Tucked deep into Don DeLillo’s Underworld is an exchange between the novel’s protagonist, Nick Shay, and one of his teachers, a Jesuit priest. It concerns language. The priest, to make a point about the boy’s abysmally poor vocabulary, taunts him to name the parts that make up his shoe. Aglet, grommet, vamp, quarter; Nick has never heard of them, but instead of shrugging it off, he turns the lecture into a wake-up call. He runs back to his dorm wanting to look up words, memorize them, spell them, learn them––for this, DeLillo quips in one of his most fulminating sentences, “is the only way in the world you can escape the things that made you.” Time and again during Nele Wohlatz’s Sleep with Your Eyes Open, I found myself going back to that line. Language serves in Wohlatz’s cinema the same function it plays...
- 2/19/2024
- by Leonardo Goi
- The Film Stage
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