Horoscope for December 9 - 15, 2024
"Meek's Cutoff"
You can watch Kelly Reichardt’s film Meek’s Cutoff for free on Tubi and Pluto.
Retrograde planets don’t move backwards. We perceive planets to be ‘retrograde’ from Earth’s perspective because they are traversing the side of the Sun closest to Earth. What we consider to be periods of planets acting against type is an experience of those planet’s heightened proximity. I’m sure there’s writing on this that I’m contradicting, but I think it’s exciting to consider that when things go wrong, we are experiencing them with more profundity than when they go right.
Meek’s Cutoff (2010) is director Kelly Reichardt’s stab at a Western. If a common thread can be drawn between Reichardt’s films — many can, I’m just choosing this one — it’s a resilience against heightening. This sounds like a bitchy way to say her movies are boring, but something interesting happens when a film is allowed to unfold itself through time without any particular attenuation to cresting or nadir, which is that the viewer is forced into proximity.
I don’t think it’s surprising to learn, then, that Meek’s Cutoff, a movie about a group of pioneers (the word we have, not the one I want) attempting a shortcut through the Oregon Trail was constructed using women’s diaries from the time. There’s a gendered divide between time-spaces in Meek’s. The men are involved in action, the women in chores; the men communicate in vocal or missile outburst, the women in subtle turns of their bonnets. There’s a version of Meek’s Cutoff that is a traditional Western, violent and tense, one that keeps its pace astride with the story’s more percussive events (kidnapping a Cuyase man, a wagon falling down a hill, Michelle Williams pulling a gun). The fact that this is not the version we get means that the film’s pervasive problem is closer to the truth of the character’s experience: they are lost.
Directionlessness redistributes the weight of purpose onto the shoulders of belief. As far as we can tell, the characters of Meek’s Cutoff are undertaking their journey for economic and colonial purposes — there’s talk of the West one day belonging to ‘the Americans’, the group is brought to near-religious exaltation upon finding crumbs of gold — which means that their sense of belief is dictated by the fear of being exploited and violated. They are afraid of their shiftless and unpredictable leader, the titular Meek, who in turn makes them afraid of the landscape and the native population they encounter; they are afraid of the Cayuse man they kidnap and prod into leading them despite an impassable language barrier, they are afraid of each other and the capacity each person has to violate their fragile pact with any significant gesture of dissent.
This is the temptation of a retrograde season, to batten down the hatches and move into distrust. Especially in this case of this retrograde season that has the planet of direction (Mars, Mercury too) and planets speaking to belief (Mercury in Sagittarius, Jupiter in Gemini) moving backwards. When the destination is changed, obscured, or removed — i.e., when Mars is retrograde — the first instinct is to look to higher meaning. Things happen ‘for a reason’, are a part of a larger plan, rejection is protection, all the old adages apply. What about when those avenues are diverted, too?
In addition to the retrogrades this week sees a tense deadlock of a Venus/Mars opposition (Wednesday 12/11) as well as a Full Moon in Gemini square to Neptune(12/14). The path being traversed this week is narrow, its pleasantness negligible, and the promise of destination keeps changing. What we do have at our disposal is something weird and nonlinear, an astrology that has no discernible objective but a wide horizon nonetheless. The more we allow time to unfold around us without expectation for the shape it will take, or an adage to explain it away, the higher the likelihood we will discover something exciting.
What’s funny is that Meek’s Cutoff is littered with suggestions that the characters are not alone or lost at all. Drawings on rock faces and man-made markers dot the landscape, indicating that the people native to the land have crossed through and charted pathways. Unfortunately, the women’s blinder-like bonnets and men’s downturned heads mean that the drawings go unseen and their fear and desperation leads them to interpret the markers as evidence that the Cayuse man is conspiring to murder them. Strange planets are close planets and their strange path is full of obvious clues if you are able to clear the fear from your eyes and look around.
NOTES FOR THE WEEK
Monday, December 9
The active process of creation and all the balances incurred or rectified, logged and forgotten. Accident and gesture as part of one long unfinished dance. Mystery is the fun part of patience.
Tuesday, December 10
The act of moving from intellect to instinct stymies the intellect and allows impulse to take over. The same procedure we use to unlock the mind does not work to unlock the body; they are different processes, opposing and ill matched when performed simultaneously.
Wednesday, December 11
Beginnings come at the sacrifice of various unresolved endings. Watching them fall away is painful, but it’s better to know what you’re spending.
Thursday, December 12
Be wary of the call to permissiveness — not because you should become harder, but because too much permissiveness without discernment results in hardness anyway.
Friday, December 13
Feeling like you suffered some loss or incurred a debt, but there’s a chance you might just be looking at an old bank statement. New things are happening all the time.
Saturday, December 14
Replenishment is found through metaphysical channels and thought experiments about going the wrong way or doing the wrong thing. Forgive yourself! Give in!