The Sutras, According to Effie White (Part Two)

II. Blurring Stages, Opaque Mirrors 

-- December 17, 2025, 10:40 pm to 11:45 pm

In the next section, Effie moves through affects and verbs as she grapples with the inescapability of her impending loss. She clings to Curtis, unable or unwilling to hide her mounting panic. But the touching, however frantic, isn’t necessarily for relation: it is to stave off abandonment and other primal anxieties around the disappearance of the other. They’re barely looking at each other, which is the clearest tell. She touches past him, reaches around him, looks through him; reciprocal gaze becomes tunnel vision in the throes of attachment-driven anxiety. 

In these panicky, frenetic moments of pleading and bargaining with the impossible, the camera cuts away to give us a distant, alienating long shot of Effie attempting to force or simulate an embrace from a mostly absent, minimally responsive Curtis. The asymmetry between them emphasized by the refractions in the background: broken, partial, uneven tableaus of fracture, missed encounter, misrecognition, strain. Whether because the relationship itself is the source of fracture and splitting, or whether it’s because the conditions for relating are no longer available (for whatever reason, he’s disappearing), it’s clear that she has to (literally) let go of her increasingly strained attachment—at least to relation in this same form. 

He walks away, starts to exit through the rear of the auditorium. And suddenly: a new angle of vision opens up behind Effie. The camera is positioned over her shoulder, allowing us to see not through Effie’s eyes, but through the eyes of an omniscient/unknown/spectral figure just beyond her gaze and out of reach. Is it a ghost, or a revenant—an opening into past or future? Perhaps both at the same time. 

Another long shot: Effie’s lament, front and center. But look at the shift in the mirrors here—now what at first looked like a flat/straight wall of reflective panels behind her become curved and opaque. No more reflections of the empty room coming through the mirrors: just blurred and partial images of Effie. These background stills compose their own trajectory of movement and affect, forming a kind of installation behind her. Are there other selves unfolding, unfurling in this ritualized confrontation with the Real of loss? 

The empty theater becomes a cathedral; the background mirrors become dynamic thresholds into opacity, with a slight amber tint. The cuts become rhythmic, ritualistic, even, punctuating vocal runs with a marked perspectival shift. Medium close-up to long shot to panoramic swivel and back again, revealing not instability so much as the reopening of the possible. Gestating within and beyond Effie is a path into attachment governed not by cruel optimism or its visual analog, flat mirroring, but instead, by generative opacity: shadowy thresholds where something like “change,” on any scale, materializes. 

Hands up, closer up, looking up: there’s a religious/spiritual orientation here. Now, as she’s singing, “And I am telling you,” the subject of the you—initially, Curtis—becomes more diffuse, ambiguous, refracted, like the opaque mirrors in the background. In his absence, she adds more points of address, literally pointing, on beat, to different “you”s in the nonexistent crowd. “And you (point), and you (point), and you (point), you’re gonna love me.” Who, exactly, is she forecasting will love her? Someone, no one, everyone, anyone, the one, and, it appears, too, the divine. Hands up: supplication, conceding her own fragility, holding the ferocity and immensity of loss without collapse. In the cascading affects of her performance, Effie models grief as devotional practice, where love = vibrating remainder animating the threshold. 

NEXT: The final repetition, final incantation, read Part III here.