something about us: daft punk, chungking express, & i may destroy you
Beloved subscribers,
I don’t mean to leave you in the dark! I have been writing nearly nonstop, but the kind of writing that feels exasperated and directionless and unproductive, that has led me to start and promptly abandon three orphaned seedlings of newsletters. The particular brand of existentialism that I’m feeling right now revolves around what do I want to write about vs. what would others want to read vs. what would I want to read. I’m realizing all three of those questions have very different answers.
I decided to lean out of this self-imposed pressure to write for the time being. When this happens, I know to lean out of it into something else. And so, I am rereading a book that means a lot to me in preparation for a tattoo I have scheduled at the end of the month. I rewatched my favorite director Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express and Fallen Angels the way you’re meant to, back to back. And last night, I was lurking on the Wong Kar-wai Subreddit and saw this:
I was not expecting to see content like this on Reddit, what I consider a post-adolescent online platform, but when I did, I knew that this was how I’d be digging myself out of this bout of writer’s block.
First, the video itself: a montage of scenes from the 1994 Hong Kong film Chungking Express, specifically stitching together all of the appearances made by Cop 223 – perhaps the forefather of today’s beam-me-up-softboi simps – overlaid with the Daft Punk track “Something About Us” from their 2001 album Discovery.
With a superficial watch, Chungking Express can easily be written off as unambitious, purposeless, lacking the substance to merit the ardent praise heaped upon it. But there is a reason (a number of reasons, actually) why every great contemporary auteur – Quentin Tarantino most famously has declared his undying love for it, and Barry Jenkins has spoken about it at length as well – cites Chungking Express as a key inspiration in their own filmmaking.
For one thing, it’s gentle and earnest, in a really human way. It knows how aching a first heartbreak is. It understands that trailing not far behind rejection is denial, loneliness, plummeting self-interest; that a bad-weather shelter need be hastily constructed, that silly rituals do the important job of anchoring us to the earth in the violent cloudbursts of grief.
For Cop 223, it’s as if someone has shifted the floor under him a couple of meters, and this floor happens to be in to a subway station. Even after the break-up, he calls in on his ex’s family, who always happen to be on their way out (doubt), reluctant to be the ones to tell him that she’s not there at all. He develops a worrying attachment to his beeper (okay fine, I admit it, I had to look up how these things work), which has taken a vow of silence. He visits the street under her window and kicks rocks around glumly, reminiscing on the good times they had together.
The most curious of Cop 223’s post-breakup rituals revolves around pineapple. Every day, for the entire month following the fact, he buys a can of pineapple with an expiration date of May 1st. (Her name is May and pineapple is her favorite fruit and May 1st is also his birthday. Is his simp showing yet?)
It’s a countdown of sorts, the holding of a breath, an earnest effort to extend something that has already long been extinguished. When May 1st comes around and May unsurprisingly leaves the line cold, 223 finally allows himself to swallow a hard truth, to eat the physical and metaphorical thirty cans of expired pineapple. He celebrates his twenty-fifth birthday alone in a bar and wills himself to fall in love with the next woman who walks in the door.
223’s arc plots a path between realizing that love has expiration dates and opening himself back up to the world in spite of that realization. This is a really hopeful refraction of Wong Kar-wai’s most steadfast belief in his body of work at large, that all love really boils down to is a matter of timing. While In the Mood for Love’s star-crossed lovers are doomed to the wrong timing, Chungking Express’s Cop 223 with the woman in the blonde wig is proof that someone can be the right person for you by pure virtue of the timing. Against the backdrop of neon-lit, seedy, rapidly globalizing Hong Kong, expecting love to thrive seems fruitless and naïve, but it does so anyway.
“Something About Us” as a song choice is also particularly saturated with weight right now between its feature in the soundtrack for Michaela Coel’s show I May Destroy You and Daft Punk’s recent announcement of its disbandment after an incandescent, twenty-eight-year-long career. Discovery was on repeat in this house for the entirety of February in solemn memoriam.
It might not be the right time
I might not be the right one
But there’s something about us I want to say
‘Cause there’s something between us anyway
Let me emphasize this in case it’s not clear: this song is so good.
The instrumentation and the layering of these voices seem really simple, the length of the two verses and refrain nothing particularly of note, the lyrics themselves oversold and uninspired. And yet, any one of its tiny, repeated gestures can devastate you. It is a piece of music that can be consumed if you’re looking to think too much or too little. It is the master class in capturing and reproducing a very specific, fleeting mood; it forces out a strong emotional reaction in you that you want to name and will spend the rest of your life trying to do so.
One person in the comments section for these lyrics on Genius thought, “This song is heartbreaking. It really effectively captures a moment in time - the point at which a relationship is crumbling but you still want to hold on.”
Another countered that it was the “best love song ever. saying these words to my future wife.”
A third commenter offered this interpretation:
It’s honestly kind of bizarre that the annotations and one of the most up-voted comments focus on sexuality, crumbling relationships, or a consuming anxiety. I’ve personally always felt that this song is the purest expression of hoping to share emotional intimacy with someone you have feelings for.
It’s the kind of thing where you might spend a few days trying to come up with the perfect thing to say, but in the end, you realize the best way to convey your feelings is to just be genuine and humble: “maybe I’m not the right person for you, maybe we’re not quite ready for a relationship right now, but I can see the special connection between us and I want to see how much further it can bloom. And, even if it doesn’t work out in the end, I’ll have no regrets. So, wanna give it a shot?”
In I May Destroy You, Arabella’s developing love interest, the Italian drug dealer Biagio, plays the song on his phone for her after pretending to have not known it earlier in the night:
Every time I rewatch this scene, I notice something new in it. The tall stalk with long, dry leaves, planted into the sand like a flagpole. The neon pink dot skimming a distant white building over Biagio’s shoulder that I initially mistake for the sun. The shade of sky that night mellows into, early-morning lavender. The gaze shared between Arabella and Biagio, never simultaneously sustained, the only point of contact when passed from one to the other, imbued with unreadable meaning. The conversation more intimate than the unfulfilled attempt at intercourse that preceded it.
The dynamic between these two is one fluid push and pull motion, shifting like fresh silt in water, contracting and releasing, invitation and withdrawal. He softens while she hardens; she relaxes and he tenses. Two near-strangers with freestanding emotional histories, needs, and injuries – strands that have every rational reason to remain separate – save for the anthropological inclination to share something with another person, to give a part of yourself away, to relent to the unknown. There is a tacit agreement that this – whatever this is – exists only in the liminal space of early morning, of this strip of empty beach, but it will be sacred and inviolable until the end of time. The moment is porous with possibility.
And what of the preciousness of impermanence that makes the moment all the more potent? What of the unyielding margin of temporality that coaxes forth deliverance through the act of stripping oneself bare, that inspires a generosity of self you can’t normally afford during daylight hours as a worker, a caretaker, someone who seeks out definitions in relationships as a precautionary measure against future pain and suffering?
Biagio says affectionately, “You get in trouble one day, don’t come crying to me.” What emotion does that express? What does it mean when someone tells you you’re on your own with the tenderness of a person who is profoundly familiar with how full of life you are and is especially fond of you for it? Is I care about you in this moment, but the next is unspoken for selfishly unfair or soberingly realistic?
These are the last words uttered as the morning sun floods the seafront in bright light, the shadows fall off the caps of the waves, and the last latent heat in the sand evaporates. An ember that burns for three minutes and fifty-two seconds is snuffed out. The previous day is over, and another one takes its place.