A note to the reader: This is a relatively dark post, so I want to reassure anyone reading—particularly my friends and family—that I am okay (I promise!). I just want to explore those seasons in my life that feel especially hard, where I really do feel a deep (but irrational) sense of self-hatred and despair that I think is common among people my age. As you read this, please keep that in mind!
It’s hard to love someone when you hate yourself. You want your loved one to have a good life, one that involves you. But when you hate yourself, you can’t picture how your beloved could have a good life with you in it. After all, you are in your life, and you hate you. If you really loved someone, and you really are as bad as you say you are, you should probably love from a distance.
But we know things aren’t quite this simple. Even if you hate yourself, there are probably people in your life who are so beautiful, so valuable that there is no conceivable way you could love them from a distance. I think about my children, two boys who love me so deeply in ways that I feel so undeserving of. They do not care how much I dislike myself; they just want to wrestle with me, snuggle with me, play pretend with me. They just want to be with me, even if there are times when I do not want to be with me. There are times when my bones feel like a thousand pounds, but when I hear Oliver say, “Come and get me, Dad!” I forget about that. But then I remember it a few hours later. And then Oliver is cute again. And so on.
I think, too, about my wife, a woman who also loves me in ways I most definitely do not deserve. She cares about what I deal with, the fact my bones feel like they weigh a lot, and that I am perpetually stressed out. It’s embarrassing to struggle and have someone shoulder many of your emotional burdens, even when that person is so kind that they could never fathom doing anything else. Still, she keeps me.
Aftersun is, in large part, about dynamics like these, ones where you are trying to love someone when you cannot stand yourself. The movie is about a single father named Callum who takes his daughter, Sophie, on a trip to Turkey in the late 90s. We don’t know much about the context of the relationship beyond the fact that Sophie lives with her mother and Callum has been separated from them for a while now. But we soon learn that this trip is Callum’s last attempt at rekindling his relationship with his daughter, which has been hard to keep since his divorce.
Sophie is 11, an age where you are aware of enough to know when something is going on with your parents but not quite old enough to understand what that something is. When they go snorkeling, Callum is visibly stressed out about Sophie losing her expensive goggles in the water. When they visit a local carpet store, he awkwardly declines to buy a carpet Sophie is interested in. There is even one night during their stay when Sophie comes back to the hotel to see Callum passed out naked on their bed, to which she responds by tucking him in and reassuring him that everything is okay when he apologizes in the morning. Sophie sees that something is wrong, that Callum clearly does not have enough money for this trip and is generally not doing well. And even if she does not fully understand why he’s not doing well, she loves him. She reassures him that he doesn’t have to pay for singing lessons so she could kill it on karaoke next time they go on vacation (they won’t). She rubs mud on his shoulders after he makes his shameful apology. She’s not really sure what’s going on, but she loves Callum anyway.
It’s not exactly clear to the viewer what’s going on with Callum, either. We get the sense that something tragic has happened in his past (his divorce, probably), and it seems like he is sincerely trying to keep going despite that. Much of Callum’s motivation in organizing the trip that he clearly cannot afford seems to be just that, an attempt at trying to keep going. He is also constantly doing tai-chi, a thing I’ve heard is a good exercise for dealing with stuff. And he’s just generally a goofy dad who likes doing cheesy dances in public that embarrass his daughter and throwing food at random people at the resort as a prank. Despite all that is going on, Callum wants to keep going and do so with Sophie in his life.
But there are other times when we see that, in fact, he can’t. I think the most harrowing part of the film is when Sophie asks him just a couple of days before her birthday, “When you were 11, what did you think you’d be doing by now?” It’s one of those questions a child asks innocently and naively but cuts so deeply at the heart that it’s difficult to even make up an answer that makes sense for a child to hear. Callum never answers her; the gap between what he wanted at 11 and where he is at 31 is too yawning. He presumably did not want to be a divorced, single father who makes impulsive financial decisions and struggles with maintaining relationships. But here he is. Birthdays seem to remind him that the gap between his childhood dreams and adult reality is even more impossible to bridge as he ages. “I can't see myself at 40,” he tells a random boat employee. “Surprised I made it to 30."
Callum wants to dance with his daughter, to hear about the boys at her school and the parties she goes to. But he’s too frenzied and full of despair to keep going.
I don't think we know enough about Callum to make a judgment about his life. We don’t know, in particular, why he divorced, doesn’t live near his family, can’t maintain relationships in his life, and is struggling financially. We just know he is a father who wants to keep going but can’t. This precludes us from trying to moralize Callum’s situation by condemning him (“He’s completely at fault for his situation, and he’s a pathetic loser for not wanting to continue anymore!”) or glorifying him (“He was just an innocent person who suffered unfairly!”) If it was not already clear enough, I am not trying to make Callum into some virtuous hero, and I think the ambiguity of his history is the film’s effort at precluding us from doing so. No hagiography, no hit pieces. Instead, we just see a father who hates himself but tries to love his daughter anyway, and we see a daughter who loves her father and wants to help him even though she is mostly in the dark about what he is dealing with.
I imagine many relationships are like this, though in less dramatic ways. It is just a basic fact of our existence that, no matter how much you know someone and no matter how empathetic you are, you will never have the first-personal experience of suffering as they do. There might be days when you can hardly move and all you can think is “I hate myself and I want to die.” But then there is a child in front of you, a spouse in front of you, or someone else who loves you and calls you to them. After watching Callum in Aftersun, I will do my best to go to them, even when everything in me says I don’t deserve to.
The 2nd link maaaaan
Certified banger.
To leave poor me thou hast the strength of laws,
Since why to love I can allege no cause.