SINK OR SWIM
Indeed, much of the richness of this autobiographical film, whose honest engagement with essential human dilemmas proves immensely moving, stems from its refusal to make simple choices or settle into unambiguous positions. One of Friedrich’s themes is the interpenetration of the past and the present; we discover that theme as her adult identity gradually emerges from a difficult childhood, but also in the way that the past keeps reasserting its influence, even in adulthood; this is one of many examples of the film’s divided, multiple nature.
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Gradually, in fits and starts, section by section and with many backward glances, the protagonist’s identity emerges. “Zygote” is followed by “Y Chromosome,” with images of a flowerlike milkweed, and “X Chromosome,” with amusingly phallic images of an elephant’s foot and trunk. Friedrich’s humor, an important leavening for material so personal and traumatic, is based on a mixture of directness and creative juxtaposition. Thus the sections named for the male and female chromosomes are illustrated by standard symbols of the two genders, but they are reversed–Y being the male chromosome.
Quite early in the film, in a section titled “Virginity,” the first hints of Friedrich’s independent self emerge, as we learn of her preadolescent fantasies about harems and mermaids. Soon after, the title “Temptation” is followed by images of women bodybuilders. It is important, I think, that neither here nor later in the film does Friedrich connect erotic references to women in any direct way with her family past; no cause and effect of the sort that pop psychologists might infer is ever suggested. Such direct linkages would suggest a more simply determined self than Friedrich claims.
But since one of Friedrich’s themes is the continual interdependence of past and present, her film cannot end here. In fact, the sequence just described is accompanied by a discordant and unexplained element–a German art song on the sound track. A few sections later, in “Ghosts,” a typewriter is seen in negative typing out a letter from Friedrich to her father. On the sound track, instead of the young narrator’s voice, we hear the typewriter keys, giving the section a harshness, even a confrontational directness, that most of the other sections lack. In the letter, she describes her mother’s loneliness after her father left the family. Mother would rush the children to bed each evening, and then listen, alone, to an album of Schubert lieder. Her favorite song was also young Su’s favorite, “Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel”–the song we heard earlier. Friedrich explains in her letter that she only recently learned the translation of the lyrics, which describe a woman who yearns for her absent lover and feels she can’t live without him.
A humorous moment late in the film speaks directly to Friedrich’s conception. The narrator says that after the father left the family, they were able to buy a television, something he had always forbidden, and we see images from Father Knows Best. In one shot, we see the faces of three scrubbed and smiling kids, all in a line, objectlike as only American mass culture can make them. Friedrich is making fun of this concept of the happy nuclear family, and the artificial media image gives Friedrich’s personal stories a social dimension as well. But there is another, deeper joke at work. The compositional perfection of this image, and the way the children’s faces are reduced to objects, is utterly contrary to the style of Friedrich’s film. It contradicts the style of the home movies she uses, with their jerky images of active children, but it contradicts the overall space of the film as well.
Of course, “Tell me what you think of me” is also addressed to the audience–the filmmaker asking for approval. But perhaps the strongest meanings to the last line are to be found if one considers it addressed directly to her father. After all the film’s progression, after all the difficulties that the protagonist endures in order for her adult identity to emerge, there is something chilling in the way the film reverts to this child’s request for approval at its end. The film and its adult maker know this terror well, as can be seen by still another aspect of the alphabetical ordering of the film. The reverse order, in its arbitrariness and oddness, can be seen as the creative assertion of an adult, taking the things she has been taught and reordering them in her own way. That she chooses to order the alphabet in reverse makes the reversion to the “correct” order in the song all the more horrible: the autonomous adult has once again reverted to the uncreative child, parroting rather than creating, seeking approval rather than going off on her own. But in the regression, and in the obvious contrast between reverse and forward orders, is also the adult’s cry of rage at the way the past keeps returning. She still seeks Daddy’s approval, but she is also enraged that she continues to feel this need. The film’s ending is a cry of protest that a child, an adult, anyone, should feel such dependency: and so the final image lingers, in the memory, like a scream that cannot be answered, like an open wound that cannot heal.
