I have some words to share and they are all about George Clooney wearing a tuxedo in Ocean’s Eleven!!
As some of you may know, I’ve signed myself up to be a resident writer at the very stylish and fashionable zine named 3shotcine, a group of very cool people in Malaysia who, like me, love movies and thinking about movies.
My first piece with them was published today - it’s titled George Clooney, Ocean’s Eleven, and the Unbearable Burden of Truth, an essay about my relationship with this movie and how it rips apart the fabric of my reality time and time again, tracing the connections between theoretical physics, 9/11, and Danny Ocean as a funhouse mirror version of the perfect husband.
A preview:
I first watched Ocean’s Eleven in the depths of 2020. Ocean’s Eleven, not to be confused with Ocean’s Twelve, Thirteen, or Eight, because eleven is the most chic number in the alphanumeric system. In writing this sentence I have just discovered that this movie came out three months after 9/11 in 2001. As I write this sentence, it is now the 11th of September. Like many of the easter eggs hidden in this movie headed by George Clooney, this fact is important to note, but its relevance has yet to be revealed to us. We shall return to it in due course. For now, file it away into the casino of your mind.
I don’t remember much from the period of my life when I first watched Ocean’s Eleven. We were in the middle of another lockdown to prevent the spread of COVID-19, and I had recently been told by my therapist that I was not, in fact, normal for staying awake until 3am, thinking about how much everyone in my life must hate me. I recall that I ate an obscene amount of polenta with mushrooms (very strange for someone who lived in Malaysia, but less strange when you consider that I was deeply Unwell, mentally speaking).
One of the few things I clearly remember is what it felt like looking up from my daily bowl of gruel and seeing George Clooney glide up the escalator of a casino wearing a tan jacket over a red shirt, his skin glowing warm from the orange light overhead. Head, shoulders, knees coming into frame, haloed by a massive chandelier in the background. Dark eyes, strong brow, hair combed back just so.
Distantly, I thought that I might be hallucinating. How could anyone move with such ease? He steps off the escalator without even looking down. It’s almost like he’s gliding towards me. Me, with my desperate fear of scraping my knee on the ridged escalator steps every time I get on. Me, gingerly tucking my shoelaces into my sneakers for fear that my foot should get swallowed and mangled by the gaps between steps. Me, too anxious about germs to clutch the handrail, yet also terrified of losing my balance and falling down. Every time I approach the end of an escalator, my mind plays out a scene of my foot colliding with the landing and twisting my ankle, collapsing and dislocating my wrist in short order. All this worry packed into my little brain. George Clooney’s easy, smooth grace in performing an everyday action felt like butter melting into the warm toast of my mind. How enchanting. How absolutely alluring…
For friends in Malaysia: The 3shotcine team and I will be hosting a film discussion about the movie Abang Adik, in conversation with Byung-Chul Han’s text Psychopolitics in December. (Likely to be 21st or 22nd Dec, at the Malaysia Design Archive.) Please come through if it interests you at all!