Kelly Reichardt's 'Night Moves' of the Soul

Kelly Reichardt’s Night Moves delivers as a relentlessly intense suspense story while, despite the familiar, “movie heist” tropes of its plot, being in perfect accord with the director’s notoriously sparse, quiet, observant, but tacitly explosive previous films—Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy, and Meek’s Cutoff. A shuddering before/after narrative about a Portland-based eco-terrorist trio’s (Jesse Eisenberg, Dakota Fanning, Peter Sarsgaard) plot to blow up a dam, Night Moves faultlessly strums the tune of crime-film contingency with the same relentless tension of Kubrick’s The Killing, while crucially building on Reichardt’s theme of modern day economic disparity and the problem of progressive ideals at odds with progressive action.

The opening image, of the dam in question as plotter Josh (Eisenberg) grimly looks on, shows the subduing of the natural world by human invention which has become a background banality. This young man could be weighing the ramifications of an illegal transgression he’s preparing or, saturated with exhausted melancholy, fixating on the end of the world. There’s mention of Science’s prognosis of the End a few times, but maybe it strikes the budding activists in this film with the same faith coupled with doubly-bound intangibility as the “World Vision” eschatological Christians referred to by Dena (Fanning) at an environmentalist film screening. Following the insolubility of Meek’s Cutoff, where frontier travelers trying to outrun the expanding Republic westward encounter a perplexing “Tree of Life” at the conclusion, Night Moves examines the ramifications of both ideas and actions, enveloping much of the eerie wilderness and haggard urban outposts in darkness. It’s a film with a deep social conscience that proceeds to excavate intimate Dostoyevskian layers of individual psychology, where decisive action begins. Social activism/politics and individual psychology prove to be similarly murky.

Read the full essay at L'ETOILE MAGAZINE

Real Bodies, False Identities: Darren Aronofsky’s “The Wrestler”

I might as well disclose how I grew up a big professional wrestling fan. Yes, yes - given my Halloween costume of two years ago – as Rowdy Roddy Piper, joined by the Hoadley brothers as Hulk Hogan and Macho Man Randy Savage - I'm sure some of you know. And to this day, whenever Erik (of the Hoadleys) and I hang out for a weekend, joining our diet of pizza and beer is the equally unhealthy dose of bad wrestling from the land of long-long ago. Our speech patterns gradually become more juvenile over the weekend, until we have finally regressed back, Benjamin Button-like, to our adolescence, to a time before rent, love, taxes, and insurance. Eventually, we reach a point of no return, identifying with our pro-wrestling heroes by referring to ourselves in the third person (The Niles says, or The Hoadley is going to, etc).

It's easy to be ashamed of liking professional wrestling because, well, on its surface it’s a little silly. Basically a bunch of guys aggressively groping each other while in their underwear. But that “stupid” is also very funny (particularly with beer), and even contagious. As a child, my dad took me to the Civic Center, sometimes with my sister, to see Hulk Hogan, Piper, and the whole group of "Superstars". And my sister would get just as into it as I was – perhaps more. I had all the LJM toys, now entrusted to my younger brother who is planning on re-painting them. And I almost cried on February 5, 1988, when Hulk Hogan lost the championship to Andre the Giant, a day dubbed by Hulkamaniacs as Black Friday. Hogan losing brought into question the existence of God and purpose in life, being that Hogan was supposed to be "Immortal": he can't lose. The way to lose to Hogan is to do your finishing move on him – but you need to do your finishing move in order to beat anybody. The bad guy wrestlers would thus be in a catch-22. The sun had been eclipsed on Black Friday, 1988, and I grew into the weariness of puberty.

This was probably a little off-putting for my dad, who endured tapings of Saturday Night's Main Event on the weekends, when he would much rather be watching Benny Hill. He would stress to me that it's not real – it's totally fake. They don't get hurt. Here, let me take you to Roosevelt High School – there's real wrestling there. However, Real wrestling was, as we all know, boring and even closer in appearance to homosexual pornography.

Baseball helped to partially subdue the wrestling thing, though video games and Nintendo, again to my dad's dismay, swooped in to steal me away from the real world and into an environment where my body was treated to hours in front of a television and projecting my ego onto 2-dimensional landscapes with action figures in better shape than me, their actions dependent on my control. I looked like many-a-man that loved videogames and wrestling: unhealthily scrawny, thick glasses, bad teeth, sometimes a mouth breather, wearing socks pulled up to my knees with short-shorts covering tighty-whiteys. If only I'd discovered D&D and comic books, I would be complete.

This bespeaks the divide between the Real World and the Virtual one, of videoscreens and false identities, between real flesh and geography, versus the artificial. The mantra regarding wrestling is thus repeated: "It's so fake." To quote a nice priest that tried to quell the rough-housing of my sixth-grade class at St. Hubert’s Catholic school: "When Macho Man Randy Savage jumps off the top rope and delivers the flying elbow of doom into the Big Boss Man, that's not real. When Earthquake jumps and squishes Hulk Hogan, the Hulkster's not really hurt. Y'know. When Ultimate Warrior gorilla-presses Ravishing Rick Rude and drops him to the mat, then gives him the Warrior splash of super-doom, that's not real." This wasn't beyond us. We accepted wrestling as entertainment. We were more befuddled as to how Father Steve knew so damned much about WWF. Maybe if we pooled our money, could we all come over and catch Summerslam and Royal Rumble at the church rectory.

But something bothered me, even then. These men in the ring are real men, with real bodies. And there's no damned way that some things, when colliding with real flesh, don't hurt. Who are these men? And what happens when they get old? I mean, they are not like Jesse Ventura in The Running Man, digitally created so that a digital Arnold Schwarzenegger can finally be killed for the network heads. In the 1990s, some of these men died, in the ring and out. Owen Hart, Curt Henning, Rick Rude, Junkyard Dog, Big Boss Man, and others. Some, like Chris Benoit, went bad-shit crazy and killed their families and then themselves, probably related to a bad dose of pain-killers. And others, from the heyday of the 1980s, would pathetically endure, with sagging muscles, and protruding guts. This was their life – a career with no 401K, doing the only thing that they knew.

Their bodies are ripped apart, and then put together again by medications (Hulk Hogan doesn't have a real knee anymore, I think). This is how they get paid. Unless they are good talkers, like Ventura, who was, after his spinal problems forced him to retire, arguably the best color-commentator in the history of the sport. They must use their bodies for capital and survival. When the body does not work, they are functionally useless. These guys, once breathing symbols of Ronald Reagan's pumped-up "USA!" aggressiveness and righteousness, are now a representation of our own economically feeble times, when all the subprime loans are being called in for payment. The body was living on borrowed time and money, so to speak, and now it might as well not exist, like so many other Americans who thought they were part of the Middle Class, of a Normal Life. They are not real, after all, with their families, romances, and domiciles. In the dark days of 2008, they are labor, meat, barely held together, sustaining themselves on technological and medicinal means until they expire, like an old vehicle.

This is what Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler is about, and why it’s an important film to watch and discuss at the present moment.

***
The Wrestler begins with Quiet Riot's "Bang Your Head" (at least I think it's Quiet Riot), the camera scrawling over magazine covers from the 1980s, which capture the career heights of Randy "the Ram" Robinson (Mickey Rourke). He was an adored sports entertainment icon, and the magazines indicate that his greatest feud, peaking during a match at Madison Square Garden, was against “The Ayatollah,” the decade’s token Middle Eastern bad guy: USA vs. Iran, and the war that settled the score (to borrow a famous wrestling tag line) set in the squared circle rather than a battlefield. The Ram never lost to the Ayatollah, because America didn't lose. Twenty years pass. The carefree head-banging of Quiet Riot is quelled by the deconstructive post-rock of Kurt Cobain, pessimistic in nature, shunning the previous decade’s glam. Cobain is called a "pussy" by the Ram, who adds, "Nineties fuckin' sucked."



Randy is now wrestling at VFWs and school gyms, taking in as much as a modestly popular local band does during gigs. He lives in a trailer that he can barely afford, sleeping in his van when the landlord locks him out for not paying the rent. He works part time at a grocery store, stocking the docks for a pip-squeak boss, taking any available hours that don't conflict with his wrestling schedule. For recreation, he frequents a strip bar, having Rolling Rocks, tequila, and lap dances from his favorite stripper, Pam (Marisa Tomei), with whom he has his only meaningful conversations. Well into his fifties, Randy has no plan or no retirement option, and needs steroids, blow, and painkillers to keep him sustainable for action. The pain his body endures is all too real, and Aronofsky accentuates each blow Randy receives, filmed in hand-held close-up. On the mat, Randy will cut himself with razor blades to give the illusion that his opponent has busted him open. He sacrifices himself for the performance. Pam equates Randy to Jesus, another guy who gets the shit kicked out of him for two hours, but that "Passion" is meaningful, powerful, even entertaining for the spectators. She sees the symbolism (a little heavy-handed perhaps) in Randy's ring-name: the sacrificial ram that dies for the sins of the world.

Both of these characters, Pam and Randy, dwell in double worlds. They have two names. Randy's real name is Robin Raminski, and he doesn't like being called by his last name, indicating attachment to the persona he has created – or a painful estrangement from his origins that remind him of who he really is; Pam has a stripper name, Cassidy, in a profession that is just as fake as Randy's, though contingent on the performance, even suffering, of the body. Their conversations are simulated conversations, because Randy has to pay for her time, and she is wary of speaking to him as anyone other than as a customer. Randy has a daughter, Stephanie (Rachel Evan Wood), with whom he is estranged because of too many broken promises. He was better at playing his invented role as wrestler than the natural role as husband and father.

At this stage in his life, Randy is fine with his solitude. He is focused on simply keeping his grip on the present: paying the rent, pumping his body up for the next big match, tanning, hair, etc. He has short-term goals because that's all he can afford. He purchases illegal medications in the locker room, costing him $995, though the seller, a jacked superman, is fine with taking $400. This exchange is analogous to so much deregulized subprime lending that led to the housing crisis of the last year, a housing bubble that, economists warned, would lead to a bubble burst (September 15, 2008). The body of Randy will also eventually burst. His body is not his own, much as most homeowners don't actually have houses (the banks own the houses). We can hear the high-pitched sound whenever he puts his hearing aid in or takes it out; his experience of living is dependent on technology, or outside forces. His heavy breathing is the result of a split clavicle from 1988. It hurts for him to move, and Mickey Rourke's performance incandescently yet naturally communicates the soreness of each step. The body is running out of time, though the character of The Ram cannot exist in Time. His own Being is illusory. His bubble bursts in the form of a heart attack, following a hardcore match in which his body endures a staple-gun, barb-wire, broken glass, and a fork-gouge. He wakes up in a web of tubes, keeping him breathing, and is sedated by injection so that he can sleep while he undergoes bypass surgery.

Randy cannot wrestle, the University hospital doctor tells him. He can only moderately exercise. If he does wrestle, he will die. In effect, Randy cannot be who he is, or the self he has created and known for the past 30 years. At last, he realizes how alone he is. At an American Legion event where washed-up wrestlers gather to sell autographs and videotapes for fans, Randy observes his "frat brothers" (as Roddy Piper calls his comrades), and how their bodies depend on canes, wheelchairs, colostomy bags, etc. At home, he puts on his glasses and looks at an old photo of Stephanie. He tries reading. He gives in to the lure of Nintendo, asking a neighbor kid to join him.

The two play Randy's own wrestling game, enacting the 8-bit primitive characters of the Ram and The Ayatollah. The kid talks about newer games involving the war in Iraq, wherein the player is either a marine or British special forces on specific missions. We notice how, as Randy and The Ayatollah dish it out on the screen, that America's ideology hasn't changed much; just the technology has. It's just that better graphics have made the virtual more real. The kid comments on Randy's own game: "God, this is old." Later on, Randy tries jogging and almost suffers another heart attack. His body cannot keep up with the man he immortalized in 8-bit 1988 Nintendo.

He wants to have a "real" discussion with Pam, who undergoes the exchange cautiously (she has a "don't involve yourself with customers" policy). She amiably tells him to see his daughter, and then gets out of Randy’s car as quickly as she can. Randy says "Stephanie" to himself and goes to find her. Of course, in kind of a movie-cliché situation, Stephanie wants none of it, and tells Randy to leave her alone.

He takes more hours at the grocery store. At the deli counter, where he has to interact with customers (something Randy dislikes), Randy is first controlled by the customer number machine ("Number 47..."), but gradually finds a groove transcending his occupational circumscriptions and he moves into a more genuine and humane interaction. We notice that he gives up clicking on the number machine altogether, sometimes throwing the customers meat and cheese like a friendly football pass, dancing behind the counter. He will retire from wrestling.

Pam, who is as interested in Randy as she is cautious to know him, offers to help him find Stephanie a present, an action that will attempt to heal the rift. It is the first time he sees Pam in daylight, without sleazy makeup or clothes. He is only more attracted to her, and she more reticent to communicate. Having a beer together, they bond over their distaste for the 1990s. She also discloses that she has a son, adding another dimension of broken beauty to her. This is intertextually an interesting moment, as much has been made of how Mickey Rourke mirrors Randy, in light of his fall from great heights during the 1990s. But the same can be said of Marisa Tomei, following her Oscar win in March of 1993. In her, we see the repeated motif of faded dreams and what could-have-been (despite great supporting turns in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead and In the Bedroom). There's a stink of rotten longing in The Wrestler, and the need to pull ahead of the pit of the past, whose demons cling tightly to the victim's heel.

This idea comes through more clearly as Randy convinces Stephanie to come with him to the Jersey shore, where years ago the two of them used to visit a fair. He would take her to the haunted house; she would get so scared that she would cry, but then beg him to take her back immediately after they escaped. She doesn't remember these details, but they have pummeled him as much as any physical punishment in the ring. "I tried to forget all about you," he confesses. As an unreal character, it would be easier for him to delete the real people in his life, but he is ultimately still a body, still human, and this is impossible. The two of them illegally enter an old ballroom, indicating that human bliss is constantly subterfuged by the regulations of governance, and he leads her in a waltz. She wonders of all the dances that must have happened here in the past, and how that contrasts to the ballroom's present ruin. But this dance is real, isn't it? Having its own magic, though the music is created by a movie director, the tenderness executed by a team of technicians and artists? Identity is not in celluloid, a videoscreen, or a magazine cover. It is experienced through our bodies – heart and mind.

But in Randy’s quest for normal and stable relationships in a life that for him has been mostly fabricated is derailed. Pam states that their relationship is not real. He has to pay for her time. This woman, who's become his confidant during lap dances, has never existed. Feeling self-pity and anger, Randy goes to another bar, does blow and picks up an easy woman with a fireman fetish. He wakes up wearing fireman boots; even in the most rudimentary and short-term of relationships, Randy must adopt another persona. He falls asleep in his trailer and misses a planned dinner with Stephanie, who does to him what he has tried to do to her: she psychologically deletes him. To her, he might as well have never existed. Now he realizes that not only is he alone, but in his pursuit of something real, he is fundamentally Nothing and useless. He angrily walks off his job, punching a meat slicer as if to punish the Ram's body that has made him a spiritual vacuum. Nihilistically, he agrees to do a rematch with The Ayatollah, a 20-year-anniversary event that will generate a big crowd. Why not? Being in the ring is all he knows, and is the only place he is acknowledged as a human being.

This nihilism reminded me of Frank (James Caan) in Michael Mann's 1981 film Thief, about a man who realizes that, in his pursuit of a normal life, he's actually nothing, which leads him to destructively sever himself from anything to which he has been close. Mann, like Aronofsky, shows how the economic systems in which these characters are trapped disallow them from realizing an idyllic dream existence or any moment of peace. They aren’t even allow them self-respect. This idea of exploitation is felt in Randy's relationship to his greasy boss (who watches porn in his office, continuing this motif of a civilization drenched in the simulated experience of closeness), much like Dennis Haysbert's relationship to his boss (Bud Cort) in Mann's Heat (1995), which was also about social structures that don't allow individuals to move forward.

Randy, the sacrificial Ram, enters the ring with The Ayatollah. At this moment, Pam realizes that she and Randy are the same. She begs him not to go in the ring. "I'm here," she pleads. "I'm really here." But Randy realizes that the only place he really exists is in the ring. Randy has lost his illusions, far ahead of the nostalgic fans who adore him, or the script of American righteousness conquering Islamic hatred. He doesn't exist in the real world, and never has. He decays as a wasted body, and will expire in the midst of action. Suffering chest pains, he ascends the top rope and prepares to do his finishing move in the All-American ritual of victory over the Evil Terrorist. He glances longingly at a window, seeing a place to which his soul can fly and finally be free from the Body (Aronofsky incorporates a certain Gnosticism that ties The Wrestler to his earlier films, The Fountain and Pi). He jumps out of the frame and the film ends.

***
The characters of The Wrestler struggle to make ends meet, its working class empathy making it perfect for the Springsteen song playing during the credits. It is a flurry of lost souls trapped by circumstances and occupation, imprisoned by their bodies in the Land of the Free, where the Body is negligible as health care is too expensive. These characters are far removed from technological means enabling success (I wonder if this will be one of the last contemporary films to feature a payphone; Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy, which The Wrestler closely resembles, may be the other). The American parable is re-enacted, though it's a sham (The Ayatollah isn't even Iranian; he's a light-skinned African American used car salesman). For many, Gus Van Sant's Milk is a timely motion picture that captures our need for hope and change in the coming age of Obama. But for me, as a liberal, The Wrestler is a much better showcase that perfectly captures the spirit of the present. It is a world where the middle class is evaporating, and people live paycheck to paycheck. The Body is at odds with Time.

The 1990s killed our sense of Time with the new forms of Information technology, while simultaneously they questioned the moral simplicity of the previous decade (like Kurt Cobain). The simpler era’s ideology has consequently crept back in the last eight years, being unveiled as something cancerous, in regards to our international and economic policies. The Wrestler communicates this sense in a raw fashion, calling its own realism to attention while also acknowledging its artifice and the artifice we construct in our rituals for entertainment and coherence. As the baby-boom generation ages, and healthcare only becomes more restrictive and expensive, the suffering lemmings fall over the cliff into a puddle of wasted flesh that is harder to turn away from, though difficult for us to stomach. For me, few motion pictures have been so timely in telling us where we are at.

The Hum: Kelly Reichardt’s “Wendy and Lucy”

I have a certain weakness for Wendy (Michelle Williams), the protagonist of Kelly Reichardt's magnificent Wendy and Lucy, a movie that looks and feels like the conjoined feminine half of Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, the other great drama of 2008. This is a lonely woman who we can assume made some bad decisions, and is now throwing herself into Fate's arms, driving away from her unfulfilling (or haunted) origins in Indiana to Alaska. She is living on limited funds in an unreliable vehicle, changing her clothes (very few clothes) and washing herself (though not her whole self) in public restrooms. Reichardt doesn't delve into many expository specifics as her camera follows Wendy. But there seems to be some Kerouacian spirit to her longing for freedom. That's what this is about, I think: the longing to fly above the barriers that immobilize human beings in moving forth and experiencing whatever it is that drives them. Wendy has one companion on this adventure. Her dog, Lucy.

Wendy and Lucy is an agit-prop human story. We should be angry watching it. It continues a sociological discussion commencing in Reichardt’s previous film, Old Joy, following a person without a safety net. We need health insurance (which relates to employment at one place over a sustained period of time); leases on residence and transportation; loans for school; we need good credit. If you have a cell phone, you are held captive by a contract for two years. To pay your contract, you need a credit card or a checking account. You need to be wired in, and the wires reach out to each other. To get a residence, you need to sign a lease which keeps you in place for so long; for that, you need a job to pay for the lease. And beyond that, to get a residence, or in many cases of employment, you need your credit checked. If you have bad credit, or no credit, what then? A felony? You can't live or work here. A driving violation? You cannot work as a courier or drive a cab. What kind of normal existence can this person ever afford to attain? To have a mate or partner? Children? A residence and room of one's own? The troubling phenomenon of the "overdraft charge" exemplifies this frustration, as banks are hesitant to get rid of such charges, which can threaten a person's financial stability, because the corporate body would suffer and have to lay people off: a lot of money comes into the company because of the poverty and fiscal irresponsibility of others – who can only afford to be fiscally irresponsible. Every step upward is met with a blow that knocks them three steps down again. The notion of complete "freedom" is a lie being that the mechanical power structures in place do their best to regulate bodies the best that they can, hampering the development of any kind of a fully realized person. The sweep of democracy over the globe is illusory. Superficially free, our deeper, essential selves are imprisoned by social security cards. If one strays or errors, theirs is a path of loneliness, fear, and a perpetual separateness from Normalcy.

Wendy has the added responsibility of Lucy, a helpless creature that she must feed, in addition to her own needs. She is relying on her car, in which she securely sleeps. And her budget, comprising of $542 at the point that we accompany her on her journey (someplace in rural industrial Oregon), will barely get her to Alaska. The dominos fall. Sleeping in a Walgreens parking lot, she is told that she has to get the car off the property. "It's not allowed," says the kindly security guard. The car won't start. She has to get it fixed. She needs to feed Lucy. She decidedly steals some dog food from a local mart, gets caught and arrested, is fined $50, and upon returning to the mart hours later, sees that Lucy, whom had been tied to a bike rack, is gone. Her quest is to find her companion, but if Lucy is ever recovered, can Wendy still adequately care for her? The film is a contemporary riff on De Sica's Umberto D.

The film opens with the sound of rail traffic and cargo trains on the graphic vectors of tracks leading to nowhere, a vanishing point with mass transportation of goods and services through the heart of America: The cold and commercial impersonal flow of industrial traffic contrasted to the warm organic relationship of creatures bonding, or Wendy and Lucy playing fetch. Reichardt's camera steadily tracks along with Wendy, simply holding the two together in their reliable companionship. This is soon broken when Lucy treads off to a campfire with a group of vagrants and travelers who have also been on this desolate adventure, some coming from Alaska. Smoking pot and telling stories, one (Will Oldham) relates how he fled one of the fisheries after being responsible for a logistical catastrophe, his lack of paper identity allowing him to get away. Wendy seems weary of this group, perhaps for good reason. An isolated trek, particularly for a young woman, cannot allow one to be too trusting of strangers and their ulterior motives. Maybe the relationship that Wendy has with her dog is more stable than anything she has experienced with another human being, which is why she is jealously preoccupied with getting Lucy away from the campfire and back to her side. In her car at the Walgreens parking lot, she overlooks her budget, and tenderly says, "'Night, baby girl.”

The security guard wakes her the next morning, tapping on the window. "Ma'am. Ma'am," he says. "You can't sleep here, ma'am. It's against the rules. You have to move your car." She complies, only to have her car begin to clunk when she turns the ignition. She posits that one of her belts may be broken and needs to be replaced. The guard stands, unable to do more than do his job. "You'll have to move your car." This character of the security guard is empathetic, but in his uniform he is like any number of other workers – attached to protocol, his singular directive being to have the car moved and out of the lot. He helps her push the car onto the street, points her to a mechanic, and gives the location of a grocer where she can get some dog food. Yet his insistence that the car be moved, regardless of how empathetic he is, feels absurd to us, as if he is some ghost trapped in his own machine.

Wendy ties Lucy to a bike rack, carefully placing some dog food cans in her coat pocket. Though she could easily afford to buy some, her long-term budgetary goal gives her the justification to steal. Unfortunately, as she exits, a teenage store clerk stops her, aggressively grabbing her arm and asking her if she has forgotten something. Taking her to the manager's office, the clerk insists, "There are rules. They should apply to everyone. Regardless." The manager, who probably could care less, shrugs as the clerk continues. He admits that the store has a policy of prosecuting all violators. Wendy will be arrested and fined. There is no nuance or use for apologies here because of the cause-effect linear rules that apply to everyone. Wendy is escorted out of the store by the police. She tries to tell her arresting officers that her dog is still at the store, but they don’t listen.

The police station is a den of an unending electronic humming, suspending life with no measure of time. Wendy looks at the generic clocks as the hours go by, knowing how Lucy is hungry, alone, and vulnerable in an open parking lot. Wendy is responsible for the dog, and this weighs more heavily on her than any transgression of the law. She is fingerprinted, her identity being recorded into a database – an imperfect database, as it turns out as she must be fingerprinted twice (therefore elongating her time at the station). An officer sighs, "This machine's going to kill me," as he records her fingerprints, which we see on a computer screen, a Kubrickian irony regarding the relationship of human beings to technological tools of the law. When told about her $50 fine, Wendy protests that she doesn't have any money. The receptionist answers, "You can also pay with a credit card," indicating just how for granted peoples' financing is taken by institutions. Defeated, Wendy relinquishes some of her precious budgetary cash money.

Lucy is missing. No one recalls seeing her being taken, or even being there to begin with. Seen in wide-shots, Wendy's whistles and calls to Lucy are meaningless in the sparse city heading towards late afternoon and inevitably dark twilight. We see the space-cadet store clerk exit through the receiving door of the store, picked up by his mother. This young man can stand firmly on the principles of unbending rules: he has a warm security blanket. Wendy doesn't (nor does Lucy, except for Wendy). Those who follow society's rules and stand firmly by its mandates often are able to do so because they can afford it.

I don't know if anyone reading this has felt was Wendy is feeling at this moment, but I have – regarding losing all of one's finances, one's pet (a heavy responsibility for a life that depends on you), and one's mode of transportation in one swoop – and all the while being in a completely strange place, as far from one's origin or destination as one is far from waking normality while in the midst of dreaming. The camera follows her walking through the barren and worn industrial streets, some gang graffiti on the walls alongside her, something that references a certain need for the most basic kind of free expression in an environment that is not conducive to communicative human needs.

Reaching the dog pound, Wendy slowly walks through the long hallway to see if Lucy has been taken. What follows is a fascinating tracking shot, the endless hall showing the engaged dogs one by one, some barking at their spectators, some hiding, some pacing while others are sleeping. This relates to the rest of the picture, bridging the animals to the human beings. The humming exuded from this white world is the same as what we heard in the police department.

Wendy, in a fit of loneliness and desperation, makes a phone call to Indiana, first talking to her brother-in-law and then her sister, both of whom assume that she is calling for money. This indeed may be her motive, but Wendy needs to hear someone familiar, if anyone at all, in this moment of crisis. She insists that she doesn't want anything, and the conversation ends with a kind of banality. “Oh, okay. Sure. Bye. See you.”

Wendy has no Identity. The security guard, whom she has discreetly befriended, understands this, allowing her to use his cell phone. "You can't get a home with no address or phone, can't get a job if you haven't had another job...It's all fixed." Reichardt shows how these conveniences that surround us are also what lock us away from freedom in our outer spaces, in addition to hampering introspective journeys within our inner space. We are compelled by our tools to join that electrical humming poisoning the air. Looking around her, Wendy does not see any kind of relational humanity. Special attention is paid to an elderly person on an electronic wheelchair. The tools of salvation are then also our final murderers, stagnating the soul.

Meeting the mechanic, she is told that she will be charged $50 for the tow to the garage. "But it's just over there," she protests, pointing across the street. Again, just as time is not a factor for the police station, so too do regulations dictate that space is not a pertinent issue. More important than the happenings existing in real space and real time are the texts that dictate how we must act in this space to keep things perpetuating. The mechanic gives her a deal: $30, which nonetheless, on the basic human scale of thought, remains unfair.

She sleeps in the park, but is interrupted by a stranger. The man begins regurgitating words to her, spilling some kind of confession of anger that is incoherent to us. We are led to think, and Wendy is led to suspect, that a rape may occur here, and the moment becomes horrifying. But nothing happens. The man, a vagrant, just tells Wendy not to look at him while he talks. Then he goes away. But he also says something that connects him to her spiritually: “They can smell the weakness on you.” She breaks out of her shock and runs, crying in a public restroom. This puzzling encounter with the vagrant arouses many questions. For me, in my own experience of being hungry and poor on the road, it relates to how nuts one is capable of going when desperate. But it also speaks of the polar end of the sparse white walls of the institution: the complete irrationality of untamed nature. The public restroom is a sanctuary for Wendy in this moment – there is a need for structure surely, for institutions and their safety. But how do you create that beast, or machine, while keeping the many different contextual faces of the human being in mind? The distance between the institutionalized and the natural is too far.

The next day, Wendy has good news. Lucy has been found and is at a foster home for dogs in a more affluent part of town. Her car is also scheduled to be fixed. She bids farewell to the security guard, who hands her a small amount of cash (a paltry $7). Her hopes crash upon discovery of her car's fate. The engine is beyond repair, and any attempt to fix it would cost more than the car is worth (around $2,000). She is trapped.

Going to the foster home for Lucy, the details of the neighborhood begin to make an impact. The camera pays special attention to a new Hybrid car, a sign of wealth, comfort, and security. Overjoyed to see and collect her companion, she plays fetch on the other side of the suburban fence. Lucy doesn't seem to want to let go of the stick, her hold on it pulling back as if to tell Wendy that she should come into the yard.

At this moment Reichardt and Williams do something extraordinary. It is a terribly affecting moment of filmmaking and film acting communicating something so clearly without words, dictated by a camera and an actor's face in close-up. Lucy is in a safe environment, a stable world so alien from what Wendy could ever grasp. She loves Lucy more than anything, we can imagine, and she believes – either selfishly or selflessly – that the best thing that she could do is to walk away and allow her 'baby girl' to remain here, in this yard that Wendy can't provide on her own. It's an incredible moment in a world that it isn't right for lovers – or pet-owners. Wendy cannot exist in the world's normalcy of the electronic hum, though the simulacrum related to that world is what she desires to give to the creature she loves. Wendy, for Lucy’s good, must disappear. And though she promises to come back, we cannot be so optimistic. Wendy still exists in the larger earth of meatspace, a terrain that has become inhospitable to those unable to adapt to the technological changes, restructuring how the one relates to other people. So she walks away, back to the rails, and hopping onto a train car, she rides into the night alone.

Critics of Wendy and Lucy have said that nothing happens in it: Traveling Girl Loses Dog, and Has a Few Troubling Interactions with Other People. It tells nothing, but shows a lot with its timely mirror to uncertain times. We should be outraged and driven to action after viewing it (if not utter despair). It's not only a film that is speaking of present economic pressures, but also the pressures of individuals adapting to the economics that are determined by technological means. It captures souls drifting through a wasteland, some of whom are part of the deathly hum, while others restlessly flee from it, both being destroyed, but one in comfort. Its hope resides in Lucy, who is conceivably oblivious to the sadness of her best friend's circumstances, able to frolic and enjoy a space of her own. Reichardt's roving camera capturing these drifters so dissonant to the surrounding stagnation makes Wendy and Lucy a great film about longing, the rough faces here so bittersweet that breathing alone is painful under its extraordinary weight.