I like to be timely with these acts of self-indulgence, adhering to the arbitrary deadline of the first or second week of December to post my annual diatribes on what Daniel Nava learned for the year. I’m a little late. Most of the time, I just let it go out of fatigue, driven to exhaustion from ruminating on the past. This year? I’m still thinking, I’m still writing, I’m unsure of what I want to say, and even less certain of how I want to say it. Why do I write?
Before June of 2020, I had grown weary of the habit. The rinse-repeat model of watching franchise blockbusters and attempting to engage with them critically inspired nothing but boredom and indifference. I wrote a year-end piece in 2019 that took everything out of me and I had nothing left to give. It all felt obligatory and passionless. The quote unquote professionals I surrounded myself with would engage in banal discourse on the latest Marvel installment and I stood in place daydreaming of a life far away from it. Wish granted.
After June of 2020, I wrote for myself. I was told that one doesn’t typically journal when they’re happy and I assure you: I was profoundly depressed. My mustard journal and I traveled the world and its pages are filled with the Capital T Truth, the gospel according to Daniel Nava. Wind-swept, coffee-stained pages have sat with me through the sunsets of Lisbon to Miami to most recently, Denver and Philadelphia. It’s filled with searing words that I struggle to go back to: words of self-flagellation & hate, despondency & hopelessness & a complete resignation of the present. My head, my words, and my pen were all stuck in the past and no matter what I did I could not escape it. This tome I carried was my anchor. I was not to forget lest the mistakes of the past repeat themselves.
I began writing this on Halloween. A thick fog overwhelms Chicago on this Monday, the pavement is damp and the fallen leaves are sapped of their chlorophyll; the crunchy foliage illuminates my cloudy path in hues of auburn and gold. I thought of writing about all the things that I lost this year: friends, confidants, etc. I made new enemies, rekindled old friendships that were re-extinguished by the slightest breeze, and saw some of my best friends move onto greater things. It’s now the tail-end of December and the sun is peeking out in Chicago for the first time in weeks. The last time I saw the sun was in Denver about two week prior, where I experienced a luminosity of spirit and mind. Chicago, I love you but you’re bringing me down. Sobbing on the flight back from Denver, I thought about how I was going “home,” but quickly realized that I don’t know where home is. This place used to be it and now it’s not.
2023 nears and my past won't keep me from my best. It’s been a year since I started writing again for this blog. I fantasized, believing that maybe my words would be a key to a forbidden door that led to forgiveness. Lying supine, I stare up at the ceiling and imagine sitting in an all-white fluorescently-lit room, surrounded by a circle of chairs, occupied by all the women of my life, past and present, as they lodge their formal complaints before engaging in a critical, thoughtful discourse. I’m pretty good with words, but I know they won’t save my life.
If time has proven anything, it’s that these people would rather occupy a world where I’m some evil presence, where doxxing (how woefully cringe) is preferred to a conversation. I wanted to believe that Elon Musk would destroy Twitter, as if the tightening noose around my neck would dissipate, and give me the relief I’ve been pining for. And I just laugh at the absurdity of it all. What a modern malady. It’s the luggage that I carry, and I am stronger and better for it. If I grew up encased and sheltered, then the world has revealed itself to me. I have weathered a litany of storms. And I persevered through each downpour. It’s easy to be bitter and want to resort to the same shame-based tactics that were used upon me. But why? That hate keeps no one warm. It just burns you up. That’s been my mantra throughout 2022, repeated ad nauseam. I have to believe in something and I solemnly believe in that.
What I guess I’m looking for, in my writing, in everything, is to have the faith in myself to give life meaning that cannot be destroyed by death. Expressed differently, as Tolstoy once wrote: what kind of meaning can my finite existence have in this infinite universe? All I know is that this is the best I can do right now, and it has to be good enough.
10.
Decision to Leave
(Park Chan-wook)
I’m thinking about the alliterative allure of the term “heavy heart,” and how when I’m heartbroken over a lover, it’s not a heaviness in my chest that I feel. Instead it’s a complete void, a palpable detachment, and a feeling of abandonment. These feelings are always oversized, but the same could likely be said of the good times. The takotsubo cardiomyopathy that I experienced at 30, after breaking up with Karina, seems positively welcoming compared to the cataclysms that followed.
I have a habit of deleting texts after a breakup. They’re not receipts to me, but curses. I do it out of anger & compulsion & disappointment. And I regret it each time. Mostly, it’s a feeling of loss, knowing that those photos, the sweet-nothings exchanged between a ghost and I are no longer there. It’s my version of deleting the memory of the past, of trying to move forward, the closest I’ve gotten to Eternal Sunshine. Or at least until my cortex and hippocampus have atrophied as a byproduct of Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome.
Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave makes some compelling and recognizable observations about how texting and voicemails inform modern relationships. He does for voicemails what Vivaldi’s “Summer” did for Héloïse in Portrait of a Lady on Fire; a confluence of every emotion leading to an overwhelming, weak-at-the-knees, sob session. In a voicemail, detective Hae-Joon (Park Hae-il) is reminded of the woman that upended his life. An insomniac, he works extensive hours before returning home to his wife. It was a routine that piled up on him and detached him from feeling any particular high or low. He meets Seo-rae (Tang Wei) and she’s unlike anyone he’s ever come across and so their relationship blossoms. The distinction between a femme fatale and manic-pixie dreamgirl seems fairly arbitrary, but given the genre most will suggest the former. I detest both classifications and simply consider Seo-rae to be the kind of person that Hae-Joon would prefer to be with. Who doesn’t get excited by a new and chaotic worldview that someone offers? And so Hae-Joon indulges in the fantasy until he can’t. Twist upon twist, betrayal upon betrayal. You’d imagine it’d be easy to disconnect from someone who’s wronged you so many times and yet you can’t. The goodwill they’ve amassed seems infinite, like the divide between the ocean and the horizon.
My brother tells me he’s looking for a new book to read and I offer him one from my library. I peruse through my titles and come across Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami. I distinctly remember purchasing the novel at the Barnes & Noble in Webster Place with a woman that I dated briefly immediately after Karina. It was November 2018 and the air was frosty and after a long day at work we collapsed in the aisles and sat on the carpet of the fiction section. She laid her head on my shoulder and for the first time in a long time I felt my heart fill up. I look through the novel now and see the receipt from the purchase. And in red ink I have the date scrawled. The ink on the receipt fades but the red is still there. I don’t have our text messages anymore, but I have that. A receipt from when my heart was heavy.
9.
Triangle of Sadness
(Ruben Östlund)
I stress that while I don’t think my life is comfortable, I do think that I’m experiencing something of a relative calm that, without question, is temporary. After leaving the psych ward in 2020 and seeing my edematous wrists return to a less ghastly size, I was still terribly uneasy. The first thing I did upon discharge was go on a lengthy hike at Starved Rock National Park, hoofing the trails and scaling the rocky terrain. It was a hot, humid summer weekday and I sat at the edge of a cliff, my legs dangling. I journaled there, relishing in being alone with my thoughts, and took a rare selfie. The picture comes up from time to time on my iPhone’s Featured Photos; my gaunt face hanging low on my skull, the bags under my eyes forming luggage, my haggard features with my gaiter mask around my neck, sopping up whatever sweat I had left in me. But I tried to smile. I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life, but then again, had I ever? Maybe I have more direction now and I certainly have greater luxuries. But I felt like I had nothing to rest on. There is no safety net.
Just a week or so ago, a contestant on Survivor, Jesse Lopez, a recently crowned PhD in Political Science, placed fourth. The editing of the show suggested that he was likely to win but came up short in a fire-making challenge. He played a good game that took advantage of his best asset: he’s charming. He spent much of his youth in juvenile hall but found grace in a partner and was able to carve a life out of his second chance. Within Survivor, he was untouchable. He made a play toward the latter half of the game that turned heads where he betrayed his closest ally. And then he came up short. When his flame was extinguished, he struggled to maintain his composure. This was his chance for relief. To repay a debt that I can understand on an elemental level. To give his family something that only money can buy: security.
I’ve talked with friends, partners, exes, and enemies about wealth and it’s frequently startling how unaware they are of their own opulence. And I mean this with no judgment or palpable envy, but a nebulous concept like “affordable” can vary wildly depending on who’s dispensing the term. It’s just notable and noticeable how we’re left pining for more but unaware of the circumstances that lead to our privilege. What I saw in Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness, like his observations on femininity and masculinity in Force Majeure or the gatekeepers of art in The Square, is an understanding that no matter what level you’re on, you quickly lose sight of those behind you. Or below you. And even when the field is leveled, as is the case in the film’s final act, you’ll find new hierarchies, new systems whereby there’s an oppressor and oppressed. And if you’ve been oppressed for that long, is it any wonder why someone would revert to violence and barbarism to not lose that glimpse of privilege? Some may suggest that I’m making excuses but I think at the root of it, it’s the reason.
8.
Bones and All
(Luca Guadagnino)
Few things produce more skull-clutching boredom than discussions of taxonomy, but categorizing Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All at times feels like an active rejection of our world of algorithms. This swampy, Midwestern fairy-tale-road-movie about cannibal youths attempting to find their place in the world is just about the most romantic film of 2022, which probably tells you more about me than it does the film. Whereas I met some of Guadagnino’s earlier films (I Am Love, A Bigger Splash, and even Call Me By Your Name) with a degree of resistance for their urbanity and privileged ennui, his recent foray into horror has ironically made him much more palatable. This prevailing melancholy, when funneled through sequences of grisly violence, feels so much more authentic.
Or maybe it’s just the content? A young woman tries to unpack the whys and whences of her impulses after her father abandons her. The journey for an answer presents more questions, but she wisely comes to grips that while her past may inform her present, it need not define it. “Let’s be people,” she says, asking her partner to join her in those romantic moments of sharing space, waking up together, cooking for one another, etc. I’ve been blessed with that kind of partnership a few times in my life and I’m eternally grateful for those moments. But it’s the aftermath, where you’ve gone through your changes. Where you think you might actually be a Good Person, when the past jostles you back into place. The alchemy at play here is that the universe sometimes organizes itself to create these tiny pockets of fleeting benevolence, but they fade away into the ephemera. “Let’s be people'' means experiencing the heights of that benevolence and the despair of its absence. Despair breeds desperation. But being a “Good Person” might just mean having the willingness to endure and try again.
7.
TÁR
(Todd Field)
Someone I briefly dated summed it up best: Daniel Nava is an idiot with a robust vocabulary. It’s a symptom of a certain patriarchal upbringing, one that’s left me overeducated but morally bankrupt; too much in my head and deprived of any meaningful human connection to know how to operate within the world. Consider my abbreviated history: coming from a destitute family, poverty lending itself to shame, shame leading to deceit, deceit hemorrhaging into regret. The cycle repeats itself and all I wanted to do is have some measure of control. Never having any agency to call my own, I’ve sacrificed whatever integrity I had for control. All of this may come across as a sort of generic Instagram therapy meme intended to rationalize all your pain without any particular clinical insight, but then again, maybe I’m not as complex a person as I sometimes think I am.
It’s late into TÁR before we see Lydia come back to her childhood home. Her reputation has already been tarnished. Her cruelty is captured with such clinical detachment that its effects in the preceding two hours don’t take shape until you really settle back and think about it. An edited video involving Lydia and a student suggests a directness and severity that may as well be a red herring. It’s her causal affronts that really add up. It’s the silence, the critical glare, the gestures of compassion that are really about something else. She comes back home, a place she’s clearly abandoned, and we’re told that Lydia isn’t even her real name; it’s Linda. Her blue-collar brother greets her with despair. This world is scorched Earth.
I mean, obviously: I saw plenty of myself in TÁR. All I’ve ever wanted was to leave the poverty of my past, believing that education will lead me to where I needed to be. As my mother insisted, “a lawyer or doctor.” Those were the paths. And so my personal failure to get there led to so much collateral damage that I can only blame myself for it. Like Lydia, my downfall is my own orchestration. And like Lydia, I’m consciously aware of the fact that I still get to do what I want to do, even if it’s not exactly as I’d like it. The grass is not as green, but I’m watering it until it is. And when Lydia’s own body rejects the idea of having people around her as serviceable, as a transaction, I want to believe that maybe she’s watering her new Earth too.
6.
Nope
(Jordan Peele)
Of the ten films listed here, Jordan Peele’s Nope is the most difficult to write about. It’s a piece of entertainment, sure, but it’s also a major studio production about authenticity and collaboration; two things I struggle with in my own work and life. Between January 2020 and June 2020 I wrote minimally for this website. I had a conversation recently about my ideal writing milieu and the first thing that came to mind was that I required a giant window that overlooked a verdant neighborhood street, preferably with foot traffic that warranted lifting my eyes from my screen to briefly make eye-contact with dog walkers and runners, if only to remind myself that all this writing isn’t exclusively some hermetic, insular exercise. It’s why I tend to write in coffee shops. During the height of the pandemic, I didn’t have the luxury of cafes, but I did have a giant window. I had the busy neighborhood. I had dog walkers. I had runners. I had eye contact. And nothing came.
Nick, my roommate at the time, a terrific abstract writer disguised as a critic, kept churning out the usual drivel on Tiger King or whatever other flavor-of-the-week. I still read his stuff from time to time; competently composed essays and listicles that amounted to a cursory understanding of its subject and even less of an understanding on who was writing it. The work of an AI. The convenience of my present circumstance is that I can write about what I want, when I want, however I want. I never said it was good, but at the very least, I know it’s me.
Following the height of the pandemic, Jordan Peele’s Nope was the first film I saw in theaters that felt like an event. I’d seen plenty of films in the interim, films by filmmakers I love, and blockbusters that even exceeded my expectations. But leaving Nope in theaters was absolutely thrilling. Not since Mad Max: Fury Road had I seen a studio production that was this exciting, humanistic, and thoughtful. While some may perceive the film to be exclusively a commentary on racial privilege in cinema or man’s folly in trying to tame nature, what sang most loudly was its reverence of spectacle and the artistic process as an individual and collaborative process. This is distinctly a work that only Peele could’ve made. There’s no mistaking it. And that’s ultimately what I ask from my artists and myself: make it you.
5.
The Cathedral
(Ricky D’Ambrose)
I grew up in a household that professed much and believed very little. My mother, my father, my brother and I. We were a unit. My father uprooted his life from Mexico, traversing through Texas before residing in Chicago. As a child and as an adult, I know little about him beyond that he worked the night shift for 20 years at the same construction company, and that he enjoyed my mother’s caldo de camaron before leaving for work. He’d take a whole San Marcos brand jalapeño pepper, take a bite, and toss it into his stew every night. He had no friends that came to the house. He had no family that would visit him during the holiday or his birthday. We were all he had. You’d figure he would treat the people around him better but that wasn’t the case. Sometimes I think I take after him.
Ricky D’Ambrose’s The Cathedral is a powerful collage of a film on what it was like to grow up during the 90s. D’Ambrose and I are a year apart and the historical touchpoints that inform his film - Desert Storm, the Clinton scandal, 9/11, Bush’s presidency, and Hurricane Katrina - all possess the kind of helpless spectatorship that come with being a child and teenager. I remember protesting Bush’s War in Iraq and wondering what I, a teenage boy in high school, could actually do to help. A similar thought came across my mind when I marched with BLM activists during the pandemic. D’Ambrose’s childhood reflections are specific, narrated with a clinical lyricism by Madeline James, as he observes the various relationships that would define his life. The effect is hypnotizing and precisely the sort of cerebral, self-reflection that I look for in film; where the historical and personal intertwine to create an imprecise image of the self. What we get from this are the indelible images that are lodged in our brains, the belief systems that we inherit, and the obliterating loneliness that comes from being a passenger to our parents lives. I can’t blame my parents for what they’ve done. All I can do is try to understand. And I think that’s what D’Ambrose does so elegantly here.
4.
The Banshees of Inisherin
(Martin McDonagh)
I don’t really believe in the idea of outgrowing someone. That kind of hierarchical mentality seems indicative of a superiority complex. If I feel that someone is being left behind, I want to carry them up on my shoulders rather than having them fend for themselves. And I’d hope they’d do the same for me. That’s not usually the case and that’s okay too. As desperate as I may become to cling onto a friendship, to return to the comfort of a familiar resting place, I know that sometimes it can’t be done. Instinctually, I know that the annihilation of my old, past dependent self is the only path to growth. And I know I rush past my instincts too often.
There were times during Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin where I wished I could grab Pádraic (Colin Farrell) by the neck line of his many ornate turtleneck sweaters to wake him up. Some friendships aren’t meant to last. And sometimes some people can’t be saved, lest you risk being taken down with them. There are few films of this ilk; about the camaraderie between depressed men, and the patriarchal masculinity that divides them. After indulging in bell hooks’ writing over the past year, my antenna was primely attuned to this broadcast and I was positively obliterated by passages of Inisherin. “Patriarchal masculinity insists that real men must prove their manhood by idealizing aloneness and disconnection,” say hooks. Sometimes we choose to be alone because the possibility of hurt and pain in finite relationships leaves us enclosed and sheltered. That’s the kind of worldview that leaves you wondering if life is worth living and if it ever had been; drained of feeling, left withering and tired. But we have to be more than carcasses animated by a habit of stubborn will. And to that end, I hope Pádraic is able to overcome his litany of losses, and fill his heart with the passionate attachment he deserves. Not sure if I deserve it either, but I’m trying to earn it.
3.
One Fine Morning
(Mia Hansen-Løve)
Things are taken for granted when you’re young. This comes across as exceedingly curmudgeonly but at 34 it’s a banal platitude with the canines that pierce through the epidermis right to the bone. The tedium of day-in-day-out work, the difficulty of maintaining and cultivating meaningful relationships, and the expectation of making peace with mediocrity, makes your mid-30s something that needs to be survived. But then there are these fleeting moments of grace, moments that are funneled through Cinemascope that make these rotations around the sun worth it.
Mia Hansen-Løve’s One Fine Morning, much like Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World from last year, is an incredible film about millennial anomie. Despite the similar subject matter, the two end up being somewhat diametrically opposed, though not necessarily in conflict. They complement each other even if their perspective on legacy and relationships seem contradictory. One Fine Morning is something of a connective ligament between Hansen-Løve’s prior films, Goodbye First Love and Things to Come, and given that I’m around the same age as Léa Seydoux’s character, I found this exercise in extramarital affairs and concerns of cerebral degradation among your elders to be attuned to everything I’m concerned with. There are few more striking scenes this year than seeing Seydoux witness her father’s decline, stumbling out of his nursing home bedroom at night, and calling upon the name of an old lover. I don’t know whose name I’ll summon when my body and mind have betrayed me. Sometimes I think it’s someone that I’ve already met. Other times I think it’s someone who I won’t meet until the twilight of my life. But all I can hope for is that they’ll hear my call.
2.
Aftersun
(Charlotte Wells)
Call it my toxic trait but rather than idly ruminate (as evidenced by all this, Reader), I prefer to abandon myself to impulse and revel in the intensity of a moment or of a memory. I’m working on it, but I can only imagine that the retreat to my mind’s positive memories is akin to a junkie’s ecstasy of pressing the syringe on a hypodermic needle and feeling their bloodstream get infiltrated by foreign agents designed for cellular hyperpolarization. The memory plays like a streaming option and you’re left hypnotized by your preferred mode of entertainment.
Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun leaves gaps for her audience to fill in. Some may find this frustrating. Others have accused the film of being manipulative (what film isn’t). I filled in the gaps, and this story about a woman recounting the presumably last time she sees her father while on vacation rang cherries. It made me reflect on my father and his habits.
My dad practiced tai chi every morning. He took out a book from the local library and performed the various exercises in the living room of a tiny one-bedroom apartment on the northwest side of Chicago where I grew up. He'd renew the book every three weeks, to the point that it began to garner the attention of library staff. Eventually, after years, they stopped letting him renew it. He'd already done all the exercises about five times over. My mother and I tried to find another copy for him to own, but it was out of print and far too expensive. And so he stopped doing tai chi. His mind was still intact then. On the rare occasions I see my parents now, he often sits idly in the living room, staring off into nothing in particular. But sometimes, I'll see him move his arthritic wrists in the same motion as he used to when I was a kid.
Say what you will about Wells' intent but the effect of Aftersun, in all its nostalgic power, is positively profound. Much like The Cathedral or The Fabelmans, Aftersun permits its audience to stand alongside these characters living in a memory, swept in like the rising tide, to live with the dead.
1.
After Yang
(Kogonada)
Habitually, I find myself focused on my own incompleteness. I’ll fixate on the inalterable past, dream up ways to soften the jagged edges of a bad memory, and quickly realize that there’s no way out of the situation without experiencing all its pain, like a fist grazing a limestone wall. Avoid it all I want, but those memories will haunt me until I’ve bled out from my knuckles and thinned away into oblivion. The tableau of my memories instinctually wants to highlight the positive; moments that complement one another in forming a vision of who Daniel Nava is, was, and can be. But for the past few years, after a monument to my indiscretions was erected, I’ve found it difficult, frankly impossible, to believe that I could be a Good Person, whatever that means. So much resentment, so much resistance to life has emerged and ossified. As a pinned tweet, I feel like my story has been etched in granite, with no room for addendums, clarity, or revision. And other times I think: I really ought to stop taking criticism from people I would never take advice from.
Kogonada’s After Yang is my favorite film of 2022 because it observes the emptiness that we all experience and asks us not to avoid the pain, but instead to cultivate it. To take advantage of that loss and learn from it. Like many of my favorite films, it’s an excavation of memory, of the moments we have lodged in our brain that we worship. But it’s also a recontextualization, where we observe an android’s memory through a father that has missed his daughter growing up and failed his partner. It’s a film that offers the impossible; it permits you to view the inalterable past, see what was missed, to calibrate the present, and prepare for the future. In death, we’re offered the capacity to be more than some penciled-in footnote and instead leave behind an indelible legacy.
My life’s greatest fear is to become a meaningless thing that merely survived time. On a marrow-petrifyingly cold morning I cycled the 13.7 miles from Pilsen to Edgewater and sat in the cafe of my early twenties, where as an undergrad I spent countless hours fixating on what I was to become. I close my eyes and open them again only to realize that in the interim so many things have vanished.
Most of the people I knew live their lives without me, but they still occupy considerable storage in my mind. I think of Karina and her nursing my wounds on the countless cycling accidents I survived; she deserves all the happiness the world has to offer and thensome. I think of Jackie and hope she finds peace and solace; her life’s great ambition must extend beyond trying to ruin my life and she deserves better. I think of Anna Lisa and hope she harnesses her anger toward her art. No one I’ve met has her talent and one day I hope she and I could have an actual conversation. I think of David, Michael S., and Scott and reflect on talking cinema and feeling like part of a community. That extends to Adam, Floyd, Jason, Michael H., Rob, Steven, Tyson, and Zach. I miss you. Excavate my brain for its memories and these faces are but a paltry few in a tapestry of those who have contributed to making my life what it is now, for better, for worse. Sometimes there’s anger. But that anger has accomplished nothing and means even less.
Life is filled with dramas that seemingly feel like the center of the world. I’m frequently told that all this pain is only remembered by me, and that it need not inform my day-in-day-out. But like the tea-making metaphor of After Yang, it’s all part of the process. I’ve spent a lot of time hoping to get around or over this but in the end: I know I have to go through it. I write to make sense of it. I write because these words, strung together to form barely cogent sentences, is the monument for which I want to be remembered. I cannot leave it up to others to tell my story. It’s up to me. And then I might find it possible to live, and even be happy, now and then.