It Passes, but the Threat Remains by MJ Strasburger

Ambient Dangers and Desires, Julia Ducournau’s Alpha, and Holding Each Other 

I’d never held my friend’s face before.

As his head tilted back in his theater seat, eyes going wide and pleading for recognition,

and as he choked and convulsed and frothed around the edges of his lips, 

I thought about how beautiful they are —

how beautiful they’d always been

and how I’d always thought that.

I wondered if I’d ever felt scared by that feeling

and if that ever held me back in our friendship.

I wondered if I should feel more scared about what was happening to him 

right now in front of me.

The opening moments of Alpha settled gently onscreen. 

A woozy, slow-motion walk through an apartment party set to Portishead’s “Roads.” 

A young girl is passed out on a couch, a rusty needle giving her limp arm a bloody tattoo.

Beth Gibbons’ tragic appeal — 

“Oh, can’t anybody see?”

Something in my friend’s expression was so childlike.

His body at once stiffening and shaking.

I suddenly felt necessary. 

Needed, obligated.

Maternal.

“We’ve got a war to fight.”

I held their writhing face gently between my palms. 

“Never find our way.”

His hair is so soft. 

I don’t know why that surprised me.

His skin was overheating. 

“Regardless of what they say.”

We’d shared so much with each other  — fears, insecurities, fetishes, changes, goals,

the painstaking, crunchy work of artistic partnership and a mutual trust that the vulnerabilities and honesty expressed through our collaboration would be protected and celebrated, 

like in a successful marriage. 

“How can it feel…”

I repeated his name over and over, my hands trying to caress and calm. 

Touch, probably, the only thing they could register 

as his eyes desperately searched mine and found nothing they could recognize.

“...this wrong?”

We’ve pushed each other to think more expansively about cinema; 

adamant, dogmatic, a devotion to the medium as one of affects, sensoriality, perceptions,

and haptics. 

Sound and image impressing. 

I’m so inspired by him.

He really challenges me.

I really love him.

“From this moment…”

I’d seen nearly every part of his body, 

an intimacy mediated by the lens of my camera

for an installation we exhibited together.

I’d never been responsible for it, though. 

I’d never held it.

“...how can it feel…”

Before I could decide whether it was time to call someone, he came to.

He looked so scared, and I’d never seen them like that.

I held their gaze

and told him he had a seizure.

I said let’s get up.

We left the theater 

and they laid down in the lobby of the Alamo Drafthouse 

and drank water I took from the kitchen.

I rubbed their back, 

wrapping my arms tightly around him

and comforted him

and sat quietly next to him

as he came back to himself.

I found the whole thing 

“...this wrong?”

deeply

deeply

erotic. 

--- 

Ducournau’s films have always shifted between the erotic and the urgent — or, perhaps, the erotic and the emergent. 

As Bataille says, a state where ecstasy and anguish coexist. 

Christlike, her characters are both afflicted and made holy through their affliction.

Through the flesh, they transmogrify and become.

In Raw, through and by devouring the flesh of others —  friends, lovers, and family. 

In Titane, through sex, through killing, through gender, through family, through death, 

and through giving birth to a new flesh.

Ducournau pinpoints an immanence — the divine encompassed in the material — in the bodies she shares with us. 

Through the eyes of a girl barely in her teens, Alpha shows a world that mirrors ours: 

one of stacking crises. One of epidemics, medical stigma, poverty, and climate collapse. 

Here, a mysterious, AIDS-like disease turns people to stone as the outside world is engulfed in reddish, dusty storms. Her disease-afflicted uncle moves in with her and her mother, a doctor exhausted from single parenting while trying in vain to fight the epidemic at her hospital. 

What ecstasy is there in this anguished world beset by disease and degradation?

The flesh shown here is not one of possibility and rebirth, but of rot and uncertainty.

Of stagnancy, languor. 

And yet, Ducournau presents an answer to this helpless uncertainty: endurance.

Not cannibalism or killing or fucking a car, but holding onto your humanity tightly as the foundation ruptures — this is its own claim to power. Even as the body betrays you, or could at any moment, moving through the celebration and joy and thorniness of life while our own world’s cascading crises threaten us at each moment is survival. 

We eat and gather and preserve our traditions and cultures, as the family in the film does. 

We dance and laugh and run and make out in school bathrooms, as does the girl in the film. 

We hang onto and process and accept our mistakes, as the afflicted uncle in the film does.

We rush to the side of those we love who suffer, even if we can’t change what’s happening, as the mother of our protagonist does. 

Early, after having her tattooed arm examined by her mother, our protagonist sleeps in her bedroom. She wakes to a dust storm rattling the walls, shaking and nearly collapsing the place. She runs to the fire escape and desperately holds on to the rails as the wind, dust, and noise assault her. 

She doesn't have time to worry, now, about whether she has the incurable stone disease. She doesn’t have time to worry about her infected uncle or the opaque, traumatic history he represents for her. She doesn’t have time to worry about the social dynamics at school, despite knowing that her peers believe she’s been given stone-AIDS (unofficial name) by the rusty needle that violated her body. 

She just needs to hang on. 

She needs to get through this one storm. 

To endure. 

After this storm and throughout the film, her mother runs to comfort her. 

As more storms come and our bodies threaten to fail us, we must endure,

Wait for the worst of it to be over, until someone who loves you 

comes and wraps their arms around you. 

--- 

My friend is fine. 

He experienced, in all likelihood, a one-off seizure: a sudden change in the brain's normal electrical activity that causes it to fire uncontrollably. It could have been caused by anything — a particular food, stressor, lack of sleep, the viscerality of what was being shown onscreen, a combination of all these, or absolutely nothing at all. 

It was a momentary storm of the body that eventually passed

and we held each other through it,

enduring.