“It was as if I had to pass through an impenetrable gate all by myself. It was as if I was completely alone in the universe, as if my whole body was filled with loneliness and tears.”
A quote from Nymphomaniac by Lars von Trier in which character Joe talks about her childhood memory of waiting to get surgery. It’s weird but I never really processed the three surgeries I’ve had in my 22 years of life and this scene completely resonated with me. It’s less about the feelings and experience of getting surgery and more about what the experience makes you (or at least me) realize about yourself and just being human in general. For low-risk surgeries like an appendectomy (again at least for me), the whole process is rather painless and I went through the 2 days in the hospital with ease and not much thought about what was really done to me. However, upon viewing this film and reflecting back, the experience of being put under general anesthesia is quite strange and the realization of what happens while you’re under. I remember being 12 years old waiting outside the surgical room in which they were preparing to cut me open, placing metal tools on plastic sheets draping over metal trays (exactly the scene in Nymphomaniac), and the nurse telling me to count backwards from 100 as I slowly felt myself slipping away. Going under anesthesia isn’t like going to sleep where you have dreams and there is a feeling of time passing; instead I felt like I woke up as soon as I drifted completely off, as if I blinked my eyes once and woke up in a different room with a sore abdomen and 3 sets of stitches. It’s almost like my mind deleted a sequence of my life and I wonder if this is a similar feeling to those who have retrograde amnesia and forget everything that happened before the onset of the amnesia. This concept of deleted time makes me consider the concept of time in general and how it can be warped. This would be an interesting topic to explore through film. How could I portray time multidimensionally and differential human experiences with time; how time passes faster or slower depending on certain factors and how we position our lives in constant relationship with time?
Anyways, this was a tangent but there is a note I wrote after viewing the aforementioned film scene.
Something about lying on that wheeling hospital bed about to be opened up inside, a part of myself I have never been acquainted with; a part of myself that is completely foreign to me and does not fit in to my self image, somehow made me feel alone. Perhaps the feeling comes with the other feeling of no one truly knowing who I am so in that way I am completely alone. The only way I exist with other people is within a different form that is foreign to me and therefore meaningless. Lying on that hospital bed waiting for surgery regresses you to feel just like a body and nothing else; a self so separated from who you truly feel you are and in that way I felt I no longer belonged in that present existence.
Next week’s blog will hopefully be longer, till then x