Leaving Denmark (on Medium)

I just wrote an essay about my decision to leave Denmark and return to Boston on Medium. Here's the link and blurb:

Leaving Denmark

I left a country with an exceptional health care system to return home to the US, a country with a maddening one. Why? An operation, of all things. 

Read it here!
https://medium.com/p/be9a4088987f

I am a Media Voyeur

I spent this past weekend away from media, in a summer house in Birkerød, Denmark with some of my hallmates. Good food, beautiful views and more than enough cultural immersion (some of it exhausting, namely the 48-hour imperative to speak Danish) left me liberated from my media-saturated lifestyle in Copenhagen. But like any addiction, I found myself craving film as soon as I got back yesterday. So I watched Soderbergh's first feature sex, lies, and videotape (1989), which left me as conflicted about film as ever.

There's us, waiting for the bus. 

In the film, Ann is a prudish newlywed, John is her cheating husband, Cynthia is her sister who is sleeping with John, and Graham is John's friend from college who invades and disrupts their lives with his voyeuristic sexual fetish. He calls himself impotent ever since he admitted he is a pathological liar, and his only sexual activity is to record women talking about their sexual activity. When Ann finds out that her husband is cheating with her sister, she decides to make a tape for Graham, which is the fastest way to splitting up their marriage as she can think of. The film is eerie, introspective, and sensitive, and while it's a film whose style normally would affect me positively, I found it made me uncomfortable. 

Not because of the sexual content, but because it made me think seriously about how much media I consume. This is an undercurrent that has been bothering me for a while now, and it, strangely or not strangely enough, came to a head when the film exposed its characters for being voyeurs. Now, the concept of voyeurism in film is not new, nor is it new to me--Hitchcock and Mulvey come to mind--but what's new for me is the realization that perhaps all media is a type of voyeurism, albeit a non-sexual type. Well, maybe I'm not a voyeur but a gleaner of experiences through media that I ought to be having on my own. 

I've written about this vicarious adventuring and loneliness before here, but now I'm starting to worry that I rely on film and television to teach me lessons instead of living them. This comes particularly into my worldview with regards to interpersonal relationships; like the episodic structure of television, I expect resolution at the turn of every new emotion, experience, interaction. This impulse to rely on stories to give structure to my experiences is even more intense when it comes to romance (damn you, romantic comedies!). I remember seeing Garden State in high school and subsequently expecting my romantic connections to be as instantaneous and deep as they were in that film. My friend Kristian who limits his television consumption to "only things that are funny" tells me that I think in very "macro" terms about how men and women are instead of just learning about individuals, and I worry that media representations and generalizations of gender have a lot to do with this.  Media even helps me imagine a future I may or may not have decided for myself yet, but I can't see it any other way than what's portrayed in the stories I consume. 

I think observing Kenneth Burke's idea that "stories are equipment for living" is a totally useful and necessary practice, but the problem for me happens when I use stories as a crutch, or when my self-worth and identity are too formed by external stimuli. This became clear this weekend, when in the midst of a full-blown experience (read: party) I found myself lagging back and not fully engaging, because I felt uncomfortable not being able to be myself in a foreign language and place. So instead of pushing myself out of my comfort zone and trying to embrace the moment, I observed the behavior of others (which was of course amusing). I kept coming back to a certain question, though. When you don't feel like yourself, what's better: leaning into this discomfort to try to make the most of it and eliminate your 'voyeurism,' or listen to your feelings and come to terms with them? This is a question I usually don't have to ask, because media provides the escape. 

So, maybe in order investigate what I really enjoy doing apart from consuming media, I have to stop consuming media! 

Loneliness and Life of Pi

It's no joke that my favorite pastime is movie watching. It's my go-to for any stretch of free time, and on weekend mornings you can often find me relaxed (or slumped) in front of the screen.

Movies are my adventures. I connect with fictional strangers every day, engulfed in their stories which are so vivid to me that characters feel almost like friends in my heart. Through films I adventure to the tips of the world, where my senses and feelings are heightened.

I am somewhat of an adventurer myself. I live in Denmark, where I am a foreigner. Being a foreigner means living outside of your comfort zone. And while it's usually fantastic and exciting, sometimes it gets lonely. So movies are also what I turn to when I'm feeling alone, because they are an escape from feeling lonesome.  It's rare that in a bout of melancholy I'll choose to take a walk in Fælledparken, despite my mom's well-guided suggestions. Instead of seeking comfort in nature or the city of Copenhagen, in these instances I tend to reach into another, filmic, world. It seems easier to displace my emotions onto a story than to tackle them head on during a walk where my own thoughts, not a character's, are front and center.

But today was different, because the filmic world became my own. My grumbling stomach pulled me into the kitchen of the kollegium where I live. I thought, I'll just make some quick lunch and then, I will work on my thesis. I had already watched part of a tennis match and Blå Mænd instead of working (being a film student makes you feel like any film you watch is justified as part of your "studies," even when it's a goofy Danish comedy about a recycling plant starring my Danish crush Thure Lindhardt). But my hallmates were starting Ang Lee's Life of Pi on the projector, and ooouuff I really wanted to see it. Plus, it was one of those listless snowy Sundays where a dour mood was winning against productivity. So I watched the whole thing, and it is dazzling. I don't need to tell you that much about this story of survival, beauty, and God; just see it.

I had a different reaction than most will have to this story. I think many will walk away from the film both struck by the gorgeous CGI, and thinking about religion, fragility of life, and whether or not the whole thing is an allegory. For me, however, it was Pi's loneliness that collided with my own. His need to survive after a shipwreck is of course something my comfortable life has never had (nor do I wish it!), but in some ways I felt his lifeboat was my own.

I think we all drift, alone, in our lives at some points--feeling isolated, warding off danger, and searching for companionship in our surroundings. Allegory aside, Pi had to tame and befriend a tiger to keep him sane and alive; perhaps in moments of deep loneliness we too feel fragilely human, and that the people who surround us are another species who do not understand us.

This is sometimes how I feel in Denmark when loneliness hits (thankfully it's not often). With my family far away, I think about the life I have here and wonder if choosing to live in a foreign country was in fact an act of isolation. My goals here--to learn the language, to make earnest friendships, to have new experiences, to create and sustain a life worth living--sometimes get lost in the loneliness of having to exist forever in translation. Because it's hard to connect, really connect, with another human being (or tiger), in a foreign language and culture.  But this is not just the case for ex-pats like me in the midst of mid-twenties self-investigation who have chosen to investigate far from home. I think it's true for everyone--beyond survival, we want to be understood.