Darling Child

“But we are alone, darling child, terribly, isolated each from the other; so fierce is the world’s ridicule we cannot speak or show our tenderness; for us death is stronger than life, it pulls like a wind through the dark, all our cries burlesqued in joyless laughter; and with the garbage of loneliness stuffed down us until our guts burst bleeding green, we go screaming round the world, dying in our rented rooms, nightmare hotels, eternal homes of the transient heart.”

—Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms (New York: Random House, 1948)

Dramatizing a quote by Truman Capote, this video presents a virtuoso treatment of urban isolation and modern loneliness. Through a collage of views from high-rise apartments and hotel rooms, Kalin illuminates the inhumanity of urban architecture, which reads as a metaphor for the social structures of fear and prejudice that divide individuals from one another.

This title is also available on Third Known Nest by Tom Kalin.