Chapter 6 Hanging Out with Strangers She is surrounded by people and yet, it's obvious: she is alone. It's her darting gaze that gives her away and alerts us to the fact of her loneliness. It's roving and itinerant; it does not rest or stick anywhere. It seeks and then gives up, turning inward as she closes her eyes and moves more deeply into the music and the motions of her own body. She dances by herself--not brazenly, not obliviously, but carefully, maintaining a safe little circle of space around her. She makes small, nervous adjustments that speak to her continued awareness of her body in that space, of its vulnerability. She fusses with her hair, arranging it into a ponytail while her feet keep the rhythm. She smiles to herself, shyly, in a way that signals her desire to share that smile with others. A crescendo builds; the song changes. Still smiling, she exits the dancefloor, her motions retaining all that energy and joy but, at the same time, still edged in just the faintest shades of caution. The camera follows her out of the room and into the bar that adjoins it. There, she plants her elbows on the bar and leans forward in an effort to capture the bartender's eye. It takes a few seconds but then he approaches. She speaks in English but uses the German word, schnapps . The bartender pours the shot and she ventures a few more words of German, clearly approaching the limits of her vocabulary in that language: Danke schön. Switching back to English, she asks if he would like to join her, using her hands to say what her words cannot. Shots are party drinks, meant to be consumed with others and not alone. She's offering to buy the bartender a beverage in exchange for a few seconds' worth of his company. She awaits his answer with eyes that are large and unsure. When it comes, we can see it in her face; her eyes drop to her shot glass in faint disappointment and her hair falls forward as she bends to her drink. She shoots it back under the curtain of her hair and then coughs slightly and looks around to see if anyone's noticed. This is how we meet Victoria. She is the protagonist in a film of the same name, a German-language thriller released in 2015 directed by Sebastian Schipper and starring Spanish actress Laia Costa. Victoria tracks its young namesake's movements across the city of Berlin over the course of a single, tumultuous, and life-changing night. Victoria is a stranger there, having relocated from her native Spain, and she is desperate to discover social inclusion. That desperation is written all over her interactions with the bartender, which occur about five minutes into the film. Conventional wisdom might hold that the last person who ever needs, or stands to benefit from, an offer of a free drink is the person whose job it is to sell drinks in the first place. Thus we see Victoria's gaffe with the bartender as driven by a sort of sad urgency. When he rebuffs her offer, her big, brown eyes radiate a look of forlorn isolation. She rallies, though. Her ponytail whips back and forth as she scans her surroundings, then gathers herself, rises, and heads for the restroom. On her way there, she exchanges brief words with a stranger, a young man who is loitering near the door with a group of friends. They are trying to gain admission to the club she's in. This is the beginning of everything that is going to happen to her. Victoria is a film about hanging out with strangers--about seeking intimacy and social inclusion, finding it, and then following it all the way down to a dark and calamitous end. The film is notable for making use of a single, continuous shot, or filmic "take," which lasts for more than two hours. This means that the camera and the camera operator, much like the actors themselves, never rests. There are no pauses or interruptions as it follows the winsome Victoria and her companions throughout the streets of a darkened, pre-dawn Berlin. When they run, the camera runs with them, sometimes struggling to keep pace; when they pile into a stolen van, the camera is there, too, sandwiched between them in the backseat. The camera's unceasing insertion within the action of the film is the audience's insertion and also Victoria's. The viewer has no choice but to go along for the ride and find out where it leads. In this way, the film captures the thrill that, often, gilds surface of another feeling: peril. Both are endemic to the experience of hanging out with strangers. There is an irresistible sense of allure and fascination, a feeling of anything-can-happen-here, because if you don't know a person you can't know exactly what to expect from them. Victoria feels it: that's why she follows the young man and his friends up the stairs of the club and out into the street and why she ignores the warning signs that, slowly, one by one, start to amass around her. The first one comes with a joke about a stealing a car. The moment passes, though: the car's owner shows up, the tension is briefly dissolved and the group moves on. But then, in a Späti , another opportunity presents itself. Späti are convenience stores that sell beer at all hours and thus serve as a cornerstone of public drinking culture in Berlin. Victoria follows the character Sonne inside one, where they find the store's proprietor asleep at the register. Sonne indicates his intentions to steal the beer rather than paying for it and Victoria, after a second's hesitation, goes along with the plan, even pocketing some snacks on her way out. This is an important moment in the film: it records a minor transgression on Victoria's part but also hints at how far she might be willing to go in order to be accepted by a bunch of people she has just met. Anyone who has ever ventured out alone--ever braved new surroundings or sought company in a room full of total strangers--knows how it feels to be Victoria. They know what it is to weigh a minor ethical infraction against the prospect of a few hours' worth of inclusion. It's a scenario that harkens back to the essential things of life, to childhood and the school playground's cauldron of cruelty and peer pressure. But, as the film shows, it's something that doesn't necessarily disappear with age. It's an urge that can lay dormant for years when presented with only familiar faces and scenes. But come a strange city, a new context, a lonely night, a random bar, a vacuous hotel room, a second language, a halting conversation, a casual introduction--come any combination of these things, and that old playground urge can come roaring back to life again. There is no amount of maturity that can be stockpiled in defense. There is no way of avoiding it except by staying home and avoiding the world. *** Once, I could have been Victoria. More than once, probably, but I'm thinking of a particular occasion, one that took place years ago, in Scotland. As an undergraduate, I was lucky enough to study abroad during my junior year. An exchange program placed me at the University of Aberdeen, where I was able to keep doing what I had been doing back in the United States at my small Ohio college and, perhaps even more importantly, where I was also able to keep bagpiping. This was part of the plan, see; my scholarship, which paid me to go to school in exchange for my work as a bagpiper, also covered the costs of my time in Scotland, or some of them anyway. In Aberdeen, I joined a local pipe band, ventured out nightly to participate in jam sessions hosted by local pubs, and made weekly trips down to Glasgow for lessons at the renowned Piping Centre. And I made friends; I stepped into friendships as readily as I did puddles littering the rainy streets, without first assessing their depths. Then I went back to Ohio, because I had to. A few years later, one of those friends--another piper--invited me to attend her wedding, which was to take place in Scotland in August. The night before I was scheduled to leave, though, I suffered an injury (a tent stake through the foot, a long story that is barely related to this one but too bizarre not to mention in passing) that made air travel impossible. So I saved my flight credit and resolved to travel the following winter, over New Year's, to visit my friend and her new husband. That's where things started to get complicated. My friend and her husband were going to be on vacation in Greece over New Year's but returning a few days later. My travel voucher, meanwhile, was only good through December 31st. So my friend offered to let me stay in her apartment in Aberdeen until they returned, at which point we could all spend a few days together. I was working on my Master's degree and not due back on campus until late January, so I had time. This is how I ended up alone in Aberdeen, a city that I thought I knew until I ended up alone in it. I was young. I don't think I felt it then, but I know it now. Twenty-three is young. And I was traveling alone. I had done so before, which made the whole plan feel less risky and audacious from the outset. The differences soon revealed themselves, though: it wasn't about traveling alone but about what I would or would not find when I got there. I was traveling alone to a place where I would likewise be alone. There was no one waiting for me on the other side, no one preparing for my arrival, no one to offer words of advice or greeting. This did not bother me until it did. My original flight, the one I had booked back in the summer, had been for Glasgow, not Aberdeen. So that's where I arrived on a cold, clear morning in late December, carrying only a backpack. It contained a single change of clothes, some toiletries, a digital camera, a few books, and a wedding gift for my friend. From Glasgow, I boarded a train to Aberdeen, just as I had done every single Tuesday for months and months on end when I lived there and commuted once a week to Glasgow for my lessons. I once composed a jig, written in the space of a train ride, in commemoration of this routine. Its name: "Every Single Tuesday." I arrived in Aberdeen after an absence of three years feeling like an utter stranger, to both the place and to myself. Though I had worked to keep some of my former friendships alive through long-distance methods, a lot of my friends had scattered during the interim--either temporarily on account of the holidays, or more permanently on account of life changes. This was before social media; this was before the most minor of intimacies came burdened with expectations of faux permanence. I didn't even have a cell phone to help me navigate my surroundings, only a rudimentary flip phone that proved worthless overseas. But I didn't really need one; I discovered that I still held the names of streets and landmarks in my head and could easily get around. "There is a peculiar voluptuousness in the naming of streets," notes the philosopher Walter Benjamin. Writing in the early 1900s, he's talking about the historical process by which a city gets mapped, charted, and tamed, largely through the assigning of names. To name is to know, to assert mastery, which is one of the first principles of structuralist philosophy. Though he died before finishing it, Benjamin's The Arcades Project is his magnum opus--a work of more than a thousand pages devoted to musings and hoarded quotations about modernity, urbanity, and the disordered entanglements that result from the combination of the two. Benjamin compares the sprawling streets of Paris, his so-called "capital of the nineteenth century," to the entrails of a beast, to the lap of a whore, to the labyrinths of antiquity--things designed to ensnare and trap the wanderer and stymy forward movement. Names, he reasons, become part of the machinery of subjugation, working to make the streets less perilous and wild. Identifying the names of streets in Aberdeen, repeating them to myself, gave me confidence. Moving through a landscape I recognized helped me to bear the knowledge that not a single person in it recognized me. Excerpted from Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time by Sheila Liming All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
