I had a bit of trouble writing this entry. Not that it was stressful or anything, it most definitely wasn’t, but Carol was a movie that affected me more personally than I was expecting. Forgive me for deciding to keep some elements of my reaction undisclosed.

Fortunately, director Todd Haynes composed one shot which nicely represents the feelings his film evoked in me. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the shot through an image search and ASCII art is a bit hard to do here, so this is the best visual aid I could generate:

In the scene, our protagonist Therese (Rooney Mara) is at a party hosted at a friend’s apartment. At first, she stands in the frame of the right window, talking with some friends (or friends of friends or whatever) about who-rembers-what (it’s one of those conversations). She then leaves their company and moves across the room so that she is framed by the left window. She stands alone for a moment, but then a woman who has been watching her all night (Carrie Brownstein) approaches her. They make brief small talk, and the scene ends with the woman tellingly saying something to the effect of “I see why your ex-boyfriend speaks so highly of you.” As this conversation occurs, Therese’s friends continue talking amongst themselves, occupying the same space while also existing completely apart from the two women. At no point does anyone in Carol say “lesbian”, “homosexual”, “gay”, or anything of that nature. Acts of kindness, acts of malice, statements of resignation, statements of indignation, and the bluntly invisible words that go unsaid reveal the truth regardless.

For reasons I can’t quite explain, there is something about being gay that produces an intuitive sense of otherness. It’s not particularly acute and it only occurs ever so often, but it happens. Therese and her admirer aren’t that different from everyone else, not really, but here they are, separated from everyone else anyways.