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Notes from Underground

  And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment.  Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are...
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Hope

To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.-- Erich Fromm


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Aftersun (2022)

 





In the foreground, an 11-year-old girl lies asleep in bed. On the balcony beyond, seen through the plate-glass door, the girl’s father struggles to light a cigarette, hampered by the cast on his right arm. Mission accomplished, he sways back and forth rhythmically, arms moving outwards and upwards and down, a dreamy approximation of Tai Chi moves, perhaps. It’s not quite clear what is going on with him, since the camera doesn’t move in closer, and there are barriers separating us from him. This is a moment of solitude for the father, snatched at the end of the day when his child is asleep. The daughter’s deep breathing provides the rhythm for the father’s movements, and there’s something almost eerie about the moment. The 11-year-old daughter sleeps through it all.

This question lies at the shifting center of Charlotte Wells’ moving debut feature “Aftersun,” detailing a father-daughter vacation at a cheap resort in Turkey, and the scene above—which comes early on, when we’re still getting our bearings—is key. There’s something unknowable about Calum (Paul Mescal), and maybe this is because Sophie (Frankie Corio) is a child, and he’s her dad, and she’s just about coming to the age where she’s separating herself and becoming her own person. 




Sophie’s parents are separated, and she lives mainly with her mother. Calum talks about getting a new place, where Sophie will have her own room, and maybe starting a new business with someone named “Keith,” and from the way he talks about all this it’s obvious he barely believes in any of it. Something’s not gone right for him. Does he party too much? He became a father at a young age. There are “clues” that his life hasn’t quite worked out the way he had hoped. He has brought books on meditation and Tai Chi, suggesting not so much a lifelong practice as a way to stave off anxiety. His worries weigh him down. Sophie senses this. It’s tense when she loses her scuba mask, and she informs him she knows it’s expensive and she’s sorry. Calum is taken aback by her remark. He thought his worries were well-hidden. Calum may be a bit adrift, but he clearly loves his daughter. They have a little tiff at one point, and he apologizes to her later for his behavior. He’s a good dad. Their energy together is comfortable, intimate, familiar.

“Aftersun” is clearly told from Sophie’s point of view, but a perceptive viewer will notice there are scenes where Sophie is not present. The film, then, is from the adult Sophie’s point of view, an adult—a new parent herself—looking back on this vacation, curious about what her father must have been going through. She knows her own memories of the vacation. But what was going on with him? 






Key Themes

Intergenerational Connection

Sophie tells Calum she likes the idea that they are both looking at the same sun, even if they aren't in the same place. This "Aftersun" (the title referring to both the lotion and the period after the "sun" of childhood has set) represents the lingering warmth—and burn—of a parent's love and their pain.

The Loss of Innocence

The film is a dual coming-of-age story. Sophie is beginning to notice the world of teenagers, sex, and independence. Simultaneously, Calum is "coming of age" in a darker sense—realizing he may not have the capacity to navigate adulthood.







The Ending Explained: "Under Pressure"

The climax of the film features a sequence set to a remix of Queen and David Bowie’s "Under Pressure." The scene masterfully merges the past and the present:

  1. In the past, young Sophie and Calum share a final, joyful dance on the last night of the trip.

  2. In the present/imagination, adult Sophie is at a rave, physically grappling with her father in the strobe lights. She is trying to "hold onto him," but he eventually slips away into the darkness.

What happened to Calum? While the film never explicitly states it, the heavy implication is that Calum took his own life shortly after the holiday. The final shot shows Calum walking through the airport doors after waving goodbye to Sophie—but instead of entering the terminal, he walks directly into the dark, strobe-lit "rave" of Sophie’s memory. He has become a ghost, trapped forever in that 31-year-old version of himself within Sophie's mind.





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