Norte, The End of History

Getting high and getting lost.

I don’t want to be repetitive and get into any discourse about slow/contemplative cinema. I know it’s okay to be sleepy during long, narrative-ambiguous movies. I know they’re not for everyone, and that as a viewer of a Serra, Tarr, or Akerman I’m signing up for an alternative experience, one where I must challenge any preconceived notion about how moving images are to be consumed. Anyway, I don’t want to write about this movie with any pretensions or with any pretend idea that I am somehow equipped to unpack the violent political history of the Philippines.

I want to write about a very intimate, personal watching habit that I have adopted, one that complements Lav Diaz’s films, including the brutal, challenging, and ultimately rewarding Norte, The End of History.

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After years of having a strong aversion to weed, I’ve gotten back into edibles. I have a routine, about once a week. I take a half of a gummy, wait for it to hit, and then put on something long and slow, something I know will be heady and hypnotizing. I watch it until I’m tired, unconcerned about finishing, not dwelling on the passage of time or what I will or won’t remember. I trust my body and mind to tell me to stop, and I don’t think it’s unholy to put something on pause. I break the arbitrary rules that make someone a healthy viewer of movies.

As of late, I’ve spent too much time intellectualizing what I watch, and I feel like this habit to think has taken a bit of pleasure out of consuming media. I’m not as generous as I used to be and have a difficult time letting things be what they are. I’m also so desperate to Comprehend, I forget to enjoy confusion and struggle to accept that it’s more than okay that I can’t be the ultimate interpreter of subtext, symbols, and mis-en-scene. I fail to to lose myself in an experience.

Norte, The end of History opens as most Diaz films do, with a lack of narrative clarity and sense of space or time. We are thrust into a conversation, a cerebral one between students. We feel like interlopers, and Diaz fights against our need for context. As a result, he demands surrender. If you’re going to stick with this long ass movie, you have to accept what will remain opaque.

So, I just watch. I look at his images, long takes of villages in states of decay and of actions so insignificant one has to resist any impulse to find meaning in the various extended wide-shots. This is frustrating for a bit, but then I’m stoned. My eyes are a bit heavy, and I don’t even have the energy to stay impatient. I’ll just let things be and see how I feel.

And after the two or three hour mark, things become clearer. Not to say that there’s some immediate sense to the film, but Diaz has fleshed out his characters. Fabian, one of the students, has, in a disillusioned-with-the-world rage, murdered a money lender and her young daughter. Joaquin, a poor, desperate man with a wife and two kids, is sent to prison for the crime. He was seen arguing with the money lender earlier in the day and is convicted.

The sting of injustice hits hardest, and the tragedy of Norte is this bureaucratic failure. Joaquin, imprisoned, must find a kind of peace in his circumstance, while Fabian grows increasingly nihilistic, insane. His life becomes a giant dissociative episode. He’s lost his personhood but has no chance of finding it. Suddenly, the conversation at the beginning of the film coheres. Fabian’s doubt about the world has thrust him into a direction. He may have carried a lightness and sense of humor, but his actions have stripped him of it all. The world becomes impossible.

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It took me about five separate viewings to get through Norte. But then cliche of allowing something to wash over you made actual sense to me. I live my life in such a controlled way, and that has impacted how I watch things. Over time, movie-watching has become compulsive. I’ve convinced myself that I must watch a film every day. I’ve convinced myself that there is a way I need to watch movies and a way I need to internalize them. The joys (and pains) of a Diaz film is that I really can’t lean into any of my usual behaviors. There’s no room for control and regiment. So I let myself get high, I let myself go on tangents. I let myself be attached to Diaz’s images and also removed from them. I can be laser-focused but also lose chunks of time to semi-consciousness. I can feel nothing and suddenly feel everything.

Perhaps I need to do this more often.