Control, and illusions of control

So on Sunday L. generously sprang me free for a couple of hours, letting me out at The Charles Theater so that I could see Sofia Coppola's Somewhere. Generally, we've been really selective in our movie choices over the past year: if you only have a few bullets in your barrel, you'd better take good aim. But, in this case, I wasn't especially concerned with the movie being a great one. Rather, I just wanted to hear the character played by Stephen Dorff utter his daughter's name: Cleo. And, even though I'd known it was coming, I have to say that hearing that name, in the dark theater - in the film's first line, no less - gave me a degree of pure warmth that not even a careless reviewer who somehow veered, in print, between Cleo and Chloe could later mar.

Above all, though, the film got me thinking about degrees of control. Coppola's story centers on a pampered film star who lives the dream of an adolescent boy - girls, pools, fast cars - but whose days seem almost entirely structured by random external events or the occasional intrusions of others. His agent calls; his daughter is dropped off at his door; his roommate has a party. While Johnny Marco is clearly a bigscreen idol, and can theoretically choose from a pile of scripts, he seems for all intents and purposes to have abandoned any control over the direction of his life - a point that he finally acknowledges, towards the film's end.

Could we learn something from that? On some level, the idea that we only imagine a control over our lives appeals to me. As I left the theater, I wondered how to make it north to Charles Village, on a quiet Sunday. Walk? Taxi? As I mulled it over, a city bus, its destination sign reading Out of Service, pulled up; the driver beckoned me on board, and we rolled north. Was the trip really mine to devise, or was it simply the result of a combination of factors? Or think, in the same vein, of Cleo, on a daily basis. Like most toddlers, she's increasingly interested in exerting some control over her surroundings: she's constantly telling us to remove our coats, or to get her some milk, or to help her upstairs. But these are, from our perspective, small things; as I get her milk, I'm often wondering if I could take her to the mall for an hour or two. Cleo may feel, as she's given her milk, that she's in control, but in fact she's surrounded by the results of decisions that are not hers.

And so on. I think of Sal Paradise and Dean, mad for the jazzmen of San Francisco, goggle-eyed at the improvisatory skills of horn men - but also involved in that very improvisation, as their shouts of encouragement only provoke an even longer flight up the scale. Who's in control, and who obeys circumstance? Does the crowd watching the bullfight merely observe an unfolding drama? Or is the toreador also beholden, as most connoisseurs insist, to the limits of the crowd's apparent patience, and to the hoots and hollers that fill the arena?

Do we watch, day in and day out, Cleo? Or does she watch us?