Friendship's Death
** On Thursday this week, we’ll returning to ADVANCED TILDA STUDIES for Friendship’s Death (1987) for this collaboration between Ms. Swinton and writer-director-theorist Peter Wollen. This brings to a definite end the series on Being Alone (and Charlie’s respite/exile in WA) with a film about being in a room with someone else and talking about Big Ideas.
Here is the link to RSVP. Doors will open at 6:50 and we’re starting the movie at 7:10!
By way of an introduction to Friendship’s Death, let me include here the poem, “On This Earth,” by Mahmoud Darwish, from the collection Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, which Tilda Swinton has listed as being one of her ten favorite books of all time (some good Scottish lit recs to check out on that list too!) Darwish’s poem shares with Friendship’s Death an inquiry what exactly is on this earth that makes life worth living, and who counts as having life at all.
As we know about our beloved Tilda Swinton, her ethereal, otherworldly qualities often lead to her being cast as slightly inhuman figures, such as the Artificial Intelligence—or is she?— version of Ada Lovelace in Conceiving Ada. Friendship’s Death sees Tilda playing not only a robot, but an alien one, sent to earth from a distant, advanced civilization in order to investigate the possibilities of creating peace on our troubled planet. Her mission was to land at MIT and find the top scientists and researchers there, but she landed somewhere else entirely: the center of Amman, Jordan, during Black September, 1970. With fighting in the streets between the Palestinian Liberation Army and the Jordanian military, she takes refuge in an incredulous British war correspondent’s hotel room. What follows is a fascinating, meditative spin on the science fiction narrative of the Stranger in a Strange Land, as the Brit and the alien debate what the nature of freedom and peace really is, and how one should go about living unto liberation.
Perhaps this philosophical approach to is to be expected, considering the movie comes from Peter Wollen, more well-known as a film theorist than a filmmaker; his work often centers on the semiotics of cinematic language. His work as a director (and co-directing with his wife/ex-wife Laura Mulvey [attendees of The Last Horror Movie may have a PDF of her writing on the male gaze] on movies such as The Riddle of the Sphinx) is not to be discounted, especially this film, a work of immense and intense inquiry and revolutionary empathy. I’ll close with another line from Mahmoud Darwish, from “We Travel Like All People,” that resonates with Friendship’s Death:
Ours is a country of words: Talk. Talk. Let me rest my road against a stone. Ours is a country of words: Talk. Talk. Let me see an end to this journey.