say on a racetrack. We begin, and there is an ever diminishing amount of track before us, and an ever increasing amount behind. As we run, we may think that we can still change our course before us, while we accept that the path we have already run is fixed in the past. Here is another way to think of it. Life is a river. And you are not on a little boat making your way down the river - you are the river. A river flows in time; it flows from the mouth of its source, down winding through the land, and ends when it empties itself into the sea. But even as it flows in time, a river exists simultaneously at the mouth and the sea: even if you are standing at the birthplace of the river, somewhere, somewhere at the same time the river is dying. Though the river moves from A to Z, every point along its long and cursive path exists simultaneously, that is, they are all presents.

Does it require too great a feat of imagination to believe that all the points of our lives, too, are simultaneous? It is not a concept that comes easily, and not one that is easy to fix constantly in our minds, because our experience speaks so much against it - we see our lives chronologically, one infinitesimal slice at a time. But we are not like the figure on the racetrack, who is only in touch with the immediate ground below. We seep into our pasts and futures, and they into us. The future changes with every tiny motion that we make - you could say that every decision, every small gesture, even the decision to remain still, pushes the refresh button on the browser of your life. If I stab myself in the arm now, my whole life up to the very end changes, and if I don't, then it will look completely different. But at the same time, we also control our past - just as our past can dominate us, so too can an act of courage and impulse in the present moment reject all that has come before, and in that way change its meaning and its import. How a story ends changes the whole story, not just the ending.

What am I trying to say with all of this? Maybe, as a species, we are always in transition. We plan for the future; we feel compelled by the past. We can't bring ourselves to make dinner at the end of a long day, not only because we are tired, but because we feel ourselves to be tired - we remember the day, and think to all the things that are yet to be done, and feel justified in saying, "Let me be." It's as if everyone walks around with blindfolds on, or rather with two faces, one pointed to the past, one to the future, and no one really sees that they are here now, now, a person on the planet who exists in this moment and who has complete control over this moment. This is not "Live every moment as if it's your last," even though it sounds a lot like it, but rather something like, "Live every moment because it is your last, first, and every other in between." Remember: the river exists at all points at once. If you are lazy in this one moment, you are lazy in all your moments, past and future. But you can always rewrite the whole thing in the next. Every moment is a decision on how you will live the entirety of your life, past and future.

Let me return to the beginning of this essay, and offer an alternative. You know those stories you hear about mothers who are able to lift cars off of their trapped children? Or how you can write more in the last half hour before a paper is due than you had in the last three weeks? In moments of great pressure, we are forced to wrench our eyes out in front of us and really see where we are. But this happens all too rarely. Think of that focus, that power that comes when we really live in the moment we are in, when we are driving toward a deadline or reacting out of impulse to save a life. But the past and the future have such a hold on us, and we are trained to let them in.

I'm not saying that being under great pressure is the only way to get there, but rather that those moments of achievement - we all have them - moments when we surprised ourselves, transcended our normal routine and did something remarkable, can teach us that any moment can be opened to the same freedom. If you are sitting at your computer, look up and realize that you are alive, that you exist here and now, that you can do whatever you want in the next moment because there is nothing holding you down, past or future. It's a remarkable feeling, and a scary one, as if you have now just taken your blindfold off, and can see where you are in the world. I cannot describe it better than this: it feels like entering the world.