Draft Four: The task of being together
The past and present of the Romanian culture wars.
Twenty years ago I had a fight with my father we both remember to this day.
I was in the US, I had just finished my first year of graduate school at Missouri, and he and my brother had come to visit. The US had been overwhelming for me, impossibly large and diverse, different in every way from my daily life in Romania – just ordering at Subway and having to choose everything from toppings to the type of bread (what?!) was anxiety inducing. Both my dad and brother felt that pressure right away: too many choices, too much time in the car, too expensive – so expensive we cut short a trip to DC and spent almost two days on a Greyhound bus.
What set off the fight was a rally for same sex marriage, back then a thorny American political issue. (Which returns in various forms every time it’s a convenient diversion – in 2004 it obscured the misguided invasion of Iraq).
Whatever I say now, won’t add the required nuance of our exchange. Let’s say I was all in favor, and he was confused this topic even existed. I was a twenty-something who had started to come into his own as an adult, and I had little doubt: there was no gray here. You had to support some sort of union to protect the right of two people to be together, especially in rough times. If a partner is the hospital, the other couldn’t visit. If a partner died, the other couldn’t inherit. Etc.
I was adamant things needed to change, and rights needed to be expanded.
My father wasn’t opposed, but he was taken aback. In Romania, queer folks back then were still shown in the media only as flamboyant caricatures, being just “a tad too much”. It was as if being gay meant you were constantly glammed up for a ballroom showdown. (A couple years later, my mother visited me in Washington, DC, and we passed two men in office slacks and dress shirts holding hands. “These are gay people?!”, she exclaimed. I burst out laughing. “They look like us, right?”.)
Back to my Dad – I don’t think he’d ever seen his son so adamant about something, so ready to school him in the ways of the world as he saw them. I was indeed filled with righteous indignation. It took everything I had to say he doesn’t understand what’s going on, so there wasn’t anything left for me to use to understand him.
That fight made my father cut his trip short and return to Romania.
The reason we remember this story is because of what happened after: on the plane, my father wrote me a letter. It took everything he had. He said everything he wanted to say but couldn’t in conversation. But then, he never sent it. He told me about it, but I never saw it, never read it. That was for the better, my father says to this day. He adds that a few years back he came across the letter, opened it, read it, then tore it to shreds.
We never spoke about what the letter said, but I can approximate from another story my dad told recently. When he was about the age I am now, he worried he failed at raising me and my brother. That we didn’t care about him. Didn’t appreciate everything he did for us. That we looked at him as “a human wallet”. He told his mother – my grandmother – about this.
She had raised him, his brother, me, my brother, my cousins, and later my cousin’s children until she died, ten years ago this month.
It's not true, she told him. They’re just kids, even if they are playing adults. This is not when you measure how you raised them, and what they became.
She was right, as always. We were still kids. And he did a good job with us.
*
My grandmother was Hungarian, so we’re mixed heritage.
I grew up 15 minutes away from the 1990 street fights that pitted Hungarians and Romanians, people I never saw as different, because there was some of both in me, and that was cool. But when I traveled to Hungary and told kids there I am from Târgu-Mureș, I felt ashamed because of my town’s history of violence. And when I travelled to Bucharest, they asked me if I was a bozgor (a derogatory terms for Hungarians).
My father taught me to be all, and love everybody, although I don’t think we ever pretended that doing so would be easy. He was a surgeon during the day and building an NGO to care for children with severe physical and mental disabilities after work. During the summers of the 1990s, he involved me in activism for HIV/AIDS awareness, when it was still a terrible stigma.
If anything, my family taught me we’re all worthy of being cared for. They did it so well that when I left Romania, the shock of my own ignorance, internalized racism, and gender stereotypes floored me. It turned out that there were even more rights to expand, more people to love than I thought.
Back when we had that fight, I couldn’t articulate all this. I couldn’t see the foundation my parents had set, just focused on what the construction lacked. Which is why today I don’t think my Dad and I actually fought over same sex unions – we fought to test our bond at a critical time, when we didn’t know who each of us was: I was too young to understand him as an adult and appreciate all the steps he took in broadening his view of the world, he was too surprised to see I had become an adult, too, and one who dared to go even further.
*
This came to mind recently when a Romanian politician, currently the mayor of a city close to Bucharest, said she voted in a 2018 referendum for changing the constitution, so it would define marriage as a union between a man and a woman. The referendum was a cynical political grenade, and it fizzled – the majority boycotted it. (Unfortunately, the referendum might pop back up in 2024).
Her recent statements became news because her party, USR, was, supposedly, on the „good” side, the progressive side. (That was never a true statement. USR was always an anti-establishment coalition of conflicting ideologies, united by a shared dislike of the political status quo.) Still – in people’s minds, USR should have been in favor of extending rights, not restricting them.
What gives?
Soon after the mayor said all this, her daughter, who lives in France, blasted her on Instagram and called her out. Their ideological and generational fight became our spectacle, and everyone picked their side.
You know how this sorting goes – we have been doing it for a month on a global scale with Israel and the Gaza Strip, and for two years over Ukraine. In this new domestic showdown, we split again: conservatives vs. progressives. Children vs. parents. The generations of the 1960s and 1970s vs. Millennials and Gen Zs. Moderates vs. everyone else. (Costi Rogozanu explains it well here and predicts how things will play out – it won’t be pretty.)
*
Romania has been circling around the culture wars for the last decade. Maybe I’m wrong, but I believe we’ve reached the eve of battle. Not to scare anyone, but the Doomsday Clock is at 90 seconds to midnight, “the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been”. I kept hoping we’d make more space to listen to each other, more space to understand (and disagree), but we didn’t.
I felt this acutely last weekend, when I saw two movies that have been haunting me since. One is Cristi Puiu’s MMXX, the other is Radu Jude’s Nu aștepta prea mult de la sfârșitul lumii (Don’t expect too much from the end of the world). Twenty years ago, Puiu became the Romanian filmmaker to watch. And Jude is the one who has arguably held that role for the past decade. Both movies spend three hours tackling modern day turbo-capitalist-recession-powered-post-pandemic Romania in a big city of many small individual tragedies. Yet they couldn’t be more different.
Puiu’s four vignettes circle his usual obsessions: fear, illness, death, and the impossibility of communication and connection. A distracted therapist fails to pay attention to a narcissistic client. A hospital fails to pay attention to the humanity of a patients during COVID, hiding behind rules and regulations. Families fail to pay attention to one another’s distress, embracing various forms of solipsism.
Puiu’s view of life has always been dark and tragic: we are dying a little every day, and on this journey we fail to make ourselves understood. If there is any kind of individual freedom in a world of evil (that wants to tempt us), shouldn’t it be used to pay attention to others, for that rare and fleeting moment of grace when we see ourselves as deeply flawed?
I have heard him say a version of this over and over – in his movies, in Q&As, in his kitchen many years ago, when I wrote about him. Back then I was absorbed by his intensity, and deeply moved by his somewhat obsessive quest. There is a scene in the making of to The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu, where Puiu screams at his crew that a man is dying (in the film), and they aren’t paying attention. It was fiction, it was work, but Puiu’s aim (even on set) was to recreate the conditions in which everyone had a chance to embrace that tragic moment. Look at the dying man. We owe him that.
There is some of that in MMXX, but it’s coated in bitterness, not love. We are farther away from one another, Puiu seems to say – even therapists, supposedly paid to listen and see us, are too busy contemplating their vacations. And we are farther away from each other because evil has made our selfishness worse – evil in this case being the protective COVID measures. Rules and regulations and processes make connection impossible. We stop caring if someone is hurting – just make sure rules are followed. We stop seeing real threats (not COVID, Puiu suggests, but human traffickers and assorted monsters). Individual freedom is gone. We have become slaves. (This comes from the film and it’s so preachy that, I admit, I rolled my eyes.). With freedom gone, evil triumphs.
Jude, who is ten years younger than Puiu, is not necessarily more optimistic about where Romania is. Angela, a production assistant, is being worked to death by her careless employers in an advertising agency that seems to be made up of people capable of justifying any hurt they inflict as long as it keeps them employed. The fear turns into a form of dissociation that is ripe for abuse. Angela scours a mad Bucharest traffic for people with work-related injuries to cast in a commercial no one cares about. They don’t care about the project, and they certainly don’t care about the people they are casting. The final chapter of the movie is a dark but all too credible scene of an entire film crew ignoring the tragedy of the family delivering a worker safety testimonial in favor of the wishes of their foreign employer (basically to not tell the true story that makes the culpable party, which they are).
Angela has a hard time caring, too: her burnout-induced rage is all consuming – her one outlet and source of agency is a series of short she posts online as a misogynist caricature of the Andrew Tates of the world.
(There are many differences between these movies – and those who know film better have written about their aesthetic better. (Read Andrei Gorzo and Veronica Lazăr’s superb analysis of Jude’s intertextual mastery, and Flavia Dima’s critique of Puiu’s didacticism – both in English.)
A simple way of putting it is that although both paint a bleak and pessimistic picture of modern urban life, Puiu’s is suffocating and didactic, while Jude’s is curious and alive. Puiu scolds individuals for being slaves to oppressive (state) bureaucracies, while Jude targets the late capitalist (corporate) systems fueling our rage and disconnection. His Angela is trying hard to hold on to her humanity, but it can’t be a personal project when you’re running around for 16 hours a day, for barely any money, and are gaslit to betray yourself constantly in the process.
*
Both are three hour-long art house movies. But they’re also two visions of the world at odds, if not in open conflict: a sense of threatened individual freedom (often felt by people who still hold power), and a sense of rage from people who never had enough power to bend the world their way. We will keep seeing this over the next year, and all through the next elections (in Romania and beyond): people fearful of a changing world which keeps expanding rights and definitions and categories, and people fed up with the slow pace of this change.
I’ve seen many in my generation – people in their 40s and 50s – move into the first camp, even though twenty years ago they themselves pushed for things their parents didn’t have. It turns out some of those things they wanted – being first, accumulating things etc. – didn’t bring happiness. Worse: some harmed the planet, led to burnout, have turned out to be unethical or downright illegal, and are now contested. Because they’re contested more harshly and more explicitly by a young generation that’s more outspoken (they might not know what they want, but they can tell you what they’re sick of), the instinct is to fight, to write angry screeds, to fire back.
I’m thankful my father didn’t fire back those many years ago. Although he was hurt, maybe even disappointed, he hung in there. We share the same values, he told us recently, even if they show themselves differently. Or, to put it less pretentiously: we have immensely more things in common than things that divide us.
*
This space of togetherness, which I don’t think has to be in the middle, is still pretty empty. Puiu and Jude do share a sense of pessimism about the world, and even if the latter is more lighthearted, experimental and open, they are still categorical, and clinical. Doubt, vulnerability, the unavoidable clumsiness of reaching for connection is rarely part of their artistic project.
“An allergy to emotional intensity is common to Romanian artists of all generations”, reads a panel at a Picasso exhibit in Bucharest. (Itself notable for avoiding the emotional intensity of dealing with the artist’s treatment of women). “Affect is a taboo in Romanian art – putting feelings on the table seems an offense to artistic reflexivity.”
There is some truth to that. Much of Romanian contemporary art (and contemporary journalism) – often represented by pessimistic men steeped in sarcasm, cynicism, or “realism” as some would put it (because manly “facts” tower over female “feelings”) shows the world from a place of contempt, sometimes anger. “Let me show you what it’s really like. Look at this crap. And stop being so emotional about it. It’s the apocalypse, nothing cute here. The way to correct the world is by mirroring its flaws. The way to correct others is by highlighting their wrongs.”
*
I told you I have difficulties getting my students to listen to one another, that I don’t want to scold them. My therapist had a good point: did I share with them that this makes me uneasy? That it makes me feel I’m not doing a good enough job?
That is what’s missing. Plenty of people already spend enough energy highlighting the wrongs of others – and it’s not fundamentally changing our politics, our workplaces, our schools. I wish more of us would try a different route: connecting from a place of vulnerability, critiquing from a place of generosity and love. Exploring our rotten systems, and our missed connections with our hearts open to being broken.
There’s more art coming from that place – from Adina Pintilie’s You Are Another Me, to Patrick Brăila’s daring in-progress chronicle of becoming a transgender man on paper (here’s a speech of his), to Sașa Zare’s soul crushing novel Dezrădăcinare, to Alina Șerban’s one woman testimonial, Cel mai iubit copil din lume.
And there’s room for even more. We can keep writing angry letters and poisonous Facebook posts, but what if we don’t publish them? What if we engage from a place of vulnerability because we should know by now that losing one another is easy. It’s the being together that’s hard.
PS: No other recommendations; plenty in the letter above. Thank you for your kind and surprising replies and feedback over the past couple of weeks – I love receiving them. It’s been wonderful, unexpected, and generous. There are seven letters left in this writing project; I’ll do my best with them.
This one touched me deeply. I'm going to miss these newsletters!