Artist's Date #54: Come See Me in the Good Light
When I bought my ticket to See Me In The Good Light I thought, “Well, fuck I’m going to cry throughout this whole movie,” and then that’s just what I did.
The story follows poet laureate Andrea Gibson and their partner, Megan Falley, after Andrea has received the diagnosis of ovarian cancer. The film documents them both processing the diagnosis and integrating that information into their personal lives and their relationship.
"It’s devastating," I said to a friend, who looked turned off immediately and I didn’t know how to explain that I also meant it was beautiful.
The story shows the emotional intensity of the way these two people lived, how they felt about each other and their own lives and work through the most banal and almost absurd aspects of life: trying to get and keep a mailbox to stay standing in a semi-rural area, for instance, which is how the film begins. The subject is not always performing but sometimes appropriately performing, knowing how ridiculous it would be to try and pretend a camera person wasn't there when the only thing you're doing is taking a Home Depot package out to the front of the road. Later the same work is done though the all consuming tasks of managing illness.
The camera is performing a very specific task which I’d argue is a queer lens. Most hetero film work is done through earning trust and then going in deeper. In this work the trust is assumed and then carefully tread. Nothing is shown that doesn’t feel totally given and given freely. The intimacy established through the imagery - the crystal clear days, the beautiful snow, the well made and well lived-in home, the two on the couch - is perfectly matched to the access the subjects give to the filmmakers, which is almost complete.
In a scene with a friend at the couple’s kitchen table, they are all talking about voice messages they leave for each other and they reveal one raunchy detail about their relationship. And the way the scenes circle around the table, as if you are there, makes you complicit in the best way.
Andrea's partner, Meg, is a glimmer. I use that word not to suggest that she’s not as forceful as Andrea as a person or artist but that she serves as this other definition of a glimmer – which refers to “micro-moments of connection, safety, and positive engagement that can shift our nervous system's response from defense to calm,” in one psychological framework.
I can still hear her describing the moments when she and Andrea first became romantically involved and how she was transformed by the way Andrea saw her body - a body she herself had seen critically for her whole life. When we first got together, she says something like - Andrea lifted my shirt and said "sexy, sexy, sexy" while looking at my stomach. I thought if Andrea (someone whose voice and perspective she admired) thinks this of my body then it is possible that I might be able to too.
The movie mirrors Andrea's creative thesis which is that the beauty of any piece of art is in its ability to expose what’s already there. There’s a moment where the couple is sitting across from each other on the couch and the two are reviewing material Megan has been writing. Cancer had become octopoidal, she reads out from the computer, and Andrea balks. There is a running joke among the two already about the mystery of how it is possible that Andrea has achieved the literary success that they have given their very limited range of vocabulary. They make their point at this moment - that writing ought not be used to make reality better but rather to show it in its own already good light.
As Megan tries to explain her use of the word – it is eight limbed – it’s clear that Andrea has had it. There is no room for bullshit at this point in their life. And yet they also are willing to make a movie, which means that art without pretense holds the highest regard.
The film captures how having a medical diagnosis puts you at odds with life and also requires you to manage both simultaneously. The most difficult moment of the movie is when they explore a treatment that has a possible side effect that includes losing one's voice. Given that it is the spoken word poet's main instrument, they are risking everything when they opt in. They do lose their voice and as they walk treatment back it becomes more and more clear that their last days are near.
Later, Andrea is in pain and they go to an appointment, after which they get news that the cancer is no longer present in the way that it was. The numbers on the charts are the best they’d been in some time and the two celebrate with a renewed hope for more time. However, some weeks or months later (this wasn’t clear) the numbers change – and there’s little hope left.
Why had things looked differently when they had felt worse? Why was the medical picture so dire when they felt more well? Why, in the two’s poetic reference, had one dove in their yard returned without their life-long mate in tow? Why should a person who made their whole lives exploring the possibilities outside of gender be punished for the same body they had questions about to begin with! As a non-binary identifying person, Andrea points out that had they transitioned, they would have been less likely to have a specific condition that killed them.
We are left with a lot of what this couple was left with and so many people get left with when the story of their lives becomes entangled with illness. That death often visits the wrong seeming door and unfairly so. That our wish that a good heart means a good death is unfounded, and yet some of us wish and work toward a good life regardless.