Coincidence #6

The last three films I've watched are Catherine Breillat's 2009 retelling of Bluebeard; Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, a mostly unsuccessful comedy from 2006 that has Albert Brooks traveling (via Air India) to India and Pakistan to find out what makes Muslims laugh; and the 1962 French thriller Le combat dans l'île.

The thriller included a shot of an Air India jet and a mention of Bluebeard. Which is mildly cool.

Coincidences 3, 4, & 5

Coincidence #3: Two references to the Wee Kirk O' the Heather within a few days.

A few days ago I watched Paper Heart, a nice little road flick about Charlyne Yi interviewing people about love while herself becoming loosely entangled with Michael Cera. One of the stops on her travels is the aforementioned chapel in Las Vegas. Yi (as played in the film) is sweet, low-key, and often childlike as she tries to get an explanation of what love really is; she's wary and tentative but not at all bitter. So is Cera (again, according to the film). They kid around in a let's-keep-the-stakes-low-OK? manner, never venturing too far from an exit.

Wee Kirk O' the Heather also appears on page 246 of Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice, which I am two-thirds of the way through at the moment. Around 1969 or '70, Larry "Doc" Sportello, a hippie P.I. in Los Angeles, is hired to locate a missing real estate developer. His frenemy is philosophical police officer Christian "Bigfoot" Bjornsen. The story rambles like The Big Lebowski, and Doc's cool reminds me of The Dude. I picture Inherent Vice as a movie (or better yet, a cable mini-series), produced/directed by David Lynch, with James Franco as Doc and John Krasinski as Bigfoot.

Coincidence #4 (weak): Inherent Vice also mentions Val Lewton, a movie producer praised in another book I've been reading, Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber. Check out Lewton's Curse of the Cat People.

Coincidence #5 (weakest): The real estate developer sought by Doc Sportello is named Mickey Wolfmann. This weekend The Wolfman opens in theaters. Based on reviews, I probably won't be checking the movie out.

Coincidence #2

The day after posting my entry on coincidence, by pure chance I listened to the Radiolab podcast on stochasticity, which explains things much better than I could.

Coincidence

Last week I streamed Of Time and the City on my Netflix account. (I posted a few notes on the movie here.) The film opened with a narrator reading Shelley's "Ozymandias," which gave me a start. Just a day or two earlier, I had read a passage in Philip Roth's When She Was Good in which one of the characters was analyzing "Ozymandias" as a school assignment. The poem is well-known among the better-educated; I had barely heard of it. At any rate, I felt an odd thrill in hearing the name of a poem, obscure to me, from two different sources within a few days' span.

Last summer, quite by accident, I watched two films in a row which featured Nick Nolte and a water buffalo. (The films were Tropic Thunder and The Beautiful Country.) The coincidence was meaningless but somehow pleasing, nevertheless.

There are some people - an alarming number, really - who would insist that these events were not chance at all. They would say that the universe is speaking to me, or that God is carrying out some clever scheme. Many find comfort in this idea; if everything is like a puppet on a string, one can stop worrying and leave the future to be worked out by whatever's in control. I like the not worrying part, but if we find agency in the reappearence of "Ozymandias," we pretty much have to attribute agency to things less whimsical - things horrible, in fact. Laying the Haitian earthquake at God's feet feels like blasphemy; I'd rather tote it up to chance. Someone might say, "Aha, but Who do you think created Chance?" I'm happy to reply that I'm not smart enough to work that one out.