Small Ambivalence

On my way back from an international conference trip, I stumbled upon a movie entitled Here, starring Tom Hanks and Robin Wright of Forrest Gump fame.

The movie looks at Hanks and Wright starring as a couple, whose story of going in and out of love is embedded in a living room. What is more, the film does not move from that living room, which is itself embedded in a story spanning over 200 years, during which the stories of other figures weave in and out of the couple’s lives.

Whilst it is nowhere near as memorable as the sprawling narrative of Forrest Gump (which is one of my all time favourite movies), I was nonetheless struck by the film’s use of a single space as the platform from which stories are launched, unfurled and then rolled up. Though not a perfect parallel, I find the same format evident in the Netflix series Midnight Diner and Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories, in which stories are told from the context of the space of a tiny Tokyo diner.

Films like Here and programs like Midnight Diner have gotten me thinking about the significance that small places have in our lives, and contrasting them to the increasingly common use of immense public spaces in our cities.

On the one hand, the contrast reminded me of the contrast Michel de Certeau made between places and spaces, in which one is characterised by intimacy and surrender, while the other is marked by distance and control (this is a tension which I explored in my book Justice, Unity & the Hidden Christ). Having lived in small spaces out of necessity in a number of cities, I am also aware of the economic pressures that have led to the reduction of living space within dwellings, so much so that once tiny worker’s cottages from the late 19th century are now seen as expansive by today’s standards.

Having said that, what shows like Here and Midnight Diner have made evident is that small spaces are the concrete spaces in which genuine movements of desire and acts of love can be manifested. This was a point brought home towards the end of Here in which Wright’s character, now old and stricken by Alzheimer’s, suddenly remembers all the little acts of love that took place in that living room. These were acts that lives spent apart in the immense spaces of big town America have winnowed to mere shreds, immense spaces in which the drive to control is brought into the living room for the viewers to witness.

Going further, and looking at the matter of space in a Girardian lens, shows like Midnight Diner bring home to me that the size of the place has an influence on the type of mediation of mimetic desire (or the type of desire that we inadvertently learn from others). The strange equation, it seems to me, is that the bigger the space, the more likely the risk of internal or competitive mediation, of which the various customers of the titular diner are the victims. By contrast, the imitation made evident within the confines of the diner seem marked by a non-competitive external mediation, because what they desire is the non-competitive being of the Master that makes and serves the food.

Thus, whilst I am aware that it is precisely these competitive desires that have resulted in the shrinking of spaces, the very act of shrinking these spaces could also be seen as a moment of redemption of what goes on in those spaces, a move away from competition into something more kenotic and self-giving.

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