Eucatastrophe Reader

"I Reckon So"

The Outlaw Josey Wales REVIEW

The other day, I was in my local library and found a recently published magazine, The American Rifleman. “The world’s oldest and largest firearm authority,” the banner reads. On the cover was a picture of Clint Eastwood in his role as “The Outlaw Josey Wales” in the movie of the same title (1975). Eastwood suggests that it was wildly popular because in 1975, the U.S. was dealing with the aftermath of the Vietnam War and the film depicts the messy psychological and social adjustments that had to be made as soldiers and the culture untangled their traumas and violent pasts. The film uses the aftermath of the Civil War to provide a cathartic tale of a psychologically damaged Vietnam vet 100 years before his time.  

The cover of the magazine provides a number of avenues for exploration. The image of Clint Eastwood brandishing his two large handguns is about as iconic as it comes. The title of the article is “’I Reckon So’ The Guns of the Outlaw Josey Wales.” The cover page includes reference to the fact that the magazine contains an official NRA Ballot inside. One article is entitled, “This Election Could Determine the Future of the Second Amendment.” An ad for a semi-automatic weapon contains the moniker, “50 Rounds of Functional Defensive Artistry” and another “The Easiest Way to Get a Silencer.” The annual meeting of the NRA will be held in Texas we are informed. Would anyone be surprised? The magazine is full of such articles and advertisements relating to the use of guns, and Josey Wales is portrayed as a sort of standard bearer for the NRA.  One is tempted to wonder why, of all the Westerns with overtly masculine gun-toting heroes, Eastwoods’ Josey Wales was the winning contestant.  

I decided to rent the film to learn more. The film introduces us to Josey Wales in the opening scenes. He is a hard-scrabble Missouri farmer just trying to plant crops and feed his lovely wife and young family when tragedy in the form of a band of marauding Union-sympathizing terrorists (i.e. rowdy abolitionists) from Kansas descends upon his home, sets it on fire, and kills his wife and child.  Bereft, Josey Wales gets out his guns and learns to shoot (we are thus given to understand that he was not a violent man before but that he has been forced into it by the brutality of Union soldiers). A band of Confederate sympathizers arrives and invites him to join their rabble of counterinsurgents and off they go to fight the Union. Flashbacks of all the violence parade across the screen for several minutes. One is not sure which side is right or wrong. It is just a lot of men shooting at one another.

Eventually, the War concludes, and Josey’s band of guerrilla fighters decides to surrender. They are promised amnesty and, without any hope of carrying on their personal wars of revenge (no one in the band seems to have any idea that they are fighting for slavery here) they head down to the Union camp where they turn in their weapons and begin to pledge their allegiance to the U.S. Government. Suddenly the dastardly Union men open fire on them from a covered wagon with a gatling gun. Josey Wales, the only Missourian fighter who refused to surrender, is spared, but not before he attacks the union camp to save his mates, commandeering the Gatling gun and decimating Union soldiers right and left before he escapes. The viewer is meant to breath a sigh of relief that he did not hand his guns over to the double crossing government.

By this time, we have established that Josey Wales is an honorable family man driven to fight a violent and corrupt Union army and government that not only slaughters women and children in cold blood but also deceives those who surrender, murdering them while they are in the act of surrendering. Clearly, according to the film, Josey Wales was correct in refusing to surrender his weapons for now that he is a hunted man, he will surely need them (you can see where the NRA bit is coming in). Over the next hour of the movie, Josey Wales is hunted by a posse of bounty hunters and Union soldiers while outdueling and killing a whole congregation of bad men – rapists, thieves, scoundrels, carpetbaggers, frauds, sex-traffickers, corrupt politicians, and hooligans. The whole while, he treats Native Americans, women (and Native American women in particular) honorably (I don’t think there are any Black characters in the film, but at one point, Josey insists that he does not have any interest in “owning any other human” thus establishing that while he despises Northerners generally, and abolitionist settlers from Kansas particularly, he did not fight in the Civil War to defend slavery – he was just protecting his family from violence subtext: as any honorable man would do).

The genius of the subterfuge is that he uses the Native Americans in the story as a stand-in for White Southerners – people who have been “abused” by the forces of the Federal government and had their “culture” “destroyed” for an inability to resist assimilation by force. Josey Wales has no intentions of demanding that proud indigenous cultures stop resisting the evils of Federal power.  Indeed, he celebrates their continual armed resistance.

The Outlaw Josey Wales is something of a morality story about the need for armed resistance in the face of a corrupt but powerful government and in a world of criminals, thieves, drunks, and scum-bags looking for opportunities to pillage and rape. “I reckon so,” Josey is wont to say. But he says other spectacularly defiant things as well:

A bounty hunter tells him that “a man’s got to make a livin somehow,” and Josey says to him, “Dyin’ ain’t much of a livin’.” “Are you gonna pull those pistols or whistle ‘Dixie’?” he asks a group of Union soldiers about to draw their weapons on him. Josey Wales is full of spit and raw nobility. He dispenses with his own justice. He uses his handguns for courts.

What not many people may know is that the novel the film was based on was written by a former Klan member and the speech-writer for the segregationist Alabama governor, George Wallace.   The author, Forest Carter, was the adopted name of Asa Carter, formally of Alabama. The name “Forest” was adopted to honor the founder of the Klan, Confederate General, Nathan Bedford Forest. Asa Carter was the speech writer who came up with George Wallace’s famous line, “Segregation now. Segregation tomorrow. Segregation forever.” You might say that like Josey Wales, he was a bad man in a former life.

You can learn about Asa (Forest) Carter’s double life from the documentary, “The Reconstruction of Asa Carter” a man who literally got two different gravestones for having successfully pulled off two different lives. One as a racist Klan leader and one as a writer of books celebrating law, order, and the humanization of American Indians.

It is interesting that at the end of the film, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Josey masquerades as “Mr. Wilson” while some of his supporters tell the law men in the saloon who have been sent to find Josey that Josey was shot down in Mexico, going so far as to sign an affidavit to that effect.  One law-man who knows Josey from his days as a Missouri Confederate decides to let Josey go though, telling  him in the films closing words, “I think I will go down to Mexico and try to find him [Josey Wales] . . . . I think I will try to tell him the war is over.” “I reckon so,” Josey replies, “I guess we all died a little in that damn war.”

Wounded, dripping blood on his boots, Josey returns to his small farm in Texas, we assume to either die in peace or carry on with a new life as “Mr. Wilson.” Just like Asa had become Forest when it became clear that the world was not safe for leaders of the Klan and segregationists any more, Josey holsters his guns and hopes that his past will leave him alone now.    

Question for Comment: Just today, I read about a man in Texas who changed his name to “Literally Anybody Else.” If you could pack up and be someone new – someone better situated to succeed in the world than you live in now, who would you become? Or are you the sort to go down fighting a changing world to the bitter end?

“Your stories can only keep you company for so long.”

News of the World REVIEW

Jefferson Kyle Kidd travels the backroads of Texas reading the news to people so isolated they are hungry for it. People gather and put dimes in a bucket to hear Jefferson read from a collection of newspapers that he curates and synthesizes for them. And then, he comes across a wrecked wagon and an orphaned child – a young girl who has been living with the Kiowa since her family was killed by them when she was an infant. She has no knowledge of English and no family to speak of any more. All she has is some official papers that indicate that she was the child of German immigrants and that she has family in Castorville, Texas.

Jefferson and Johanna thus begin an adventure of epic and danger-laden proportions as Jefferson attempts to return her to what semblance of family she may have. He, a Civil War veteran of the confederacy with war trauma who lost his wife while serving. She, a traumatized child lost in the woods violently removed from her biological family and then from her Kiowa family and then again violently from the courier who the army had hired to return her to her kin.

One can tell that the film is all about how to move on from devastating loss. The theme emerges as Johanna tries to recover from her losses, Jefferson tries to recover from his losses, and the South tries to recover from its losses. “Your stories can only keep you company for so long,” one of Jefferson’s acquaintances tells him.  “I guess we both have demons to face going down this road” Jefferson says to his new charge in a moment when she clearly begins to remember the attack that took her family from this world. “Going back is not good. Need to put it behind you. Move forward. Stay on that line and don’t look back.” “No,” she says in Kiowa, “to move forward you must remember.”

I suspect that her point is that one cannot partake of the present when one’s soul is stuck in some un-resolved, unsettled, or un-cauterized wound.   

To tell you how Jefferson and Johanna find their way out of there traumas is what this story is all about. A story that kept me company one Spring evening in May.

Question for Comment: Do you have something left unresolved that keeps to from experiencing life as it unfolds in the present?

“They are stable, and we are catastrophic.”

Anchors REVIEW

Dillon and Julia Jones. Former intimates meet by coincidence on a street outside a hotel in New York. He is a month away from getting married and she has just discovered that she and her husband are pregnant.

The conversation soon makes its way to the last time they were supposed to have met eleven years earlier. They had a planned dinner out. She did not show. He does not know why. He asks why she stood him up. She asks him why he did not come and look for her. She had only one friend in New York. He should have known where to look.

“Explain yourself,” he says.  

“You knew where I was. Think about Dillon. You knew where I was. Guess. Rachel’s. I went to stay with the only other person I knew in the city. . . .”

He accuses her of abandoning him. She accuses him of not being persistent enough. They both assess their current partners in life and confess that, incentivized by stability, they have “settled” for something so much less real.

They both try to disconnect as they connect and it is clear that they have attachments and reservations. A poem I once wrote comes to mind.

Cautious and Interested

Intimacy.
To say that I am
Cautious and Interested
Involves understatement
On both sides of the conjunction.

“I tried to sneak out Jones, but we are in it now.” Dillon says at one point. He clearly believes that they should leave their previous commitments and rebuild what they once lost. “I don’t know how I messed this up or why I let you go,” he pleads. “We have these great memories,” she responds, “but at the end there is so much sadness.”

“They are anchors Julia. They bring us down and they drain us,” he insists.  “They are anchors Julia.”

She responds, “You and me. We get each other completely and not a lot of people do but what just happened here, this isn’t a reason for us to be together. You know in a month from now you will be thinking about Marcy and what you gave up with her. . . .” “They are stable, and we are catastrophic,” she continues, “It is beautiful but it is so impossible.”

One senses the title of the film is about this dilemma and the metaphor of anchors. Anchors are things that keep you from speeding away and they are things that keep you from being blown away. Both of these two individuals realized when they were younger that they needed someone more stable – more responsible – less erratic – more practical. They moved in the direction of what they were not and gained balance at the cost of connection.

In the end, she seems to see having an anchor to keep her from blowing away as the better choice. He sees the anchor metaphor as a liability, keeping them from celebrating the creative playfulness at the heart of their personalities. It seems that the financial demands of life in the big city require them to find partners with more monetary values that can support them in their art even as they diminish the value of that art.

I cannot say that the conversation that I would have with certain people from my past would look like this. It wouldn’t. But nevertheless, I wish the conversation could be had.

Question for Comment: What would a conversation with some long-lost love look like for you?

“I know you want her back, kid."

Chemical Hearts REVIEW.

What exactly happens to your body and brain when your heart gets broken?

Chemical Hearts (the movie) Our Chemical Hearts (YA Novel) tries to explain it in a story of two high school students dealing with their own broken hearts.

The author of Our Chemical Hearts takes the approach that the thing we experience as love, like the thing we experience as heartbreak, is a chemical thing. It has its basis in the way that our brain sends in a shipment of chemicals to give us a feeling of euphoria when it believes the time has come to pair up. And then when the object of our affection leaves, it doubles down on what it wants by sending in tanker trucks of other pain and stress inducing chemicals to drag us back to “the chosen one”. It is the biggest, cruelest, insufferable chemical transference imaginable and it literally can throw you right off a mountain top feeling of exhilaration to the bottom of a high jagged cliff. It is joy to desolation.

Like yesterday. I was putting my boot on in anticipation of a lovely dinner at my sister’s and all of a sudden, my calf and ankle convulsed into what I can unequivocally assert was the worst cramp pain I have felt in my life. It immobilized me and had me writhing on the ground in agony. The main character, Henry Page (played by Austin Adams), has an older sister who is a nurse who explains it all to him in the book this way:

“I know you want her back, kid. And I know that people saying things like 'there are plenty more fish in the sea' is only going to make you hurt more. And I could tell you all about the science of what your brain is going through right now. How it's processing a pain as intense as hitting a nerve in your tooth, but it can't find a source for that pain, so you kind of feel it everywhere. I could tell you that when you fall for someone, the bits of your brain that light up are the same as when you're hungry or thirsty. And I could tell you that when the person you love leaves you, you starve for them, you crave them, Heartbreak is a science, like love. So trust me when I say this: you're wounded right now, but you'll heal.”

I wonder if we should all take out heartbreak insurance.

“Your brain runs hot, the cogs inside your mind jarring together until all the oil of your thoughts is burned away. The fire spreads to your chest, where it chars your lungs and turns your heart to embers. And right when you think the flames have burned away everything but your skeleton, the spark skips from your bones to immolate not only your flesh, but your entire life.”

As the book closes, Henry reflects on what he has learned or is learning about his senior year encounter with a broken heart.

“I can’t lie to you and tell you that standing in front of someone and offering them your soul and having them reject you is not gonna be one of the worst things that ever happens to you. You will wonder for days or weeks or months or years afterward what it is about you that was so wrong or broken or ugly that they couldn’t love you the way you loved them. You will look for all the reasons inside yourself that they didn’t want you and you will find a million. Maybe it was the way you looked in the mornings when you first woke up and hadn’t showered. Maybe it was the way you were too available, because despite what everyone says, playing hard to get is still attractive. Some days you will believe that every atom of your being is defective somehow. What you need to remember, as I remembered as I watched Grace Town leave, is that you are extraordinary.”

The other main character of the story is Grace Town. She is dealing with the death of her former boyfriend in an automobile accident that she partially caused. In the course of the movie/novel, she tries to “move on” but she too is unable to buckle her brain’s chemistry (and the grief it can inflict on a person who has lost a deep love) into some sort of emotional car seat. Grace may be the object of Henry’s desire and affection and love but she is tied to a now-dead love of her life in a way that leaves her cruelly in need of connection and unable to offer it. She tells Henry,

“I can’t put into words what it is to love someone like that. Or lose someone like that. Which is part of the reason why I don’t write anymore. Because words fail. A lot of people they don’t know what they’ve got until it’s gone, but I knew. I knew. I knew every day that we were together that what we had was extraordinary. And I was so afraid, every day, that I would lose him, lose them all. I used to worry so much about his safety, worry that they’d finally get sick of dealing with my messed-up family, but they never did. And I used to question how two people could be so lucky. How could the universe justify bringing us together when we were only nine? How could it ever be fair that what everyone was looking for was handed to us on a silver platter when we were too young to even know that we wanted it?”

Henry comes to understand that sometimes you can love people who are unavailable to you.

“The love Grace had described,” Henry says, “was the kind that transcended time and space. In any universe, in any life, it would always be them and I would always be the after. The lesser. . . .  I somehow knew, in that moment, that Grace Town was a jagged piece of glass that I'd cut myself on again and again if I let myself get involved with her. That the way forward would be pockmarked by sadness and grief and jealousy.”

Chemical Hearts is a movie/book that I can put into my “Thomas Hardy file.” It ends realistically. It leaves you hoping that these two young people do eventually find a way to “move on.”

Question for Comment: What do you think causes us to suddenly “latch on” to someone? What is the secret to unlatching?

"I have the soul of a millionaire."

La Boheme REVIEW

It almost sounds like a joke that my son the IT major might tell: An artist, a writer, a philosopher, and musician walk into a garret in Paris on Christmas Eve, unable to pay the rent or pay for adequate heat … [You finish the joke]

The philosopher has failed to sell some books for food. Its freezing and the artist and the writer argue over whether it would be better to use the artist’s latest painting or the writer’s latest play to fuel the fire.

Suddenly the musician reveals that an Englishman has paid him to play violin for his dying parrot and the four euphorically decide to go out and party (maybe find some girls). In the modern world, these would be like four guys in a van who call themselves a band. Suffice it to say, their Humanities degrees (if they went to school at all) are not paying the bills.

As an aside, I was not aware that there was actually a fashion style that is associated with the bohemian ideology. Somewhat rooted in the counter-culture of the 1960’s, “Boho” dress involves the use of relaxed fits, natural fabrics, creatively made and crafty accessories that send a message of frugality and a rejection of whatever is cool on Fifth Avenue. For those who can’t out-work people in a competitive marketplace, it is a perfect way to maintain your dignity by asserting that you have rejected the culture that you have no way to join.

In La Boheme, the writer stays behind for a moment and is thus introduced to a young woman from down the hall who stops by for light (she is out of matches). Because these are Bohemians, and because there is a little bit of moonlight out the window, they soon fall in love (as in, before they even know anything about one another). Rodolfo proclaims his love for her in the following words:

“I have the soul of a millionaire. But now all my treasure has been robbed. … robbed by two thieves - two lovely eyes. Tonight, they came in with you and stole away my dreams. All my past dreams floated away in air. But the theft doesn’t bother me. Because the empty space has been filled with the sweetest hope.”

“Now that you know something about me,” he says, “tell me bout yourself. Tell me who you are.”

In other words, if you are a Bohemian chick, a pair of eyes is all you need to attract a soul-mate. It is hard to know if Puccini intended to make fun of the Bohemians in this play or if he intended to celebrate them.  The romantics in this opera are capable of honest self-reflection but seem incapable of being other than what they are. The painter, Marcello, reflects upon his roomate’s moon-smitten romance and says, “Oh lovely moments of false utopia.  You believe. You hope, and the world seems beautiful.”

 Of his own former mistress, Musetta, he exclaims “She eats hearts.”

But when Musetta dumps her rich boyfriend to shack back up with him, he is more than willing to go along. “I’ll leave these bills as my farewell gift,” Musetta says as she leaves the check for her beau to pay when the band of ne’er-do-well’s realizes that they do not have enough money to pay for their meals.

There are two more acts to go but you get the picture. The Bohemians celebrate their life of Thoreauvian poverty and their rejection of materialism but seem to always have to come back to the realization that romance requires money eventually. In some circumstances, the love of your life can even die from a lack of sufficient heat or healthcare (I will avoid telling you any outright spoilers). If I had to guess the theme of the opera as far as the Bohemian lifestyle goes it is something like “be amused by them or admire them if you must . . . but don’t be them.”

Question for Comment: Have you ever tried the life of a Bohemian? What did you conclude from your experiment?  

"Its not fair”

“I don’t understand. I try to do my job. I follow the rules and people hate me. Innocent people get hurt and other people – people who are not good get to walk around and do whatever they want .  Its not fair.” – Peggy, Mad Men

Peggy may be the closest thing to a “good person” in the first season of the television show, Mad Men. She works as a secretary in an advertising firm on Madison Avenue in 1960. Over the course of the first 12 episodes, we are introduced to an office full of immaculately dressed urbanite rakes who run and work in the company. In the first episode, we are introduced to the work they do – selling tobacco products while scientific studies are being published making it clear that cigarettes cause cancer. Their character development only seems to regress from there. The show is a condemnation of their cosmopolitan and elitist lack of values. They swear, they smoke, they drink incessantly, They carouse. They all cheat on their wives. They sexually harass the secretaries (who are by no means always innocent). They are rude, anti-Semitic, dishonest, back-biting, treacherous, greedy, egotistical, spoiled, and devotees of Ayn Rand.  Watching this show makes me think of that old Bible verse “There is none righteous, no not one.”

It may be that the script writers intend for us to somehow feel empathy for their plight but it is an almost hopeless task.

Peggy plays a central role though she is only a secretary on her first day on the job when the first episode opens. Clearly, she is not immune from the influences around her but she is somewhat like Lot in Sodom who the apostle Peter says (if you read it in the Greek) that he “tormented himself (reflexive verb tense) with their lawless deeds.” 

It is the task of the executives in this advertising company to figure out ways to lie to the masses about what products can do for them. It should not surprise us to find that they are all such good liars in their personal lives.  “All you who use words, you are such good liars,” the novelist Orson Scott Card once wrote. They lie to one another. They lie to their wives. They lie to their mistresses. They lie to their clients. They lie to their bosses. And like Peggy says, it all seems to work out for them. “People who are not good get to walk around and do whatever they want.”

This is not a sentiment felt for the first time in 1960. Indeed, there is a Psalm written by Asaph, King David’s choir leader who pre-echoes it over 3000 years ago. You can find it in the 73^rd Psalm.

The Psalm begins with an affirmation that the world is governed by a just God.

“Surely God is good to Israel – to those who are pure in heart,” Asaph says,

But then he explains how he fell into thinking otherwise.

 ² But as for me, my feet had almost slipped;
    I had nearly lost my foothold.
³ For I envied the arrogant
    when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.

⁴ They have no struggles;
    their bodies are healthy and strong.
⁵ They are free from common human burdens;
    they are not plagued by human ills.
⁶ Therefore pride is their necklace;
    they clothe themselves with violence.
⁷ From their callous hearts comes iniquity;
    their evil imaginations have no limits.
⁸ They scoff, and speak with malice;
    with arrogance they threaten oppression.
⁹ Their mouths lay claim to heaven,
    and their tongues take possession of the earth.
¹⁰ Therefore their people turn to them
    and drink up waters in abundance.
¹¹ They say, “How would God know?
    Does the Most High know anything?”

¹² This is what the wicked are like—
    always free of care, they go on amassing wealth.

¹³ Surely in vain I have kept my heart pure
    and have washed my hands in innocence.
¹⁴ All day long I have been afflicted,
    and every morning brings new punishments.

¹⁵ If I had spoken out like that,
    I would have betrayed your children.
¹⁶ When I tried to understand all this,
    it troubled me deeply . . .

I can imagine that Asaph might well have been speaking of some of David’s sons – Amnon or Absalom, powerful princes who the historian of the book of II Samuel explains to us were never disciplined (David, a flawed man himself, always preferred to let God do the disciplining). These are the characters of Mad Men and this is exactly how Peggy comes to feel about them . . . and about herself.

In Puccini’s opera Tosca, the lead female character sings a prayer of lament, complaining that life is not fair.

I lived for my art, I lived for love,
I never did harm to a living soul!
With a secret hand
I relieved as many misfortunes as I knew of.
Always with true faith
my prayer
rose to the holy shrines.
Always with true faith
I gave flowers to the altar.
In the hour of grief
why, why, o Lord,
why do you reward me thus?
I gave jewels for the Madonna’s mantle,
and I gave my song to the stars, to heaven,
which smiled with more beauty.
In the hour of grief
why, why, o Lord,
ah, why do you reward me thus?

Why are the rewards and afflictions of justice and injustice so often sent to the wrong addresses? The Hebrew Prophet, Habakkuk found himself asking this question one day.

² How long, Lord, must I call for help,
    but you do not listen?
Or cry out to you, “Violence!”
    but you do not save?
³ Why do you make me look at injustice?
    Why do you tolerate wrongdoing?
Destruction and violence are before me;
    there is strife, and conflict abounds.
⁴ Therefore the law is paralyzed,
    and justice never prevails.
The wicked hem in the righteous,
    so that justice is perverted.

It is this conviction that we have that the world should be just and that it is not fair when it is not.

What is so striking about the show Mad Men is just how firmly all the drunk liars in the show agree with Asaph and Tosca it at some point. They all object when they are lied to, when they are cheated on, when they are back-stabbed, when they are insulted. Their inability to make the connection between their own pain when thusly treated and the pain of others they thusly treat is the great irony of their characters. They simply never see the connection between what they sow and what they eventually reap.

In Psalm 73, Asaph the choir director gets himself back on stable ground by looking forward rather than behind and around. His theme is “justice eventually.”

I am not sure how many seasons of Mad Men is required to get to that same outcome.

Question for Comment: What is your antidote to injustice poisoning?

“If we had not met again, everything would have come to a natural conclusion.”

Innocence REVIEW

Innocence (2000) is about a couple separated by circumstance who agree to meet again 40 years later, now in their 70’s. Claire is still married while Andreas is not. The connection they shared in youth is abundantly present from the moment she steps off the train to meet him. The film is a playing out of the opposing forces of love, loyalty, morality, and mortality.

The reunion is initiated by Andreas in the politest way possible. He is not assertive or uncareful. “I would like to meet you again. Is this possible?” he asks. She is hesitant at first. ““I shall always love you but please dear Andreas . . . “ but then feels compelled by forces of curiosity and memory to meet. When explaining her relationship with her husband, she says “We are good friends. That is all that really matters in the end.” And yet this is precisely what she concludes is not actually true. Her life without what her and Andreas share is actually a form of death while living 

Andreas and his daughter have a conversation where this subject is raised.

“So many people are dead inside. Nothing. A few memories. A few thoughts of the past . . . We should live. Its now that matters. You know what really matters in life? Love. Everything else is rubbish.”

“I am in love again,” Andreas says to his daughter, “With my very first love.” She is delighted to hear of it.

“You’re a wonderful child,” he says to her.

“Your’e a wonderful child too,” she says noting his giddiness.  

Claire’s husband is clearly hurt by the news of this rekindled flame (even though he knows just how cold the embers between he and Claire has been for decades). When he asks his son to talk sense into Claire, Claire responds,

“Life is brutal at times. Don’t judge me lightly . . . It isn’t always possible to resist. To obey the rules and deny the things that really matter.”

 Her son seems to understand and tries explain to his father that his mother is not in need of a doctor. “You have to live for something or someone,” he explains “Otherwise it doesn’t make sense.”

Eventually, Claire and Andreas meet again and eventually the discussion turns to what happened back in their youth. We are given to understand that the breakup was imposed upon the couple by a disapproving parent. Claire confronts him for not being tenacious enough. “You never really fought to get me back,” she says. “I expected you to come every night and save me but you didn’t.” Andreas can only apologizes and say that regardless, the love never abated. The two become “involved.”

Her relationship with her husband begins to deteriorate. He is hurt, wounded, angry. Claire wonders if she should have agreed to meet Andreas again. Everything has gotten ever so complicated. “If we had not met again,” she says, “everything would have come to a natural conclusion.”

“Or unnatural conclusion.” Andreas responds.  

The concluding line of the film is a voiceover a scene in which Andreas and Claire’s husband are walking together in the woods after she hs passed away. “I caused such hurt allowing love to blossom again,” Claire says, “I ask you all to forgive me but any other way would have been wrong – would have killed me. I have loved you both differently but completely.”

Question for Comment: What is the relationship between healing and wounding in these matters? Is it wrong to wound people in an attempt to reconnect with a relationship that should have never been disconnected?  

“Doesn't feel good to have people you trust be reckless with you, does it?”

Say You Will REVIEW

This is one of those movies that requires a sequel to know if it ends well. Not everything is wrapped up with a bow by the time the final credits roll. The story line keeps coming back to a central theme about whether or not people should be judged for leaving relationships they are expected to stay committed to. Over the course of the film you learn that high school senior, Sam’s mother left a previous relationship to marry his dad. Twenty years later, Sam’s father leaves the family by ending his own life. In the year since, Sam’s mother has been distancing herself from Sam in her grief and he feels it. She is depressed and he feels guilty for his decision to leave her alone in order to attend college.

There are two kinds of people," he says in his English class journal. "People who leave and people who stay."

Sam is just graduating from high school and starts to develop a close friendship with Ellie, a classmate who is still figuring out who she is (and who she wants to be with). “I like you, Sam, she says when explaining why she keeps seeing her old boyfriend even though she has started to get attached to Sam. “But I'm not really an all or nothing sort of person like you.”

When Sam finds a box of letters that were written between his mom and the man she loved before she married Sam’s dad, Sam decides to see if he can arrange a reconnection between them so that he can leave home to start his own life without feeling guilty.  He tries explain his reason to Ellie:

“Found all these photos of my mom with this guy. -Some guy before my dad.
-Like a high school boyfriend?
No.
It was serious, they were engaged. There were all these letters.
Did you read them? You did.
They were so different.
Different how?
My mom really loved this guy. She loved my dad too, but these letters... Every single one of them was about forever. My parents never talked like that.”

When Sam meet’s the old flame, he discovers that the man is still interested. “It's easy to draw lines in the sand,” the man says, “But trust me, people don't exist... on one side or the other.” “The truth is people are much more complicated than that,” he adds later, “They don't exist on one side or the other. You have to let them in just as often as you let them leave.” He explains to Sam that he had issues when Sam’s mom left and that there were good reasons why she chose Sam’s father.

 “Not everything has to be one way or the other, right?” Ellie tries to explain to Sam later when her commitment to him is demonstratively erratic.

“Haven't you ever been unsure about anything?” she asks Sam.

“No,” he replies, “Not when it comes to you.”

There is moment in the film when Sam promises to back up Elli in a difficult decision she has to make and he elects not to follow through because of her fickle commitment to him. “Yeah,” he says to her later, “Doesn't feel good to have people you trust be reckless with you, does it?”

Towards the end of the film, Sam and his mother have a conversation. “Dean's a good guy,” she says of her old fiancé’ “He did not deserve what your dad and I did to him.” And then she tries to explain her silence over the previous year.

A couple of months before it happened... we got into a really bad fight. I was just so sick of him making me suffer with him, you know?
And...
He asked me if I regretted choosing him over Dean.
And...
I just didn't answer, I just didn't say anything.
I just let him sit in it, you know, just let him wonder.
Mom.
Then a few months later he did what he did.
I really need you to forgive me for that because I can't forgive myself, Sam.“

In other words, her emotional abandonment was coming from a place of guilt.

I suppose the point is that in every one of the relationships of the movie someone stays at one point and leaves at one point and comes back at one point (except the father who made it impossible for him to come back) and in each case, they have their reasons. People are not stable. Sometimes, they are in the process of sorting themselves out and they make decisions to connect with you and abandon you for reasons that are not always about you.

In a moment of honesty, as the film concludes, Ellie tells Sam that she hopes that sometime in the next decade, she will grow up and be more committed than she is at the moment. “I wish we could've met down the road. When we were like 27,” she tells Sam, “and we have everything all figured out.”

I wonder if 27 is some sort of magic number. Is that when people are supposed to have themselves figured out well enough to make commitments?

Question for Comment: Have you made decisions to stay and leave someone? Have you been reckless with people who trusted you? Have they been reckless with you?

“I don’t think I was quite ready for a goodbye.”

Monsoon REVIEW

Imagine that you are young and have your entire life ahead of you. You are about to head off to college and your life-long friend and next-door neighbor have a decision to make: Do you love each other? There you are alone together swimming in the pool in the back yard, obviously attracted to each other. You begin to talk and it is clear that you are best of friends. You go for a drive together and spend the day in each other’s company experiencing the sheer bliss of being with someone so attuned intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, physically. The outcome of the day is a sense of profound happiness, satisfaction, affection, desire, love, and commitment. The car can barely contain the joy of the life-long decisions that have been made that day. “It wasn’t complicated. That is what makes it great,” Sarah says about the relationship.

And then “WHAM!” The car is struck on the passenger side and she is dead.

Gone.

Its over.

If something like this has ever happened to you, you probably know that it is not over. Love can often be impervious to death. This film is about that reality – the reality of people you love who are lost to you and yet won’t go away. This is a movie about the grieving process. About the different things that people will say to you as you try to “get over it.” Some will just demand that you move on. Some will tell you that grief never ends. Some will tell you that at some point, you have to take risks and jump into new relationships. Ultimately, John concludes that however moving on happens – whether neatly or raggedly, you have to be ready to move on before you can. If only the one we miss most could come to us in a vision and tell us that it is okay.

Throughout the film, we see John driving back to the scene of the accident. “I just wanted to finish that drive home,” he says. “That’s not going to happen, is it?”

“I can’t stay. I am not real,” his imagined Sarah says,

“You are to me,” he replies. “I don’t think I was quite ready for a goodbye.”

As the movie ends, we can hear Yael Mayer's song Carry On playing in the background. 

How do you know when it is time to let go?
How can you tell when it is time to farewell?
All things have a season, it all comes to an end
It's hard to follow reason when the heart won't bend

How do you know when it is time to make a change?
How can you tell, when it all feels so strange?
To leave friends behind for unknown things to find
Whether it makes sense we will only learn in time

And you win some and you lose some
And there's no right or wrong
And you look back at what you used to have
But now it's all gone
So you give up or you make up
For what you have lost

And you carry on, carry on
You carry on, carry on
Yeah you carry on, carry on
You carry on, carry on

Yeah you carry on, carry on
You carry on, carry on
Yeah you carry on,…

Question for Comment: The film raises an interesting question for people dealing with loss. Should one be over some past attachment before they move on to another? Or do we really need some new attachment to help us disconnect from the previous?

La Belle Dam Sans Merci

Waking REVIEW

Ben has a tough choice to make. He has to decide between the perfect relationship or a literal dream. His girlfriend of six years has just moved back into time and is ready to marry. Her father, a therapist, is ready to retire and hand over all his clients to Ben. Ben’s friends are all jealous of how everything is falling into place for him.

Enter Nadia. A girl that Ben has been dreaming about since he was a child. And as he soon discovers, she has been dreaming about him too. They start going on frolics with each other in their shared dream lives while both of them have significant others in their real lives. Ben is able to discover that his dream girlfriend actually lives in Sacramento and now he has to decide if he is willing to break up with his real fiancé’ to go running after his La Belle Dam Sans Merci to use the words of John Keats (“the beautiful woman without mercy”).

I met a lady in the meads,
       Full beautiful—a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
       And her eyes were wild.

I made a garland for her head,
       And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love,
       And made sweet moan

I set her on my pacing steed,
       And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
       A faery’s song.

She found me roots of relish sweet,
       And honey wild, and manna-dew,
And sure in language strange she said—
       ‘I love thee true’.

She took me to her Elfin grot,
       And there she wept and sighed full sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
       With kisses four.

And there she lullèd me asleep,
       And there I dreamed—Ah! woe betide!—
The latest dream I ever dreamt
       On the cold hill side.

I saw pale kings and princes too,
       Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried—‘La Belle Dame sans Merci      
       Thee hath in thrall!’

I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
       With horrid warning gapèd wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
       On the cold hill’s side.

And this is why I sojourn here,
       Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
       And no birds sing.

I suspect that the writer and producer would have us believe that Ben makes the right decision in the end. But perhaps that is something the film is asking us to debate.

Question for Comment: Have you ever sacrificed, or refused to sacrifice, a good life for a better mirage?

“We need to break up.”

See Girl Run REVIEW

Closure. “The act of ending something”

See Girl Run opens with a series of interviews with women talking about high school sweethearts. We learn that they are being vetted for a reality TV show that involves being re-introduced to their high school flames 20 years later. We soon discover that this is a movie about moments in people’s lives when they start imagining “what if” scenarios with people they were once attached to. “In reality,” the central character in the film says of her high school boyfriend, Jason, “We didn’t break up. We never have. . . . . technically, we never broke up.”

Emmie is now in her early forties and she is married but going through a marital conflict of sorts and she is given cause to wonder if maybe pursuing her marriage is the unfaithful course of action to take since it has become apparent that Jason is still living in their old hometown in Maine and still carries a torch for her. She is critical of one her employees who she deems unvirtuous for her serial infidelities. She begins to wonder however if the person she married was simply a person she settled with rather than the person she should have settled down with.

And so she heads home for a visit planning to get answers.

Jason, as luck would have it, is working in the same restaurant he was working in in high school while he strives to be a self-supporting cartoonist.

From here on in, the movie is an exploration of the question of commitment. When is it okay to let go of a dream, a fantasy, or  relationship? When is it not okay? How do healthy adults navigate the waters of their disappointments, their broken hearts, their losses, their experiences of falling out of love?

Perhaps it helps to examine the different minor characters and work our way back to Emmie and Jason.

First, there is Emmie’s widowed eighty-year-old grandmother who has begun to see and fall in love with an elderly man. She feels guilty that somehow she is being unfaithful to her husband even though he has been dead for 14 years. She has arrived at the place where she is ready to move on, afraid that her children will not forgive her if she does. She is overjoyed when she discovers that they like the gentleman and think it is a great idea.

Then there is Emmie’s brother. He is a depressed alcoholic who is himself stuck. He is in his mid-thirties, living with his parents and clearly unable to overcome his addictions. When he is asked about what he had going that he quit on in life, all he can say is “Something. Something great I think.”  At some point drinking became more important than any particular thing he had going and now he does not even know what could be more important than drinking if he wanted there to be something.

Next, there is an old high school friend of Emmie’s that Emmie meets in a clothing store. They take a moment to reconnect sitting on a bench and Emmie finds out that her friend is on her third marriage. When Emmie asks how she knew her friend’s relationship was over, the woman explains that her and her husband liked watching TV and since they liked different shows, they got extra TV’s for different rooms so that they could watch their own shows. Then they realized that even when they liked the same shows, they preferred to watch them in their separate rooms. And that was all the evidence they needed to part company.

We can follow that up by looking into the lives of Emmie’s parents. They seem to have agreed to maintain their marriage together by not really being married. They seem to have no intimacy and they fight about their alcoholic son a lot. When Emmie asks her father why he and her mom stay together given how much they seem to dislike each other, Emmie’s father gives her a metaphor as a way of explaining. His metaphor draws from his life in the navy and describes the difference between ballistic missiles and a cybernetic missiles. Ballistic missiles just land where you pointed them, he says. They do not alter their course just because the target moves. Cybernetic missiles change course and remain flexible as the target relocates. We are left to assume that there is some wisdom for relationships embedded in this metaphor – perhaps that it is best to know when a fantasy is not worth locking in on when the result is the loss of the actual target.

I used to ask myself “What if?” Emmie’s father says, “But you can live your whole life with ‘what ifs.’ Don’t you ever have to relish the choices you made?”

This brings us to Jason. The director leaves his character difficult to judge. It has been twenty years that he has stayed in town working at a seafood restaurant and trying to support himself as a cartoonist drawing frogs – the same frogs he was drawing in high school. It seems clear that he is never going to make a living drawing cartoon frogs but - he cannot disengage from his fantasy life. And so he keeps drawing them – he keeps refusing to take promotions in another location at the restaurant chain not wishing to give up on his fantasy that Emmie will come back. He is simply unable to move on in life from his high school job fantasy or his high school crush. Is he noble? Or immature? This crippling commitment to an idealized life becomes apparent when we discover that his father has been covering a lot of his expenses for him and buying his frog paintings. Jason cannot even afford the flowers that he sends to Emmie without a credit card his father gives him for essentials.

I think the point is that sometimes people change – sometimes they move on – sometimes they do not. And a person cannot afford to lock in on fantasies and projections of imagined people or even on real people when they die (in the case of gramma).

I hate to spoil the plot but when Emmie and Jason do meet, her message to him is short and sweet and poignant.

“We need to break up.”

Question for Comment: Is there any person or fantasy that you need to break up with?