"The Thrill" by Bonnie Chau
It started with Family Business. Maybe to go further back we could say it started with my family’s Francophilia, which we can follow into a rabbit hole of neocolonialism and cultural imperialism. But let’s say it started with Family Business and Francophilia.
Family Business is about a multigenerational Jewish family’s adventures turning their failing kosher butcher shop in Paris into a weed business, and watching it turned out to be generally outlandish and warm-spirited family fun. I suspect it touched upon a nerve of nostalgia, watching scenes of cars speeding through the streets of Paris, past Parisian shops, facades, and rooftops. Ah Paris, where we had all been, once, twice, three times, four, years or decades ago, when we were all younger and when we were allowed to travel freely.
We sped through the two seasons and then, quick! what to watch next?! My dad said he found something good and brand new, another French Netflix show, Lupin, and its quick-witted fleet-footed pace was also quite a crowd-pleaser; and then onto yet another French series, the crime drama thriller The Forest (La Forêt), which we soon abandoned—perhaps too grisly, too jarring to go from the goofy comedy of Family Business to the wholesome PG mystery action of Lupin to occult gruesomeness—and then my dad said he’d found another French something, the show Spotless, actually a French/British co-production, pretty much entirely English-speaking, focused on two French brothers in London, one of whom is a man named Jean who runs a crime-scene cleaning business.
Though over the course of the series I found myself more and more into Jean’s trouble-making older brother—a bit hapless and hopeless, surprisingly nimble on his skateboard—my parents and I were entertained, in a sympathetic way I think, by how tortured Jean was. His facial expression constantly bore the weight of suffering a soul-darkening burden—he’d committed a murder as a child, and now his ne’er-do-well brother had arrived, getting him and his colleagues and family dragged into corruption and organized crime. I was initially drawn to the show because Jean is played by Marc-André Grondin, who starred in C.R.A.Z.Y., an excellent French-Canadian queer coming-of-age film I watched fifteen years ago, in which he was beautiful with lightning bolt makeup, dancing to “Space Oddity” in his bedroom.
I think often about the art/artist separation, about the personal lives of artists, or rather, perhaps more accurately, what we think we know, given personal biography, oeuvre, etc. I think about how an actor’s previous roles become, for me, like layers of paratext of what I perceive their personhood to be—that an actor’s personal life is the one thing that connects their disparate roles and characterizations. I think about art/artist separation when I think about conversations regarding what we do with the artists whose work we have loved but who have been canceled and I think about art/artist separation as applied to literary translation: the invisibility and visibility—the writerly hand—of the translator. Translator Ralph Manheim compared the translator to an actor who takes lines written by an original author and performs them with their own specific, idiosyncratic, decisive and/or instinctive interpretations, possessing the ability to do it with a wide range of authors and/or texts.
Separations and dichotomies are one of my lifelong preoccupations: thinking about binary systems which also means thinking about nonbinary systems, e.g., rhizomatic systems and continuous spectrums. When I watch Grondin in Spotless, I cannot completely separate the actor and the character from his C.R.A.Z.Y. character, young and conflicted and vulnerable. Or I suppose, the point is that I don’t want to. Aside from issues about whether separating the artist from their art is ethical or feasible (or maybe partially because of this?), to consider them together adds a richer layer of signification or interpretation. When I watch Lupin, I cannot completely separate the character of Lupin’s estranged wife Claire (easygoing, patient, tolerant, morally upstanding and straightforward) played by Ludivine Sagnier, from a character I saw her play in 2003 in the French erotic crime thriller Swimming Pool, a mysterious perpetually naked/half-naked young woman always lazing about or trysting by the backyard swimming pool of a Provençal country house.
In this way of encountering, not only do the artist and the art become inextricable from each other, but they become inextricable from the viewer—a confluence or binding that helps to clarify my own relationship to my creative work and its potential audience. Any perceived shortcomings of a character as presented on a screen or page, whether attributed to actor or director or author, can be made more whole, or at least balanced out, by the influx of narrative provided by an actor’s previous roles, or a writer’s previous characterizations. Perhaps I could trace this back to some sort of personal coping mechanism or survival tactic to compensate for past or current failures, or the parts of the self that seem lacking, or the ways in which I have felt limited by how others see me. Perhaps these compensations might be filled in elsewhere, by someone else, such as a character or an assumed role, and the discontentment or loss or misrepresentation in one place is not going to define me forever, and in all places—perhaps transformation can be enabled by the presence of others.
Spotless lasted my family a good while, and then once again, my dad came through with yet another French crime thriller series, The Break (La Trêve) which actually turned out to be Belgian). What exactly did it mean for me and my family, at this time, to be descending into the darkness, from lighthearted and goofy French comedies to relentlessly bleak French thrillers?
These days, any realist show that takes place in non-pandemic times seems as fantastic as any fantasy show—the biggest imaginative leap is that these are non-pandemic worlds that the stories take place in, not that they involve weed-growing butcher shop grandmas or gentleman robbers or organized crime/murder mysteries. These days, reality and fantasy/nightmare all seem to blur together. These days, how are we to reconcile the bright things in life with the destroyed things? I’m not sure. I think about my mom who once mentioned her friend’s words (were they words of wisdom or of comfort?): what’s bad is good and what’s good is bad.
At my parents’ house, I was grateful for my mother’s home-cooked meals, for my daily morning walks, and afternoon swims in the warmth of California winter. But the surrounding negative space, the space on the other side of the outline of the things you are incredibly lucky to have, how to deal with that nightmare?
In beginning drawing classes you’re given exercises that focus on drawing the negative space, and it can seem like once you see this, once you activate this perspective, there’s no going back, you cannot un-see it. How to hold opposing ideas in your mind at the same time? In This Little Art, Kate Briggs writes about this kind of cognitive dissonance as it pertains to reading a work of translated literature: the seeming impossibility of simultaneously keeping in mind the hand of the original author and the hand of the translator, that it seems like you can only do one or the other, but not both at once.
How to describe—in the formal way, as with a line—a nightmare that refuses to adhere to one shape? How to describe—in a formal way, as with a line—something that doesn’t want to be described in a verbal way? I thought about the elements of a thriller, as a genre: danger, death, uncertainty, violence, crime, corruption. Certainly all of these things are in the ether as we speak; and suspense, well, we are all undeniably suspended in some way right now. Generally, with thrillers, there are consequences. Our thrills depend on expectations—met or unmet—and consequences. Thrillers are reliant on intensity, ups and downs, a roller coaster of emotions. But a thriller ends, presumably. There is dread and anxiety, but also relief, even if the relief is a horrific ending. At some point, the suspense is supposed to give way. Holes are punctured, the air let out—a new breath, a new day; or, perhaps, the last breath, the end of all days.
Through the haze of the strange and awful days of this last year, I can barely differentiate anything. My grandma suddenly—or maybe not that suddenly—gone from this world. People disappear or are yanked out of our lives and we might not bear witness to any real trace of the process. My grandma died, her body cremated, ashes scattered in the Pacific, and even though my family was just a dozen or so miles away from her, we didn’t see any of it happen. An official notification letter arrived in the mail. Others disappear with even less of a trace. Right now, there seems to be nothing, an infinite swath of it, like the photographs of Frederick Sommer, whose desert landscapes seem to have no beginning and no end.
In reality, the single most thrilling thing to happen last month, one that will last longer than the thrill of any French series, happened outdoors. I can still feel it now, the sighting of a vermilion flycatcher one morning as I took a walk with my parents at the nearby San Joaquin Marsh & Wildlife Sanctuary. I’d never seen one before, certainly nothing like it in southern California; they seem to be rare in the region. There it sat though, a startlingly brilliant, vibrant wedge of red perched at the top of a tree. It flew and sallied out and back as it caught flies midair. From one treetop perch to another, we watched it. It was there, and then gone, and then there, and gone, there, and finally out of sight—a thrill, and its end.
Bonnie Chau is a writer and translator from Southern California. She earned her MFA in fiction and translation from Columbia University; and has received fellowship and residency support from Kundiman, Art Farm Nebraska, the American Literary Translators Association, Vermont Studio Center, the Millay Colony, and the Black Mountain Institute. She is the author of the short story collection All Roads Lead to Blood (2018), and is currently an editor at Public Books and the Philip Roth Resident at Bucknell’s Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts.
