Wishful Thinking

Watching the film "Last Year at Marienbad" truly made my brain hurt! In watching any film, I try to connect to the characters or submerse myself into the plot; which in this film was impossible. The "plot" consisted of various locations with no real sequence to time filmed in the manner of jump cuts. The characters had no names or personality traits to connect to. It took me until the following day (after I viewed the film) to compose a thought process about this movie and what was going on between protagonist "X" and his lady obsession "A". In watching the movie, I felt as though I was imposing on "X's" dream-like thoughts. In the film, X is constantly trying to convince A of their love affair which presumably occur ed at the Marienbad last year. Even though she tells him to leave her alone and go away, he keeps persisting. For the viewer of this film, he or she is left wondering whether this is reality, a dream, or X's internal thoughts. I felt this film was the wishful thinking played in X's head and viewed by us as an audience. I feel as though he did encounter her at the Marienbad last year but he never approached her and hence wish he did. As the audience, I feel as though we are watching X's wishful thinking play out in his mind of how it could have been if he saw her again. I got this impression because of the garden maze (which is constantly being referred to in almost every other shot) as being the inner workings of the human brain.....in this case X's.
In class discussion, I loved how one peer made the connection between this film and the 1976 song Hotel California by The Eagles. What an awesome comparison because I feel as though this song explains almost what is going on in this movie. A quoted lyric :"Mirrors on the ceiling,the pink champagne on ice And she said, "We are all just prisoners here of our own device." Mirrors are so critical in this movie, they are in every shot giving the viewer multiple perspectives as well exposing surreal art forms. I believe the mirrors are mentioned and seen both in the song and in the movie because they represent the confusion in dephiring what is real from what is not. It can be seen as two sepreate worlds. Both the song and the movie deal with surreal art images and both talk about the hotel corridors. Throughout the movie we hear: "I walk on, once again, down these corridors, through these halls, these galleries, in this structure of another century, this enormous, luxurious, baroque, lugubrious hotel, where corridors succeed endless corridors--silent deserted corridors overloaded with a dim, cold ornamentation of woodwork, stucco, moldings, marble, black mirrors, dark paintings, columns, heavy hangings, sculptured door frames, series of doorways, galleries, transverse corridors that open in turn on empty salons, rooms overloaded with an ornamentation from another century, silent halls ... " This film and this song both make the listener feel as though they are watching/listening to someone elses dream: "Last thing I remember, I was running for the door I had to find the passage back to the place I was before"Relax," said the night man"We are programmed to receive you can check out any time you like but you can never leave!" This quoted lyric explains trying to escape/wake up from the dream but you cannot. It is almost a sick cycle. In the film, "X" is trying to find a passage back to a time in making "A" remember their supposed love affair. Even the title Hotel California deals a lot with the movie since it is filmed at the Hotel Marienbad in a dream like trans. However, I personally, I feel that we are not watching "X's" dream but rather his wishful dream-like thinking about what might have been. I do not feel as though he wants to wake up until he has created the perfect ending (he gets A) in his head. In this case he is a prisoner of his own device.
I found the reading every interesting and helpful in understanding exactly what is going on in this film.I have always loved Rene Descartes's quote "I think therefore I am." In the movie, the viewer is never sure what is real or a dream. Are some scenes "X's" dream and others his reality? We never know. All we know is that we are watching "X's" thoughts/his dreams, therefore we can assume he is real. He exists because he has the mental thought process of thinking/dreaming. We can assume that we are merely, watching a dream and their is no reality but then again who is doing the dreaming/thinking? That is where I say "X" is and therefore he exists.