RSSUnmoored Among the Stardust
24 March 2022
Forewarning: This is going to be messy, and personal. This is largely about the series Revue Starlight; both the show and the movie. But it's necessary to digest, for me.
I understand.
Track 1 - Needing / Getting
There was a moment in Revue Starlight where I started crying. When Junna recognizes that even though Banana is big and looks after everyone, that she's sensitive and cares a lot.
There was a moment in Revue Starlight, the movie, where I had to pause and stop watching to recollect myself. When we see Karen's childhood, and her struggles with shyness. It hit very close to home.
I had felt some sort of resonance with Karen during the show; the stubbornness, the interdiction, the assertations of devotion. The way she drifted when somebody she trusted vanished. The way she has two girlfriends (lol). But the thing that hit the absolute hardest was watching her prefer to sit alone, playing a Gameboy while everyone else played in the park, until somebody called her over.
Feeling hesitant until somebody called her in.
When her friend moves away, she makes a pact, a promise, to reunite with her in the future. Revue Starlight (the series) plays up the nostalgic devotion of this pact.
Revue Starlight, the movie, breaks the glass and pulls out the artifacts, showing every ugly angle. Every moment of unhealthy dependence. Every way that Karen was coping poorly with losing a friend, and how her mother over-indulged her adherence to esoteric rules of the pact.
But Karen needed that pact. She didn't know how to move in the world without direction. Without somebody saying "come here," she didn't know where to go next. "To the stage, to reunite," the promise said.
And it was glorious.
And then it was over.
And she was unmoored.
Track 2 - I Still Remember
My senior year of high school, and high school itself, has one moment that shines brighter than any other. In the fondest arc of those memories, one climactic night.
I took drama through my last three years of high school. The last year was my greatest. There is an unmistakable type of connection you form as theatre students. It is constantly on-screen in Revue Starlight. You are all messy dramatic bitches in your own ways.
One time, a distant friend acted dismissively to me for several weeks. I confronted him in a whirlwind moment in the center of the theatre room. He paused, the room dim from old lights. He halted so suddenly and turned on the spot, as if I had thrown a javelin into the wall before him. When he responded, it was with the only bravado I knew I could expect in that room. And he apologized. The room dripped back in to reality, like icewater in the sun.
This is the energy of Revue Starlight.
In my senior year, we produced a fantastic play. It was a butchered play from the Toronto circuit, plagiarized and corrupted by every one of us in a dozen ways. The entire class took passes at editing it, until it was legally distinct from the original play. Permutation and obscurity were the tools by which we escaped.
A close friend of mine, D, was another actor in the class. He and I had often flirted in a way that would never become productive. It was a teasing not-quite-hetero edge of his. It was a bisexual crush of mine. So it goes.
Our production was a fantastic night. We got a full standing ovation, and we felt a comradery that I had never experienced before. We were exhausted by the end, giddy from success, bubbling from starlight.
The washrooms in the school had those circle fountains, the type with a ring-lever you stand on to spray a fountain of water in all directions so you can wash your hands. D and I broke from teardown to lounge in the washroom, sitting on the edge of the fountain with our wrists running under cold water, panting and sweating and laughing at everything we had done that night.
I have had many fantastic experiences, many fantastic feelings. And none is like that moment. That moment felt like rebirth.
And then I graduated.
Track 3 - The Middle
Revue Starlight, the movie, begins with Hikari declaring she can't be with Karen. She then vanishes, leaving only a note, having run back to England out of fear.
Karen is devoted. So devoted. Terrifyingly devoted. And devoted to a moment which is now passed. Hikari is scared. Utterly scared. And she's also a teenager. And they're all messy, dramatic bitches.
Been there.
Karen is devastated. She struggles to even think about where to go next in life. She has lost the thing she was focusing on, yes, but she has also lost her oldest friend. She is unsure who she even is, with Hikari gone.
She feels unmoored.
There is a lot of falling in Karen's revues. She spends a lot of time in the air, thinking, feeling little, lost, unsure of herself. The world is a roaring noise, wind ripping at her. She is incapable of moving.
I understand.
Track 4 - This Too Shall Pass
As the girls collectively confront their looming graduation, Hikari is dragged back into the auditions in a confrontation with Mahiru. Mahiru, seeing first-hand how distraught and devastated Karen is by being abandoned by Hikari, stalks her and outmaneuvers her in a fierce battle across every sport imaginable. And continues, her smashing stone tiles with her mace as she point out how fucked up it is to leave somebody suddenly like that. Hikari admits she was scared of confronting Karen. But she knows now she has to.
In Hikari and Karen's final revue, Karen goes limp, catatonic. Hikari apologizes for abandoning her, but emphasizes that she can't do this. Hikari cannot be with Karen under threat of Karen's catatonia. Karen leaves and takes a train. She is reborn in a thunderstorm of sand. "I took the train," she says, triumphantly reemerging. Hikari confronts Karen, and stabs her in the heart. Literally, though, "literally" is metaphorical in this show. But not coldly. Karen had earlier said that her "position zero" was Hikari. Now Karen wears the knife wound in her tunic (not her flesh) in the shape of position zero. The two are able to talk with a smile. In her rebirth, in the final unmooring, she found herself. She found her own stage, inside herself.
Junna quotes Shakespeare repeatedly throughout the movie. I will pull a quote that is conspicuously missing, here:
All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players
We are players on the stage of our own lives. Of our own hearts.
Hey you know what else is a life filled with acting where you constantly have to navigate feeling unmoored in a howling reality?
Masking when you're autistic.
Track 5 - Bandages
I think a lot about the way Karen has no idea how to socialize as a child. She hides behind her mother, behind the teacher, behind Hikari. Until she feels comfortable. Until she knows she's welcome.
She spends years, actual years of her life, writing monthly letters to girl who never writes back. Well, or at least, that is how it is explained to us in the series. In the movie, it is revealed that Hikari's mother has been writing back, but Karen has refused to read the letters or hear any details, because it would break the rules of her promise to Hikari.
Ah, whomst among us has not done something far beyond the point of absurdity because you accidentally promised a partner something and breaking a promise is anathema to you.
When my girlfriend and I were watching this, she asked if I had ever held on to a promise for years of my life to somebody who wasn't even there. I replied "No!!" in my most called-out voice, followed with "and I'm definitely not autistic."
I understand.
Track 6 - A Single Explosion
Behavioural Chain Analysis is a self-regulatory practice you can learn to deal with complex mood swings and PTSD episodes. It works by unwinding the chain of events that led to a bad situation (flashback / episode) and talking through what could have been done differently at all the points along the way. Not just the earliest point, but every point.
It is exhausting.
It is also one of the best ways to handle flashbacks and triggers, in my experience.
There are often multiple ways to avoid a bad situation. There are also often not as many ways as one may thing. But it helps to know what they are. It doesn't help as much to go "Next time I could do this;" next time you may not be able to. But three things? Four? Five? The number of potential interventions increases the likelihood of effective intervention.
It is hard. It helps a fuck load.
We are given so many slices of Karen's childhood, where perhaps she could've learned to unhook her obsession from Hikari. And, to be clear, it's a bad obsession. It's a rough obsession. It's an obsession that I am familiar with.
Ontario Family Courts are currently processing a massive backlog of papers from two years of a pandemic. They said I should check back in May to see how my divorce is going.
Track 7 - Disaster Hearts
I started dating my ex, N, in my first year of college. I had never been in a relationship before. (As I said, things with D never went anywhere.) They were living in an abusive household under the worst patriarch I have ever known.
The last time I saw him, he was dropping off some of my ex's belongings. He pulled up while I was working in the garage. I just so happened to have a hammer in my hands. It stayed firmly in my grip during the entire encounter. It was impossible to look at him without thinking about how he threatened to fight me on Christmas in front of his entire extended family, because he struck N as a "joke" and actually hurt her, and I defended her. He looked so meek and hesitant, on my home turf.
I didn't know what it felt like to have anybody love me like N did. It was intoxicating. It was a direction and purpose, a drive.
N didn't know what it felt like to have somebody love them like I did. It was solidifying. It was a direction a purpose, a safety.
We spent 8 years together. It wasn't all bad. But I would say maybe half of it was. They helped me transition. After we broke up, they broke their binary. We are sincerely so happy for eachother, over there, away from eachother, where we finally had the chance to grow.
But getting there was messy.
Bonding can be messy.
Holding on can be a bad idea.
When Karen latches onto Hikari's love of the theatre and takes it up herself, that isn't bad. Or the way she cares about and loves her, that isn't bad. But the way that her sense of life and purpose are tied to Hikari? The way she is unmoored without her?
That's bad.
I understand.
Track 8 - Constellations
I fell out of touch with D at some point during college. We drifted. He went and did theatre. He was close to all my friends. I lost touch with most of my friends. I was a shitty cis dude. Now I'm a kickass trans gal. Maybe things would be different if we met now. Maybe I wouldn't even like D.
I found myself reaching out to him at some point. We had a falling out over something neither of us could remember. Messy bitch shit. Once a theatre student, always a theatre student. We had a phone call over the sound of rustling spring leaves. A couple hours later, everything was better.
And then we drifted.
I drifted.
I spent so much of my life drifting.
The years after college, when I couldn't find work and N was the only thing to hold on to, were the worst. Having one person as your anchor is horrid. It's a terrible feeling. It feels empowering and intoxicating and safe and warm because the open air seems so much more terrifying.
Holding on to a lamp in the dark, because the dark is scary.
But the dark is full of stars.
And you can't see beyond the light pollution.
The image of position zero, a torn void of fabric on Karen's chest, is emblazoned on my retinas. At one point while watching I described some of the scenes as "viscerally satisfying in an un-articulatable way." Maybe I am slowly managing to. That feeling, the tear on the chest, the resonance of unmooring oneself and discovering how to be your own stage, is visceral to me.
I understand.
Track 9 - Welcome to the Breakdown
I spent most of the day after watching the movie unmoored. Nobody's fault. I stumbled across things in myself that I was unprepared for. I think I've come out of it stronger. Much love to all my partners for helping me on that path.
I have a cyclical mood disorder. Today began my down cycle. One of the hardest parts to articulate about the disorder is how "coincidence" and "causation" are stuck in a sort of permanent superposition. When the down mood is coming, anything can cause it. But it will be caused.
I also have insomnia. It is debilitating, often. Since daylight savings time began, I have had difficulty sleeping before dawn. I will lie, tossing and turning, exhausted, mind reeling, for hours. I also have a delayed sleep phase. I am naturally a night owl.
When I went to go visit my rival, Nat, I was stunned to see how many stars were visible from their place. It was overwhelming. Beautiful. Moments like that force confrontation with how much is out there. How much possibility. I sat under the stars smoking a joint and wondering how much unmooring I could handle. I didn't resolve that question until months later.
I am so familiar with those stars. I was scared of being unmoored. I found an anchor, and N found an anchor, and it was bad, because we would rather abuse eachother than be unmoored.
And we did, eventually, unmoor eachother.
And in the stardust our selves are reborn.
I understand.
Track 10 - Silence
I think about the idea of "needing direction" a lot. How often, as an autistic lady, I want direction. How terrifying lack of direction feels. And how almost every personal victory I've had is when I've learned how to define my own direction.
How to set my own position upon the stage.
How to find my own starlight.
Thanks for reading.