Tree Time in Richard Powers’ The Overstory

I read my first Richard Powers’ novel (Operation Wandering Soul) while in graduate school over twenty years ago. I’ve read everything he’s written since then. I note this because there’s a compelling sameness to his body of work. Lots of reviewers have complained that his characters are flat, designed more to embody ideas and ways of understanding than to portray complex human emotions. For me, that’s more of a feature than a bug. I can barely remember any of his characters and that’s fine. What stands out for me is the subject of each book. Orfeois the one about avant-garde music; The Gold Bug Variationsis about classical music; Three Farmers on the Way to a Dance is about photography; TheEcho Makeris about brains and birds. Gain is about corporations. 

In that way, The Overstory: A Novelis about trees. This sense of “aboutness” is at the heart of each of his novels. Powers writes about a subject like Herman Melville writes about whales or N.K. Jemisin writes about earthquakes. His chosen subject leads to a way of being in the world; give Powers a subject and he will make you an ontology. If you want to know, Gainwill tell you what it is to live in a world of corporate personhood. He’ll tell you the history and the present of that world, and he’ll at least gesture toward the future of it. 

So what is it to live in a world of trees? It’s a slow, subterranean, aerial world where communication takes place through sunlight and volatile organic compounds. Unlike the Lorax, who gets mentioned once in the book, Powers does not speak for the trees. Some of his characters try to do this, but Powers speaks near the trees, in the trees, around the trees, even asthe trees. The Overstory’s first section is called “Roots.” Its final three sections are called “Trunk,” “Crown,” and “Seeds.” The book grows like a tree. In between these tree parts are sections titled with human names, but most of these humans take on tree pseudonyms. “Douglas Pavlicek” becomes “Doug-fir;” another character becomes “Maidenhair,” another “Mulberry,” another “Maple.” A character thinks of death as “hemlock time” (417). In fact, trees render time inhuman in The Overstory. One character, Neely remembers a favorite science fiction story about aliens who land on earth but remain unseen by humans because “they operate on a different scale of time. They zip around so fast that human seconds seem to them as tree years seem to humans” (487). And some other characters come close to experiencing what could be called “tree time.” 

A character sentenced to two consecutive terms of seventy years in prison thinks of the sentence in tree time. “Seventy plus seventy is nothing. A black willow plus a wild cherry. He was thinking oak. He was thinking Douglas-fir or yew. Seventy plus seventy. With reductions for good behavior, he might even finish out the first half of the sentence just in time to die” (471). Another character suffers a stroke and sees himself “turn brown and fall” (311). He loses most of his ability to speak and move. He becomes a tree. Later, his wife “envies” the stillness that has been forced on him.  “His years of enforced tranquility, the patience of his slowed mind, the expansion of his blinkered senses. He can watch the dozen bare trees in the backyard for hours and see something intricate and surprising, sufficient to his desires (458).  When he dies, she thinks that she will join him, “at the speed of trees, very soon” (498). 

Through the scale of tree time, Powers tries to makes global warming visible. A character has a mystical experience in the “boreal north” (355) and briefly hears trees speak. 

Nearby lodgepoles and jack pines demur: Long answers need long time. And long time is exactly what’s vanishing. 

The black spruces down the drumlin put it bluntly: Warm is feeding on warm. The permafrost is belching. The cycle speeds up. 

Farther south, broadleaves agree. Noisy aspens and remnant birches, forests of cottonwoods and poplars, take up the chorus: The world is turning into a new thing (355-6). 

The man thinks to the trees, “we’re all doomed.” The trees tell him that “we have always been doomed.” The man tries to tell the trees that “things are different this time.” And the trees answer him: “Yes. You’re here.” (356). Humans destroy what the lodgepoles and jack pines call “long time,” the slow time of the lifespan of trees, the slow time of evolutionary change, the slow cycles of climate change. The trees tell the man that human time is deadly; it goes too fast other living things to adapt. Humans have accelerated global warming past the point of return. 

Ray, the character who has a stroke, lies in bed and comes to the same realization. He reflects on his previous life as a property lawyer. He realizes that no law, no attempt to avert global warming will work. They’re on the wrong time scale. “Life will cook; the seas will rise. The planet’s lungs will be ripped out. And the law will let this happen, because harm was never imminent enough. Imminent, at the speed of people, is too late. The law must judge imminent at the speed of trees” (498). Tree immanence is unthinkable for humans. It has been for at least a century, since humans sped up time with the industrial revolution. Powers makes the case trees live in a fundamentally different world than humans. Unfortunately for trees, these worlds overlap. One character thinks, “it’s not the world that needs saving. Only the thing that people call by the same name” (495). Tree time, tree world, trees themselves, can outlast the short time of global warming. 

This is sort of where The Overstoryleaves us. It’s not a happy book. Powers makes a science-fictional gesture toward a techno-scientific understanding of life, but it is only a gesture. He’s not the type of writer who speeds off into the future. He tries to slow things down. He succeeds for 502 pages. But then the book ends with the voice of a ghost, and the stillness of its last few pages disappears. Back at the beginning of the book, a pine tells a woman “Listen. There’s something you need to hear” (3).  

This Week in Nancy: "Mass Hysteria"

In How to Read Nancy, Karasik and Newgarden, in their discussion of "ballon design," note "Any number of word balloons can be used within a panel . . . For Bushmiller one balloon per panel was the norm, two were the exception, and three or more were reserved for mass hysteria" (140). On April 28, then Olivia Jaimes gives us mass hysteria. Five word balloons crowd the space of the third panel, crushing Nancy, who pulls her arms toward her body and grimaces. All of the words in the balloon exceed the space of the panel; almost half of the words cannot be read because the push into the invisible space inside or underneath the panel.

The words themselves continue Jaimes' meta-commentary from last week about Ernie Bushmiller purists. The first panel features Nancy, seemingly floating in white space, while someone off-panel intones, "Nancy is iconic for her simplicity." In panel two, another voice adds a longer commentary--notice that the line of the word balloon is lower in the second panel than the one in the first, suggesting a second speaker. Another speaker than chimes in from the right. We cannot see all the words that this speaker intones. The words will not fit in the panel. And the word balloons are beginning to crowd Nancy. She raises her hand as if defense, as if she is getting ready to push back. Her half-smile from the first panel becomes a frown. Her eyebrows straighten out and push toward each other. By the third panel, her mouth opens slightly in a frown. She looks like she cannot breathe. Word bubbles from the left and from the right touch each of her hands as she tries to push back. The word bubble in the bottom right side of the panel cover part of her shoe. Nancy is in danger of being blocked out, erased. That's the gag. The online commentary is not allowing us to see Nancy today.

On Monday, April 30, Jaimes continues her meta-commentary. Speaking to Sluggo, Nancy says "I'm sick of these reboots and restarts." Fans of Bushmiller everywhere nod in agreement (perhaps while they acknowledge but dismiss the irony as simplistic). Panel two zooms in on Nancy's angry face, ash she complains "why can't something that's gone stay gone?" The half of Sluggo's face that we can see looks neutral--his mouth a straight line, his nose a quarter circle and a dot, his pupil a black dot, and his eyebrow a semi-circle above his eye. Panel three pulls back from Nancy's face. We see four bushes and two gigantic flowers. Tiny black dots of pollen emanate from two of the bushes and the flowers. There are no rocks. The gag, as revealed by Sluggo's dialogue: Nancy was talking about the return of spring, and the pollen that causes her allergies. See--she wasn't talking about her own reboot. We have one more day of direct meta-commentary ahead of us. 

On May 1, Nancy sits on an undersized chair and looks through her window at the black diagonal slashes of rain falling. She says "I love the sound of rain." Readers, of course, cannot hear the rain, we can only see the black lines that signify rain is falling. In panel two, which zooms out a bit, Jaimes helps us to hear the rain. The word "PLOP" appears seven times, in bold type, around the window. But Nancy sees the words! The gag is in panel two. Her word balloon partially covers two of the "PLOPS" as she says "also the sight of the sound of rain." Karasik and Newgarden write, "In short: the lettering in comics is generally meant to be read and not seen." Undermining that general knowledge establishes the gag--we first read the words and hear them as the sound of rain but then Nancy sees them and we cannot help but see them. She concludes, in the third panel, her face occupying the middle third of the panel "Ahhhh . . . so relaxing." Her eyes are shut. Nancy does not see the "PLOP"s that fill the space around her because her eyes are shut. Note, too, that Jaimes uses what K and N call "The Modified Silhouette," the small white (or in this case, green) space that surrounds something. "A white halo around an object grants prominence" (143). Unlike the word balloons from a few days ago, the "PLOPS"s do not touch Nancy. Instead, they follow the contours of her body, head, hair, and bow. Not only do they lend prominence to Nancy, they keep their distance, as they are in on the joke. 

May 2 gives a straight-up visual gag. Nancy's jam handprint serves as not the kind of reminder that she intended. Sluggo is mad about the jam on his shirt but he is also aware of Nancy's obliviousness,  as one of his eyebrows arches and the other curls. No meta-, no social media, just a gag.

 May 3 returns us to the outdoors and to spring. Nancy seems to have gotten over her annoyance of a few days ago regarding spring. In the first panel, she is framed by blue sky as she smiles and says "Spring is so beautiful." The second panel makes a jarring shift in perspective. Nancy speaks from off-panel left, as we see bushes, flowers, and a tree take central focus, like the scene Nancy and Sluggo walked through on April 30. The bushes seem to have finished blooming. Instead of flowers, all they have are small black dots. Nancy sets us up for a visual gag. Spring is only beautiful "for the ten seconds I can see it before my eyes start tearing up from allergies." The ten seconds elapse in the gutter before panel three. The lines of the scene become wavy and imprecise. Nancy's teary vision infects the reader's eyes. But there's also a secondary joke. The word bubble in panel three differs from the one in panel two a bit. Whereas panel two's bubble's tail starts very close to the edge of the panel, telling us that the speaker is outside the panel, the bubble tail in panel three is a bit further from the edge. It actually seems to be emanating from the bush, which is now simply green, absent not only of flowers, but of black dots that signified flowers that have shed their petals. The bush speaks, "We had a good run this year." Is this another meta-commentary? Is the bush actually Bushmiller?

All of which brings us to today's strip. Nancy sits crosslegged on the floor, her laptop on her lap. "Reading social media all day is making me grumpy," she says, and her facial expression shows it. From outside the room, someone (Aunt Fritzi?) says, why don't you go outside? Nancy curtly answers "Fine." She still looks perturbed. Panel three's gag relies on the literalist Nancy established by Bushmiller, the Nancy who lounges with Sluggo in the "Lounge" and literally rests on someone's laurels. 

 In panel three, Nancy sits in the exact same position, legs crossed and laptop on her lap, only now, as the view pulls back a bit, we see that she is indeed outside. "Now there's glare on my screen!!!!" She has followed the advice given to her to its letter but not its intent. She is probably still reading social media as the sun shines down on her. But does the fact that Nancy sits among two trees and flower mean anything? Unlike the other two outdoor scenes this week, there are no bush(miller)es to be seen. Is Nancy free of the yoke of Bushmiller's long history? No--she is still reading the comments.

This Week in Nancy: "Be E(A)RNEST, DANG IT!"

I'm feeling compelled to write about Olivia Jaimes' Nancy reboot every week, so here goes.

In their exhaustive, detailed, and insightful book, How to Read Nancy: The Elements of Comics in Three Easy Panels, Paul Karasik and Mark Newgarden perform a detailed analysis of Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy strip from Aug 8, 1948 in order to get at just what makes Bushmiller a master of the "gag." They examine the strip in whole and in parts--the images, the text, the word-ballon placement, the spacing, the background, the props, and as they write, the"details, details, details"--to work toward their conclusion that to make "good comics" one must understand "the hard-won language of all the great twentieth-century practitioners, a language exemplified by the clear, unambiguous example of Ernie Bushmiller" (158).

Does Olivia Jaimes' know Bushmiller's language? Can she speak it? Lots of people say "no." I say, "not so fast." As Karasik and Newgarden tell us, Bushmiller published his first comics as a teenager, and by the time he changed the name of his strip Fritzi Ritz to Nancy around June 11, 1938, he had been drawing Fritzi for more than ten years (58-59). And he didn't have Ernie Bushmiller as a guide. Nobody knows how long Olivia Jaimes has been making comics, but we do know that she has fifty years of Bushmiller's Nancy to contend with.

So what is she doing with this history? To my eye, she is "working backwards" with it. That is, Karasik and Newgarden write that Bushmiller often wrote the "gag" first. Bushmiller says "I draw the last panel first and work back toward the beginning, which is the opposite of the way you read (I hope)" (66). I don't know if Jaimes ever starts with the last panel, but today's strip seems most interesting if a reader considers the last panel first.

We end with a pun, a pun aimed directly at the new Nancy's critics. "You Hooligans, Be Earnest, Dang It!" says a crotchety-looking old guy, half out of the frame, shaking his fist at Nancy and Sluggo. Be Earnest . . . Be Ernest . . . Be Ernie . . . he might as well be saying. Nancy dismisses him with an emotionless "Nah." Here's the whole strip.

In the first panel, the old man looks toward Sluggo and Nancy and starts with a cliched "Kids these days." In the second panel, we see that he was concealing a mailbox from our view, so his claim that kids today "don't know how to mail letters" makes some sense. (I can't say the same for his "or write checks"). We see Nancy holding a letter; she and Sluggo look sleepy. The old man's speech balloon fills the top of the panel (the old man himself is off panel) with a long tail, as he explains that these two kids are exhibiting "an air of ironic detachment." Jaimes is trolling the trolls. She has set up a false dichotomy between the "earnest"  old man and the ironically detached kids, Nancy and Sluggo. The joke is on the reader. Are you an earnest Bushmiller purist or an ironic fan of the Nancy reboot? The battle grounds are staked.

But the dichotomy is false. Jaimes has been creating Nancy for less than a month.  She knows the Nancy vocabulary, but she only deploys small parts of it. Look at the balloon placement in the second panel. It's hideous and distorted. Or is it just a riff on the precision of Bushmiller's balloons? Is the weird inconsistent perspective on purpose, "on purpose," or neither?

On Monday, April 23, Jaimes anticipates Friday's old man with the picture in the "Age-Me App" that apparently allows you to "See Yourself Old." Jaimes has something invested in having Nancy and Sluggo use social media and apps. "NANCEE 22" gives the app 1/5 stars. Is this a comment on the online comments about Nancy? Is it?

On Tuesday, April 24, Jaimes breaks out Bushmiller's "Nancy sees Sluggo talking to another girl and gets jealous" trope. Only this time, Jaimes reveals that Sluggo's interest in the nameless girl is only because her parents "have accounts for HBO and Hulu." Sluggo must be dreaming of watching Game of Thrones. 

On Wednesday, April 25, Jaimes gives us Nancy lying in a dark room. Is that the voice of Aunt Fritzi?

Is this comic an homage to this one? Look at the blanket. But also look at Nancy drop the phone on her own face. She looks like a cyclops. That's funny.

On Thursday, April 26, we get Sluggo looking at Nancy's computer in panel one. In panel two, he seems inordinately angry that Nancy has "logged five hundred hours" on a game but hasn't "beaten any levels" yet. What the heck is she doing. In panel three, Nancy tells Sluggo "Oh I love that game." Sluggo must be wondering why she's so bad at it again. The gutter between the third and fourth panel shifts the scene. Nancy is now in bed, and we see the gag. "Nothing overheats my computer faster." We even see three (three!! Bushmiller's favorite number) little heat waves emanating from the laptop that sits atop Nancy's blanket. She plays the game only to overheat her computer to warm up her bed. Bushmiller's Nancy could get behind that logic.

 Of course, Bushmiller's Nancy would just invite some pets into her bed.

I'll end with a question, Does today's future, except for the "Earnest," know what bebop records are?

Nancy Lives!

A simple press release came out early in April.

KANSAS CITY, Mo—April 9, 2018– Andrews McMeel Syndication has announced that Olivia Jaimes is the new cartoonist for the legendary “Nancy” comic strip.

The Guy Gilchrist era was ending. (No more oval face! No more sweetness! No more weird Aunt Fritzi t-shirts!)

But who is Olivia Jaimes? The syndicate was cagey. They noted her love of Nancy and they noted her gender.

Glynn continued, “We’re going on almost 100 years of a man writing for Nancy and we loved the idea that Olivia had this delicious blend of love for the old Bushmiller work and a 21st century female perspective that would bring new life to this iconic character.”

But they didn't provide any more of Jaimes' biography. No mention of other work she had done. Barely anything else--"In addition to comics, Jaimes enjoys jogging, video games and playing piano."

Clearly, they were being coy.  And mysterious. "Olivia Jaimes" is a pseudonym!

The press release does give readers a brief quotation from Jaimes. "“Nancy has been my favorite sassy grouch for a long time. I’m excited to be sassy and grouchy through her voice instead of just mine,” said Jaimes, “and I can complain to the whole world about things that bother me instead of just my friends and family.”

Sassy and grouchy. Complaining. In other words, a super-promising statement of purpose. Ernie Bushmiller focused on these aspects of Nancy's personality.

Jaimes' first strip, on April 9,  immediately showed her love for Bushmiller's Nancy. The lines are simple. Nancy's head is the right shape. And most importantly--Nancy likes food!

Nancy's love of eating was one of Bushmiller's favorite tropes.

Over the next few days, readers could see that Jaimes was bringing something new to Nancy, too. Her adults looked nothing like the ones Bushmiller drew. Jaimes' adults, at least going from the first strip, are more simply drawn--they're "cartoonish," with basic curved and straight lines. They're less detailed than Bushmiller's adults, and because of that they seem to fit into the strip more naturally. Bushmiller's adults always seemed to be too big for the strip. They only fit partially into the frame, unless seen from a distance. Jaimes follows this tradition, but her adults seem different, less detailed and fussy.

On April 11, we see that Jaimes' Nancy is not just sassy and grouchy, but also resentful.  And Jaimes is a master of Bushmillerian wordplay, using over-literalization to great effect. Yes, Nancy is "always thinking of other people" but not in they way the speaker expects.  Jaimes gives Nancy an inner life. People don't know what's she's thinking. Jaimes' Nancy's mind shares the same self-doubt that Bushmiller gave her.

Like Bushmiller's Nancy, Jaimes' Nancy takes extreme actions. On April 20, instead of reading her report card in a happy, park-like setting, Nancy finds a place that fits her emotions--two dumpsters and a garbage bag. 

And Jaimes honors Bushmiller's visual language. On April 12, we see lazy Sluggo leaning against a tree. On April 18, we see Nancy lying awake in bed, thinking. 

All of this is not to say that Jaimes is not bringing something new to Nancy. She is not resting on Bushmiller's laurels.

In the first two weeks of the strip, Jaimes' has begun to establish her own visual and linguistic style. Bushmiller often reflected on the art of drawing and the space of the comic strip. 

Jaimes' updates, in a direct way, the joke of the cartoonist not wanting to draw, on April 19. Nancy and Sluggo stand in a bare room marked out by three straight lines to make things easier "for the cartoonist." The last panel pulls away from the close-up of the first two panels. Nancy and Sluggo look almost like they are floating in space. 

And Jaimes makes the strip contemporary and timely, like Bushmiller did in his day. Instead of talk of war bonds and modern art, Jaimes gives Nancy and Sluggo cellphones; they talk about internet bots. And Jaimes gives us an almost surrealist rendering of Sluggo as a bot on April 17.

And perhaps best of all so far, Jaimes updates the "poorly drawn comic" trope that Bushmiller used so well, when he "lost his glasses" or was "tired". (For a poor use of this trope, see Billy's drawings in Family Circus.) On April 16, Nancy and Sluggo look "a little . . . off." Nancy says that that the "cartoonist is having an off art day." But the cartoonist is having none of that. She crosses out Nancy's  words in the second panel. Instead, in the third panel, Nancy tells us that "this is just a snapchat filter"! Jaimes' has gone meta-, crossing out the words in a speech bubble so that we don't know how to read panel two. Does Nancy say these words? Does she unsay them at the same time? And the fourth panel gives us a "Cartoonist Note" telling us that "any questionable art from now one" is a snapchat filter. Jaimes uses the joke, retires the joke, and hints that the joke will return, all at the same time.

Bushmiller had an inkwell and modern art to go meta-.

Jaimes has a world where meta- is so common that we barely notice it. I can't wait to see her Aunt Fritzi. She might destroy the internet. 

On Annihilation

On Annihilation, the movie

1.     Ghost Bird is Missing

This will not be a review of how Annihilation the movie differs from Annihilation the book. But having read the book multiple times, I cannot help but notice some of the differences. Maybe I should say this will not be a review of the qualitative differences between the two. Yes, they are different, one might say radically different. But they do different things; they formulate different concepts.

That said, Ghost bird, aka the biologist, aka the narrator/journal-keeper of the book, does not appear in the movie. I think of this as a cinematic decision. Filming a character writing in a journal is boring. Having a character speak in voiceover is cliché. The movie, then, subtracts the biologist’s words, and thus, a specific sense of her interiority, her closely kept privacy. The biologist of the book is socially-inward and somewhat unprofessional. The novel’s psychologist reminds her “you were let go from a number of your field jobs” (122). The disappearance of Ghost bird makes perfect sense for the movie and weirdly fulfill a promise of the novel. In the novel Ghost bird seems on the verge of disappearing on every page. The movie makes that disappearance manifest.

2.     Names are Present

Instead of Ghost bird, the movie gives us Lena, a molecular biologist with a PhD who teaches and researches at Johns Hopkins University (if I remember her credentials correctly; I’ve only seen the movie once.) Yes, she has a name. All of the characters have names. For those who have read the book, and are familiar with the absence of the characters’ names (they are called “the biologist,” “the psychologist,” etc.) these names sound shocking when first heard, as if we are learning something we should not know. And we are. Annihilation the movie amplifies what the book can only suggest—the power of sound and light. The characters’ names enable the movie’s dialogue and allows them to form relationships. For part of the movie, the five women who enter the shimmer seem to really care about each other, in stark contrast to their mostly adversarial relationship in the novel. And then there is the shimmer itself. In the novel, the border is ephemeral, invisible, almost indescribable. Expedition members must be hypnotized to cross the border. They walk right into the shimmer.

3.     Light and Sound

The shimmer shapes the whole movie. It is kaleidoscopic light; when the expedition walks through it, everything around them takes on the shimmer—colors refract through the trees and reeds and in the sky. This shimmer makes Annihilation beautiful. We see white deer with bright flowers growing in their antlers, like they have fled from a Miyazake movie. Flowers are everywhere. Vibrant, multicolor blooms flow from the same branch, giving the expedition one of their first clues that the shimmer not only refracts light and radio waves, but also DNA.

We see crystalline trees explode into orange light. We see phosphorous grenades explode in incandescent light. Even the lighthouse itself, rendered as a beautiful white structure encased in something like shell or bone, gets in on the act. It goes up in flames and burns the screen bright white. Even the automatic weapons that the characters carry, and fire often, send out bursts of light.

They send out sound, too, of course. Annihilation is loud. The conflict in the lighthouse throbs with sound; the theater I was in shook during this scene. Lena struggles with a creature that mirrors her and shimmers with light. It does not speak but it fills the space of the lighthouse with sound. Ben Salisbury’s and Geoff Barrow’s score might be emanating from the creature’s body. Not only light, but sound too, shimmers. Strings and static give way to a noise that might be a refracted voice. The “voice” divides and get louder. It phases in and out. It shimmers.

4.     Annihilation might be a horror movie

Amidst all this beauty, Annihilation might actually be a horror movie. The bear-like creature that stalks the expedition and screams and shrieks in the voice of one of them as it kills her presents a more horrifying vison of becoming-something-else than most of the creatures of the novel, such as the dolphin with human eyes. Likewise, the scenes of Lena’s interrogation by a member of the Southern Reach dressed in a white anti-contamination suit, while a crowd of blue-suited individuals watch from behind glass, points to the fear of infection than runs through the movie.

Having one’s DNA altered by the shimmer seems cancerous in the movie. The opening scene shows Lena lecturing students about a dividing cancer cell as she shows them a microscopic view of this division in action. Dr. Ventress (the psychologist) does not want to leave the shimmer, in part, because she is dying of cancer. Lena examines some human cells while inside the shimmer, and they divide and divide, each new division infected by the light of the shimmer. The shimmer infects everything. It cannot be escaped. Unlike Ghost bird, who stays within the borders of Area X, Lena wants to escape the shimmer.

[SPOILER ALERT]

In the lighthouse, Lena’s encounter with the creature made of light and sound is a struggle. Lena tells her interrogator that she fought the creature. She ignites a phosphorous grenade, which allows her to escape the shimmer through the doors of the lighthouse. Lena does not share Ghost bird’s ambivalence, even embracement of Area X. Lena flees the shimmer, and during her interrogation suggests that the shimmer is of extraterrestrial origin (we see something like a comet strike near the lighthouse at the beginning of the movie).

As she reunites with her husband in the movie’s final scene, they embrace, and he asks her a simple question: “Are you Lena?” She does not answer. The camera closely focuses on her eyes. Her eyes shimmer with light. The shimmer, whatever it is, is not finished spreading. It is beautiful.