So, I’ve been wanting to post here about the Virginia Tech tragedy, but as this is a class blog, I feel the need to balance that or somehow tie it in with Portrait of Jennie. I think I’ve been able to do that, or at least, it seems fairly balanced in my head.
For those of you who don’t know, from South Carolina, making me an out of state student. I learned today that Ben is also an out of state student. Its nice to know I’m not the only one, because it can feel like I’m the only odd-ball not from Virginia quite a bit on this campus. Anyway, Ben and I were talking about being from out of state, and he asked me if I felt removed from the tragedy at all; he did, he told me. And I do feel separated from it somehow. My roommates asked me if all of my friends at Tech were accounted for. “Yes” I said. I wanted to say “of course they are! None of my friends are at Tech.” I felt removed again today as everyone at Mary Wash changed their facebook picture to “today we are all Hokies. None of my friends from high school changed theirs, nor did they make any comment about it, and again I wondered how I fit into all of this emotional-wise. Its hard to feel connected to something you only found out about four years ago and still don’t quite feel connected to yet. But I also told Ben that in some ways, I feel much closer to the tragedy than I’d like. My fiancée is a Roanoke native and lives there now, and that’s where I’ll live after the wedding. He’s also a recent graduate of Tech’ mechanical engineering program, which meets in Norris Hall. Needless to say, we’ve had quite a few conversations about the shooting recently, especially as he’s still wondering which, if any, students and professors he knew. He’s also been quite consumed with wondering why it happened now, and thinking if it had happened a year ago, he would have been there, in that building and been involved. It’s hard to tell someone whose friends live in AJ (the dorm involved) that they’re okay, and that’s what’s most important to you. It’s also hard to keep moving from feeling distanced from the tragedy to feeling so closely linked on another, and in some ways I think that’s harder than either, navigating a world that feels so horribly and inexplicably real, and then feeling suddenly jerked into one where the only thing that matters is the grade you get on your latest paper.
In many ways, I think this is where the film adaptation of Portrait of Jennie fails; it doesn’t make us feel connected to the characters. I believe novels have an intrinsic ability to make us identify with the main character. Mostly, I think this comes from the knowledge we can put the book down and stop reading, but we choose not to, tying us to the story and its characters. A lot of times, I think films fail to carry this same feeling over. Maybe its because they don’t make eye contact with the viewer, maybe its because they show events from an “overhead” or omniscient view, which allows us to judge things without feeling connected to them. The film Portrait of Jennie certainly feels like this to me at times. At the same time, it has its moments where we feel tied to the characters and invested in what happens in their lives. For me, one of these moments was when Eben was talking to Spinney in her office/living room/whatever it was. But these moments thrust us in and out of a highly emotional state to a move ambivalent state, and that is worse than failing to make us feel at all – now we don’t know when to feel.
Also, I finally had time to sit down and watch Fast, Cheap and Out of Control. I think I liked it. I’m not sure yet.