Laurie Anderson Takes On Love and Death in Heart of a Dog

I’m early to interview Laurie Anderson at her studio, so I wander the streets for 15 minutes, hoping to gain some insight into Heart of a Dog, her difficult-to-parse, deeply moving new film. Anderson’s studio is located in a strange corner of New York City, a no man’s land between southern Soho and northern Tribeca. On Canal Street, the dividing line, stout Federalist houses rub shoulders with looming luxury condos, and converted brick warehouses sport modern rooftop additions, worn like off-kilter fascinators. If you stand on the corner of Canal and the West Side Highway, three lanes of traffic swoop by in both directions, and a scrum of cars slows to inch into the turn eastward. Look north and you’ll see a sanitation facility housed in a sleek building that could, on first glance, be mistaken for a contemporary art museum. Look south and you’ve got an unobstructed view of the gleaming new One World Trade Center (home to, among other things, Vogue.com). Tucked behind, out of sight but never quite out of mind, is the 9/11 Memorial.

It’s a vista that also appears in Anderson’s film, as she describes the chaos of New York in the days following September 11, trucks barreling up the west side carrying away the wreckage of the Twin Towers, everything covered in white ash. Heart of a Dog is set in the post-9/11 world, but it’s not explicitly a story about the aftermath of that disaster. (For something like that, you’d have to have caught Anderson’s installation “Habeas Corpus” during its three-day run at the Park Avenue Armory earlier this month.) But the film is haunted by that national calamity, by the sense that it indelibly damaged our way of relating to each other and to our environment.

Anderson’s film is tough to classify. Some critics have called it her Year of Magical Thinking, and it’s not a bad comparison. Heart of a Dog is a 75-minute reflection on love and death, a journey through the artist’s brain, a swirl of memory and philosophy that meanders according to its own logic, based more on the unruly laws of dreams than on the established rules of storytelling. She collages her own paintings and drawings, home pictures and videos, from life with her longtime partner, the late musician Lou Reed; 8-millimeter footage from her childhood in Glen Ellyn, Illinois; and snippets from other sculpture and video projects, playing them against the aural backdrop of her own music and her meditative, lulling voiceovers.

Most of the narrative concerns Anderson’s relationship to the dying mother she was unable to love, and to the dying dog she loved in a way she never knew she could. That dog is Lolabelle, a rat terrier that Anderson and Reed adopted years ago. Watching Lola decline into old age raises many questions for Anderson. Can you teach an old dog new tricks? (Answer: Yes. Even after she’s gone blind, Lola learns to make art and music.) Do we have the right to put a suffering animal out of her misery? (Answer: No, at least per the Tibetan Buddhist teachings to which Anderson subscribes.)

Just as the Buddhists believe in reincarnation, all narrative threads in Heart of a Dog are prone to shape-shift. Anderson’s experience with Lola comes to bear on her more complex relationship with her fading mother. Searching for a way to relate to an emotionally unavailable parent, Anderson floods us with stories from her youth: the time she somersaulted off the diving board, missed the pool, broke her back, and was told she might never walk again; the terrifying memory of her stay at the hospital’s children’s ward, where other, sicker kids screamed through the night and disappeared by morning; the time she almost drowned her toddler twin brothers by skating them onto thin ice in their double-wide stroller, then dove in after them when the ice broke; her mother’s atypically compassionate response when she found out.

The death that’s not addressed, of course, is Reed’s, who passed away from liver failure in 2013. Anderson dedicates her film to her late husband and uses his love song “Turning Time Around” as her outro, but Reed is barely mentioned and only appears in the film briefly, playing a doctor in a hospital scene. Still, when Anderson goes off on a tangent about baby teeth and wonders, “Wouldn’t it be great to have a second brain, a reserve heart to drop down into place when the first one breaks,” it’s hard not to infer a reference to the failed liver transplant that Reed underwent just before his death.

“Every love story is a ghost story,” Anderson quotes from David Foster Wallace. But while it may feel that way in a film about learning when to let go, that sentiment actually runs counter to the philosophy that Anderson has worked so hard to embrace. “Death is so often about regret, or guilt,” she says about Lola’s passing, echoing the sentiment she expressed about Reed in a beautiful essay for Rolling Stone shortly after losing him. “Why didn’t I call her? Why didn’t I say that? It’s more about you than the person who died. But finally I saw it, the connection between love and death, and that the purpose of death is the release of love.”

I get too cold to keep wandering and ring up to Anderson’s studio, where I’m welcomed in by a man in a black Jacques Cousteau hat and Anderson’s barking border terrier, Will. I sit to wait for Anderson in a wooden rocking chair in a large, cozily cluttered room. There are bookshelves spilling with tomes on art, travel, and Eastern philosophy. The seating consists mostly of dog beds and miniature overstuffed armchairs most suitable for canines or children. On the walls hang a few film festival posters, instruments I can’t name, and a large framed photograph of the Dalai Lama, draped with a white silk shawl. From where I’m sitting I stare out three arched, north-facing windows, set high so that they frame only blue sky, clouds, helicopters buzzing in the distance, and in the foreground a disembodied waving American flag.

Clouds and the things that fly among them loom large in Anderson’s filmic universe. As a child, she dreamily explains, she worshipped the sky. The attacks on the World Trade Center were, for her and the rest of the country, a rude awakening to the reality that we have to look up, that danger can descend from above. Lola comes to the same realization on a hike in California, as birds of prey circle in the sky, threatening to swoop down and attack. The clouds that drift lazily across Anderson’s movie grow ominous over time—the home, perhaps, of the souls to whom Anderson has had to bid goodbye, but also not simply clouds but “The Cloud,” bursting at the seams with terabytes of data that our government has collected about its citizens in the post-9/11 surveillance state.

Anderson emerges from a door in the back and invites me to join her in another room, where the windows face onto an air shaft and coffee brews in a retro diner–style pot. She’s spiky-haired and tiny, delicate-looking, dressed in gray jeans, a white button-up fastened high on her neck with a rectangular pin, and a puffy orange vest. She gestures that I should sit in a funny, yellow, vaguely Christmas tree–shaped chair, which I know from having read previous interviews was custom-designed for Reed by Philippe Starck. When Anderson speaks, she does so in a hushed, soft voice, with the same soothing cadence that she uses on camera, except when she gets excited and squawks emphatically.

We discuss her childhood outside of Chicago, her complicated relationship with her mother, the Buddhist teachings that help her access compassion and love, and why everyone wants this film to be about Lou Reed. Below is an edited version of our conversation.

This film is so moving. I cried.
Yeah, it does that. I was just in Chicago yesterday showing it at the film festival there. It’s intense to sit through it with people. But I really enjoyed it because it was my hometown and people really could relate to the stuff about Chicago. And to the sky.

How far from the city is Glen Ellyn, where you grew up?
Probably 40 miles. Starting from when I was about 11, I would take the train in and go to the Art Institute, do classes, play in the Chicago youth symphony. It’s a wonderful city for kids.

Were you allowed to take the train in by yourself?
Yeah, I was. It was a different world.

Yes, though I grew up in Chicago, too, in the ’80s and ’90s, and I used to wander around by myself as a kid. I don’t think anybody does that anymore.
No! I spent yesterday morning with Bill Ayers, who was one of the Weathermen. He was also from Glen Ellyn—all the Ayers boys. I remember just riding around feeling daring and free on our bikes. We could just go anywhere we wanted. Now Bill has two little girls who are his grandchildren, and I think he’s a little bit more protective.

Let me ask you some questions about the film. Did you have the idea to do this only after Lolabelle died?
Yeah. I was doing a kind of reading in Paris, and this producer from Arte France said, “I want you to do this personal-essay film.” I was like, “I don’t know what that means even.” He said, “Why don’t you do some of those dog stories that you were reading?” That’s how I started. And that’s very typical of how I build something: I start with something I like and put other things in, and start to see how they relate, and is there even an engine? This is a collection of short stories, but how do they animate each other? Is there some kind of arch? You know, when I did a kind of ill-fated opera based on Moby Dick, I learned that the first version of that book had no Captain Ahab in it. It had whales, but not a whale, and no captain. I just really love to picture the conversation with the editor who was going, “You know, Herman, it’s a great book. It’s really interesting with all those whaling details, sailing lore, but where are you going? It’s basically guys go fishing.”

When did the project cohere for you?
Really when I added the 8-millimeter footage, which I wasn’t planning to do. But my brother said, “I have all these cartons of stuff. Would you transfer these since you’re making a movie?” Suddenly, there’s the lake, there’s my mother pushing my brothers in the stroller. I called my brothers and said, “Do you remember when I almost drowned you?” That’s when it had a place to go.

That particular story was one of my childhood stories, but not one that I told anyone, because it was sort of too complicated. My mother’s reaction to that was kind of atypical of a parent. You come home and you’ve lost a stroller and you’ve almost drowned your little brothers, and a parent would typically go, “What were you thinking?” I admired her very much.

I really did try in this film to not make things up, but to say how I actually felt, not what I should feel or what other people think you should feel. It’s kind of a taboo thing, to not love your mother. And even more so is a mother who doesn’t love her child. But that’s the case sometimes.

Even hearing you say it is kind of shocking.
Yeah. But one of the things I like about [the Buddhist practice of] Mother Meditation is that it’s possible to take these moments where you feel like you just can’t generate feeling, and there are a number of exercises to generate compassion. There’s one that was really too sad to put in the film. Imagine a really sweet little puppy, dancing around, playing by himself. Then there’s a crowd that gathers around him. And then a couple people take stones and throw them at the puppy. And then a lot of people pick up stones and everybody’s stoning the puppy. And they stone him to death.

This is an image that you call to your mind and you feel everything that you can for this puppy—its innocence, its beauty, the compassion that you feel for another creature. It’s too much for this film. I mean, it really is.

You can’t stone your main character.
No, you can’t, but it’s one of the compassion exercises that Buddhists use. I think it’s just so effective because you realize that you do love and respect and feel the innocence of living things, and the injustice of how we treat each other.

Is that what you mean in the film when you refer to the Buddhist practice of “feeling sad without being sad.”
Yeah. I meant there’s no way you couldn’t just be completely sad and destroyed watching that happen. But Mingyur Rinpoche, the teacher who says to practice that, is technically the happiest man in the world, according to the University of Wisconsin neurology department. He really is genuinely someone who believes that we are here to have a very, very, very, very good time. Period. And of course not to push away things that are sad, because there’s a lot of sad stuff in the world, and if you do try to push it away, you won’t succeed. His teaching is about being able to really feel it. Not to just kind of go, Oh! Really feel it, but absolutely don’t become it. That’s a waste of your life.

He’s disappeared, however. He’s been gone for over four years. He goes and does two-, three-year meditations, goes to caves and sits. This time he’s been gone four and a half years.

In a cave?
Yeah. And he was to go with his lamas, but he left by himself and left a note saying, “Don’t look for me.” I find that really inspiring but also kind of terrible, because his teachings are really wonderful. They’re very radical. Everything is about love. Even suicide is about love because it’s the attempt of that person to be free. For me Buddhism and being an artist is the same. There are no beliefs connected to either one of them. You don’t have to believe anything. All you have to do is pay attention. That’s what an artist is.

It’s amazing to me that he can truly disappear.
The Himalayas! There are some places where you can’t find people. Fortunately it’s still possible. He didn’t bring any devices, so we can’t track him.

So much of this footage you captured, or somebody captured, without the idea that it was going to end up in a film, right? Like the home video footage, the footage of Lola playing piano, pictures of Lola . . .
Lou and I took hundreds of pictures of Lolabelle because she’s just such a beautiful creature. We’re both photographers, and she’s a fantastic subject. There was no film at that point. The whole hospital sequence was for another project, a sidewalk of film projected onto crunched crumpled paper. That was shot a couple of years before, and I have to say, there’s no more fun than if a hospital gives you a whole wing and you get to dress up like doctors and patients and use the equipment.

Your description of being in the hospital as a kid is like a nightmare. Is that something you’ve returned to a lot, that memory of being in the hospital after breaking your back?
That was just my punk story of being a 12-year-old. Most 12-year-olds think adults are absolute idiots. They’re saying stupid, embarrassing stuff all the time. You wish they’d just go away. That was my memory of it: The doctors were stupid, the volunteers were stupid, and I was the star of my own hospital experience.

But then just in the middle of randomly telling [that story] to someone, [I had] a hallucination through hearing. I just remembered suddenly how [the ward] sounded. I don’t know what triggered that memory, but you know, you spend a lot of time [in the hospital] and it gets into a certain part of your brain. You’re not necessarily able to handle it at that time, so you put it in another part. When I did remember it, it came with all of the emotions, the fear of being there. Kids were all dumped in the same place, [the adults] thought, “Just put them in the same ward, they’re not going to worry that kids are dying during the night! They won’t even notice.” And it turns out adults are idiots. I put that in as just a way of talking about remembering things.

You introduce this idea about memory: When you tell and retell stories, you inevitably forget things, reshape the truth. In telling this story about Lolabelle, do you find yourself crystallizing certain memories and forgetting about others?
It happens with everything. You’re always featuring some element of a story, you’re only taking one aspect of what was going on at that point. The whole idea of narrative is a fiction. Certain things do come before other things, but it gets complicated when you start remembering, because you do start doubling back into the past and projecting forward into the future. That’s why I put Lou’s song “Turning Time Around” at the end, because it really is about trying to just appreciate that state of trying to be in the present. And trying not to use regret to [say], “Awww, the past, it was so much better. If I just do this and get that, it will be so much better in the future.”

Does that David Foster Wallace quote you reference speak to that same idea for you?
Not really, because that has a lot of nostalgia in it and built-in regret. Sometimes a lost loved person can be even more real than when they were there. You know, they don’t necessarily turn into vapor or ghosts. They can become more, they can become almost hyperreal if you exaggerate what they actually are and how it was with them.

Terry Gross interviewed Mary Karr about her new book about memoir recently, and practically the whole interview was about David Foster Wallace, which would have annoyed me if I were Mary Karr. But Mary Karr said something like: “Yes, David Foster Wallace proposed to me, but everybody gets that wrong, because he actually proposed to almost every woman he ever dated.”
I remember that quote from her. Yeah. Terry Gross—I was talking to her about this film, and she said, “What I really want to talk about is why certain women don’t get married.” I was like, “Can we bring this back around to the film? What are you talking about?”

On the other hand, there are plenty of people who go, “This film is all about Lou!” And I was like, “Did you not notice that there are about eight stories about my mother?” It’s about her. It’s not as acceptable a topic, you know, not loving your mother. People would feel more comfortable talking about, “Well, you must miss Lou a lot. And what was it like to be with a rock star?” I’m like, “Oh, please.” Could I have been any more graphic?

Would you have made this if your mother were still alive?
Probably not. While I didn’t love her, I really admired her and I respected her a lot. I also do think she would have loved this film. She was a dog lover, and she loved it when people told the truth. She wouldn’t be fazed for one second to hear that I didn’t love her. She would go, “I didn’t really love you, either.”

Was that said explicitly?
She wouldn’t quite say it like that. She had eight kids. She wanted to have a production of kids—successful kids who did things and learned things and went places! She was embarrassed by somebody saying “I love you.” She was very formal.

She was a very smart person, but I can’t say that she was really at all skilled in maternal love. She was very interested in the concept of love. But she hadn’t been loved herself. Her parents were quite cold, and she didn’t know how to do it. I don’t think any of her eight kids really held it against her that we didn’t have a loving mother. We just didn’t have one. It’s one reason that we have two parents. I had a great dad, just a wonderful guy. How come he’s not in the movie? He’s the DP! Like all of the dads, he’s got his camera. My dad shot a lot of this.

I feel very lucky to have the parents I did—a mother I admired and a father I loved. It doesn’t get better than that. I mean, maybe it gets better and you have a cozy family. But very few families are really like that.

You have all these siblings, too. Are you close?
Not with all of them. But I love them all. We taught ourselves to love. And we helped each other a lot as well. We do it as well as we can.

This interview has been condensed and edited.