How will we know when it’s over?
January 2022
by Aziz Güzel
Notice how the metaphor of sleep is incorporated into our social and political imagination. Whether it is the life of a dissident who finds themselves in the grip of a repressive order, an employee feeling stuck in an exploitative workplace, or a partner caught in a cycle of abuse, why is the end of persecution often associated with the end of a nightmare? We refer to rising nations, awakening citizens, and wake-up calls. This is not strange. The strangeness resides in the way sleeping is used to describe a form of failure or positioned as antithetical to wakefulness. Sleeping is equated, for instance, with being off track, being in denial, missing out on life, or falling behind. What we attribute to sleep surfaces as a series of acts we are told one should be doing instead of what one is actually doing.
These metaphors circulate in personal, and political conversations because of the line they mark between tragedies and new beginnings. Change is often culturally imagined as a moment of waking up, either as a consequence of will or as something imposed from outside. Here we can recall scenes of quitting a job, a powerful divorce, or election nights. The antithetical positioning of sleeping and waking situates us in relation to an intrusive order and therefore helps us find a safe distance where we are not alone, defenseless against the stifling domination. But why is waking imagined as a solution to sleeping?
One does not need to be a trained psychotherapist to be suspicious of this strange binary. Waking may relieve us of frightening experiences that may seem, up till the moment of rousing, like relentless horror. Yet could even a populist political discourse find an unassuming audience for an exit-strategy promise without staying carefully silent about settling the cost? Here we can recall redemption-driven films about life in the aftermath of a conflict. There is always a sense of debt being paid after the fact. Trauma creeps in at night. Nightmares catch up with us in daylight.
It may be the appealing impersonal arithmetic of debt that allows us to imagine we can settle our deals with others by turning human relations into mathematics. Even then, why are our ideas about the effects of having to live through tumultuous times less sophisticated than poorly written redemption films? Whether or not we are convinced by the duality of sleep and wakefulness, there is a psychological question that tends to be publicly concealed, quietly feared, and carefully avoided in our personal and political discussions: When we finally wake up from our personal or collective nightmares, how will we know if we are okay?
Popular works of cinema and literature are often concerned with this question, seen most clearly in those scenarios in which a protagonist is compelled to consider their place within a structure of domination that they find themselves in either because of a sense of responsibility or as a private crisis. The Hour, Trumbo, and The Lives of Others are some examples of films dedicated to this psychological question. We watch portrayals of figures who tend to be hemmed in by suspicion, restrictions, and uncertainty. We watch, for instance, political activists exercising their rights of protest while anticipating repercussions, or journalists chronicling the state of affairs while anticipating a phone call gently requesting their resignation.
What is noticeable in these cultural representations is that the psychological cost is linked to goal-oriented, crisis-focused forms of transgression. What happens, conversely, when the conditions for transgression are in place but the act never comes about? What should we make of quiet forms of subjectivity that are often considered as petty and messy details of daily life, too mundane to either prompt a new awakening or evoke the horrors of nightmare?
The end of a toxic job can come through a decisive act, either a resignation, retirement, or lay-off. But what about the case of an employee, who while exchanging pleasantries with others, worries deeply about the meaning of their work, and finds themselves asking the old—and not always welcomed—questions: How am I being affected by these exploitative working conditions? What kind of person is one becoming by staying in this abusive relationship laced with indifference? To what lengths can one go without compromising oneself? How is this affecting me? Is it too late? How will one know if it is too late? And, more poignantly: What does it matter? This tension between defense and desire is exactly the place artists and writers occupy. If we accept that debt-redemption films are a bit too simplistic in their diagnosis to demonstrate the effects of conflict and a little too ambitious as they strive to offer once-and-for-all healing experiences of redemption; where else can we turn to talk about the cost of domination?
Aylin Kuryel’s beautiful film The Balcony and Our Dreams takes up these dark threads and magnifies them. Shot during the days of lockdown in the Turkish province of Izmir, the film opens to a view of a street under partial lockdown at the beginning of the pandemic. There are two concurrent narratives. One is visual and one is auditory. Seen from a balcony, we are watching the conditions of the pandemic in a major city by observing life under public health restrictions. The visual composition has us follow the entrances and exits of a long list of people, many of whom are interesting to observe for their differing relations to authority.
Kuryel crafts fragments of life in crisis through dynamic transitions between public and private, inside and outside, personal and political. It is important to remember the perplexing uncertainty of the beginning of the pandemic. Among a long list of unknowns—some of which remain today after almost two years of the pandemic—were medical, political, and economic uncertainties waiting to be settled. In the early days it was still possible to imagine we would soon regain some sort of stability to everyday life. These uncertainties were at the backbone of much anxiety expressed through the difficult question: When will it be over?
Kuryel captures a public in the grips of crisis: people jogging in circles in their apartments, the giving and receiving haircuts, a street musician entertaining neighbors listening from the safety of their homes, a mobile bakery delivering bread to households, shopkeepers creating the impression of a private fight to keep the virus out of their shop as they sanitize the street, protesters trying to march and being taken into custody by the police, and the sporadic entrances and exits of youth who are puzzlingly relaxed about the state of affairs.
On the level of visual narrative, the film establishes one aspect of the tension between desire and defense. The overt forms of subjectivity depicted offer us a powerful commentary on the question of cost that can only be estimated once this state of emergency and the highly regimented lifestyle it imposed, comes to an end. But what kind of estimation would that be?
Kuryel’s film opens viewers up to this complex play of projections through a collage of narratives that bid us to decipher the scenes. There is a second narrative in the film – a collage of pandemic dreams that accompany the visual scenes and which opens up the interplay between defense and desire. Spectators listen to these dreams one after the other, claustrophobic and political accounts crammed with distinct and anxious imagery. The string of dreams, together with the visual imagery, convey a sense of urgency. But what can dreams tell us?
Such a question is overlooked by a sanitized imagination of subjectivity obsessed with surface and statistics. Dreams, along with other aspects of life deemed to be trivial, such as jokes, speech accidents, forgetting, and slips of tongue, have long been devalued. Indeed, it often feels like dreams do not quite belong to us even as they invite interpretation. The dream reports in Kuryel’s film—figures that make appearances and disappearances—are less of an object to look at than a prompt bidding us to ask: What does this all mean?
By inviting interpretation, Kuryel’s film allows us to reflect on questions often lost to a casual observer: How can we make sense of our ongoing negotiation between safety and risk, compliance and non-compliance, the personal and political? Just like the way the meaning of a dream demands an interpreter to think of their relation to the manifest content of the dream (the subtle and often misunderstood link between wish and desire), Kuryel’s film reminds the viewer that dreams are a way to think about the relationship between what is experienced internally and what is taking place outside. Dreams, the film intimates, are occasions to think about the inextricable links between the shout in the street and our stifling private and social nightmares. Dreams demonstrate the urgency of this conversation.
Aylin Kuryel is a lecturer at the Literary and Cultural Analysis department at the University of Amsterdam. Her research areas are nationalism, image politics, aesthetics/resistance, and politics of emotions. She is the co-editor of Cultural Activism: Practices, Dilemmas and Possibilities (Rodopi, 2010), Resistance and Aesthetics in the Age of Global Uprisings (Küresel Ayaklanmalar Çağında Direniş ve Estetik, Iletisim Press, 2015), Being Jewish in Turkey: A Dictionary of Experiences (Türkiye’de Yahudi Olmak: Bir Deneyim Sözlüğü, Iletisim Press, 2017) and Essays on Boredom (Sıkıntı Üzerine Denemeler, 2020, Iletisim Press). She has been involved in projects as an artist and is working as a documentary filmmaker. Among her documentaries are Taboo (2009), Image Acts (2015), Welcome Lenin (2016), Heads and Tails (2018), CemileSezgin (2020), The Balcony and Our Dreams (2020), A Defense (2021).
Aziz Güzel is an adjunct faculty at York University and Seneca College and a psychotherapist working in Toronto. He is the co-author with Deborah Britzman of the book Mental Health for Educators (2021).