The Gentle Weight of re-Experiencing
On watching 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being' again
As with many readers, I was captivated by Milan Kundera's opening thought in his novel "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," about the fly-away nature, the impossible lightness of being conscious in linear time, where nothing can be tested or made sure of, because each thing we do happens just once. This thought catches hold of you because, while not exactly counterintuitive, it's certainly counter to how we usually frame and speak about such things: we endure and persist like Odysseus, we carry on (calmly or otherwise), we bear and brace up, we get through our days, our weeks, our grief, etc. Life is hard, life is heavy—much has been said about that, and has been since we conceived an afterlife, possibly to answer just such a feeling of imbalance, felt in our minds, that Kundera articulates here.
A musical pairing:
Some examples of heaviness-themed art include Adam and Eve departing paradise by Masaccio, and postlapsarian-themed things in general—see the Middle Ages: all of it, as an example, the medieval lyric "Earth Took Earth"—
"Earth took of earth earth with woe
Earth to the earth earth (will) draw
Earth laid earth in an earthen trough
Then had earth earth enough"
If that's unbearable for anything, it's not lightness! My favorite example from music is "Superman" by the Flaming Lips, as sung by Iron and Wine. Great song, man! Heavy!
No!, says Kundera, life is the most paradoxical combination, impossibly rich and impossibly light. How on earth do we keep track of anything? How do we make anything count? How can we ever hope to see past our noses? Anyway, profound thought! Excellent novel (in some ways, my first Substack article, called "The Rabbits of Time," was a response to this idea—a scheme for putting on weight, I guess).
I have thought about that idea with some regularity since I first read the book. I recently thought of rereading it, but decided instead to re-watch the movie.
I'm very happy I did, because I feel I significantly underrated it the first time I saw it. I remember thinking that it was all right but that it didn't really capture the essence of the book. This still may well be the case—after all, it's been a long time since I read it. I remember feeling that the rush of sensuality, particularly at the beginning, was a bit brutal and empty without the quizzical interior reflections of Tomas. This may be accurate; Tomas may indeed appear more of the monster he jokingly accuses himself of being in the first moments of the film, but film and literature are different media with different ways of working on people. It may well be to the purpose of the film to make Tomas something of a monster, from the outside—that is the prerogative and virtue of film, that in this too-light existence, which only allows us to see from one position at once, it steadfastly and exclusively shows us the outside. (In fact, this situation, of being able, however poorly, to compare two mediums' treatments of the same material, may show us the simple way out of Kundera's bind of being limited to one experience at a time, and thus, because each moment is unique, to one experience absolutely. Namely, we can use our minds to imagine other experiences of being.)
In any case, despite only referring to the opening thought hardly at all explicitly—once in the beginning when Tomas complains to Sabina that he can't know whether he is doing the right thing moving in with Tereza because he can't divide himself and experience the outcome of the opposite decision, and again, possibly, briefly at the end, where the man with Mephisto the pig describes life as "impossible without explaining"—anyway, despite these limited explicit references, the film does an excellent job of capturing this theme for the story of the rich, incomplete lightness of being alive.
"Take Off Your Clothes"
One of the ways the movie accomplishes this, of course, is the performance of Daniel Day-Lewis. The way his eyebrows lead the way into every room, then give way to his hyper-focused staring eyes—he really clearly sees what is happening directly in front of him, but he can't see the big picture for the lowering, humorous eyebrows.
Tomas has a characteristic thing that he does that is representative of this focused vision: multiple times, in a way that suggests that it's "his thing," he either begins or nearly begins an interaction with a woman with the demand "take off your clothes." This demand is both a way to trade on his being a doctor and, I think in an important way, for him to actually be the kind of person he claims to be. This kind of vision is excellent at seeing what is in front of you clearly, but when it comes to the big picture he seems less able and certainly less interested in seeing in the same way. This, despite the fact that a major plot point involves Tomas writing an essay in which he counter-compares Czech communist leaders to Oedipus, who allowed themselves to claim they knew nothing of Stalinist atrocities while they were happening, keeping their eyes in the metaphor.
Although it's a criticism of the big picture political situation, it doesn't feel as if his essay comes out of his sense of the long-term swirl of history, but rather as if the communist party happened to walk in front of him, and he said "take off your clothes." He appears to be unaware of any ironic disjunction—one doesn't know if any such feeling is intended—between his way of looking at things and the kind of historical self-awareness he is expecting of the party.
The Weight of the Antithesis
The case of Tereza is different; she seems very caught up in the tide of events and aware of their threatening, overwhelming quality. She is constantly seeking her own "take off your clothes" effect through the enforced stillness of her photographs. (Here, I think of the essay "The Destruction of Experience" by Giorgio Agamben.)
Being caught up in events with Tereza made me more aware of the film's historical context—1968 through sometime in the middle of the '70s in communist Czechoslovakia. I had a thought, and a curious pang of regret: we in the western world are no longer divided so starkly and vibrantly into communist and non-communist. Easy, crass thought to have now—presumably we are better off for those days being over and how that turned out. We'll see if we still feel that way when the python of inequality logically implied by capitalism finishes constricting us. Anyway, crass thought or not, the idea is that, as a human collective, by having a large number of our number take up an explicitly antithetical life to another large group of us, we enable ourselves to run just the kind of experiment collectively which the lightness of our state of being denies us individually. We are able to divide ourselves and have, as it were, some of us move in with Tereza, while others of us remain free to see Sabina. The problem is that the experiment is too complex, too impersonal, and remains inconclusive.
Mephisto's Way
Tereza and Tomas have a friend, a former patient and a farmer, whom they go to live with towards the end of the film, who lives with a pig named Mephisto. The friend says he appreciates life with Mephisto because he "is very clever but he doesn't understand any of this." This doesn't exactly mirror either Tereza or Tomas, but I feel it's an approach to life the movie supports: alertness to all the complex sensation of life without any baggage in the way of preconceptions about it.
For a story that has such a strong sense of the rich precarity of life as it passes through that very brief confluence between our bodies and our consciousness, while it obtains, it makes sense to me that the story would see its characters to their end. Before that moment comes, however, there is a scene which, perhaps, prefigures their deaths and tells us how to feel about it, in a way.
Tomas and Tereza get a dog together, early in the movie, named Karenin. Shortly before the end, they find out Karenin has cancer and decide, because of Tomas being a doctor, to put her down immediately, together. It is a sad scene, but matter-of-fact, simple and honest—one moment Karenin is there and in pain, the next she isn't.
When it comes to their own deaths, we hear about them first through a letter to their friend Sabina, informing her. Then, we see them returning through the woods from an overnight stay in their local town, where they carouse and dance with their country friends. They take off in the truck they are borrowing—we read, in the letter, that the brakes failed. This is fitting: you race ahead until you stop. We see the turn in the road, shrouded in fog. And fade out.
"Good dog, Karenin. Don't be afraid..."