QUANTUM IDENTITY

This week has been a bit of a Charlotte Rampling festival in honor of older women. Last night was “The Duchess.” Tonight was “Swimming Pool.” The two movies could not be more different in one way: “The Duchess” is based on historical fact, heavily overlaid with modern bodice-ripper interpretations. “Swimming Pool” is . . . well, what is it? An erotic thriller? A psychological philosophical mind game? A French excuse for toplessness? Charlotte was absolutely believable in both, without any extravagance or obvious tricks.

The interesting movie is the latter. I’ve been reading about “quantum mechanics” (finally got around to “The Dancing Wu-Li Masters,” which I suppose is already obsolete since there appears to be an additional “force” in the cosmos -- we’re up to five now. Quantum mechanics are for particles so teeny they are indefinable, not quite perceptible: energy in both wave and particle which has the potential to be two places at once, possibly in multiple parallel universes, and -- on the Newtonian level -- to make our solid world. At least as we perceive it. Human identity appears to operate on a quantum basis.

We know that the brain takes in all the sensory information of our bodies, sorts it, throws out some, makes up some, and creates from the result a reality of its own. One for the daytime, one for sleep, maybe one for school and one for home, and slides into the identities in books and movies with no trouble at all. Writers? Oh, my. It’s clear that a world summoned up in a book and worked through (a virtual world) is real to both the writer and the reader and capable of changing them in the same way as real experience. And actors? Sometimes they’re lucky if they stay on the functional side of insanity, especially when they’re starting out. When I was taking acting classes and hanging around actors as an undergrad, there were several who wavered back and forth over the line between their own identities and those in the play. Actually, it didn’t seem to hurt them but it was hard on the people who were intimate with them. How do you know to whom you are really relating?

And that’s the premise of this movie. Charlotte is playing an abrupt, impatient, productive writer who has a testy relationship with her publisher. (PUBLISHER now, not editor -- I’m not sure most people would see the difference. Publishing is about money; editing is about the product.) Slender, short-haired, Charlotte is the sort of person who goes abroad in khaki trousers, as opposed to the kind of older woman who wears black jersey skirts and keeps an eye out for attractive waiters. Except that Charlotte DOES keep an eye on the waiter. In a restrained English way.

The publisher lends Charlotte his house in the south of France -- everyone is more “themselves” in the south of France -- and mentions a daughter. Expecting a spotty half-grown girl, we and Charlotte are dazzled by a daughter with a fabulous body, a golden girl far more sophisticated than anyone of the type in California. She is outrageous, sexual, seemingly all surface and no boundaries and yet . . . The writer is intrigued. She reads the girl’s diary. The girl reads the writer’s manuscript, which is about the diary. The two fantasies entwine until -- well, you have to remember that this writer’s specialty is Brit murder mysteries and they always include someone being buried in the garden. I loved all the footage of Charlotte at her laptop, though the outtakes show many didn’t get included.

Viewers of this movie decide for themselves what it is all about. (One must remember that a movie is quick flickers of still photos which only seem to move because the eye is not fast enough to see them separately, and then one “take” is edited with another in a sequence as little attached to Newtonian rules of reality as any other art form, so that one must fill in for oneself a good deal of information. Anyway, in the first place the movie was shot by a camera that changes the light, distorts distances and proportions, and can only see what the cinematographer allows. One is probably viewing on a computer or TV screen, depending on one’s eye NOT to see individual pixels.) Some thought it was a straight mystery story. Some thought Charlotte was inventing a book as we watched what was in her writing. Some thought it was a little lesson in expectations, a joke really. Some worried about what the director thought he was doing. (A director is sort of combination writer/editor.)

Reality is equally a matter of selecting identity through perception of many options, many of them involuntary and unconscious. Women are forced into awareness of their bodily swings over a month’s period. Even at seventy that constant tide affects me, but I was never so aware as in 1990 when I was taking hormones. I was controlling the swings consciously. I hated it -- not the high-awareness, over-emotional part, but the nesting week when I purred and cuddled and didn’t want anything. Now I take daily pills for high blood pressure and diabetes, neither of which is very accessible to consciousness but both of which affect everything from eyesight (the thin film of the retina swells up with extra sugar and loses focus) to patience. A ten minute walk makes me different because it changes my blood glucose by twenty points.

On blood tests I test high-normal in androgens (yes, the testosterone male stuff, though I don’t look at all male) and cortisol which is self-made cortisone and meant to go high after emergencies. These are about high energy, passion, willingness to risk. Forget the pharm people’s pills. These inside chemicals, like adrenaline, respond to and create the world.

There’s a focus of auto-chemical studies that is about the gut. The brain is evolved from the gut. Emotions (which are chemical) are in the gut first, then recognized and responded to by the brain. Pay attention to your digestion, because it is part of your whole autonomic sympathetic/parasympathetic feedback system, on its own to keep your heart beating, your blood circulating, your cells getting their energy, the whole chem lab inside human individual bodies which is the foundation of identity. We’ve learned how to intervene with powerful drugs, both legal and illegal, but also we are flooding our minds with media images and ideas that get us in the gut: fear, contempt, hatred, rage. As one film character asked (in another movie), “Where’s the love, baby?”

This interests me. If I weren’t living in a quiet village, I would be so flooded I wouldn’t be able to think about it clearly. It’s only barely possible now. Like Charlotte or an actor, I go in and out of roles. I don’t need the south of France. A publisher wouldn’t hurt.