There is something dizzying and mesmerizing about the absurd (but as convincing as the absurd can sometimes be) final scene. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Doom. The giddy Harrison Ford as he pleads with “goddaughter” Phoebe Waller-Bridge (an androgynous beauty with whom everything speaks of the incestuous love of the old “Indy”) to beg her to let him stay where they are. “There” is none other than Syracuse during the battle with the Athenians (415 BC); and as he prays to her, the daytime sky is criss-crossed in the background by the arrows of naval warfare, a pyrotechnic contrast to the film’s climate. So, after two hours of adventures and misadventures in a hectic sequence, this return trip, lightning and lightning fast in its very distant projection back, convinces, and in Syracuse centuries and centuries ago, and the viewer here seemed to have been there himself.
In prototype form and waiting in the market in Tangier, Indiana Jones drove a supersonic van in reverse gear, and in a reckless and inverted maneuver, he found another “exit strategy”, once again avoiding danger and saving the goddaughter and the little boy. who are inseparable from him, close friends, ready to follow him at every step back or forward in time and space. The back is saved. Go backwards, think backwards in the mind, find a home in the “back” that releases the present by projecting it back over your shoulders and from there allowing its light to reflect forward. “Leave me here,” Indiana Jones pleads with absurd but believable tenderness in his eyes; and even if his prayer is not answered, just by stating it, it is retribution, it is rebirth, it is new to face the inexorable loom of old age and the passage of time. I stay behind, I want to stay there, it’s like saying “Indy” because it is behind you that you find and rediscover the key to everything. Salvation nestles behind, where thought is at work, revisiting, revisiting, redeeming the way it reformulates things.
WHALEfilm by Darren Aronofsky, has in its title not only an ingenious double echo of the word “whale”, referring to the tonnage of the protagonist, nor a simple echo moby dickhe loved the book of the same protagonist, opened it and taught it (first to his daughter, when she was younger, but already painfully moved away from him). WHALEis also an allusion to a thick-skinned memory: it speaks of the enormous weight of the past, of what is left behind, not processed, not fully perceived in all its weight, a burden that means the burden of a large amount of pain, but also incompleteness, unfolded (unfolded) non-total. He chokes, swallows his vomit, and meanwhile the obese professor races back in thought, an amazing actor as well as the heartbreaking character of Brendan Fraser/Charlie.
Brendan Fraser in the movie The Whale
In a convulsive but very measured race as she is modulated by the dramatic demands of her present, her mind searches back and comes to mind, remembers everything, love, loss, escapism, retreat to genuine but only partial work (he teaches literature online, leaving behind, i.e. hidden, his face and body, stuffed with kilograms and kilograms of excess). And at the same time, when he turns back like this, his incredibly swollen and fat body betrays him, interferes, upsets him to such an extent that he wants to die. Not only does he walk backwards, but he is not isolated in his urgent need to walk à rebours. In addition, everyone around him retreats back, being drawn to his house / lair, where the last days of his life pass.
Each reconciles with his “back”, each with his own. An Asian nurse who does her best to accompany him in extreme discomfort, with her adopted daughter’s history and her in-laws linking her inextricably to him, the whale professor. His ex-wife, a woman whose “back” is a ball of bitterness, never expressed or screamed, never really, never completely. A randomly appeared little boy knocks on the door on another rainy day and seems to be a member of an evangelical sect, but whose “back” turns out to be completely different. Framed photographs are brought back on the tables and shelves of the house / closet, the daughter of the protagonist is almost forcibly pulled back by the dying father – the one who would like not to think about anything, or rather not to probe anyone, only to step back, bite and attack anyone, who blocks his way with anger and lack of love. The back is salvation. We would like to stay behind, because behind we die with dignity, looking forward.