Be Mindful When You Are Engulfed in Flames

In 2014, I saw Wild Tales (Relatos salvajes), directed by Damián Szifron and produced by the Almodóvar brothers. I remember sinking into my seat until the very end, as I watched all the credits roll — including mentions of Argentine Cinematographic Industries. Caring about anyone who has contributed to making a masterly work of art can be poetic, but it’s not why I stayed. I just couldn’t get up from my seat, being in a state of almost ecstasy — the one you may see portrayed in a Caravaggio painting — or in the face of a child watching trapeze artists somersaulting in the sky.

Wild Tales is a collage of six untamed stories in exquisitely dramatic order. One after another, they build up a tension that never fails to release itself — offering the kind of catharsis that black comedies often promise but do not always deliver. As we hold on to our armrests, we see characters highjacking planes full of people who humiliated them, serving fries spiced with rat poison, engaging in passionate fights in the desert, blowing up the towing office after too many tickets, and making it through a wedding party that even Quentin Tarantino would run away from.

Since that December evening of 2014, this movie has hunted me down like Kovalyov’s nose in Gogol’s story. I tend to fall in love with every form of absurdity this world can offer, I’ll admit to that, but when I say hunted me down, I mean something very specific — the obsession for an artwork that reaches its maximum potential. When a film, a novel, or play, permeates our conscience until it secures a place in our memory (which is quite selective), it becomes a precious threat. As it shines a light on what was previously only a distorted perception, it makes us see something that we might have always noticed but never quite grasped. It can unsettle us — and redeem us at the same time — because it leaves us no escape, as it scratches out the surface of that silver glaze that stands between us and reality.

What happened to me? I started seeing Frustration, the film’s main character, everywhere I looked. In Wild Tales, Szifron cherishes, honors, and mocks frustration, giving it the same role played by opportunity in Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite. He acknowledges it for what it is, but also for what it’s not — a reason to give in to that feeling of asphyxiation and impasse that we’re torn by when things are not going our way. Frustration had always been around me, but until the Argentine director threw it at me on a screen 30 feet tall, I kept confusing it with all the chaos that it brought about. I simply couldn’t define it — as it shined on every cautious look in a crowd, it triumphed over every assumption that became judgment, that turned into resentment. It took pleasure in its own omnipotence because every attempt to repress it did nothing but increase it. It evolved, in the midst of lost chances and regrets, within the cautious silence of a waiting room, through the lines of the upcoming best seller on How to Fall in Love With Yourself (Before it’s Too Late). Popcorn in hand, it enjoyed the spectacle of our Human Comedy.

So I asked myself where to draw the line between Szifron’s genius and the broad material at his fingertips. Every time I heard someone raising their voice, showing rage towards the slightest injustice, I imagined what would have happened if I had written the next scene. I looked at apparently insignificant episodes from my daily life as the prelude to wild events. It’s a writing exercise that can uplift you from the inescapable constraint of being, but I warn you — it’s wickedly addictive. Now that life has changed even more, and the pandemic brought a whole new kind of frustration, one that needs to be further studied, fathomed, and understood, I still can’t think of a better way to sharpen my imagination.

As they set someone’s car on fire or have sex with a stranger at their own wedding, Szifron’s characters go beyond — which is essentially what every character dreams to do. Leaping into the darkest land of nowhere, which, even if it sounds a bit nostalgic, can be done much more artistically than existentially.

Szifron’s memo — as he shows us in the opening credits of the film, featuring pictures of wolves, sharks, lions, alligators, and bears — is very clear: once you release the brake, there goes the beast. If life is nothing but a constant loss of control we never had, we can either choose to emulate The Big Lebowski (a card we should always keep at hand) or turn the paradox in our favor. Wild Tales, which won a BAFTA in 2016, isn’t just about the risks of living in a world that promotes an obsession for control that appears more delusional every day — it’s an exceptional writing lesson.

The creation of stories is fueled by conflict, as the swinging of acrobats is fueled by heights. Nobody wants to see a flip on the ground. But the conflict must be built three-dimensionally, or we can say goodbye to complexity. All the more, when this narrative trigger is attached to a merciless timer, the reader’s engagement is thorough. Tic, tac, tic, tac, tic, tac. The action is hanging by a thread, because someone has flipped the hourglass and time is running out, with all the tragicomic effects that this entails. To this point, chance is the most brutally human source of conflict — whether you’re writing a comedy, a tragedy, or a thriller.

But how to conceive masterfully written conflicts like Szifron’s? By waking up in the morning and opening your eyes wide. People are a living conflict. Just look at how unusual they are; when they constantly sabotage themselves, they end up doing the opposite of what they intended to do. They’ll try to shield themselves from everything, even from what doesn’t hurt, especially from that. They’ll wait, and wait, and wait — and while everything is moving so fast, Godot doesn’t show up — expectations keep getting higher as the time to fulfill them keeps getting shorter.

They’ll try to cope — the best way they can. They won’t say “I’m worried,” they’ll tune out. They’ll obsess over the most insignificant details on the verge of a nervous breakdown. They’ll become passive-aggressive to their bones. But nine times out of ten, they won’t face what’s in front of them because they love to complicate things. Over and over again.

Like popsicles to savor in the middle of the desert, human beings are an endless source of contradictions — a handful of stories almost begging to be told.

See the brochure David Sedaris found in a Hiroshima hotel for more absurdity worshipping.

A booklet in our hotel room includes a section on safety awkwardly titled Best Knowledge of Disaster Damage Prevention and Favors to Ask of You. What follows are three paragraphs, each written beneath a separate, boldfaced heading: ‘When you check in the hotel room,’ ‘When you find a fire’ and, my favorite, ‘When you are engulfed in flames.’

David Sedaris, When You are Engulfed in Flames (2008)

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