Rabbit Rabbit #22: Real & Pure
Familial closeness in Heti’s Pure Colour and Eisenberg’s A Real Pain
Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg in A Real Pain
A little over halfway through her 2022 novel Pure Colour, Canadian author Sheila Heti writes, “Part of human life is following the traditions of family. That’s part of the real plot of it.” This statement is a snippet of a larger conversation taking place inside of a leaf (yes, a leaf) between her protagonist Mira and Mira’s recently departed father. “What are the traditions?” the narrative voice continues. “They are kindness and family get-togethers, for instance. They are everyone being in the same room. They are openness to other people, and keeping the fixers out.”
Heti’s novel, which veers into the abstract and philosophical in its second act, constructs a new, rudimentary world and corresponding language to analyze the acts and meanings of creation. Humans in this “first draft,” as Heti deems the world, must rely on one another to survive. Family, as Mira’s father reminds her inside the leaf, is of the utmost importance. “It is not a coincidence who we encounter here,” he says, “or who is put inside the family.”
Green (Vert) from Ellsworth Kelley’s Suite of Twenty-Seven Color Lithographs, featured as cover art for Pure Colour
My family had two weddings this year. My cousins got married four months apart, and so we all traveled to Virginia in the summer and then to Arizona in the fall to celebrate. It had been six years since the entire extended family was together, and before that, it had been another three. I hadn’t seen one aunt and uncle since I was seventeen. Everybody always did a lot of growing up, wondering about, and missing each other between the large chunks of time. This gave a sort of formulaic cadence to any reunions that did occur, so it felt particularly thrilling to say, “see you in a few months for round two!” in June. Actually nobody could stop saying it. We liked hearing the sound of it in our voices, and then saying it again over text after leaving for the airport. What a relief –what a luxury– to finally have the chance to say see you later instead of goodbye.
I find almost nothing more amusing than the intricate social dynamics of a family. It feels anthropological. How do certain pairs or groups of people interact with one another? Who gets along with whom? What history and little gossips have I not been privy to by the sheer fact that I was born thirty-odd years after this iteration of the family really got on its feet? One of my cousins lives in the city so I get to see her a lot, a great pleasure of my life. We grew up halfway across the country from one another and she is eleven years my senior. Having her nearby is kind of like knowing that a celebrity lives in your neighborhood. It’s so fun to share the quiet, excited smugness of, here we are in a different state with the whole gang, but we got to have dinner together two weeks ago at a restaurant none of them have heard of.
Perhaps the thrill of these events is due in part to the fact that I am older and have surpassed the kid category. I now have the privilege and power of seeing my relatives as regular people rather than a cast of fixed characters in a story to which I am merely bearing witness. I can recognize patterns of behavior and ways of being that I couldn’t even a couple of years ago. Not that 24 is some magical age where you finally see things as they are, but I think that leaning into one’s own identity and interests allows for a refreshing clarity about other people who’ve been there all this time. Sometimes what we find is surprising, or affirming, or disappointing.
What then, when we realize we have agency over the choice to continue building these relationships? “To be a daughter is to be leaning, half,” Heti writes. I would interchange ‘daughter’ with any familial role– granddaughter, niece, cousin. Certainly I am leaning like a tree, bending the branches of my ears toward family chatterings.
In Arizona I swam around the hotel pool, floating between conversations between family members. My parents pulled me around while I floated on my stomach– my mom at my ankles and my dad at my wrists. I felt five; it was joyous. At the bar that weekend, I took a mental snapshot of my three cousins standing in a row in a brief moment of respite. I love seeing them together. It’s always seemed impossible to get close enough to it all.
I thought about the strangeness of family dynamics when I saw A Real Pain earlier this month. The film, Jesse Einsenberg’s sophomore feature as a writer-director, stars Eisenberg himself and Succession star Kieran Culkin as estranged cousins who reunite for a trip to Warsaw, whereby embarking on an all-inclusive tour they will trace their lineage as descendants of Polish Jews who escaped the Holocaust “by a thousand miracles” and made it to America. The tour is to honor their late grandmother Dory, with whom the troubled, deeply emotional Benji (played by a dazzling Culkin, in arguably the year’s greatest acting performance) was particularly close. He has not recovered from her death, or from a deeply traumatic personal incident that occurred six months before the trip. David, the more tightly wound of the two who speaks a marathon a minute in true Eisenberg fashion, makes every attempt to control his cousin’s erratic behavior. As things go increasingly awry, David comes to terms with his own dissatisfactions, despite his ideal life as a digital ad salesman, brownstone-owner, husband, and father.
A Real Pain
On the surface, the film, which Dargis deems “an unexpectedly emotionally fraught journey, and a piercing, tragicomic lament from the Jewish diaspora,” adopts a handful of classic cinematic tropes: it is at once a Felliniesque ensemble comedy, an odd-couple buddy flick, and a classic road movie. Benji and David are perfect opposites, which produces a tone of hilarity that bleeds in and out seamlessly. The bombastic Benji communicates physically, through playful slaps and punches, side hugs and shoulder squeezes, while David silently implodes, neck veins pulsating with the desire to tame his unruly cousin. In an early scene, Benji corrals the tour group into taking a photo, reenacting battle alongside massive metal statues of the First Polish Army. David, reluctant and embarrassed by Benji, ends up taking the photo on everyone’s phone while they pose outlandishly. I was laughing out loud. David is both embarrassed and amazed by his cousin.
Ultimately, what A Real Pain captures so well is the dizzying experience of connecting, namely reconnecting, with family and lineage. Benji and David were once inseparable, spending their teenage years wandering around New York City, getting high and pulling all-nighters. Benji misses it more than anything. David does too, but he’s an expert at repressing it. In one scene, when the boys (certainly around one another they are boys) miss a train stop because David falls asleep, Benji admits he just couldn’t wake him. “Oh, you were havin’ such a good nap, dude,” he clucks. “I couldn’t wake you! I thought to myself, ‘this is the kid asleep on a bench in Chinatown I used to have all to myself.’” It’s achingly devastating.
We can all empathize– although Benji lives in his mother’s basement in Binghamton, he too has changed. No one is immune to change. It is a classic activity of our most beloved cousins to get married, have babies, and move coasts, or better yet, to do it all at once. Jo March famously cries at her sister Meg’s wedding in Little Women. “I can’t believe childhood is over,” she laments. Life shifts are never easy, and what I appreciate about A Real Pain is that Eisenberg has crafted a grounded character who loudly voices and embodies his pains, which derive from the utter sadness of big change. The film begs us to consider these feelings, and our hesitancy to express them in real life.
There is a balance between realism and intimacy in the movie that makes for a surprisingly delicate space for reflection about understanding oneself through family. It is as delicate as the leaf conjured by Heti in Pure Colour. Maybe this is why Heti needed her characters to be inside of a leaf in order to spell out the importance of family tradition. It eludes meaning, falls short of language. It’s familiar and yet strange all at once, the ultimate unheimlich. Sort of like sharing a joint with your estranged cousin on the roof of a hotel in a Polish city after touring a concentration camp. Or gathering once a year to eat the most outrageously specific array of dinner food with the same twenty-ish people.
Sheila Heti
Some critics of Heti find fault with her creative decision, assuming it’s a metaphor for something larger. Heti challenged this assumption when I saw her speak at the New Yorker Festival in October. What if the leaf is not a metaphor? What if she simply means –has always meant– a leaf? Form for form’s sake, she posed. The very medium is a leaf, no less tangible than a book. Mira and her father get as close as they possibly can inside the leaf. It’s like me in the pool with my parents, the closest we’d been in “a million hot years,” as Heti would say. I don’t know the last time they’d touched my ankles.
Works like Heti’s novel and Eisenberg’s film aim to fill in the gaps left by the insatiable desire for closeness to the people we love. By closeness, I do not necessarily refer to the emotional sense of the word. Benji makes every attempt to be physically close to David, literally hanging onto him for dear life; David refuses to let go of Benji at the airport. “I love him and I hate him and I want to be him,” he admits tearfully at dinner with the tour group one night. The boys leave the tour early to take a taxi to their late grandmother’s old home in Krasnystaw only to be chastised by some bothered neighbors. If only they can get to her home, maybe then…maybe then what? What does closeness mean? How close can you get to someone with whom you rarely spend time, or who is gone?
Towards the end of Pure Colour, Mira, out of the leaf and back in the first draft of the world, meets up with Annie, a woman with whom she has fallen deeply in love, but who does not love her back in that way. They catch up in the corner of a cafe. “Even if they weren’t as close as two people could possibly be, still they were sitting at the very same table, and that was pretty good,” the narrator muses. “It didn’t have to be as close as possible for it to be something good.” This is a new philosophy for Mira, a new state of mind. I think it is a good one, one that comes close to offering a balm to the endless search for meaning in the family.
My family has started a tradition of playing a game at Christmas called, appropriately, Family. Everybody writes down a name –a celebrity, a historical figure, a person in the room– and puts them in a pile, and then someone reads them aloud and you go around guessing who wrote which name. You form teams too. Usually, there is one name that no one can remember, and then that person is left alone feeling like a genius. We’ve never been a big “let’s all gather ‘round the fire and swap tales of old” group, so it feels like a little miracle that the game pleases everyone and brings us closer without demanding too much. The game is sort of random; no detailed information about people (besides their capacity to conjure up stumping names) is necessary to win. There’s something electric and warming about challenging your short-term memory alongside extended family members’ in an aggressively low-stakes setting. It’s not forced like a lot of family stuff can feel, but rather very real. The game as a medium for connection feels pure, like a leaf. I think this is the place where Mira, Benji, and David all end up too, in the cafe and at the airport, toggling between the pain and color of change.
Something real and pure, at last– something good.
***
Recs: In the family spirit, Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm, perfect down to the last frame. This is THE SUPERIOR WEEK out of the entire year to watch it. Also, even though I’m only halfway, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Haven’t felt this immersed in a world since 2020 when I read The Cider House Rules in a week with the flu. Lastly, this Marty Robbins album, c/o my friend Andrew who is, I think, part cowboy. Chappell Roan’s name is derived from one of the tracks. Guess which!
