Sunrise

June 19, 2024 at 10:46 AM

Feel quite split within. Part of me wants to commit to privacy and introversion for the rest of my life; another part wants to be read and consumed. It’s agony. Anyways, yesterday we watched Murnau’s Sunrise. There is a moment in the film when the rural couple takes the tram into the city, and they get lost in the blaring, bustling streets. It’s a terrifying scene, and I empathize with the way these people must have felt during the great migrations from the countryside to urban centers (that is the story of my grandparents when they moved to Mexico City, I’d like to write about this). I feel in a similar way regarding the totalitarian rule of the screen. Nowadays I experience as much confusion, thunder, roar, and slaving business regarding the screen and the digital realm, as my ancestors did in the midst of those early modern cities.

But there is a magnificent moment in Sunrise when the couple hold and kiss each other in the middle of the road. Their image is superimposed: all the cars go by them, go through them. They seem imperishable. Murnau tells us there is much amusing about the farce of modernity. Ultimately he rejects it, and the ethics he charts for his characters is simply a devotion to love. To love, to love, to love. That is all there is to do. And what a radical kind of love we’re capable of undertaking in the twenty-fist century. Because of the growing integration of human societies, we are aware of how much we depend on each other to survive. The struggle of indigenous people for their land signifies the very struggle for my Earth. It’s such an astonishing and passionate love that comes from knowing that if an oil pipeline is allowed to go through unceded indigenous territory, then that action also directly threatens the life of my unborn child. This special and vital solidarity binds the entire world together, and represents a unique dawn amid the darkness of our age.