Horse Girl

If there was one movie I was looking forward to seeing it was Horse Girl.

I was excited to see it because I heard it was about lucid dreaming. I am always down for any representation of the dream realm. Unfortunately, this didn’t turn out to be the center of the movie. Still, I couldn’t look away. I really liked it.

Netflix itself is an amazing dream, because they go full bore into so many little nooks and crannies. Everyone has their own nooks. Horse Girl is in one of mine.

I don’t know anything about horses except that they are very difficult to draw. Thankfully, this movie has very little to do with horses. Horse Girl, as a title, is not representative of the movie. That’s okay. Sometimes titles are very representative (THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP) or underline some central idea (INCEPTION), but they don’t have to be. Titles can also be just a hint, or a small mystery, a handle to jiggle while you take a trip through another person’s mind.

In this case that was Sarah’s mind.

I have to say, this movie really impressed me. Yet I shouldn’t recommend it because it is a very difficult watch. I can see most people being variously bored, nonplussed, unimpressed, or incredulous. Some of the scenes can feel very slow, and some of the tricks are reused a lot, presumably to drive certain ideas into your mind again and again, and it’s like they’re making the same point over and over, a point we already understand. At that point it doesn’t do any good to continue to belabor it. It’s like they’re, how do you say, well I forgot the phrase.

Yet especially in the slow parts, I believed in the reality of the movie. It felt like real life at times. The acting was quite honest. I believed that these were real people. And that’s a really important impression for a movie like this. It wouldn’t work without that.

Because a movie like this is about an alternative to reality. Most people might describe it as mental illness or being plain nuts. In that sense it can feel quite horrifying at times. There’s that sense that something is coming, and perhaps you sense it or you don’t, or the people around you sense it. An alternative experience.

Sarah’s experience is what I thought my experience would be. Or, one of the possible ones. For many of my teenage years I was 100% certain that one day I would have a psychotic break and lose touch with reality completely. I would wake up each day feeling sure that next year, or maybe five years from now, or tomorrow, I would either be dead or in an institution. A lot of my time was spent mentally preparing myself for this eventuality. I needed to guard against the terror of not knowing, not understanding, not realizing how each moment was connected to the next, of being unable to suss out for myself which way was up. When the time came, I would need to accept that my time here was done for. It was important to not cling to anything because in my mind that’s what really hurts as a “crazy” person. You try to hold on to something and it’s always the wrong thing. It doesn’t match up with what the universe has planned for you. Of course, it impossible to plan around your own insanity. But I had contingencies in contingencies. If it happens this way, if I still have these mental faculties, if this method of testing reality proves amenable, if I can just remember one of these moments, if I can just believe one person from my life, if I commit to this no matter what, what would I be willing to be wrong about, which delusions could I feel comfortable with being my last thoughts, what’s a belief I would cling to even in the face of death, could I trust someone else to define reality for me, could I live being so tethered, could I last in locked room, could I if, if I could, if I could, if I could. If I could be ready, If I could just be okay with however it has to happen. If I could forgive myself beforehand.

How quickly it could all go, no? I mean we think things continue because that’s what they’ve done for so long. But there is no sacrosanct rulebook that the universe plays by. Tomorrow blue could be red. The sun could just never come up. You could meet a horse and a half tomorrow. You don’t know. You believe, and you have good reason to believe. But that’s all it is.

And if you happen to believe the wrong thing a little too much, or a little too easily, you could suddenly be adrift in a very, very strange place. Maybe to everyone else it looks the same as it always did. But what use is that. You aren’t everyone else. You’re you. You’re the only person you’ll ever be. That’s it. So even if other people know, or see, what use is that really? I’m sure it happens to all of us to some degree. It doesn’t have to be a complete break. There are many degrees of broken. And it can be like a cell phone dropped too frequently, invisible fractures developing, and then the next time is one time too many, and it shatters all over your foot. You’re bleeding, stomping around to the bathroom, getting dizzy, wondering whether you should call someone or whether this is worse than it seems, and then you feel kind of tired but you can’t rest because you should really clean up this mess, and then you drift off on the cold tiles holding a wad of paper towels, and have one last dream about the smell of copper.

What impressed me the most is that we always stay with Sarah. I think a lesser movie would meander a bit further into other people, and give the viewer much more to hold on to. It would give us more assurances. It would also have been very easy for the movie to be moralizing. To have some well-meaning agenda. But this movie isn’t about that. It’s about Sarah and only Sarah. To me, it did a good job of portraying each moment of her experience. There was a definite chain of logic to her reasoning. Her reactions always felt earned. Her relationships with other people were exactly hers. Where there were gaps, and there definitely were gaps, those were the gaps in Sarah. A lesser movie would have filled those in with excess. I think this told her story with as little as possible. Well, with as much Sarah as possible, and with as little of anything else as possible. And that’s all I wanted out of it.