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After Yang, an A24 Production directed by Kogonada and released in 2021, is maybe one of my most watched movies, and one that has become a fixture of my mind.

To me, it is a masterpiece of its own kind which has gone criminally underrated and has been spoken of far less than it deserves. Maybe this is because it received no wider theatrical release, or maybe it is simply a movie that misses the wider American audience, almost by design. That isn't to say that it was a conscious decision—I have no evidence that it was—but I think the spirit of the movie and the ideas that live in it are unfamiliar to most Americans, and the method of storytelling is so far outside the “content” and “entertainment” industry that we have become accustomed to that I saw many reviews angered that it didn't live up their idea of “storytelling”, which is a concept I find very troubling. If you find the movie boring, that is one thing, but to explain it away by saying it “has no plot” or “has no conflict” is an egoistic, pseudo-intellectual way of dismissing something you simply didn't have the patience for. It doesn't give you the dopamine rush you crave, or it requires you to try enjoying something new. This is a topic for another post, some other time, but I will conclude by saying that I think many Americans may consider this film an “art film”, not because it is abstract or difficult in any way—it is a very straightforward film—but because they do not understand its slower form of storytelling or the feelings it is dipping into. To me, this is what movies should be. Not that they can't be exciting or have action; not all films need to be slow poetry, but I think they should all be art. And the gap that appears to be growing between what we consider art and what we consider entertainment is concerning, and is backed by industries that want to sell us slop while keeping us mindlessly engaged. I don't think that should we should allow art to be co-opted by these forces, and I don't think we should resign ourselves to pieces that leave our dopamine receptors clapping while we remain hollowed. But, I digress.

(Sometime I'll have to talk more about Ursula K. Le Guin's “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”, as I think this offers a different perspective on storytelling than what the typical viewer might be used to.)

I'm writing this because I think this movie deserves to have more said about it, and deserves a wider audience. I hope to at least give it the former.

I watched the movie with my father recently, and he told me that he sort of got it, but not really. He didn't understand “the message” exactly, but he seemed to pick up on a sort of intuitive understanding; something he could not put into words. And this is where I think we fail our children when it comes to art. We talk so much about “the message”, the logical understanding of a movie, a story. But any art should, I think, contain an element of poetry. And when I say poetry, I am going off a more colloquial definition, which I think we apply even to the written word; poetry is a sort of aesthetic leaning in art which I believe points to the truths that we cannot articulate. The thing you understand intuitively, the actual experience of the piece and how it moves you. The logical understanding, “the message”, comes after, and is bound to be somewhat personal.

(I would like to digress again. As I understand it, this is also how we experience life on a neurological level. We in take stimuli, and our brain processes it in different areas before our prefrontal cortex can creates a story later. It is obvious that the statement “the rain falls” is quite different from the experience of seeing rain fall. The words are how we make logical sense of life and communicate what we have experienced, and they have meaning, or maybe, more accurately, they point to the meaning in our experience. But they cannot convey the whole truth, they cannot convey the exact experience. Which I believe is fundamental to art. It is not a “theme” necessarily, or a thesis statement. It can have those things, but a piece of art with a great thesis statement still fails if does not convey feeling, if it does not convey an experience.)

It seemed foreign to my dad that the “point” of a movie might be to feel something. Yes, a plot so abstract that you can't make anything of it can be hard to get through (am I a hypocrite for falling asleep during 2001: A Space Odyssey? I was a little high). But there's nothing really abstract about the plot of After Yang. On the contrary, it is very straightforward, and I think the straightforwardness of the plot makes it an even better vehicle for the things it actually contains.

For a quick summary, the movie revolves around a husband and wife with an adopted Chinese daughter, for whom they purchased an android sibling, named Yang, specifically marketed and purposed to teach her about and connect her to her heritage. But, at the beginning of the movie, Yang “breaks”, and it soon becomes apparent there will be no fixing him. It is about what happens after Yang, after all, and remainder of the film is uncovering the life Yang lived, walking through the memories he was allowed to capture in short video clips, and dealing with the grief of losing him.

Now, I believe many “themes” can be drawn from the well that is After Yang, not all of which I am qualified to speak on. But there is something I feel is missing from a lot of the reviews I have seen, and I am hoping to lend some new perspectives on the film by sharing what I found meaningful and profound about it. I'm very passionate about this and I think I could go on at length about many of these things, so I will separate them into at least a couple different posts. How exactly I will organize those, I am not sure, but I think the first one will cover memories and their role in the movie.

Until then, if you haven't seen this movie, I would highly recommend settling down for it on a nice day and giving it a watch. It is only about 90 minutes long, best enjoyed, I think, when you're in a mood to come back down to Earth, and remember the things you truly enjoy. For days when the sun is shining through the window just right and you remember that you need to touch grass.