StrangeScaffold
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You Were Never Really Here (2018 film) = Finished
🕑 Added 2018-11-01 03:05:42 +0000 UTC You Were Never Really Here is the first movie I've found to capture the reality of what suicidal ideation feels like on a chronic level.Most of the time, movies treat suicidal thoughts and impulses as a dramatic element, or simply a deepening of depression. Neither of these uses quite capture the truth. Yes, suicide can be a dramatic, sudden, or all-encompassing thing, but sometimes it can just be mundane and draining as hell. Yes, suicide can be connected to depression, but they don't necessarily walk hand in hand. Not always.
When you're in this place - and place seems to be one of the few ways I can describe it - you don't need a reason. There isn't necessarily a cause. Sometimes, you can't find one if you try.
You're just there.
You Were Never Really Here understands that.
Joe gives a man he shoots in the stomach a painkiller, to hold a conversation with him. He holds the man's hand as he dies. Joe loves his mother. He walks almost everywhere. He saves trafficked girls for a living, or avenges them. Joe is a compassionate, utterly human person in a genre where monosyllabic slabs of revenge meat are the norm.
Joe is also suicidal.
We constantly see Joe in positions on the edge, but never quite stepping off of it. He pulls a plastic bag tight over his head, breathes into it, and pulls it off. He holds a knife over his open mouth and ever so slowly lowers it towards the back of his throat, towards his spine, and pulls it out. He imagines blowing a hole through the back of his neck in the middle of a crowded diner. Nobody notices. No one cares. His server gives him the bill as blood runs over the thin paper receipt. In real life, Joe lowers his head onto the table, feeling the cool. Remaining with the dreadful, weary meat.
Joe's fantasies are consistent, intense, actionable, just within reach...and left to lie fallow. I can't think of another movie that seems to understand this seeming contradiction.
Suicide is not always the gun to the head, or the meticulous plan heaved out through tears. It's going to the kitchen, picking up a knife, and holding it in your hand. Running your finger along the edge of the blade over and over, deeper each time, knowing exactly how you'd draw it across your wrist, up your arm, and around your neck. Just a little bit more pressure. Just the tiniest change in angle. You'd be dead. You don't even think where the blade would fall. It doesn't matter. You don't care. You wouldn't be here anymore. You'd be dead.
There is a point where you pass beyond wanting to die, and wanting to know how to accomplish this, to absolutely knowing that you could kill yourself, and surrounding yourself with the means to do so. Maybe you fill up the bath just a little higher tonight, because that's the exact amount you'd need to slip under the waters forever. No one else knows this thought process. The intentional pattern of decisions leading up to a thousand paths for your death that you never take--but you do, and God does, and so does this beautiful, brutal movie.
You snap from your reveries. For family, for necessity, because someone walked into the room...sometimes the reasons are the same. Often, they're the same. The thoughts never go away, though. They stay there. Like a sticker with its visage worn to white little bits. Clinging on, just like you are.
Remaining with the dreadful, weary meat for one more day, living in spite of yourself, for the people around you and the God you hope to see.
