 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 | 🎙️ EPISODE 312: 02.07.2021 Like Old Joy, there is a radio heard playing in Wendy and Lucy too, but gone is the neoliberal psychobabble: it's just arbitrary advertisements. The story feels adjacent and not just because this is the same dog (Kelly Reichardt's very own real life pup, a tremendous actor) . We're in the Northwest again, and Wendy (human), played by Michelle Williams, feels like she could be a cousin of Kurt or Mark, or a friend of a friend of a friend. Life isn't perfect for those two guys but they have made it in the shade compared to her. When Lucy first goes missing, Wendy–distraught, manic, and eventually frustrated and angry–describes him as "yellow, gold." When she gets the chance to hang missing posters, the description reads: "yellowish brown." Our expectations and our reality never meet up. At best, they touch something as mundane as the color of a dog. We can do our very best; we can have $525.00 (cash) to our names... |
...and it's never enough. We'll steal a single can of dog food because we know it isn't enough. And I'll be damned if the greatest villain in cinematic history isn't the Christian teenager at the grocery store who nabs Wendy, who jostles her about like she's nothing, because that's what she is to him. How many sons like this has America birthed?Wendy and Lucy is a bleak film, compounding some similar threads and themes from Old Joy and adding a thick layer of dread and fear on top. And the bleakest thing of all is how this vision of America is only getting clearer and more realized here in 2021.
There is the fear of money, of not having it. What's the greatest amount of money in the world? Is it the six dollars she's receives from the security guard out of pity? Or what about the two thousand she's told it will take to fix her car, an amount she's then told is more than the car is worth? What even IS money at that point? There is an amount of money and almost nobody has it.
The fear of men is less tangible, until it isn't. It's all around, all the time, right outsidse the door or right on top of you, lecturing you about how they wanna be a good boy but they (society) just won't let them. When Wendy decides to leave Lucy behind, she does so because she feels that the man who took her home "seems nice." She never meets this man, only sees him, fleetingly, from fifty or more yards away.
The 'plot' of this film involves Wendy trying to get to Alaska, maybe for a job or maybe just because. But long before she loses, finds and then abandons her dog, her only friend... long before her shitty car dies and she has to pay thirty dollars for the right to never see it again... long before she spends half a day in a police department with a cop who is too dumb to work the new fingerprint computer... Alaska is a lark. She speaks to a group of wanderers near the beginning of the movie, at night around a fire, among them: Will Oldham, as the most vociferous of the bunch, unhinged with a face tattoo (two fangs hanging out the corner of his mouth). He's been to Alaska, had a job there. His story turns manic and he barely makes any sense. Just like life.
Wendy and Lucy starts and ends with trains, freight trains (the Jonathan Raymond story it's based on is called "Train Choir). They move products not people. That's the only constant in America. The men with money use it and move it around it. It's a game. The best everyone else can do is try to grab hold, and try not to get caught.
CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 311 - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 313 ⫸
⫷ EPISODE 311 - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 313 ⫸
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