#scurf153: A photoessay on a photoessay

Notes on Kyle Chayka's New Yorker essay on In the Mood for Love

Yesterday the New Yorker web site (CAN’T GET OVER THIS hilarious usage!!!) published an aesthetic, gorgeous video essay called “In the Mood for Love” ’s Era-Defining Aesthetic.

I read and then immediately re-read it in the early hours of my Indian Saturday morning (9am lol). Nursing a sour hangover through one corner of my double-bed, I padded up and down my phone’s humid screen. As the sun beamed in from the East facing giant glass window in my room, I turned on the AC to dull the pain of the heat and imbue a sense of comfort, however fleeting.

Reading the essay felt a lot like when I had first watched In the Mood in 2015. Then, the movie had cast a fugue, a spell, a something unnameable over my depreciated, port wine-induced senses. In that Shakespearean stupor, I had stepped out for a walk at 3am in my leafy Pune neighbourhood. After 20 minutes a generous policewoman in her van had escorted me back home. She was worried I was a girl trying to run away from home. Little did she know.

Paging through the essay on this very sunny, ultra-bright September morning in Delhi, I felt the need to be transported to a nameless place while reading it. So I pilled up my bedcover over my face, covering one eye, squinting morosely through the other. I waited for the headache to draw up, the senses to pulse in, the air conditioning to work its humid charm.

In the frisson-like state I put out this silly tweet:

Everything about this Encounters piece by Kyle⁩ is gorgeous. Like a novel on In The Mood For Love waiting to be written!

(I wrote “Encounters” when the section under which the essay is published is called “Touchstones”)

Moving on, I was so taken in by the essay’s effervescence, Chayka’s scholarly attention to the lore around the movie and its eventual TikTokification that after my third or fourth read, I sat up. In the next minute as I was seated at my desk with my laptop and mouse, I wanted to deep dive into the essay — this time with even more minute attention to detail. This obviously meant screeenshotting my way through it, and delving into my small, little thoughts for a bit longer.

The result was this photoessay on a photoessay which is in essence a compilation of my tweets alongside some screengrabs, but also an attestation to my love obviously for the movie but also for the writing Chayka does at the intersection of technology, culture and modernity. I’ve been an avid reader of his essays on his substack, new yorker and other places.

Chayka’s daily-ish newsletter Dirt is one of most favourite contemporary places to read up on culture, books, fashion and the mores. I tried so hard, for almost a year, pitching various ideas to Dirt but couldn’t cut it.

Coming back to the mythic movie that In the Mood is and Chayka’s New Yorker essay here are my outtakes and what I’d have wanted imbued more in there.

(My philistine self wants very simply to scroll through the essay while listening to its resounding theme music in the background!)

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The essay opens with this frame that simultaneously lets us into the humid contours of In the Mood as well as the text that trains its attention on many aspects of the movie’s cultural holding in our modern times.

The piece is interspersed with screenshots from various scenes. This creates a blocking sense of its own. A style then emerges that looks erased poetry-like and I absolutely love it. The interface does this thing only very briefly while scrolling here and in a couple more instances. Even if accidental, it's beautiful!

The frame here perfectly encapsulates my obsession with communication being in fact a conduit for all of life's miscommunications. In more recent weeks and months, the more I’ve tried to communicate with people around me the messier things have become. In fact, I wrote a dedicated entry in my notes about how communicating in itself is an attempt in vain to try to make sense of oneself, others, anything really. More than communicating, then, it is letting the other subtelties take over and do the talking.

As a forever In-the-Mood-for-Love-girlie I vehemently espouse this frame and those precise words (“smoke tendrils swirl upward like the churning of his mind”) as the beating heart of the characters' loneliness, the unsaid mess-ups in their lives and various unspoken thoughts. All of alone at night, smoking our lonesome full-bodied cigarettes.

After reading this essay, a lesser filmmaker would think to himself: make a movie so abiding in its glory, so singular in its milieu, so substantive even after the passage of a considerable chunk of time that the New Yorker becomes a girlie, comes down to its knees, making a texty-video essay just to show how differently it loves the film!

The only thing I'd have dealt differently in the essay would’ve been writing more about husband Tony Leung. I’d have encased a few more paragraphs about his general listlessness. The soi-disant loser in love, luxuriating in a melancholy so absent and deep he almost evokes it out of the ether in his life. “A journalist who whispers his secrets into trees…”

The ennui casts its spell on Tony Leung. ITMFL to me is a movie in which the cigarettes, soaked walls, the food and overall atmosphere does more talking than mere words. A grainy, soulful, if sad, texture woven so intricately to convey all that even in real life (especially IRL) words fail to communicate.

All of us Kyle, all of us. Anyone who has ever watch In the Mood understands the importance of cigarette smoke in the lives of us melancholics. Wong Kar Wai along with his Australian cinematographer Christopher Doyle, was able to create an ambient texture of sorts through the wisps of smoke rising from the antechamber of Tony’s life, that went beyond it being a mere vibe, a simple mood. Over the years, vignettes of husband Tony Leung smoking (puffs swirling, covering him in a carapace of his own) have served as a smorgasbord of emotions — solitude, dejection, victory, thoughtfulness, even, fleeting joy.

The fairly predictable denouement of the essay, the movie, our collective lives (ftm) leave us simmering in a delicious panoply of anticipation and longing. It's us watching from a distance, cigarette in hand as lives move on; it’s life taking over in the silent minutes of whatever time of the day you are in; it's pragmatism spreading its wretched wings; it's the sound of dreams dying. Nothing changes, and yet.

Listen to the deeply phantasmagoric theme music by Shigeru Umebayashi from the movie’s OST to let these emotions thrum, reverberate and shake you from inside. And then maybe smoke another one of those slim, non-tarry ciggies!