Nanette (2018) Hannah Gadsby
repetition of themes around tension - there is something cyclical, cycles of violence.
there's the question of relatability and difference - where in Gadsby's story there is difference there is connection.
The anger at the end is cathartic. Is powerful - but what do we ask for when we ask ourselves for catharsis.
I think I disagree about anger - about laughter. I think I want anger to be safer? I wonder if it's the reactivity of anger - or reactive anger? That initial burst of rage. But I don't know if anger from the powerless has the same colour/shape/voice as anger from the powerful. Gadsby's anger was part of the story.
I wonder if we devalue anger because we are afraid of feeling ashamed. Because we are afraid of doing to others what was done to us in anger.
But I don't know if anger is what drives violence. I think power is what drives it. Anger needs power to become violence. Just like sexual desire or masculinity is not what drives abuse - what drives and enables it is power. It's the control.
The boys who assaulted me did not do so because they were angry, they did it because i was powerless and they wanted what they wanted. I'm thinking again to that scene in 8th Grade (2018) dir. Bo Burnham in the car - he realises he has power, he realises the MC can be controlled, can be manipulated. His anger is not so much a feeling as a tactic.
Maybe Gadsby is getting more at the idea of anger as a tactic - she's talking about the responsibility of comedy and the tensions within it. She says she has a responsibility not to spread anger, and to instead tell her story. Maybe it about anger as a tactic, rather than anger the feeling. Organising around anger.
But again - who gets to be angry? It's like self-deprecation - self-deprecation when it comes from the already marginalised "is not humility, it's humiliation"
I decided to watch Nanette again because I was reading about BPD in the small hours because I couldn't sleep and I couldn't stop thinking about the self-deprecation, the self-flagellation.
I can let the self-deprecation and self-flagellation just sit on it's own - I find it hard to accept anger turned inwards. It, ironically, makes me angry. Tension. Self-deprecation as tension diffusing.
"I didn't have to invent the tension, I was the tension"
Anger is not tension diffusing. But is tension actually bad? Tension and transformation. Gadsby says she needs to quit comedy because of the tension, but the tension she creates is transformative and moving through the tension is the structure of the set.
Her set reminds me of the one in Baby Reindeer
It's not a resolution of tension, or a diffusion of it, but a release. Anger is part of what releases it. Putting it out there - this is my tension, this is my anger, this is my story.
The anger is part of the story.