Still Eating, Praying, Loving
by zunguzungu
On the “veritable battalion of sudden class warriors have emerged in recent weeks to bash Eat, Pray, Love for its portrayal of cluelessness in rich white yoga-lady form, a near-universal object of derision if ever there was one in this culture,” please find:
Michelle Dean (at the Awl)
Millicent (at Millicent and Carla Fran)
perhaps I didn’t read it closely enough (sorry, toddler tugging my pantsleg) but I thought that MD’s Awl review missed some things about I Am Love. In my mind, the movie is one long (kinda heavy-handed) exploration of the effects of wealth on the subjective experience of love and intersubjective family and social life. All of the characters (the woman, her husband, her children, her lover, the maid/confidante/housekeeper – everyone) are viewed through their relationship to money, capital. And what we see is that that results in either diminished sense of self or a colonized sense of self (i.e. the three generations of patriarchs who perpetuate the wealth which is the only medium for the family and its members to know each other). I saw it as a tableaux of people wrestling with the effects of savage capitalism. I liked it for that. If the movie accentuates the sensuality of wealth, it does so only to contrast that with another kind of sensual experience – a sensuality which is felt *in* the body, through more robust and more compelling claims of affect. I saw the characters as falling on or trying to cross this line – of attempting a different kind of integrity and fulfillment beyond just seeing the body and the home and the world as an ornamental surface for decoration. And because this comes at such a tremendous price (rupture and rending of long-standing, binding relationships) I thought it was kind of Antigone-like in that sense of choice. MD doesn’t really see any of that or talk about that in her review. What did you think?
I haven’t seen I am Love, unfortunately, so I can’t comment. But it may amuse you to know that I spent many minutes being fascinated/confused by what I took to be your reading of Eat, Pray, Love, a reading I very much wanted to be able to sustain but couldn’t because, after all, you were TALKING ABOUT A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT MOVIE. Duh! But I’ve put I am Love on my list.
My movie reviews don’t usually flummox anyone :-) Yes, go see IAL. It’s kinda like a classy version of Dallas. As for E,P,L, I haven’t see it yet (cf. the toddler pantleg-puller who doubles as my own personal movie-going-limitation). I read the book. Whatever criticism people make of Gilbert, I still think that overall, in our society, it is still very difficult for women to leave marriage and I respect what was surely the difficulty involved in that decision for her. I’ve been on that cusp myself, struggling against what feels like the quicksand of suburban heterosexual middle-class marital status-quo. It was hard. The social pressure of assumed gender roles left me raw and wobbly and spiritually off-kilter. I don’t think we (women, but men, too) have clean (ethically, socially, emotionally, politically in the broad sense) road-maps to navigate our way out of that mire. That’s how ideology lives in real life, making us confused about the terms of fulfillment. So her out was “messy”, but not I think unnecessarily. I agree with Bookslut’s review, mostly. And I particularly liked your take on the book in the post previous to this – looking at healthy self-cultivation and unhealthy self-absorption. A fair read, and a helpful distinction.
You have any summer this summer? Time off to regenerate and recreate?