After watching How to
Make an American Quilt, I am not sure if I should be disappointed with the
movie, with the post modernist philosophy that most the characters have their
lives mangled by, by American society as a whole, or if I should just be disappointed
at the fact that sometimes your life can get more trashed by keeping rules as it
can by breaking them.This is a movie that requires some subtle thinking on these issues.
Let me say at the outset, this is not a movie for everyone. Maybe not even a movie for anyone. I teach Modern American Social History and will soon be teaching Ethics and I have to say that this movie could find its way into a discussion of both categories. The women who form the quilting bee this movie is about tell the stories of their lives and loves and invariably disappointments and betrayals and the in the course of their various stories, they tell the narratives of American women in every decade since the 1860’s. I suppose the irony of the stories, when taken together, is that the two bookend romances, the story involving a young slave finding her true love by following a crow is the earliest story and the last involves a young contemporary woman similarly following a crow through an orchard to her life’s partner.
I am not sure what the message is but it would almost seem that it suggests that the best decisions that our hearts can make are not so much made by our hearts but by some “outside” wisdom our hearts merely recognize. And that it is simply a matter of recognizing who we are “chosen” to be with rather than finding or luring or reasoning our way to the decision. Finn (Wynona Ryder), the young woman who begins the movie wrestling with the decision to marry or not marry, concludes at the end,
“There are no rules you can follow. You have to go by instinct and you have to be brave.”
Instinct, it should be said, must be a different thing than
hormones because every woman in the story who follows those seems to wind up
paying for it with disappointment. What they get are shards of love … or, to
use the quilt metaphor, “patches” “Young lovers seek perfection,” one of the
characters suggests, “Old lovers learn the art of sewing shreds together and of
seeing beauty in a multiplicity of patches.” In other words, the story of most
people’s lives, involves costly mistakes that one must simply assimilate as
they try to focus on the memories that did make them feel loved, even if for
only a brief moment. It would be hard to recommend this movie to young people.
It would be hard not to. I suppose it depends which of its characters comes out
making the most sense after they have gone and made all their stupid mistakes
and rash human mistakes, and honest mistakes - after they have LIVED and drawn up their conclusions.
I am still not sure if the point
of the movie is to influence people to think MORE or think LESS when they make
their choices of partners. In the Biblical book of 2 Kings, God is said to have
sent ravens to feed the prophet Elijah while he hid out in the wilderness. In
this movie, it is as though God (or some unseen wisdom) sends crows to do the
work of cherubs, pointing in the direction He believes people should go.
The title, How to Make an American Quilt, is probably an appropriate one because most of the characters follow what is generally thought to be the quintessential American philosophy of the transcendentalists. Ralph Waldo Emerson is thought to have stated that philosophy most clearly in his essay Self Reliance.
To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is, that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages.
. . . There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion
. . . Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.
http://grammar.about.com/od/60essays/a/selfrelianessay.htm
One of the characters regrets deeply a decision she made in a moment of profound grief and sadness. “When you have spent your life with someone and they start to die and you feel this terrible terrible severing” she says, “you do things without thinking because what you have to face is so deeply unthinkable.” This movie is full of acts “done without thinking”
“I never liked full moons,” Anna advises (played by Maya Anjelou), in one of the movie’s more thematic exchanges, “they give people an excuse to do foolish things.”
“well” says Finn, “I’m young. I am supposed to do foolish things.”
“. . . and spend the rest of your life paying for them,” Anna replies.
“Well, its better than spending the rest of my life wondering what I missed.”
“I’d rather wonder than kick myself”
“well I’d rather kick myself”
“Fine. You will end up with a deeply sore backside.”
Three philosophies of life compete with each other in this movie. There is living your life by rules. There is living your life with no rules. And there is living your life with something that is not quite like rules, and not quite like no rules but best described as “guidance” … or perhaps what one might call “the rule of the inner light”. I think perhaps the biggest mistake in the script was the decision to call this guidance, “instinct” which I suspect is a word more closely associated with arousal, hunger, and with the chemical physiology of fight, flight, and mating. Perhaps the reader would enjoy the task of filling in the proper word. So much of the outcome of a person’s life depends on it.
“There are no rules you can follow. You have to go by [ ] and you have to be brave.”
Question for Comment: How have you filled in that blank? How would you advise a young person to fill in that blank? Why?
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