C'mon C'mon (2021)
Joaquin Phoenix: Johnny
Photos
Quotes
-
Johnny : To visit planet earth, you will have to be born as a human child. At first, you'll have to learn to use your new body, to move your arms and legs, to pull yourself upright. You will learn to walk and run, to use your hands to make sounds and form words. Slowly, you will learn to take care of yourself. Here, it is still peaceful but there the colors, sensations and sounds will wash over you constantly. You will see so many living things, plants and animals, beyond imagining. Here, it is always the same, but there everything is in motion, everything is always changing. You will be plunged into earth's river of time. There will be so much for you to learn and so much for you to feel, pleasure and fear, joy and disappointment, sadness and wonder. In your confusion and delight, you will forget where you came from. You will grow up, travel, and work. Perhaps, you'll have children, even grandchildren of your own. Over the years, you will try to make sense of that happy, sad, full, empty, always-shifting life you're in. And when the time comes to return to your star, it may be hard to say goodbye to that strangely beautiful world.
-
Johnny : I'm not fine and that's a totally reasonable response!
-
Johnny : [narrating] I don't like feeling this, but I feel like he's spoiled, or I am.
-
Johnny : He's been such a trouper I feel like I owe him a good time.
-
Johnny : [to Jesse] Are you laughing or are you crying? I can't... I can't tell. I wanna have the appropriate reaction.
-
Johnny : [narrating] I ask for trust, cooperation and permission without knowing where the experience will lead the subject. I can and will leave a place, a situation, a problem, but the people I interview cannot. The work offers the interviewer access and a reason to stay in a world that's not my own, *complete* distraction from my own life, a sense of invincibility, a sense of invisibility. I traffic in hope without the ability to know what will happen in the future. The work offers the subjects a chance to speak of things they have never spoken of, a chance to see themselves as subjects worthy of time and attention. The work offers the subjects the creation of an image of self, the distribution of which they cannot control, on a global scale, in perpetuity.
