Death to Organisation!

Michel Gondry's movies are stories beautifully told. Most people who have watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind will agree that his plots are weirdly beautiful, and I mean that quite literally. They don't seem too logical at first like a person that you've just met, but, with time, all the tiny fragments fall into place and apart from a chink or two in certain places that always remain unfilled, you can see the whole picture. Once you've reached this state, you keep going back to them time and again, greeting the characters with the kind of familiarity that you share with extremely old friends or with people that you connected with instantaneously. The first time I read about The Science of Sleep was in a newspaper article of some sort. It had a particularly evocative snapshot of the movie alongside: the kind of picture that sucks you into it, like you were a part of it. I've always thought that pictures of this kind should be called something special. They're quite ordinary and yet not so. The article said that the movie was about a man who couldn't differentiate between waking and dreaming-- and so I stayed up that night, dwelling in the half-childish, half-grave world of Stephane Miroux. I have been in love with the movie ever since.
I watched it for the umpteenth time last night. My favourite scene in the movie (the picture above) is one in which Stephane and his neighbour Stephanie make a "forest in a boat" with felt, floating on a sea of blue and white cellophane. "Death to organisation!", cries Stephane, as he tries to mix white and blue to achieve the randomness of flowing water. The scene and the dialogue merge effortlessly to point at, what I consider, the single most important reason for existence. What are we but anomalies--tiny glitches in the twists and turns of genes that turned out to be favourable? Isn't chaos the underlying truth? Wouldn't we have been engulfed by the insatiable appetite of entropy had we not been able to break free of organisation and predictability?
Moreover, what is the purpose of all forms of art if it isn't to mirror life with all its deviations from the standard? Is true beauty any different from the startling differences that make it impossible for two things to be exactly alike? Is not the purpose of science to illuminate the fact that the deepest truths are complex and subjective?

I have great admiration for people who have come to terms with the world in all its disorder. The beautiful, strange people who live lives in snatches of reality. The social misfits who are not completely sure of who they are; so that they occasionally astonish the world with their colour and then turn an obstinate shade of grey. If you, like me, have been in search of people who belong to this elusive kind, then you will find two of them in The Science of Sleep. They are like the imaginary friends you talked to as a child. Their dreams are the dreams you had in the absence of logic. 

Hiding

It's scary to think how it's impossible to hide anymore. How everything that one thinks, writes, reads, says always remains. It's almost as if somebody pressed the record button so hard that it's jammed and you cannot pry it out. You try all the while, first with your fingers, then with the tops of your nails and then with your teeth. You pull, scratch, bite to no avail. If you're around people, you ask for help. Slowly, a crowd gathers around you: everybody tries their hand at solving the seemingly innocuous problem. Slight, skinny people are laughed at by the more hefty ones. They fail too. Everybody does. Some get angry, some perturbed. That's when the suggestions and the questions start pouring in. "Drop it and see if it stops!" "This might take a wrench!" "How did this happen?" "How did you manage to do this?" All the while, every single passing comment is on record. Everything is indelible. Every forgettable statement is stamped on to the reels, and the reels roll on endlessly.

In the end, you decide to lie, joke and make a fool of yourself so that everything about you that is recorded is a falsification. You hide under fake names, fake e-mail i.d.s, fake hopes, fake aspirations till all that's left of you has curled up so deep inside some nameless cavern that it can never be reached. And that's when the recorder is defeated, that's when you feel exceedingly happy, almost mad. It's strange how it's always more pleasurable to hide than to show. In a world so full of light, we're like tiny orbs of darkness floating without reason.