MY BODY IS MY TEMPLE ? PARALLELS BETWEEN SARA GOLDFARB AND GREGOR SAMSA
« My body is my temple ». Here is a saying that people use when they feel guilty because they wanna eat one more piece of chocolate, a last one. It could be approached in another way: my body is mine and only mine. It is my very sacred property and none can have use of it. This is a premise one would find flouted in #Kafka’s and #Aronofsky’s works The Metamorphosis and Requiem for a dream. Chronologically separated by barely a century, they deal with similar themes, and make their characters suffer existential pains.
To many regards, Gregor Samsa, a commercial traveler, and Sara Goldfarb, an old widow and lonely woman, are literally depossessed of their bodies. The first quoted wakes up believing he transformed into a cockroach. Mrs Goldfarb, she, suffers from hallucinations caused by drugs, that alter her perception of reality, and make her live an illusory existence. Their « temples » are violated. Their identity is stolen.
Requiem for a Dream is the story of four characters who fall in drug-dependency and are eventually aspired in a hole of horrow and despair. Sara Goldfarb is one of them. Her personality was perverted by television and consumption society. In the beginning of the movie, she receives a call and comes to believe she is going to participate in her favorite TV show. She eventually becomes mad because of that: in order to get slimmer and fit in her red dress, she goes on a drastic diet and starts taking pills, which appear to be amphetamins. The red dress, metaphorically, represents the society in which Sara wants to be recognized, in which she wants to find the place she lost. The whole misery of Sara’s situation is that she takes herself for another person. She sees herself in the eyes of society, and more especially in the eyes of the TV presenter.
The new « purposes » of Sara’s life have, all things summed up, nothing to do with her own existence, her self. She tries to accomplish her life through others and that physically kills her. « Hell is other people » said #Sartre famously. Sara Goldfarb’s fate is one tragic illustration of what he meant: when trying to fulfill myself through others, I come to lose the essence of myself.
Sara looking like a cockroach
In The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa’s body seems stolen. Without being warned, he finds himself with another body, a cockroach body. The story makes me think that this transformation is the result of the misery of his life: Gregor has a very harsh (and, to some extent, oedipal) relation to his father and failed in his professional life. He leads a meaningless life, that basically consists in being the cash-provider of his family. Once he cannot fulfill that function anymore, he becomes a burden for his family, for capitalist society, and his life loses all the (illusory) meaning it had found.
In actual fact, his metamorphosis could only be an illusion: Gregor lives so far from himself that he comes to believe he is a cockroach. One thing is more certain: as the story goes on, Gregor is more and more perceived as a thing, rather than a person. The members of the family think nothing of his death.
#Descartes had founded the certainty of existence through his faith towards feelings. The Metamorphosis and Requiem for a dream, just as the movie Matrix by the #Wachowsky brothers, reintroduce a deeply harrowing, but no less useful questioning: to what extentcan I trust my feelings ? Who owns my body ? Characters in this book and those movies do not find the opportunity to leave the misery they reached. I think this is one big point of existentialism: life could be absurd, realizing this statement is already a big step to overtake the absurdity, and master my existence.
Neo facing the colony of humans where he was grown
I agree with your analysis about Sara's body and her red dress, but what about her hair?
ReplyDeleteI consider that the colour of her hair is a good indicator of the degree of possession of her body. Then, it corresponds to 3 levels of integration in Society.
Indeed, at the beginning of the movie, Sara Goldfarb is a blond woman, granted alone, but owning her life. Notwithstanding her monotonous life, she is able to eat what she wants, go out and talk with her female neighbours. She lives, and is aware of the small scope of her existence.
However, when she gets a call to belong to a tv program, her first will is to dye her hair red. This colour is then the meaning of integration in a huge world, bigger than her small building. As she says, she'll be greeted and loved by millions of people. In this way, she will exist for other people, instead of just exist to live. This quest of recognition could be considered as her only sin.
When amphetamines begin to make her crazy, her hair appears untidy, and means the failure of integration. Striking moment is when she attempts to go to head office of tv programs. In fact, roots of her hair have lost their colour, and seem white. A new phase is taking place: the isolation from real Society, provoked by an useless hope and her disappointment.
==> Complete desolateness is achieved when her old friends come to see her at the hospital. Sara Goldfarb is a short-white-haired woman. A gap separates her form the society: her madness destroyed her former life. The scene where her former friends are crying strengthen the end of Sara Goldfarb as a human living, existing.