Dreams & Cinema as Polar Horizons: On Diana Hamilton's The Awful Truth

Diana Hamilton's The Awful Truth (Golias Books, 2018) is reviewed by Ryo Yamaguchi for the Michigan Quarterly Review, and it's a rigorous, insightful read. Yamaguchi notes the concerns of the book: "dreams ... but also persuasion, the impulse to write, wanting to feel better, research, bibliography, and fucking that."

Even further, Yamaguchi writes that Hamilton's "dream has chosen you, and given you this act of love, which is itself. My god. So you see this isn’t a book of dreams, heavy with symbolism (sharp with structuralism), nor really a book about dreams, but of or about dreaming, as an action, a thing we do and then think about after, assess perhaps, for quality and purpose, for its puzzling irreducible (imperfectly analyzable) presence. And there is so much more: reading, dreams, analysis, and this search for, if I can use this term as neutrally as possible, well-being (both personal and public, both need and justice)." More:

At least, that’s section one, which by the way is titled “Write in Your Sleep.” Section two is titled “Fear and Trembling,” and here the self and life and needs for wellness remain, but now the instrument is no longer dream or dream analysis but cinema (as I had mentioned). Hamilton is fairly direct in the project: where dreams are a form of writing, or active writing, cinema is a form of non-writing, or of predetermined writing, and this predetermination can provide, in fact, a kind of healing—it only requires matching one’s life (and concerns, obsessions, entrenchments, so on) to a specific film. Vis, with apologies for the ellipses:

If I could talk sense into my friends, I’d ask them to give up; I would tell them to enter the movies. With their lines written in advance, they would be freed from the anxiety of wordlessness—except where they were directed to express it—and freed too from the burden of getting over it. Take Joey, one of my oldest friends, a writer whose fantasies of control are even bigger than most poet’s. . . .  By getting him to admit that all of his problems centered around his frustrated relationship with masculinity. . . . it didn’t take me long to identify exactly which film he should continuously relive, although it took much longer to convince him to stop writing. We deliberated one night over dinner and figured out it had to be Cary Grant’s role in His Girl Friday.

And as such section two variously elucidates the psychic underpinnings of specific films as they relate to the author’s friends — her therapeutic subjects — whom she guides along toward the discovery of their prewritten lives and, thereby, a truer, actually successful therapy in place of the failing one they have otherwise been attempting, namely, writing. Give up, she says, and the pessimistic resignation is definitely dark, but if you have guessed it, yes, it is also really funny, tongue-in-cheek, friendily jesting, and immensely readable in an almost magazine sort of way when the writer is especially in command of the sociality of the writing. Which is to say you really ought to just read this book because you will lose track of time in doing so.

Find the full review here.