Though not your typical holiday movie, I did find myself watching C.R.A.Z.Y. by Jean-Marc Valée for Christmas. The only festive link I can find is that the film’s star, Zachary, celebrates his birthday on Christmas day. The film’s title is an acronym for the names of five sons: Christian, Raymond, Antoine, Zachary and Ivan. It is also their father’s favourite Patsy Kline song.
C.R.A.Z.Y. is one of my favourite coming out/coming of age films. The subtlety with which Valée narrates desire and anguish is what makes it so watchable. Even if English subtitles would make the witty Quebecois dialogue easier to follow, you can still lose yourself completely in a visually arresting world of unspoken secrets and shame.
Zachary’s parents are devoutly Catholic, so he does not quite fit in with his heterosexual siblings. After another man emerges from a parked car with Zachary, his father sends him to be ‘cured’ by a psychiatrist. Shortly after this bizarre intervention, Zachary appears to fit his father’s expectations with a new girlfriend. Appearances, however, have a way of unravelling themselves.
At Christian’s wedding, a guest describes his view of Zachary in another parked car. Though Zachary had only been sharing a cigarette with his cousin’s boyfriend, his brother Raymond physically attacks the guest. This altercation acts as a catalyst for Zachary to come out to his father and escape on a journey to find himself.
When Raymond is committed to hospital for a drug overdose, Zachary senses the need to return home. Although he is initially met by one of the most crushing rejections for being gay, the death of his brother Raymond, and the lyrics to Crazy by Patsy Kline help his father reconsider the relationships he has with his four remaining sons. C.R.A.Z.Y. captures the love between a father and his son, and is enjoyable to watch, even on Christmas day.
After reading the catalogue for the exhibition From Sea to Shining Sea, curated by A. A. Bronson, I felt inspired to create this space.
". . . Intoxication must first have heightened the sensibility of the whole machine before it can come to any art. And all kinds of special varieties of intoxication have the power to work in this way: above all, that of sexual excitement, which is the first and oldest form of intoxication. And then, too, the intoxication that comes with any great desire, any great emotion: the intoxication of the festival, of a combat, bravado, victory or of any extreme movement: the intoxication of ferocity; the intoxication of destruction; intoxication under various sorts of meterological influence, that of spring, for example; or under the influence of narcotics; or finally the intoxication sheerly of the will, of an overcharged, inflated will. The essential thing in all intoxication is the feeling of heightened power and a fulness [sic]. With this feeling one addresses oneself to things, compels them to receive what one has to give, one overpowers them; and this procedure is called idealization. But let us, right here, get rid of a preposession: idealization does not as is generally thought, consist in leaving out, a subtraction of the insignifcant, the incidental. What is decisive, rather, is a tremendous exaggeration of the main features, before which those others disappear. In this condition, one enriches everything out of one's own abundance: whatever one sees or desires, one sees swelling, bursting, mighty, overladen with power. The individual in this condition changes things until they are mirrors of his own energy - reflections of his own perfection. Andthis compulsion to change things to perfection - is art." (emphasis added)
-Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idol 1888 (cited in From Sea to Shining Sea, A. A. Bronson, p.164)
