Inhabiting Pessimism

23 Mar, 2026

by Tiffany Beam

When I first watched Sayun Simung’s SPI: Dreaming in the Plahan (2025), it had been a week since the U.S. and Israel dropped bombs on Tehran. It was a weekend where I was entranced by texts on doom and pessimism.¹ The despair engendered by this war is not exceptional, nor was this my first time encountering these texts, yet I felt newly attuned to what they offered: the idea that we are likely doomed—that there are no villains or ideologies at the helm, orchestrating the scales of violence that doom us. Ours may simply be a metaphysics in which catastrophe, not human subjects, is sovereign.² Those who know me well might find this stance surprising. To witness myself in this trance, sucking on the tits of doom with an appetite for pessimism, feels like a personal mutation—an enigmatic one.

What lures me about these doom and gloom writings is, unexpectedly, a belief in the world. They affirm how we make a life out of catastrophic conditions not of our choosing, but which we nonetheless remain bound to.³ Pessimism of this sort is not resignation nor demoralization, but a disposition that faces how bad things really are without an eagerness to overstate the positive. This nonchalance towards reality—as it is—offers a way to endure the relentlessness of doom, not escape or resolve its cruelty. The point is not to rescue the world, but to continue acting within it—even if such acts cannot undo the conditions that make them necessary. Encountering SPI at this particular time and configuration of the world helped me sort out these thoughts.

Watching the film from this pessimistic posture, I was attuned to how Simung, her family, and her village endure and live through the loss of Simung’s grandpa Wilang—a cultural knowledge bearer and a reticent man who rarely openly passed down the knowledge he embodied. In his absence, there is a subtle but palpable sense of flailing about amongst the villagers. Rites are explained imperfectly and ancestral knowledge is fragmented, held together through dreams, improvisation, and speculation. The film shows how relationships and practices are sustained when the conditions that once held them together—Wilang’s presence­—are absent. And it does so without offering assurances that efforts to recover this knowledge will necessarily amount to an absolute restoration. Instead, SPI dwells within the banalities of Indigenous persistence, exploring how to endure without the promise of recuperation.

Early in the film, in voice-over narration addressed to grandpa Wilang, Simung notes that many Tayal believe one is not truly Tayal without fluency in the language, before jokingly acknowledging that her own grasp of Tayal is limited. This tension emerges throughout the documentary through its continual negotiations between languages. The English subtitles cannot fully convey how often speakers shift between Tayal and Mandarin within a single exchange—elders often speak Tayal while younger family members respond in Mandarin, and sometimes both languages are combined in a single statement. The interplay of languages negotiates memory and knowledge across generational gaps and the erasures imposed by settler colonialism. Contravening expectations of linguistic purity, Tayal persists through adaptation and improvisation in the worlds—and words—it now inhabits. The very conditions threatening the language’s disappearance also generate new forms, echoing Emalani Case’s reminder that “everything ancient was once new.”⁴

This is my pessimist’s wager: that doom does not preclude miracles that arise in the chaos of possibilities, nor does pessimism preclude novelty against all odds. While certain definitions of what it means to be truly Tayal—Tayal speak fluently, Tayal men hunt, Tayal women weave—are invoked throughout the film, Simung ultimately conveys that her sense of identity emerges through the act of searching for and experimenting with identity itself. SPI prompts us to consider questions of becoming, particularly how one is shaped through absences and voids.

In Tayal, plahan describes people sitting around a fire to support one another. The film begins and ends at Simung’s family firehouse—one of the few in the village—where loss is collectively held and navigated. Family members tend the fire, adding wood to keep it going as stories, memories, and dreams circulate among those gathered. In the film’s final moments, we see grandpa Wilang in the firehouse struggling to cut pig feet. With the help of Simung’s grandmother, he finishes the task and leaves, with his back the final shot of the film. Yet this quiet farewell is not necessarily finalizing. When Simung’s grandmother steps in, we glimpse that what grandpa Wilang knew does not reside in him alone, but has been shared, taken up, and carried outwards. The camera, held by Simung, lingers at the entrance of the firehouse as her grandfather departs, suggesting that the knowledge that he embodied but never shared will become with those gathered around the fire.

By the end of the film, the absence of Simung’s grandfather’s feels less like a void and more like a contour orienting the family and village’s ongoing life. If pessimism prompts us to ask how one might live in a world that does not promise restoration, SPI offers a simple response: to continue anyway. The film reminds us to endure, and that endurance lies in the doing—in continuing to gather, remember, and become—absences and all—regardless of how this world turns out. I’m not sure who I am becoming by inhabiting pessimism, nor what will yet emerge from my encounter with SPI. But perhaps that is enough: that even in a world that offers no guarantees, something still moves us to think, write, make, do, and go on.