Wow! Salinger just gets teenagers. The slang might be outdated but those are the exact sentiments, anxieties, fears, and joys I had growing up.

Okay maybe not exactly exactly but the tricky thing about writing and talking about teenagers is that it's very easy to undermine them on the basis of their immaturity—society is incredibly mean and all-too-willing to not listen to the immatures on the basis of their immaturity. Everyone has indeed been a teenager at one point, but most everyone also moves on from it.

Holden Caulfield is certainly no exception. It's clear that our protagonist has a teenager's limited perspective (and that a lot of what he knows about the world and how it works comes from perception and imagination, rather than direct experience), that he makes a lot of hillariously bad and impulsive decisions in response to immediate stimuli (because every emotion feels incredibly big when a teenager like him is feeling them for the first several hundred times), and that he is still in the process of constructing his identity (I really love how this is expressed through the constant construction of new characters whenever Holden introduces himself to strangers). But by never telling the story beyond his terms, Salinger avoids invalidating his experience. One cannot help but ask while in Holden's head: but why? What'd drive a person to saying and doing this? It's otherwise easy to distance one's self from a foul-mouthed, sex-crazed teenager (and Holden certainly is aware of this, with how much he has to emphasise his "telling you the truth"-s and "you must think I"-s), but the text makes it easier for you to also see that he's a young boy in puberty and sympathise with the how seemingly every adult in his life has failed him, one way or another (notice how the only real connection he seemed to truly be able to fall back to is the one he has with his little sister).

I also really like how the frame story of Holden telling us about his adventures balances this validative lens. From the very first line, we know that this particular set of picaresque adventures might not even matter in the grand scheme of Holden's life, even as he sits there all fabulist-like telling us about it; we are still told the story as it mattered to him at the time—not as something that matters just because it can amount to anything in the end, but as something that matters just because it exists. And what a beautiful way to summarise teenagedom that is!

Gonna be shelving this next to my other Christmastime comfort media—from Home Alone 2 to The Holdovers to After Hours and the like. Simply lovely.

I do wonder if this would've been better if both Garin and Dyna just wrote their own monographs—it seems to me both has conflicting goals (Garin wants to write a personal account of his career and the historical context to which he arrived as a young film director—which shows in several paragraphs where he writes in the first person) while Dyna wants to write a "birds eye" view introduction to the history of the Indonesian film industry (which naturally requires huge amounts of contextualisation regarding Indonesian history—bizzarely, some of these sections refer to Garin in the third person as if he’s not writing in first person elsewhere in the book).

Problem is, what we ended up having I can only describe as two Wikipedia stub articles in a trench coat (and even then, the contributors of that wonderful site has better standards). There is no editorial control over the chronology of events—with multiple events being needlessly redescribed throughout the book. Chapters overlap and collide in a way that just makes you want to put the book down because it wastes your time the way marathoning an anime with last-week’s-episode’s-recaps-at-the-front-of-each-episode feels, except the recaps sometimes revisits last month’s or last year’s episodes too. The central thesis of the book is also incredibly weak, lacking deep analysis beyond observances of what films were released and what context they exist in (that Indonesian film exists either through or as states of crisis—which was never properly examined beyond the fact that the country as a whole were often in crisis—and that Indonesian film contains paradoxes because Islamic themes coexisted with producers casting pornstars—which was also never analysed beyond “look at how paradoxical this is!”).

To be fair, I had my suspicions from page one, when the co-authors stated in their introduction that they didn’t want to just “write a diary of a filmmaker“, but rather to produce a high quality reference work which fills a niche in the literature regarding Indonesian film. I do think there is value in how the book brings together the works of film scholars (such as Herlina herself and Krishna Sen) alongside the works of Indonesian historians (such as Shiraishi); but the execution here falls incredibly short—neither authors are historians and I think the work produced could’ve actually benefitted from more subjective analysis and an “anecdotal” style to make up for the methodological failings. The authors seem satisfied with merely naming events that happened and films that were released without much effort in synthesising and advancing their thesis. It is literature review, but badly edited.

It really does not help that this is probably the worst translation I've ever read in any language (from Indonesian to English, in this case)—tenses slip, subjects are often unclear, usage of verbs and syntax frequently fails to make sense. I think this will probably be less of an issue in the original Indonesian edition, but it does not help the book's case as a reliable reference. It is not entirely worthless—it’s a good directory to get to the primary sources. But my god reading this was awful (And I genuinely like reading papers and academic texts and such! Those tend to have really high standards when it comes to editing even if the language used can be incredibly dense.).

Shame, I was really hoping this would be an accessible entry point into the history of Indonesian film (especially because it purportedly covers post-1998 cinema on top of the revolutionary and military dictatorship period, which are already well-covered by other monographs). But then again, the chapters here rarely actually focuses on film history and instead talks mostly about the media landscape as a whole—a topic which is much better served by many other monographs by the many media studies scholars who writes about contemporary Indonesian politics and mass media.

If you are interested in reading about Indonesian cinema, go read Krishna Sen’s Indonesian Cinema: Framing the New Order instead.