Two Comedies

I discovered the Noel Baumbach jewel of a movie, "Kicking and Screaming" a few months ago. I watched it and thought about it a lot. Then, about a month ago, I watched it... eight more times. Although I haven't had this experience with a movie in a long time, I have had it with books - when there's enough to hold onto the first time, but it challenges you beyond that with a language that you have to learn slowly.

There is enough evidence to support a hypothesis that the characters all started as caricatures, but such a hypothesis would be moot. I don't know how many revisions Noel went through with his script, but there is not a sharp edge to be found in any of the characters, nor their various interactions. This is all the more impressive given the pushing and pulling the script does with the characters and, in the case of Grover and Jane, the evolution we see. I imagine that Noel could tell you about each character's childhood in depth, and it would all ring just as true as what we see in the movie. Call me a simpleton, but that is a "good movie trump card" in my book.

Like most glowing artistic criticism, listening to my tone will set you all wrong on the movie. It isn't perfect, and a big part of why I like it is undoubtedly that I relate to it so well. But maybe it is worth watching.

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Tonight, I saw "The Trip", which was hilarious. I can't remember the last movie I saw that was as funny as it is. And it, too, rings of truth foremost in its conversations and relationships and it too leaves narrative form (even further) in the background - good for it. But the real bonus was Steve Coogan's dream that Noah Baumbach wanted him to star in his next movie. Now, I can't claim that Michael Winterbottom was thinking what I am thinking. But, I am thinking that Steve Coogan's character in The Trip is an older, British version of Grover - cynical, listless, intelligent, talented.

I suppose that we all fit on some great tree of archetypes and sub-archetypes, and whatever you call it when someone you just met reminds you of someone you used to know, but you can't quite put your finger on what it is about them.

A Conversation With Myself

I have been engaged in writing for some time now, and although a flurry of keys has not been a constant current, my thoughts have undeniably stayed active and I have been having a consistent conversation with myself that underpins my progress. To avoid producing a one-sentence paragraph, I will now point out that I have sufficient writing instincts to notice such a trivial violation that, as a rule, is little more than a crutch for weak writers, or: I could title this sentence, "Treating the Symptom".

I have found it difficult to answer even such simple questions as, "For what purpose am I writing?" But, today I certainly made some progress. Before a person can write for others, they have to be able to write for themselves. Or: first comes the art of writing, which I would call a selfish pursuit because how could we know otherwise? For others to agree with you is this other matter. Others might disagree. You could suggest that the art of writing includes this, but I choose to believe that aesthetic considerations are aggregated only because they are subjective to begin with and thus must be aggregated if we are to talk to others about "works of art". To me, art ultimately resides in one person's mind, and if others agree, then fine - but agreement is not a prerequisite to the presence of an aesthetic experience. But to get back to the point - why do I write?

I have felt the answer all along, but I didn't quite get it into the correct words until recently. I initially thought it possible that writing was a means of closure to the subject matter. (I suppose this is simply a more charitable take on Nietzsche's, "That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts." But I now believe I was wrong. The new theory I offer for writing is to understand what I have experienced by having a conversation with my memories.

I have traversed a lot of mental and emotional ground in the last ten years. One day I wanted to understand what the hell had happened. It's not that I was unsatisfied with where I was (although it helps to realize that such issues are always a mixed matter). I couldn't accept that I had gone unaffected by my decisions. I couldn't believe that different decisions would have spit the same "me" out at the end of some other causal sequence - that the same "me" might be writing these same sentences having joined the circus years earlier or living behind a bedroom door all this time. I needed to see how I happened. Ultimately, I needed... need... to learn how to see ahead through the emotional perturbations of my decisions to the person that will come out on the other side. Not a decision made out of time and in a bubble; a decision that must be anti-fragile. It is critical that I make the big choices ahead of us the best that I can. I should have no other goal.

The effect of transferring memory so directly into writing is to have a conversation with those memories. They are pulled apart and I get some sense of what was present there, see how their essence changes with embellishment. It can be fascinating - the aesthetic content of a life. That it can be made better or worse strikes me as some enigma. This is the strangest of all mirrors I know - between what we are and what we imagine and project.