November 10 – Day 54

I came to Moscow hoping to shed some of the bitterness and disillusionment that began to cover me over the last year in LA. Several people have outright laughed in my face at this thought but I don’t think it is completely without validity. I am pretty sure I am not quite as bitter and I am hoping I will return less disillusioned, but I began to notice today a new side effect of a daily existence in Russian society. I am becoming a line backer. Really. Physically, mentally, emotionally, you name it, I have started to carry myself with that ‘Fine. You wanna go? Then let’s go!’ attitude that dominates the Russian exterior. You have to be that way here. This place is brutal and if you are worried about niceties you are bound to get run over. It seems even the most basic interaction is dominated by a stare down if not a physical shoving match. The subway doors will take your arms off. Cars will speed up and graze your knee caps as you try to cross the street. Pedestrians with feet of room to spare will completely body check you because they feel no need to veer from their given path. Watching interactions between Russians is equally bizarre. People don’t address each other apologetically. There is no ‘excuse me’ or ‘would you mind…?’ It is an immediate battle with both sides barking at one another in that guttural Russian tone, but oddly enough two seconds after the interaction is resolved all parties are smiles and niceness. This place is so strange. It is not for the weak. It is not for the timid. They don’t care about your problems or your excuses; just bring it, get it done. In the same vein there seems to be no need to apologize for pure ineptitude or laziness. Thus the “That’s Russia” excuse. All this has left me in my current line backer state- shoulders down, charging forward unapologetically. Lately I have had little to no tolerance for bullshit or drama, even my own and I know I am being harsh but I really don’t care if you don’t feel emotionally prepared to go there today- if you can’t handle it, that is your problem. On set you are getting paid to break down. Figure it out. It is an icky, unempathetic feeling in the work and life but in some strange way I kinda like it, it cuts down on the drama – there is no need for it. It does pose a problem every time that I feel emotionally stuck and then become disgusted with myself but at least it is better than being bitter. It was this feeling that made me want to launch into a rage of bitch slapping against all post-revolution Soviets after watching Eisenstein’s so-called masterpiece “The Fall of Berlin.” The movie deifies Stalin so grotesquely that the heroine, who has just reunited with her lover after escaping a Nazi concentration camp, realizes that as much as she is in love, she would rather be with Stalin. (Oh yeah and apparently America sided with the Nazis in WWII.) I get that it is social realism. I get that it was made during the beginning of the Cold War but I just kept thinking how ignorant is a population that simply forgot to notice 20 million of its own citizens being tortured and executed because they had the audacity to have independent thought. Rationally I realize that these societies are dominated by terror but emotionally I keep returning to the same questions. How can we as a human race hide our eyes from the atrocities of this world, of our own home, and choose to ignore the truth? And also so much of the rationalization for behavior here is that it is either a remnant or rebellion of Soviet times and this has caused me to start thinking. How long can we use our past as an excuse avoid moving forward – at what point does it become imperative to let go and start over without clenching onto that scare tissue?