📒 media log: jeanne dielman, 23 quai du commerce, 1080 bruxelles

there’s kinda a spoiler in here.

Mais tu ne peux pas savoir, tu n’es pas une femme.

I’ve never lived with my grandma before, not until this summer. I have learned how living together, seeing each other's daily motions, how we each pass the time, is this quiet, heavy thing.

I track dust into the house, into rooms that weren’t being used before my arrival, so there’s more to clean. And 할머니 is the cleanest person I know. She cleans every thing every day. Pointing to the pristine pot she’s had for over 40 years, she tells me about how her in-laws would make digs at her - and where’d you get the money for this? But it’s just that she takes really good care of her things. Meanwhile, the things i use always get ground down. No matter how hard I try to pay attention, my things seem to have this penchant for looking old. My mom says I use things like my dad. There’s a lot of dust in my life, and I tend to let it pile up.

할머니’s cleaning habits annoyed me when I first arrived. Her probing broom + persistent wash cloth constantly in the corner of my eye felt reflective of too much idle time, the strictness of tidying up and ordering an otherwise unruly world, a fear of uncleanliness, an incessant searching for things to be put back in place, work to be done - nagging and neurotic.

할머니 talks to me about how depressed she is, how dead she has felt in her relationship to my grandpa and all the carework he demanded - early in their marriage and after his health started to deteriorate too. Ever since he moved out of the apartment and into bright rooms at the hospital, she’s been left at home, in the apartment, by herself. Taking care of the house passes a few hours, but with the time she has left in the day, she doesn’t really want to go outside. There’s something about the apartments in Korea that feel especially isolating - the density of all these homes stacked up on top of each other but the unsettling silence, being suspended so high up above the ground, the steel railings outside the windows.

Jeanne Dielman’s apartment is a lot like my grandma’s. It’s not a sterile kind of clean - it still has texture, still feels very lived in. But there’s no dust anywhere, not a single minute of electricity wasted. The shower-head-less, curtain-less bathtub, where u must crouch like an animal and slowly pour the water over your dirty body, is familiar.

Watching her tenderize the veal on a big theater screen felt necessary. Watching her peel the potatoes felt necessary, like paying a debt for not having helped my 할머니 peel potatoes the night before.

I feel a distinct distance from the kind of womanhood immortalized in Jeanne Dielman. In two generations, a combination of some migration + some wins for feminism + some gender trubble + some class mobility has plopped me in the privileged position of not having to take care of anyone but myself, let alone a man. But maybe it does linger…in the way I have this itching hunch, a persistent self-consciousness that I do not do enough of this kind of carework, and that I should always be doing more, to prove I’m good. I’ve always felt this quiet magnetism, orienting the compass of my life decisions so that I’ll be ready to take care of my aging parents in the future. I do want to take care of the people that I love. And at the same time, I feel really comfortable receiving care and feel guilty about that comfort.

One day, i help 할머니 pickle some cucumbers. She doesn’t remember the proportions, so she has to look up a recipe. She makes a comment, with a tinge of embarrassment, about how she used to know all of this by heart but just doesn’t cook a lot since living by herself. 아무것도 땡기지도 않고. She doesn’t want to do anything anymore. Everyday I’ve been with her, I have witnessed how worn down she is now.

With the harrowing stillness of the movie’s last scene, I ask everyone watching…who will keep doing the cleaning? The maintaining? Why does it seem like it’ll always end up being the same people?

What would our world be if 할머니 was granted a life where she could have done whatever she wanted, every day of her precious life?

Jeanne Dielman gives us a glimpse. The world might crack open, it might just explode. The old world could die.

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