Film Journal 2024: The Listener

Film Journal 2024: The Listener
Directed by Steve Buscemi

“We’re programmed to hate the idea that we’re programmed.”

That line has been sticking with me like few others this year. Perhaps the best descriptive of what it feels to live in the tension of attend8ng for reality while at the same time finding the freedom to live within it. For anyone who’s experienced this existential crisis,it can become an all consuming, mental, physical, psychological challenge.to wade through.

We find the language of this crisis fully formulsted in the context of one of the films final callers. Whereas the help line employee has spent the night trying to help people through their personal points of crisis with her words and her verbal presence, the final caller throws all of these words into question by forcing them to attend for reality. How is it that we attend for the illusion of this thing we called life. How do we reconcile the fact that our experiences of this life are essentially dependent on acts of manipulation. As the final caller surmises, we have this inate need to feel like we are the author of our stories, and to feel otherwise is to experience feelings of oppression. The problem is, reality tells us we are not. Thus we find ourselves managing this apparent discord even as we remain unaware or wilfully ignorant about what this discord is.

In a climatic moment, our final caller poses a challenge to the worker to give a rational argument for why someone should not commit suicide, readily anticipating and cutting down the inevitable answers as irrational. I remember distinctly sitting down with an association of mine and giving them the same challenge once upon a time. I noted that there is no rational reason to not to end my life, especially when reality tells me that suffering far outweighs the pleasures of living, not to mention the purely ethical question, should we want to breach that, spilling out into the stark fact that no matter what I do my life will, objectively speaking, do more harm than good simply by me existing. The only way to truly get around my awareness of this was to choose to live in ignorance of this, and to bind myself to truths that were in fact illusions and manipulations of reality. It just felt like something has to give in that equation- either my conception of reality or my living.

This film definitely tapped into all of that old wrestling in a very real way. I loved the simplicity of its premise and the way it uses it to dig down deep into those vulnerable spaces. There’s a subtle progression to the phone calls, even though they are each occupying their own space with different conversations with different people at the same time. It mounts to this space where everything is ultimately thrown into question, and where the language being used to speak to points of crisis is turned back on the worker.

Blue skies on one side, grey skies on the other.

There is a rather clever and brilliant move on the part of the Director to keep the narrative from gettimg locked into any hard and fast conclusions, regardless of how deep and dark and vulnerable it gets. There is no hand holding here that pretends to offer false answers. As it is noted, whenever someone says “there is always beauty and meaning we can find”, or “you mean something to me”, what this is in fact saying is that there is no meaning in a rational sense of the word. This is the language of human nature, grasping as it it designed to do at meaning making constructs. We are designed to fight against what reality ultimately is and says about this world, who we are, and our place in it. And the world, or nature, is designed to push back.

If I can be clear and transparent, I once thought this way. I was this caller caught in the throes of this battle between the world and my ability to survive it. Confronted by the truths that surfaced through my desperate search for some objective truth that could help explain how I was feeling, I was left with no way to reconcile my allegiances to the illusion with my observations about reality. While my journey ultimately brought me to a place where my conception of reality had to give, it did so with a sense unease and fear. Thus I often find myself analyzing and experiencing the world through wearing different sets of shoes. I find it necessary to reason from those differing assumptions and to allow the reasoning to take me where it will within those given parameters. And thus what this film evokes, and where my journey once found me, is as true as the fact that I am still living and would ultimately find myself working from a different set of assumptions. They are both part of me and my story. Which is why I find films like this, even though they go to dark places, helpful and rewarding and even cathartic. It reminds me that my questions and struggles are ones that find good company, even if they find equal resistance on all sides of the philopshical and religious/non-religious fence.