Wee Small Hours

You could call me a night person. There’s something I like about the night that gives you a few hours to do just what you want. I’ve always been more able to concentrate on things in the nighttime. There’s more focus, less people to meet, less people to deal with.

I think about all the stuff I did in the wee hours of the morning. 2 of the better plays I wrote. When I was in college, and sometimes pulling all nighters to get my stuff done. How I read “The Great Gatsby” until 3 in the morning and almost failed a chemistry exam the next day.

A few of my favourite movies have to do with the night. Like they have to do with a lot of journeys that take place in the night. “Crimson Gold”, about a pizza delivery man driven to rage by social inequality, takes place at night. He visits a few fairly wealthy places, and ponders, like the film maker wants his audience to do likewise, about what the delivery man sees.

There is “Collateral”, a film by Michael Mann, who is one of my favourite film makers today. In it, Tom Cruise holds Jamie Foxx hostage while he goes on a killing spree. Night is also about struggle. The night that Jamie Foxx had to get through as a hostage was a struggle, but also fairly meditative, because he gets on with Tom Cruise and talks about his life and plans. Manages to kill him (Tom Cruise) by dawn, symbolising the triumph of daylight, but what follows would probably be another dreary day driving a taxi. The characters in Michael Mann’s films, a reviewer has pointed out, are survivors, not winners. They struggle to get by, and then struggle to get by some more.

The atmosphere is broody, almost unreal. Both are loners, one a hired killer who can’t talk to that many people, and the other a taxi driver who spends most of the time driving around alone in the cab. Both are also wanderers who don’t stay in the same place for long. So even though one is black and the other white, and even though one is much richer than the other, they have a lot in common.

The night is a lonely, isolated place, where most people are asleep. There was once when I was walking through a new town when everybody was asleep. Did a quick calculation: if a block of flats had 1000 occupants each, and you had a few hundred blocks, then it was a few hundred thousand in each town. There was so much potential and capacity for life in the blocks I walked past, but all of them were asleep. And like they say, “sleep is the cousin of death”. It’s a minor concession you make with death every day until the real thing takes you away for good. So I was thinking, all that life, and nothing being done right now. Anyway, one of the appeals of keeping late hours is that you’re using some time that other people are spending sleeping, doing nothing. It’s like finding a dollar bill on the ground, except of course you need to pay it back later.

The night is meditative. When you’re up all night, maybe you’re thinking about big decisions, and maybe you’d have reached a conclusion by dawn. Like the Buddha’s enlightenment took place at dawn, after he spent all night trying to figure out why humans everywhere always live in shit.

Another film which features the night is “Nights of Cabiria”, a famous Fellini film, possibly one of my favourites. It is about the resilience of an aging prostitute which suffers setback after setback. When you see a lot of things at night, there is definitely an allusion to dreaming. She sees a person who delivers food to the poor, maybe a burlesque performance at a theatre. All these images (especially the way that Fellini shoots them, if you’re familiar with his style) have a dreamlike quality about them, because she could well have been seeing them in a dream.

Then there is Antonioni’s “la Notte”, where the night parallels the cloud that has descended over the relationship between a man and his wife.

The night has a way of framing many of the events that take place, a way of cooly distancing yourself away from things. It has a way of making you conscious that you are seeing something, but from a detached distance. When you are in a cinema, it is an artificial night too, because it’s meant to tune out all the distractions and focus you upon the visions on the screen. It’s the film maker’s way of telling you that you have to interpret them as metaphors, rather than literally, which is how you’d interpret things in a dream. The night is existential. During the daytime your attention is focused on many things that you can see before you, but during the night you don't have these things to distract you from the really big and vast questions: who am I? Why am I here? Why am I always so busy and there's nothing more for me to give? These are questions that are asked at night.

In the most famous scene of "Rebel Without a Cause", James Dean is inside a planetarium, literally facing the void. Set side by side with the documentary which narrates the creation of the universe, he realises that his whole life pales into insignificance when placed besides this. It is probably the point where the notion of "teenage angst" (highly existential in nature) entered popular culture.

I will at some point blog at length about 24 hour McDonald's joints. But it's become some of my favourite past times to go there, either buy a coffee or a large coke, and plonk myself in front of a book for 2-3 hours. It's remarkable how easy it is to get your reading done, even with the late night music blaring in your ears at that point.

Then, what of the dawn that breaks? I normally find that for all nighters the hour of 5 o'clock is the most difficult because that's when I fall asleep. Usually if I make it through there, then I can catch the sunrise, and retire at say 8 or 9.

I will remember my SISPEC graduation ceremony, because that was the day I earned my stripes. People have described it to me before, but I guess it was still interesting. We left the camp, and then we marched up elephant hill. Then as the dawn breaks, they give you your stripes. It's very cliched, but when it's the culmination of 2-3 months of a miserable existence learning how to fight in a jungle it probably means something.

The half marathon, which I had already blogged about, is also the night turning into day. It is dawn when you start out, and you get the full blast of the sun when you end. It's almost the triumph of light over darkness, of perseverance over lethargy. But I am a night person, and I also feel that with the dawn a spell is broken.

I watched "Crimson Gold" at the Singapore International Film Fest a few years ago (haven't been going down for a couple of years) and I was late for "Crimson Gold", although I knew what happened in the opening scene. The structure of the movie is that there is a dramatic opening scene, and the rest of the movie is all about the events that lead up to that scene.

Thanks to the wonders of youtube, you can now see the opening scene, one of the great cinema moments of recent memory.