Mood Indigo
...on where I've been, physically and otherwise; plus, thoughts on a moody French film
I.
One of my writing professors last semester, a short and volatile Russian woman, said that houses fell sick when their owners did. She had seen it before, a homeowner nearing the end, and the house following suit: pipes suddenly useless, water pressure weak, cabinets rotting inside. Or that’s what I imagined when she said that, her head tilted to one side. A lull fell over the class, as often did when she recalled an absolute truth.
We had been workshopping a story written from the perspective of a house. I had brought to the table my concerns. There were loopholes to address. How did the house know what happened two blocks away? Was it omnipresent, all-knowing? If not, the house would only know what happened within its domain; it would struggle to fill in the narrative gaps, to piece together the stories of its inhabitants. At the time, it would have a vast generational memory.
I rewrote the story in my head. I imagined the house to be moralistic and vengeful. I imagined the house, tearing open a sinkhole under the toilet, squeezing together the walls of a hallway or loosening a tile wall until the pieces rain down like chiclets. At the time, I loved the idea of a house interfering with the lives of its inhabitants.
II.
In surrealist 2013 film Mood Indigo, a house falls apart. It centers around a straight couple, happy and in love. One day, the woman in love--Audrey Tautou--is diagnosed with a mysterious illness. There’s a water lily in her lung. It’s a killing sort of flower. Audrey and her man are shocked, but viewers are not: we watched the beginning of the end. We watched the flower twist through a screenless window and settle in Tatou’s throat.
It turns out that the only way to fight off her symptoms is to fill the house with flowers. Her man, the Man in Love, played by Romain Duris, does this to the point of his own bankruptcy. (Alternatively, a lesson in loyalty: if he wanted to, he would.) As Tautou’s character gets sicker and sicker, the house they’ve built crumbles around them, and color seeps out of the film.
Mood Indigo is based on the 1947 novel L'Écume des Jours written by French novelist Boris Vian. Translations of the title include “Foam of the Daze” and “Froth on a Daydream.” The pdf in English is near impossible to find. Mood Indigo the film, however, is easily streamable on Hulu. It hits that sweet spot where it’s right outside your mental orbit: you could probably try hard enough to understand, but you won’t; rewatching would tug the threads of your brain together unpleasantly.
Tautou has apparently been a fan of the novel since she was in high school, confirming my conception of her as a manic pixie dream girl. In an interview, she described being on the eclectic set: "As soon as you consider that this fantastic world is your own real world, and when you think and accept everything around you...even if it's totally crazy and unbelievable...but when you think and you believe that everything around you is your truth, you just feel at home," said Tautou.
III.
My house is falling apart, or was, for some time. The issues began when I first moved in, a few months ago. I struggle to remember what came first--was it the lock? Did I flip a switch, invoke a curse, when I turned the brass knob? To this day, the lock is sullen, uncooperative. You have to throw yourself into the door to close it effectively, and tug quite a few times before it opens again. There’s a gold chain lock on the inside that fell off the lock at some point: today, now slinks away on a hallway side table, like the abandoned first chain of a rapper.
After the lock came the toilets. They gave up at the same time, out of the blue, on the cusp of winter. The plumbers didn't know quite what was going on. They replaced the chains, and there was a honeymoon period of easy flushes; after that, they gave up again.
After the toilets came the gas leak. The smell crept from the kitchen into the living room, slinking low to the wall all the way to my bedroom. There was a flurry, a panic, an involvement of the neighbors, a calling of National Grid. They acted as I imagined the National Guard would, stomping over our nice wooden floors with dark boots. They turned a valve in the back of the stove, called the super, and did something in the basement. That was the end of our stove for a month.
There are new discoveries to be made all the time. Half of the windows, mysteriously, are without screens. Behind the sink faucet, along the base of the kitchen counter, is a narrow strip that needs to be caulked. Both kitchen windows creak when they open, one louder than the other: it’s a painful, distinctly female wail. The issues multiply when solutions are attempted--the management company directs us to an array of third party services, rattle off numbers that seem to be made up, and otherwise redirect us in ways screaming to be immortalized in an absurdist play. When the Bronx fire happens, I think: this could be us.
Inexplicably, the cupboards of the apartment are filled with items from owners past--a knit red hat with the tag still on, a rubbery pair of black and white boxing gloves, a green and yellow ceramic parrot. There are condiments in the fridge that we are still slowly picking through, a glass bottle with the dregs of Cranberry juice that I threw out this morning. .
IV.
I’ve been in a strange purple mood. Doing the right thing--and sometimes, anything--feels like the last moments of a plank, right before your knees hit the floor. I let decisions build to the point where making them is no longer tolerable. What have I been up to, besides pattering around the house sullenly? It is unclear.
This time of my life, allegedly busy, is filled with meandering moments. Partially because I work from home, many of them are domestic. I put Folgers grounds in my expensive Chemex. I roll fat, frozen blueberries--surreal like picture book blueberries--into a blender called The Beast. I add collagen powder, which globs up into the almond milk, and creates a slurry that sticks to the bottom. I push groceries off for a day, a week, a month. I order in when I need something solid. I scrape slurry out of The Beast. I ignore text messages. I read five pages of a novel. I microwave my Folgers coffee until it burns the tongue.
I often feel like I’m floating outside of myself. What am I doing, and when? With whom? I am certainly not vibing; on the other hand, I’m not languishing. What I'm experiencing isn’t new, unless it is, which I suppose it could be. Although truthfully, it just isn’t. I’ve described it recently as “a surrounding sense of malaise.” It helps to externalize what I’m going through. I can’t describe the feeling, only the scaffolding. There’s so much I can blame it on: capitalism, or the pandemic, or my gluten intake, or my early 20’s, or a cocktail of GMOs, or seasonal depression, or “mental illness” at large.
On paper, it is clear what I am doing: working at a literary agency and finishing school. Dealing with family issues, mentally if not actually. “Settling in,” although my bedroom walls are as barren as Kim Kardashian’s. Forming odd, intimate ties with my next door neighbors. Listening to fiction, reading fiction. Stopping just short of the writing. Going on runs along the highway, dodging patches of ice, feeding myself halfheartedly, sleeping in warped positions.
There’s the big house and the little house; the little house contains my mind. Here, too, it feels like I’m living on a set. The structures of this house feel even more artificial, malleable, untrustworthy. I often wonder about myself: what is happening? When did the water lily come in? Have I always been this way?
V.
To clarify, the apartment I’m living in is the only one that has felt like “home” in awhile. (In my last newsletter, I referenced the many moves I’ve undertaken in the past few years.) It is also by far the nicest--it is spacious, with high ceilings, and gets great light. Honestly, I;ve
I’ve tried to rewatch Mood Indigo a few times now. I’ve tried to finish this essay for a few months now. A few seasons, if we’re being real--there are edits that date back to January 30th. There are all sorts of clever things I wanted to say, things about Mood Indigo I wanted to point out: the kooky alarm clock that jumps off the wall and skitters like a bug; the conveyor belt that food travels on in Romain Duris’s house; the odd little mouse the functions as a house laborer/pet; the way that Duke Ellington’s music in the film spins rooms until they are circular.
When I first move into this apartment, I remember my professor’s words. I wonder if I am causing the house to fall apart, or whether it is taking cues from me. Am I falling into disrepair, or am I regenerating? It’s unclear. It seems like I am undergoing a transition that refuses to spit me out, to let me look at myself in the face. It also seems completely possible that this is all made up, brought on by another stinking purple mood. I think about Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dreamhouse, and remember that houses and the people who live in them are not to be trusted--even if you are one of them.
One Tip
Like my writing? Feel like you came away with some solace or, at the very least, a movie recommendation? Feel free to tip me through my Ko-fi account.
One Recommendation
Daddy, Emma Cline
One Thank You
To Marci, for so kindly helping me edit this back in January.
One Apology…Or Many?
I'm sorry for vanishing, and saying that I won’t do it again, and vanishing again. I’m sorry that I probably haven’t texted you back. I’m sorry if I ever rejected you romantically.
Thanks for rocking with me, accepting this as it is, and reading my innermost thoughts.
rocking with you has never felt more important... dont let them -- the years? gmos? capitalism? mental illness? the color purple? -- keep u down!!!!
It took me a while to read this as I kept going back to read sentences, and paragraphs that I was drawn to..absolutely gorgeous.