4v291o

Tips fedora

Awkward

💀

That makes sense

name checks out

I don’t have an opinion on this

The human body has 60,000 miles of blood vessels in it. That’s enough to circle the planet multiple times.

Real

This is so true, you guys

There’s nothing funny about 9/11

My dogs are barking

No

Yes

Hell yeah

Ugh, I hate adulting

This reminds me of something

Still won’t heal our broken country

Welcome to Crazy Town, population: this movie

This gave me second hand embarrassment

Bro looking like an iPad kid

It’s giving Slytherin

Hold on, shut up, I’m trying to think of something to say

We are the dream makers

Chat, can I get a kiss?

Yucky

This is low-key Bridgerton coded

Is this satire?

❌

Me thinks I just soiled me undies

Oh yeah that’s cute

Bro just won the woke contest

This got me feeling a type of way

We've all felt the “call of the void” before. That moment when you look around and see nothing worth truly living for. When you look ahead and see a future uncertain in every way. In a world polarized more every day over so many things, big and small, it’s hard not to feel it sometimes. Those thoughts inevitably start to creep in. Will the world be stable enough for me to live until I die of old age? Can I even make enough money to own a home, or to start a family? Are we all going to die in an idiotic feud between fools who run our governments and speak not for the people but only for their selfish interests? Injustice, war, and poverty have been everywhere recently, bubbling up to the surface more and more. Sometimes I find it too much to take, and I feel the call. In the back of my head like a whisper, it gives me an out. One simple trick to take my stresses away.

For a film that was released sixty-one years ago, Winter Light captures that feeling exactly to an almost scary degree. It was humbling, seeing this thing I had stupidly thought was unique to me portrayed on screen over half a century ago. The reasoning might not have been the same, but that feeling very much is. There is always a reason to lose hope, to see death as an out, an end to the suffering that is life. Watching fisherman Jonas become crippled and inconsolable because of his despair eviscerated me. To see something I know all too well, put so succinctly and completely into a character who is broken. A man defeated by the world, with no place to go but down. It wounded me in a way I wasn’t aware I was capable of being wounded. 

Had Winter Light only been relatable through Jonas, I would have been shaken. But there is, also, the protagonist of the film. Tomas Ericsson. A man so consumed by his self-hatred that he is rendered unable to fathom being loved or appreciated. A man who rejects all comion directed towards him, all kindnesses offered to him, everything. Tomas isolates himself from humanity, boiling in how much he despises himself. He creates a self-fulfilling prophecy where he deserves everything bad that happens to him and refuses anything good. If Jonas wounded me, then Tomas broke me into pieces and forced me to glue them back together. 

There aren’t many films I’ve found that manage to harmonize with my soul quite like Winter Light does. It reaches deeper than most art I’ve experienced in my life, to an uncomfortable degree. I hated being shown these people who bear such a resemblance to myself because, deep down, I knew that their feelings weren’t alien. For as much as I can try to ignore my own “call of the void”, my circumstances, this movie forced me to reconcile with it. To see the way that kind of mindset can play out. That fruitlessness of despair.

It was a wake-up call. I’m not quite sure how I’m supposed to change, or better myself to “fix” what was wrong. But I do know that something was wrong now and that I do need to try to help myself. That’s a kindness offered by very few things in life, and I am eternally grateful to this film for that.

It’s true what they say, girls get it done

This is giving me goose pimples

I love this song

Bro, how do they do that?

Look at this chungus

Yup, it’s mukbang time

Guys we can all agree that abstinence rules, right?

This is my reacting face

Challenge accepted

That’s actually really funny

Not the asshole

Erm, did they just say what I think they said said?

Not me nose exhaling

No god, on cap

I’m gonna feed you guys good today

Bro left no crumbs

But Doctor, I am Pagliacci