Opening Up: 2022 Year in Review Intro
A 2022 reflection from someone living perpetually in retrospective
Rather than write a separate preamble for each of my planned year-end posts, I’ve decided to put together just one introduction for my usual salvo: A messy and occasionally insightful reflection on the (messy and occasionally insightful) year I’ve had, which should hopefully illuminate why the art I’ll be highlighting spoke to me the most. Strap on your seatbelts—we’re about to get personal.
Be sure to subscribe to my newsletter for the actual lists, which will hopefully be coming out fast and furious over the next few days, culminating in my annual Top 25 Films video!
In Catholic school, I was taught that theology was faith seeking understanding: Our attempt at knowing something inherently unknowable. I’d like to believe this isn’t borne out of hubris. The basic premise of theology, after all, is that it is an asymptotic endeavor: A divinity that lent it to finite human understanding would be no divinity at all. We do it both despite and because of its impossibility. There is something beautiful about it, then, this clumsy effort at holding infinity in a cup, if only to grasp it for a moment.
In those same classes, we learned that God could be understood through beauty, because in bearing witness to something beautiful, we could approximate the sublime. This appealed to me, being as it was an interpretation of God as something more profound than a bearded man in the sky, unmoored by the constraints of existing within the bounds of human imagination. In this paradigm, beautiful things allow us to directly experience a transcendental, supranatural God like a door suddenly cracked ajar. In some cases, beauty might even kick the whole damn thing down, if only for a second.
And thus, in the words of the Lebanese poet and painter Khalil Gibran, we live only to discover beauty. All else is a form of waiting.
I have discovered that beauty most consistently in art, which is why it is almost second nature for me to talk about art in the same breath as God, even as my own Catholic piety has ebbed and flowed over the years. Much like the divine, art is the elephant we blind men spend our days trying to describe, and each of our stabs at explanation says just as much if not more about us as it does about art. If we are likening art to faith, then writing about art must be an attempt at a personal theology, spurred from those among us who see beauty in such things by some mysterious force urging us towards transcendence.
I believe that this mysterious force is what draws us to God and to art, and in fact, it is the same one that draws us to each other as well. It is a gravity that emanates from us, beckoning us to enter into the orbits of others, to open ourselves up to be seen and understood or read to filth, to feel that twinge of the divine that comes with loving and being loved. So elemental is this force that I can’t seem to stop describing it in terms reserved for physics textbooks: This desire to know and be known.
For lack of a better word, let’s just call it loneliness.
2022 was the loneliest year of my life. This is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, my being able to admit that is one of the most important lessons I’ve taken from it.
The material conditions that led to it—chief among them being half a world away from almost everything I’d ever known for most of the year—are nothing new, but living through them has allowed me to better understand the virtues of loneliness, an emotion that is often minimized in a world where human interaction has become a friction to be slowly sanded over by convenience. In a year that saw me exploring the different ways in which I could relate with others as well my own capacity to be seen and connected with, I have turned loneliness over and over in my hand, slowly making peace with the fact that I will always be pulled this way or that, sending out and responding to signals from each other’s alien universes.
It’s no wonder, then, that so many of this year’s standouts in film and music to me deal in this push and pull between isolation and connection, with loneliness as the moon facilitating these tides of human relationship. The best movies of 2022 centered on stories that invited us to understand (the remembered parent-child dynamics of Aftersun and The Fabelmans, the mystery-box flirtations in Decision to Leave and One Fine Morning) and characters that longed to be understood (the three-man weaves of Girl Picture and Paris, 13th District, the different portraits of alienation in Benediction, Return to Seoul, and The Banshees of Inisherin). In music, artists like Carly Rae Jepsen, Weyes Blood, and MJ Lenderman trafficked extensively in charting the contours of loneliness, both in the context of the past three years and beyond. To listen to them is akin to learning how to navigate with stars.
These pieces of art have helped me arrive at many small epiphanies over the past 12 months, and when taken together, they’ve hammered at one big one: To be lonely is to seek understanding, and that is nothing to apologize for.
Listen to your loneliness, then, and do not let your past lock you away from life. There is a bigger world out there than the one that met your vulnerability with coldness. Allow yourself to imagine that world again. Let your loneliness make you brave.
The world is not as cruel as you might think. After all, you are in it.
I hope that, as you go through these lists, you find something that speaks to you in the same way and inspires you to check it out, in that mysterious way all revelations of the divine whisper to us. If you do end up doing so, I’d love to hear all about it.
I realize the essay above might have already tipped you off as to what my favorites of the year are going to be, but I hope you stay tuned for the rest of my end-of-year content! This is also the first real personal piece I’ve written in god-knows-how-long, so any and all feedback would be appreciated.