Rabbit Rabbit #10: Intellectual Intercourse
Revealing Oneself in Kogonada’s Columbus (2017)
7/1/23
I’ve met a lot of new people in the past two months. Like, the most new people I’ve met in quick succession since my freshman year of college. With the convergence of starting a new job at a restaurant, filming a movie over the course of nine days, and the general social schema of New York, I bobbed in seas of new faces. I forgot people’s names. I never forget people’s names. People called me “kye-ruh,” as many do upon seeing my name on paper. I can’t stand that. It’s been both exciting and overwhelming. It’s also gotten me thinking a lot about the way I am perceived.
Admittedly, this is somewhat selfish. Meeting wonderful coworkers my age and a professional film crew of ten, and all I can think about is myself? Blech. However, I don’t necessarily refer to the “please like me!” anxiety of yore, but rather a curiosity about how others see me, and how much control I have over my own narrative, one that’s emerged, as it does for everyone, by virtue of my existence in and movement through the world. Of course, we can never know for sure, due to our corporeality. I’ll never get to take a good, hard look at me. But, as we form relationships in life, we do possess the power to reveal ourselves to others. The ways of doing so change with age and experience, but the same questions remain: how do we get to know someone, and how does someone get to know us?
I considered these questions last week when I rewatched Columbus, the 2017 directorial feature debut by Korean-American filmmaker Kogonada, and (in my opinion) among the best films ever made. The film follows Casey (Haley Lu Richardson, in one of the decade’s greatest young performances), a slightly precocious yet undeniably brilliant 20-ish-year-old living in Columbus, Indiana, an architectural hubbub of the Midwest. Staving off college to stay home and support her recovering meth-addict mother, Casey spends some of her time shelving books at the library, but most of her time dreaming about giving tours of her town’s infrastructural and aesthetic treasures, which she fervently studies on her own. When a prominent Korean architecture theorist falls seriously ill on a lecture circuit in Columbus, his middle-aged son Jin Lee (John Cho) flies in to stay. Casey and Jin soon meet and strike up a unique friendship that profoundly alters both of their lives.
On a grand scale, what I love about this film is that it tells a coming-of-age tale about a bright, young woman without falling into old patterns. In his review for the New Yorker, Richard Brody astutely notes, “For once, that trope doesn’t involve a sexual awakening or a family revelation; it’s the tale of an intellectual blossoming, thanks to a new friendship that arises amid troubled circumstances.” Casey never screams or slams her door. She is not extravagantly quirky or brash like a manic pixie. She just knows what interests her and tries as hard as she can to learn more, with the added responsibility of domestic duties shared with her struggling mother.
What to do about her interests, and the pent-up energy they’ve stirred inside her, is Casey’s conundrum. She seems to have been around most of the same people her entire life, waving hello to neighbors, calling her mother’s factory coworker to check in during the night shift, and quipping about marginalia with her dopey but equally-bookish coworker Gabe (played by an endearing Rory Culkin.) Jin’s arrival presents a new face, a chance for Casey to reveal herself, and her beloved hometown, to an entirely blank slate. What I appreciate specifically about this film is its insistence that the notion of who I am is forever entangled with where I am from.
Jin is the perfect recipient; ripped from his mundane life as a book translator in Seoul, he finds himself staying in his father’s room at the grandiose Inn at Irwin Gardens, reckoning with mortality and their tumultuous relationship. He allegedly “hates” architecture, but immediately clocks Casey’s potential as a scholar and encourages her to reach bigger. She becomes his unofficial Columbus tour guide and unexpected confidante.
Over the course of the movie, Casey takes Jin through her meticulously numbered list of favorite buildings in Columbus. A key moment comes early on in their friendship when she brings him to First National Bank and begins launching into a rehearsed description of the building and its history. Jin stops her to ask, “You say this is one of your favorite buildings. Why?” At first, Casey cannot answer. “Do you like this building intellectually, because of all the facts?” Jin insists. “No,” she replies thoughtfully. “I’m also moved by it.” “Yes, tell me about that. I’m interested in what moves you, particularly about a building.” Casey starts again, but this time, we just see her lips moving. A pensive, ethereal music plays over her second attempt at articulating her feelings. Her face radiates sincerity, as if she might cry, but not before she finishes her thought.
It’s fascinating, how the act of getting to know someone, or people, is so heavily informed by our physical surroundings. For the movie I was in last month, most of our shoot days took place in a cramped basement apartment deep in Bedford-Stuyvesant. I spent many hours between setups stretched out on a bed, chatting with two or three crew members, or eating lunch on the sunny picnic table out back. Because of the tight quarters, we got close quickly. It was weird the first couple of days, feeling both guarded and vulnerable acting in front of complete strangers all in a fifteen-foot radius of me. At the restaurant, my friends and I exchange stories briefly mid-service, standing side-by-side but never making eye contact, watching our tables like a hawk while clutching water carafes. We celebrate “backstage” at the dish pit when the kitchen makes a mistake and we each get a bite of rigatoni. When we move through a space with people, the nature of that space allows us to open ourselves up in surprising ways.
Throughout his film, Kogonada focuses on the importance of space & place in budding relationships by featuring Columbus’ breathtaking architecture. He does so in the calculated framing of nearly all his establishing and master shots, providing an apt juxtaposition for tight close-ups on the pensive faces of Richardson and Cho. The result is a stunning balance between how his characters share this specific environment: a home to one, a foreign town to another, but a soft place to land for both. The way Kogonada’s shots are framed mimics the ebb and flow of Casey and Jin’s emotional and intellectual states.
Columbus’ City Hall is the best example of this, with its proscenium entrance of two brick slabs pointing toward one another, but not quite touching. Kogonada frames the slabs in such a way that leaves only the sky in the background, as if they stretch in mid-air but somehow fall short. For me, City Hall and its depiction in the film symbolize “modernism with a soul,” which Jin mentions as his father’s leading philosophy, signifying “some sort of…alternative possibility.” A literal reading of the slabs might suggest they are Casey and Jin, coming as close as possible without ever touching, as romantic/sexual desire and transgression are not a part of their story. But I see it more as an image of both of their lives on the precipice of change; they meet one another in a cosmic state of unrest, with questions to be answered and dreams to be followed. For Casey especially, the two sides will meet, but not in this town. In Columbus, the slabs stay forever reaching, like they have since their construction.
My friend Jane once brought to my attention how unabashed I tend to be about sharing what moves me. I was playing her an Indigo Girls song in the car, likely for the third time in a row. “You’re really transparent about what you like,” she said. Hopefully, Jane meant this as a positive trait (Jane, feel free to dispute), but it’s true nevertheless. I unspool myself to others through the art that I love: films, passages in literature, plays, just-right songs, paintings. There are a sprinkling of movies dear enough to me that, when shared, signify an intimacy so sublime, it borders on the religious. I don’t see it as gatekeeping or riding atop a high horse, but a doling out of passion in the form of love. Let me give you this little part of me. We are shielded from hearing Casey’s ode to First National Bank because the moment is private, naturally birthed for her and Jin only.
This intimacy reminds me of my favorite Alanis Morisette lyric, from “All I Really Want”: “And all I need now is intellectual intercourse / A soul to dig the hole much deeper.” I listened to it almost every day when I was seventeen. As someone whose brain has always resembled an encyclopedia, I appreciated Morisette’s wordplay. I felt stifled before college, but not because I was thinking about sex or partying. It was an intellectual ache, as if my town, which I grew up loving, suddenly wasn’t big enough for the ideas I wanted to explore. Above all, I wanted to find people out there who felt the same way and get to know them. It happened as soon as I got to Oberlin, and it happens for Casey the moment she starts showing Jin the wonders of her world.
This brings me back to my earlier point, about the desire to know how others perceive us. Even Casey, who I think is one of the most lovely characters to ever grace the screen, is not without vanity. While meandering inside North Christian Church, Jin tells Casey she reminds him of a younger version of his friend Eleanor (Parker Posey). “Yeah? How so?” Casey coaxes. “You know, an architecture nerd.” Casey pauses in faux coquettishness to ask, “Oh, is that what I am?” She pushes him even further: “Really? Hmm. Go on.” The exchange is jokey, but Casey’s questioning cracks something open– an earnest desire to know what she is to someone else, if –and how– she belongs to the universe, the most religious question of all. Dwarfed by the massive church ceiling, Casey and Jin look like tiny ants. At first glance, one may miss them in the bottom right of the frame. Kogonada’s shots remind us that even when stripped bare to our innermost desires and curiosities, we are consistently humbled by something greater than everything.
At the end of the movie, Casey leaves Columbus behind, riding with Eleanor to Chicago for an apprenticeship after a tearful goodbye to Jin. The final shot of the film is the most potent, as we have seen it before– the Robert N. Stewart Bridge, ushering cars and people in and out of Columbus like a permeable membrane. We see it first choked with cars during rush hour, but now empty in the grey of a thundershower save for a single car headed north. All of Casey’s places are now spaces, empty without her as she leaves full of memory. It is indescribably moving.
During my first semester at Oberlin, I told everyone about my hometown in Massachusetts in great detail: the boats on the harbor, houses dating back to 1640, the woods. Now, I talk about Oberlin in this way. Maybe one day I will describe New York City as if viewing it through the rose-gold tint of a rearview mirror. I will. It’s one of the first things people ask: where are you from? Sometimes the places we love the most are the places we leave behind. But they stay with us indelibly, unfurling deep within, shaping who we are and how we are known.
P.S. June recs: The Starling Girl starring Eliza Scanlen (by all means, when/however you can), this delightful Parker Posey interview, & the Indigo Girls live in Central Park, which I realize isn’t a recommendation because it already happened, but it was the best night ever. Listen to Digging For Your Dream, my current favorite.
