"28 HOTEL ROOMS"

Intercourse means, besides the one you’re probably already thinking, “conversation”.  “28 Hotel Rooms” is about both.  “Inter.”  Enter. “Con.” Connection.  In a compartment called a “hotel room.”  A proper hotel with amenities.

This is poetry of the flesh, what bodies express.

Compartmentalized, like verses or stanzas.

There IS such a thing as bodily love -- not emotional, or reasonable, or shaped by social expectations and not lust --   just the real and deep connection to someone else’s body through one’s own body.  Almost everyone’s first love is skin-against-skin with the mother when newborns are laid all bloody and gooey on their mother’s chest.  Some babies develop depression symptoms after birth: the change is too severe, they are too deeply affected.  The prescription is for the mother to go to bed naked with the naked (except for a diaper) baby beside her.  They should stay there together for a day at least.  It works.  Skin-against-skin is innocent and reassuring, deeply satisfying, soul-making.    In the tribal instinctive world the baby travels always against the mother in a shawl or a carry strap or a parka hood.  An infant who is not embraced, stroked, kissed, will die of mirasmus.  Simply giving up.  The mother who does not embrace, stroke or kiss will not bond and may be grateful if the infant dies.

As adults we meet others in multiple ways, often interrupted, so that the demands of household and job, the expectations of family and partners, all interfere -- breaking off, confusing, submerging.  What would it be like if two people could express skin-to-skin relationship in a compartmented place sheltered from everyday life?  This is the question asked by “28 Hotel Rooms.”  Two people, matched as to age and social class; both employed in ways that let them move around the world anonymously, discretely; both emotionally mature; intelligent; self-determining but open to relationship.  This is an intercourse of the bodies, without dominating or damaging.  Just enough difference and change-over-time to remain interesting -- not quite enough to break the relationship.

Simple relationship is very rare.  People have intense relationships via the internet that might seem protected and intimate, but they are suffused with fantasies, saturated with the skills of rhetoric, stripped of smell/taste/temperature.  Everything is recorded and therefore subject to scrutiny beyond the moment, loss of secrecy, reflection that is objective and outside -- the way this movie is observed by us.  Yet we are drawn in, we share as we cannot in an internet exchange.

Modern corporate life, based on global travel to conferences or speaking engagements with strangers, rarely one-on-one but rather in panels and around tables, can induce a kind of mirasmus.  Separation from family, familiar environments, comfort foods.  Time dislocation.  Pressure of tasks.  Judgment from others with power.  Politics. There are plenty of films about these corrosive effects on morality and ability to relate to others.  Many others about the lust for strangeness and secrecy in a luxury setting.  People long for a zipless fuck, in Erica Jong’s phrase.   But this film is neither without friction nor just a fuck.

Few know any relationships this simple and yet profound.   In spite of being well-matched, the two characters are different enough to intrigue each other.  She is the cool analyst; he is the extravagant poet.  Yin/yang.  Gender doesn’t have a lot to do with it.  Both are able to be present in the way of a child: curious, responding in the moment, no filtering.  This is only possible to portray when actors are very skillful in a particular way that is accessible to a camera.  This kind of acting originated as a “method” of establishing the reality of stage plays that portrayed relationships and society in a subtle and revealing way.  It is a technique that allows the actor to inhabit the character so thoroughly and without restraint that their own inner life can show through the assumed role.  

The brains of human beings, we now know and can even see with the help of electromagnetic, computer-augmented instruments, are a symphony of relationships and therefore can play many “styles” of identity, all of them valid and “true,” but responsive to what is outside the person by presenting different aspects of the self.  They call it the connectome.  These two actors, Marin Ireland and Chris Messina, are so skillful that they can move in and out of the script, sometimes using memorized lines and sometimes speaking their own thoughts.  In any case, their task was to create many scenes -- jazz riffs -- that could be edited into a “shaped” film by the writer/director.  I haven’t seen this kind of acting since auditing acting classes taught by AK.  There is a kind of purity -- as opposed to intensity -- that engages empathy.  This is not “bubble gum sentimentality” with a perky childish female and a prince who will make her life wonderful.

True enough, the compartmentalization and intermittence that protects this relationship, constantly renewing it, is also a confinement and interdiction that prevents some kinds of development.  The naked lovers shout from their balcony at the people below:  “life is a puzzle -- help us figure it out.”  That’s also a description of the movie.  If there were 28 hotel rooms -- chosen out of hundreds that the site managers looked at, but all in LA except for a few in NYC -- there were also hundreds of film shoots, compartmentalized and intermittent, that had to be edited as a puzzle in narrative aesthetics. 

http://anthemmagazine.com/qa-with-marin-ireland/

This is a very interesting interview.  Two things struck me: that Marin was in another show at the time they were shooting, so to save travel she just slept in the rooms where they shot this film: continuity.  Second, she has an intriguing theory about how to find an “eye of the storm” spot that’s near the action but not in the way.  “Nobody’s talking to you and there’s this bubble that you can create for yourself.” 

http://www.blackbookmag.com/movies/actress-marin-ireland-talks-her-new-drama-28-hotel-rooms-1.54873  Here’s another good interview that overlaps some.

http://www.aroundphilly.com/blog/2012/11/19/28-questions-for-chris-messina-about-28-hotel-rooms/   And an interview with Chris.

The different levels in considering this film include that it is a narrative in images and 28 scenes; it is a particular kind of acting; it is a genre to itself: minimum of characters, long  duration shots while characters develop and think through issues;  it is invented along a spine of trajectory through time.  Viewers seem to wonder about conventional moral issues, not allowing any deviation from marital faithfulness. The actors involved wonder about their careers and how this film fits into them.  In real life, as friends, these two worry about protecting and supporting each other.  Probably there are ten-year-olds out there wondering whether this couple is really having sex.  The film is as pristine and self-contained as a pearl -- think about it all you like.  It remains itself.

The contrast is “Monogamy,” same fine cinematographer, same exuberant male actor, but all distraction, confusion, context, family, friends, kids, dog, commotion, bargaining, implications . . . the “hero” goes from photographer to voyeur to detective to stalker to -- aw, just a dawg.

INTIMACY

Sex, Love, and now Intimacy. This last is not a mirror ball. This is one of those black fortune-telling balls that you ask questions and the answer slowly surfaces in a little window. Or maybe it’s one of those black boxes where you throw a lever, a trapdoor opens, a little hand reaches out and shuts off the lever -- then goes back inside and the door locks. I’m being way too clever, but intimacy -- unlike love but rather like sex -- can be time-limited, just a few very close moments that can end or be sustained. Not necessarily anything to do with sex, possibly between equals but not always, often unexpected though it can be invited. It is a moment when boundaries are dissolved and there is emotional fusion, something like a Spock/Kirk Vulcan mind-meld, that supports true understanding. They say it is an evolutionary advantage that is uniquely human. It’s partly what makes soldiers fight in combat for the guy next to them.

Not everyone wants to be a secret-sharer, or maybe they do in that moment but repent later, so the same person who abandoned caution in the moment may have to use enormous care to prevent damage later. Think about the elaborately wood-paneled protection of the confessional, which can also -- we now learn too late -- be used to shield secret abuse, which is why it has been removed and curtailed in modern times. Now the priest sits with his parishioner in the middle of the gym floor, two chairs for a quiet talk in plain sight. Think about psychotherapy. Think about professional sexwork. Think about writers. Disclosure, honesty, small details that mean a lot, being really in sync -- sometimes you have no idea what happened. Sometimes it’s simply there every time you look for it. A hand in the dark. Dependably.

We read and watch movies for an illusion of intimacy we can put down and walk away from. It’s not real intimacy if the disclosure is one way, one person dropping the veil -- the other person not. Yet it’s the risky intimacy that carries the most emotional punch, which is probably one reason we are all so hooked on stories of underworld characters or spies in wartime.

Everyone has had the experience of intimacy shielded by anonymity; for instance, someone who confides to a seat mate on a big city bus or waiting in an airport, unlikely to ever be seen again. It can be a burden to be the receiver, unable to resolve questions raised, wondering what words might have shown understanding or even helped this stranger. Research claims that this impulse to help is inborn and blooms in toddlers, even when they only understand the general emotion and have no remedy but awkward patting with a fat little hand.

What a great luxury to find a friend or partner or even relative (that’s a little problematic, if only because in these days of blended families and open adoption it’s hard to know who IS a relative or what obligations they might feel) who can provide intelligent sharing, truly be in the moment without any agenda or ax to grind. It’s hard to lose all awareness of the larger context and just let the moment be a bubble in which it is safe to cross boundaries. I don’t advise it, really. But a life without intimacy is a barren trap. It can make a zombie of you.

The only real safeguard is to make a life in which it is relatively safe to be intimate, but the world doesn’t work that way for a lot of people. Too many have had to start over, too much can’t be done in plain sight. Those people need to keep it clear in their own heads what must be protected. But if they get drunk? If they are very, very tired?

You’d think that in a small town, there would be no need for secrets since everyone already knows everything anyway. But many an author (Sherwood Anderson, “Winesburg, Ohio,” for instance) has written a book about the hidden stories of people in small towns where the neighbors are convinced they know it all. These days do they go online to achieve intimacy with far away people on Facebook? What if the wrong person stumbles over it?

We’ve reached the days of TMI, but Too Much Information is not the same as Too Much Intimacy. Intimacy is far more dangerous. Intimacy would seem -- SEEM -- to be one state in which one can be entirely trusting -- part of the dynamic is that one should feel that way, but part of becoming mature is becoming guarded. Alas. One must resort to love and experience to achieve wisdom about intimacy, but there is never complete safety. Take the damage. Learn from it. Heal. Guard your playing cards.

There is plenty of advice on the Internet (of varying quality) but issues can include fear of pain, fear of not being good enough, fear of being smothered and limited, wishing to dominate and “own” in order to fend off all these fears, re-enacting old scripts that went wrong. These are old, old issues. I’d bet that neanderthals worried about them. One is forced to remember that intimacy is not just about the one person you can control -- yourself -- but also the other person, their complex of motives, self-deceptions, pressures, and safeguards.

To become intimate with someone is to risk love and love means hostages, the possibility of loss. However impervious you are, loved ones who can be hurt are a worse threat than damage to oneself. If you easily sacrificed whom you thought was a loved one, then it wasn’t love. People fantasize about ESP and mind-reading and there are sci-fi stories about it, but if we ever achieve it, we may be sorry. What if this person you felt so close to is not who you thought at all? Maybe that’s what all these twilight characters are about. Can a werewolf or a vampire report you to the authorities for being hard-hearted and reckless? Can anyone? Can a person have true intimacy with an animal? And yet, maybe there was a moment in a zoo when you looked into a caged tiger’s eyes and saw a world totally alien. Shuddering. Yearning.

ATTACHMENT FOR ADULTS

Reviews and promotion have called my attention to a book called “Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find-And Keep-Love” by Amir Levine, M.D. and Rachel S. F. Heller, M.A. It turns out to be a re-visit to my old friends Bowlby and Winnicott, the “teddy-bear” Object Relations theorists. During seminary, late in the evening, I would walk down to Michael Powell’s Hyde Park bookstore (the precursor for the Portland Powells’) where I checked the shelf for the Object Relations psychotherapy books coming in from England where the “school of thought” was developing. Much of it was a response to the confused child-raising practices and shattered families of the Brits trying to understand class differences, WWII, the end of Empire, and so on. They were asking something like the questions about “resilience” today: what can make a child invulnerable to tragedy?

Obviously the answer is NOTHING and they were naively more concerned with their own Brit children than the children of the Third World they had once known intimately. Nannies were one answer, though the theory that supported that was not about the discipline stuff that’s fun in comedy sketches but about the continuity of a caring and constant care-giver. (Where does all this alliteration come from? Oh, well.) First intimacy -- that of warmth, enfolding, cleanliness, food, and skin contact (the orphanages discovered the importance of skin contact when the babies without it died) -- becomes one’s template for every other intimacy throughout life. It’s best to know what that template is, even if there’s no wish to change it, because it affects one’s life so deeply.

Without making allowances for differences in temperament (which could be pretty problematic if there were a major style difference between the mother and child) kids tend to sort out into three groups: those who are "anxious" if they are separated from their care-giver (let’s call her “mom” since that’s a short word to type) but settle down quickly when she comes back; the “anxious-resistant” (20%) who are even more upset when Mom is gone and try to punish her when she comes back by pretending to not notice her or to hate her; and those called “avoidant” (20%) who seem self-sufficient and turn away from mom. Of course, in the early thinking of the experts Mom was to blame. Now, not so much. Nowadays some of the experts ARE Moms.

The pattern that had been identified with me at seminary and that I was trying to resolve (didn’t) was not really represented. It was seeking for a savior, choosing someone impossible, providing devotion, and confirming that the relationship ended because it was impossible. Clearly I must really want a relationship for some reason but -- then -- not after all. The professors and mentors liked the first part, but thought of their fall from grace when I detached as my serious character flaw. This turned out to be predictive when I left the ministry. If one is looking for an impossible and disappearing love-object (which was probably originally my father since he was on the road all the time), God is an excellent choice, esp. for a ministry student. So why wasn’t a religious love good enough, any more than any human?

The answer I came to was “fear of fusion.” The feeling that I would be swallowed into the personhood of the loved one and lose my own identity. It was not unrealistic and probably came from my mother considering me an extension of herself, therefore just like her, which I wasn’t. Or maybe she too chose a “leaving lover,” because of her own dad who was a building contractor for large structures (barns and warehouses) and often gone.

There’s another element that I haven’t seen in “scientific” literature, though it’s there in novels. Both my parents were coming from a rural setting to the city where they had petit professional jobs. (White collar/no power, like teaching.) It was a self-conscious time when people monitored themselves, watched themselves, to see how they were doing. Were they stylish enough? Up with the latest stuff? Raising their kids properly? How big a car, how big a house could they afford? How many children? How high an education?

Very much like now, except that then, mid-century, the moving was country to city and now the migration is likely to be regional or even international. These days this “reflexivity”, always watching ourselves, is practically an industry. Surveys. Advice columns. Articles. Night classes. The ‘zines provide questionnaires. You can find “attached” questionnaires on the Internet. For myself they confirm what I already know.

Maybe this element of watching oneself all the time is a good distancing mechanism that leads right into writing, which is one way to commercialize (or was) human relationship. (Short of whoring or counseling.) Watching oneself “parent” distances one from the kid -- interferes with the sincerity and spontaneity that make intimacy work. “Helicoptering” alienates children as much as paying no attention.

What about those floating Third World street kids with no parents? Some attach to an older kid. Some attach to a trick. Some attach to someone who exploits their labor. What choice do they have? Most don’t live long enough to have to worry about it. But they’re skeeters -- vectors for disease and disruption. Otherwise why would society pay any attention to them at all, except to use them as convenient? These children expect nothing, take what they need, but even they spin the fantasies of intimacy: a family, a gang, a sponsoring partner.

A family is no guarantee of intimacy. Families are hard work. The rivalries and injustices and left-over agendas from previous generations interfere all the time. If it’s a real family, someone nearly always needs to be rescued. People die. When people marry nowadays, the two sets of parents are often nothing alike and make no effort to weave together, because their children remarry and remarry and cohabit and don’t settle down until they are old. Dear Abby is always having to sort out entitlements and point out irreconcilable templates. Will someone write a book entitled, “Detached?” Hurry up, please. It’s time.