Jazz Versions of Reality

Uh-oh… Violet's losing it a wee bit. In what would clinically be called disassociation, Violet is imagining her life as existing independent of herself. Stuff is so routine, and she feels so divorced from her reality, that she imagines that her life would go on just the same without her in it.

Man, sometimes you just sit in the street, right? No? Oh, well that's what Violet does, because she feels that doing one (normal) thing, like walking forward across the street, is basically just as easy as doing another (abnormal) thing, like sitting down in the road. And she has a point: We do what we do because it's societally acceptable, not because we have to. So really, old Violet is living life to the fullest and looking into each possibility. Hmm… Maybe we'll have a sandwich for dinner, or maybe we'll just eat a huge bowl of pudding.

Okay, so on the surface, Violet is acting nuttier than trail mix, but under the surface of this comment? Uh, she's acting kind of like jazz music. She's riffing, she's improvising—you never know what she's going to say. That's a little crazy and disorienting, but you know what? Jazz is also kind of crazy and disorienting. It's a new way of storytelling, a new way of expressing truth.

Another Grade A Prime example of Violet acting like a nutso, but also acting a whole lot like a jazz riff. She starts with something sensible—"Two o'clock" is a perfectly reasonable answer to the question—but ends up with something a little askew, a little morbid, a little shocking. She starts out in familiar territory, but lands someplace else.

If you're going to have split personalities, make sure that one of them is shameless and hard to disgust, right? Especially if you live in a world where (as we've seen) so much of what women do is labeled shameful or disgusting. You know, like wearing silk stockings. Violet has a pretty sensible kind of crazy sometimes.

Existential crises are much harder when you have various personalities to keep track of, unless, like Violet, you come to the grand epiphany that actually, you're all one big happy self. Who doesn't think of themselves as in someway split? There's a reason that the whole angel-and-devil-sitting-on-the-shoulder-thing is a thing. They represent two sides of yourself, the good Shmooper who is going to eat salad for dinner and the bad Shmooper who is going to eat tater tots.

Violet just phrases real-life in a way that sounds unsettling—it's still true. Kind of like a little musical genre called jazz.

Here's another Violet-as-jazz gem. This quote sounds seriously spooky, right? Violet sounds like the kind of woman that you would cross the street to avoid because she might be having an argument with a streetlamp. But, thought of in a different light, what she's saying makes tons of sense: Keep stuff bottled up and it's bound to come out in an unpleasant, unsettling manner.

Violet is not the only person who loses it a bit. Golden Gray kind of breaks when he finds out that his father is black because, you know, his entire identity has been a lie. When confronted with a crazy situation, acting crazy makes sense. And what could be crazier than realizing (1) that you could have been born a slave, and (2) the idea of slavery itself?

Felice knows what Violet is talking about—she's had the experience of feeling like there are disparate parts of her personality battling inside of her. And you know what this feeling is kind of like? The conversation between various instruments within a single jazz composition.

Sure, on the surface this sounds like an existential version of the logic puzzle where you have to move a tiger, a goat, and a bunch of grain across a river using one boat. The initial takeaway is huh? But all Violet is talking about, in her signature Violet style, is the sensation of realizing that her various personalities or public faces—wife, hairdresser, woman who tried to cut a dead girl, bird-lover—are part of the same woman.