David and I finished watching Michael Winterbottom’s Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story last night. Based, of course, on Laurence Stern's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, which I haven’t read, the movie kind of tells the story of the life and birth, which it can barely get to, of Tristram Shandy. In the movie the story of the book is itself barely seen, as the story of the crew making the movie becomes increasingly important.

Appropriately enough, as the subject of the film is, in large part, digression, David and I had had to divide it in two, watching in the hour or so between Henry's bedtime and our own on Wednesday and then Thursday nights. I’m not going to now tell you about that intervening day, which was spent for me, anyway, in some frustration, from the point of view of work and potty training, because I’m not interested in digressing from my discussion of the movie to show you that I know the movie is about digression. Except unfortunately I am, as the movie understands, caught entirely in a web of digressions from which I vainly try to manufacture a linear life, and so I’ve digressed, and each word I write takes me a farther from what I started to say, and will continue to say, once I stop writing this.

I loved the movie and in fact spent part of the day after we saw the first part of the movie specifically in anticipation of seeing the second part of the movie. Thinking, I can't wait to see the end of the movie! But then, in the end, what is funny about the movie, apart from the funny parts, is that even though the movie builds to a conclusion, and in fact was conceived and built to make precisely the point that nothing in life or narrative is as satisfying as the lack of satisfaction one gets from the beginning of things—structure and closure and an ending being impossible, and shitty—even though the movie knew this, and planned on this, the ending still wasn’t satisfying. Intellectually, I was impressed. But I was not satisfied.

There's a connection, in my mind anyway, between Shandy and Jean-Pierre Melville's Army of Shadows: Both are concerned with the creation of story from no story. Melville's movie, about a band of French Resistance fighters, starts out sporadically, episodically, a series of scenes without direct links between them. As it continues, though, the links become clearer, and the story becomes, clearly, a story about how the life that seems episodic, scattered, based on chance, is in fact anything but that. The scenes become the story, and the story is that scenes add up, luck runs out, and everyone is killed.