Light Sleeper

or, How to Get Through It

I watched this for the first time in the early months of the pandemic. I’d not been to Manhattan in months and was craving a closer view than what I had from my Queens apartment. Also, Willem Dafoe? I’ve a weakness for aliens with excellent jawlines. Click, buffer, play. When the early 90s Manhattan came on screen, I knew this movie would fix me in the same way an eggandcheeseonaroll can a rough morning.

Maybe its my age, maybe it was the sense that life in New York was feeling somewhat terminal. Everything about this movie was hitting in every way. The neon, the early 90s hair, and godammit even Susan Sarandon was great as the gravitational center of this movie’s characters.

We orbit along w Dafoe, as LaTor, a man with a surface life, a fake name, and the robotic smoothness of a long-time player. A man who has survived his hedonism era and is now doing steady work delivering drugs to high end clients and paying his way w a series of single-use subway cards. Everyone he knows is getting ready to move on. What is his plan? He doesn’t know anything other than who he’s meeting next.

That’s the thing that Schrader, our king of “In Search Of” as a genre, spends his time telling: that a life propelled only by habit runs a high risk of simply sputtering out.

I clicked play for the skyscrapers and stayed for the low-key ennui. All the plot twists of the drugs and sex, all the oh that really is the Upper-East-Side aside; seeing a character who’s survived a minefield only to have stalled out in comfortable empty stasis was smashing the oof button labeled “pot kettle.” What was I doing, writing emails from my couch and shopping from my bed while the covid bodies were stacked in freezer trucks in Brooklyn?

I was riding my bike to meet my friends in parks. I was doing a book club with my mom, aunt and cousin. I was stumbling onto a perfect movie for this moment. What strikes me is the way it shows the after-party of mid-age, how tender it can be, how it has earned the realness of its close relationships. And, how easily that wealth can be overlooked.

And, what floored me: the end of the movie — one of the most significant gestures I’ve even seen on film. A woman reaches her hand out, and a man takes it with both of his, holds it to his face for an interminable moment. Partnership. Caring. Doom. Penance. Salvation.