"The Romance of Hopelessness," a response by Mira Silveira. The short film “Demons” beautifully captures the conflict of being in a rocky relationship with someone keeping you on their hook, while simultaneously distancing themselves. This particular situation is almost a rite of passage for young adults, an unfortunate situation that forces personal growth. When I watched the film for the first time, I was struck by how relatable the dynamic of their relationship is, both to my own life as well as countless friends who have shared the travails of their first big love. For my response collage I knew I wanted to capture the arc of the protagonist processing her emotions and overcoming her demons. The way I source materials is simply that of reusing: it always feels like a challenge to pull the vision in my head out of the five or six magazines in my home, but I feel that the metaphor of working with what's in front of you was relevant to this project. I began drafting my collage about "Demons" while listening to an acquaintance's recently released EP, titled Memos. In a similar sense, artist Eliza McLamb’s track “Debt” speaks of the conflicting feelings that occur when you are in love while being used by an unsatisfactory companion. These multiple instances further emphasized to me how common the shared experience of playing games involving this particular kind of emotional labor is for young American women today.
The film becomes more captivating the deeper we go into the protagonist sorting through her emotions. The arc of the story perfectly mirrors the lust at the beginning of many college romances, the terrorizing of the roommate on the bottom bunk included, but moves through to conflicts and confusions that result from falling for someone who does not reciprocate, either in terms of feelings or other, related behaviors. I appreciate the contrast between the opening shot and the final sex scene, when we see how the protagonist has grown. Maybe it’s confidence she’s found, or maybe her self-possession is derived from the satisfaction afforded by certain kind of revenge. Whatever informs her final action, ultimately, she realizes that she is better off sans the instability. Aloneness stops being a condition that must be avoided at any cost. For me, recognizing this is where self-possession, particularly for a young woman trying to learn how to navigate our society, truly begins.
I aimed to mirror this emotional arc in the collage, the juxtaposition between the phrases “the joy of sex” and “the romance of hopelessness” seeks to express how, while they appear to be opposites, in a relationship the joys and the hopelessness are different sides of the same coin. I thought to represent the figurative “demons” as these small, yellow, male-looking figures who spin around the left figure’s head, body, and thoughts. Ultimately, the male figure on the right is covered by one of the yellow demon figures to draw attention away from the focal point of his face. This story is not about him. I love collage as a format because there is not a singular, linear way to interpret all the aspects, instead they are all pieces of any number of potential stories. If reading the collage left to right, we see the burden of the demons on the left figure, being circled by thoughts, and as we move to the right the woman on the top right holds power, casually smoking a cigarette while looking over the woman with lasers shooting out of her eyes as she stands atop the man. The celebration of vices felt right here, as it did in Ariana DiVanetino’s film. As the lead character reminds us, we all have vices, best to be in power over them rather than controlled by them.
Of course, it’s one thing to recognize this truth and quite another to accomplish the kind of self-control such power depends upon. That’s a struggle we navigate in different ways across many aspects of our lives, not just romance. It’s also a struggle that, while different for each of us depending upon our particular situation, is something we must confront, however much prerogatives privilege certain appetites. The monster in DiValentina’s film can take possession of each of us at any moment. Certainly I can’t claim to possess control over my own just yet. …I’m working on it.