siegfried liu
Because one is meant to feel rejuvenated in the gentle breezes of spring, rowdy under pouring steamy summer rain, and solemn beside a solitary winter. Around the calendar, every season proposes a pure emotion for humans to experience, a complete contradiction to the internal truth of a species in constant search of meaning.
We come from pastures with no paths, and treaded until there are. Then some of us, the wise or foolish ones, which we all are sometimes, took a revolutionary step onto the grass once more, yet somehow, we are sad that we lost both the green and the brown. Fall describes that emotion. Millennia of melancholy condensed into three months of transition, hesitation, and reflection. A time of utter uncertainty about the coming cold and a faint light at the other side.
Fall becoming synonymous with withering is not a coincidence. Leaves crumble, animals die, and we cave people start to lose our minds over the concept of inevitability. Much like twilight, fall pops the facade that we try so hard to maintain. It forces us to reconcile with the incomprehensible, not to mention irreconcilable, fact that we are fishes in the ocean trying to make the best of the situation that we are placed in. Fallen leaves can be crunchy, yet soggy after rain. Autumnal gusts can be chilling, yet refreshing at the peak of day. This emotional state of being perfectly matches with the existential selves travelling between our hearts and brains, pulling logic and feeling into a jumbled mess called life.
Spring takes a brisk walk, in awe of flourishing. Summer sprints, full of passion. Winter stands still, looking back at where we came from. Fall is when we trip and fall into the ground, scrape our knees, tear up, and lie in our warm cozy beds sipping hot chocolate and watching a movie.
Humans love melancholy, because it upsets the apple cart. Too often we put an address in the GPS and zone out until the voice says “the destination is on your right”. This habit is not the natural state of being for life with an innate urge to wander. Melancholy is the stranger that we keep running into who shoves us off the road into the green pastures, shaking us from following that path to uninterrupted death we were on and instilling that immense sense of cluelessness and hesitation. By “cluelessness and hesitation” I don’t mean being unaware or uninformed. On the contrary, it is a state of existence caused from suddenly regaining a flooding consciousness so that one is terribly overwhelmed. To me, it feels like a misty-eyed wanderer letting that hazing layer of film slip off, finding themself in the middle of a green pasture. Not knowing how they got there or how to leave, they simply stand there, gazing at the horizon as a breeze blows over their cheek and makes their shirt flow. It is the emotion of leaving a late night conversation beside the fireplace with friends who you by some miraculous slip of the cosmic operations found, and now sitting alone for that heart-to-heart to marinate into wine. It reminds me of a painting by one of my friends, in which musical notes fall off the page onto the piano, eventually to bounce back within the five lines. Fall is the low among the highs, and high amidst the lows.
In our pursuit of recreating the sensations of fall, we produce the motifs that are now so commonly associated with the season of cold drizzling rain and warm delicious pastries, and, most importantly, melancholic hesitation. This natural creation of connotations builds the foundation for the media to capture and heighten every sense of it. In the manner that the media does best, it finds a way to intensify emotions by layering them on top of each other to paint shades of teal, burgundy, and pumpkin orange from the joy of comfort, sadness of the cold, and fear for the future.
Standing over the field saying a prayer at sunset, The Angelus by French painter Jean-François Millet depicts two peasants concluding their work in the field with a worship of God, and perhaps a reminiscence of something else. Millet finished the painting in 1859, catching onto the end of the authoritarian years of the Second French Empire. It was a time of stunning economic growth, dwindling civil rights, and enforced social order. I do not know whether the financial improvement of the empire extended to its citizens. The two peasants in the painting don't seem more concerned about the economy of their distant ruler than their prayer of gratitude and a good harvest of potatoes. Far in the distance, a vague outline of a church appears on the plain landscape under a yellow sky. Millet’s capturing of this routine moment in neutral and warm colors gives the viewer a sense of comfort and resolution, yet leaving the option to feel concerned for the farmers open. Will they get a good harvest? Will they have a relatively comfortable winter? Do they know that millions of people will try to guess the content of their prayer beside the literal text? Are they truly not concerned with these questions, or is the feeling of standing in an open field that their sweat dripped on all day overwhelming in the slight breeze and twilight? We will never know, and us looking at the painting pondering these questions makes us no different from the people in the painting. Harvesting is indistinguishable from the element of the human experience of fall, and stillness lies even deeper in us.
We love the sensations of fall so much that we seek to recreate fall in the media in every situation and every season. Catharsis screams fall, a final reconciliation with the world. Until, of course, the next story beat comes along and we go through the process with a richer foundation once again.
The classic soundtrack One Summer Day by Joe Hisaishi in the movie Spirited Away epitomizes fall in other seasons. As the title suggests, the story takes place in the backdrop of summer. Chihiro’s family stumbles into an abandoned town on the way to their new home. In a twist of fate, Chihiro’s parents are turned into pigs, blissfully ignorant of their transformation. Chihiro overcomes various challenges and makes several friends until she successfully rescues her parents, only to realize that they don’t have recollection of what happened. The fairytale Chihiro experienced remains solely in her memory, and leaks into her internal revelations. Despite her parents physically by her side, Chihiro stands alone in the forest, before a dilapidated structure and a leaf-covered car. Summer heat replaces the chill of fall, thus putting all discomfort on the mind. The warm wind plugs every pore on the skin, travels to the center of our chests, and allows warmth and bleakness to coexist. Even on a summer day, we still fall in fall.
After the long tradition of complicating the feelings associated with fall, the media circles back to affirming motifs related to this season. However, purely capturing fall now emphasizes it, as if creating a double fall in one attempt.
Tailless, he points at the creature in the distance. “Canis lupus,” then himself, “Vulpes vulpes”. The movie Fantastic Mr. Fox directed by Wes Anderson is set entirely during harvest season. From the plot to the color palette of the film to the animation style, nearly everything creates a warm and fuzzy ambiance. Under the guise of a child-like fantasy, the story explores the themes of dreams, expectations, and the consequences of greed. The family of Mr. Fox has to hide from the relentless pursuit of destruction by the three scary farmers, because of Mr. Fox’s dream of achievement and respect. He eventually realizes that his actions caused great disturbance to his family and other animals, and comes up with a plan to help them escape the dire situation. Orange, yellow, and brown are used throughout the film to create a physical environment of fall while simultaneously enhancing the emotional rollercoaster the plot is taking the audience on. As the sun sets on the land, Mr. Fox experiences an existential crisis of the impending yet possibly distant death of himself. He grasps for the last strands of warmth in his heart before the cold takes over, because he doesn’t know if he’s in for a harsh winter. Desperation and melancholic hesitation brews in Mr. Fox. Is his winter coming too? He doesn’t seem to know. Our journey alongside the family of Mr. Fox also doesn’t yield an answer. Perhaps that is the point of the story. He fell in fall, and climbed up again. To orbit around the same fate with a slight change of trajectory every cycle. That uncertainty is autumnal media in its purest form.
We hold onto companionship and rediscover solitude, and experience the joys of both. We fear for uncertainty ahead and shrink from what we will grow to be on the other side. The accumulation of thoughts and emotions hoarded away finds a way to squeeze through the cracks and explode into our minds. A firework shoots out from the chest and explodes in every shape and color we ever felt. We all fall in fall, then we all climb back again.