We call them fairy tales because they exist in fantasy, in the revelation of the imaginative. A life is something lived, actively enacted; a tale something told. (From culture to culture, era to era, tales also contain a sizeable malleability of change. Grimm’s Fairy Tales are told very differently today as compared to when they were originally published in 1812.) Fairies, of course, exist nowhere except in the mind—but to millions of people old and young they are exceedingly real in that insular space, the interiority of their materialism never in doubt. The phrase “it’s all in your head” primarily means that we’re too focused on forces that we cannot control, on things that we have no power to shift or change. Mind-centered and solipsistic, normally “it’s all in your head” is used pejoratively. But it’s within the vasty recesses of the mind that we first render what cannot be into what is; the fictitious soon molded into a non-fiction that exhibits itself in the outside world, that “real” one filled with physical movement and audible language and active shapes formed into actual architecture. It’s the outside world where most of our waking emphasis lies, although it only exists because of the worlds solely encased in our individualized minds.
Fairy tales and the fabric of the imagination are at the forefront of my thoughts right now, as I’m currently writing this paragraph from Bruges, a tiny hamlet in Belgium. And Bruges is, as Ralph Fiennes’ character Harry says in the can’t-be-recommended-enough Martin McDonagh film In Bruges, “a fairy tale town… filled with beautiful fucking fairytale stuff.” Harry’s right. Everywhere out my window are cobblestones and turrets, belfries and balustrades. Bells meditatively toll every hour on the hour, reminding their listener that time is both inexpressible and ever-present. There is a sense of contentment here that is only matched by a near-imperceptible freedom of space and spirit.
This is a small city; you can walk the perimeters of the whole town in an hour. Directionlessly wandering around in Bruges, spending a day here or even a long afternoon, is the equivalent, then, of a deep-body massage. Only—and as immensely cheesy as it sounds—this is a spa for the mind, not the body. Even with the prices and the tourists (a group I of course am a part of) and the rain and the clouds and the prices, a (mental) cleansing seems possible here, and that isn’t true everywhere else. (Except maybe in Iceland, another place I heart with an unmatched fervidity.) Anywhere you go here it seems you find only your best sense of self—and for me at least that’s a rarity, something hard to always access.
I live in Portland, Oregon, a place I’d like to think has more going for it than against it. I enjoy it there, and when I return home I’m sure that I’ll quickly and gladly fall back into my routines and schedules, my idiosyncratic tics once again given the opportunity to flourish (and then fester). To be reductive, I like my life in Portland. I like my dog, my friends, my social circle. So even if, by some miracle of heraldry, I was given the chance to spend the rest of my life in Bruges, I don’t think I would take it. If I moved here I’m sure I’d eventually—foolishly—grow bored and jaded, disdainful of tourists like myself and the irrevocable lull that is a small town in Belgium. Everything I’m currently in awe of would eventually become a part of my everyday life, would be taken for granted. Although I don’t like it, I can believe the above scenario very well might happen to me if I up and moved.
Everyone dies at the end of McDonagh’s In Bruges except (probably) Ray, Colin Farrell’s character and the movie’s primary protagonist. Ray is the only person in the film who doesn’t like Bruges, its inherent fairytale-ness. As he puts it to his friend and pseudo business partner Ken, (played by Brendan Gleeson): “Ken, I grew up in Dublin. I love Dublin. If I grew up on a farm, and was retarded, Bruges might impress me but I didn’t, so it doesn’t.”
Without getting into too many details—you need to see it, for real—both Ray and Ken are hitmen and hiding out in Bruges because of a shooting gone awry. Needless to say, though, Bruges doesn’t allow them the security that they hoped it might, from either themselves or their enemies. At the film’s conclusion, then, Ray—shot multiple times and severely wounded—is being carried to an ambulance on a stretcher through the town’s central square. As he’s being transported, he drifts in and out of consciousness, and above his field of vision, the town becomes a shroudy, Hieronymus Boschian fairy tale of sorts, one where everyone he’s encountered in town makes an appearance.
When the film ends, Ray truly doesn’t know if he’s alive or dead—only that he’s still in Bruges, a town he hates. (“Maybe that’s what hell is, the entire rest of eternity spent in fucking Bruges.”) Ray’s revulsion aside, though, In Bruges is, in part, a movie about what it’s like to visit the town of Bruges, a fairytale place if there ever was one; there’s a reason the film is set here. And even if, for moi at least, it’s impossible to wholly inhabit a fairy tale, it’s become clear to me during my stay that it’s not impossible to visit one. So exist the swans and the turrets and the cobblestone here, the rain eventually subsiding into a sunset spanning the sky entire. Somewhere in the distance, a train leaving, and nearby another arriving, the dreamscape and the fairy tale beginning all over for someone else, anew, again.