Photo by Ralph Nelson - © 2006 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Longing
Stranger Than Fiction
Like missing someone you haven't met. Someone you don't know yet...
When it comes to learning, fragmentation has always been my modus operandi for a variety of reasons. Images, words, phrases, films, and music are all unified through pattern identification into streams of thought.
The structure of this project attempts to capture that. On the left is a still from the film Stranger than Fiction, directed by Marc Foster. In it, the main character, played by Will Ferrell, begins to hear a voice in his head whenever he does something. At first, he thinks he's going crazy, but later he realizes this voice is narrating and actively directing his whole life. Up until that moment, his life was incredibly monotonous, with almost complete sameness in his daily routines, always obsessively timed by the watch on his wrist.
The themes of unfamiliarity, yearning, anxiety, and unmet desires within the film connect to the playlist and help source the title, Stranger than Fiction. I then began thinking about other songs with the same title that evoke similar sensations of oddness, longing, and missing someone or something.
The playlist starts with "Perfect Stranger" by FKA Twigs, which is about desiring someone sexually and physically, but without an emotional connection. This is not because she cannot offer it, but because she is afraid of losing them. It is a contradictory desire that we have all experienced after some heartbreak.
"Beautiful Stranger" by Laufey is about yearning in a very Romantic sense: nostalgia for someone she has never met, yet whose presence fills her with longing. She never approaches him, and now he's an unchanging memory. Not actually a real person, but a figment of her mind, transformed into a “Beautiful Stranger.” Björk explores a similar idea in the song "I Miss You," but in a much more forceful and playful way, almost approaching neuroticism (ironically, almost sarcastically), as she isn't truly experiencing distress.
Other songs on the list, like "Shim El Yasmine" by Mashrou' Leila and "Pienso en Tu Mirá" by Rosalía, explore the same concepts but with deeper intensity drawn from heartbreak and lived experience. They are embodied forms of those sensations.
That was interesting to me in terms of experiencing the powerful responses each of these pieces of media can generate. Returning to the point of fragmentation, the pattern of strangeness links them all together for me and creates a broader understanding of the sentiments and, ultimately, of all the artists and their work.