I want to jog back to something Josh said late Tuesday night – something I meant to address yesterday, until I went to see Synecdoche, New York a second time and then lost the better part of my day to its lingering effects. (It’s unfair to spend much time talking about it, since most of the world hasn’t seen it yet, but, world, I’m really ready for you to catch up because I’m dying to talk about it. So I’ll leave it at this: I am in love with this movie.)
Right, so back to what you said on Tuesday, Josh:
“The self-help gurus have it all wrong: We don’t become better, happier people by improving ourselves or working through our issues; we become better, happier people by giving in to all our competing, contradictory impulses – consecutively, contiguously, contemporaneously, convivially, cantankerously, consumptively, concurrently, or all at the same time.”
I’m almost reluctant to open up this particular line of argument, because we’ve been down this path before, Josh, and it’s the kind of late-night conversation best accompanied by a couple of drinks, and not necessarily with the world wide web watching. Also, if I get into it too much, then I’m likely to get foot-stamping mad at you before it’s even noon.
But: To crib from the candidates, this is a fundamental difference between me and my opponent. We agree on one thing: the necessity of self-examination. Where we cross swords is in what one then does with the fruits of that self-examination. It’s a notable achievement to identify one’s own defects, but the real struggle is in righting those defects, or at least trying to temper their damaging winds. Whereas you’re fine with identifying the defect and leaving it at that. Even reveling in that. That might make you more comfortable in your skin and more at peace with your god but it’s the lazy way of going about being a citizen of the world. It’s giving yourself a pass. And while you’re not at all a bad sort of person, Josh, there are a lot of no-good types out there that I would like to discourage from taking an all-access pass into a Lord of the Flies-like Island of No Self-Checks and No Self-Improvement Plans.
But we’re not here to argue over how we live our lives; we’re here to argue over how we live our movies.
Actually, now I’m going to twist myself into a pretzel and confuse my own argument. I was thinking about Mike Leigh’s Gilbert and Sullivan movie Topsy-Turvy this morning (hey, sometimes a girl just wants to listen to the The Mikado while she’s getting ready for work). It’s a terrific movie and a fascinating exploration of the creative process and the collaborative process of creating. The first third of the movie is about Sullivan, the composer, balking against another collaboration with Gilbert, the librettist; Sullivan thinks their operas are disposable, low-entertainment stuff, and what he really wants to do is write something important – his legacy-establisher. The “punchline” is that G&S’s comic operas have been beloved for more than a century, while Sullivan’s “serious” works are all but forgotten (something the film points out in a cheeky coda).
Which is all to say, everybody wants to be better than what he perceives himself to be, so much so that he’s often blind to his own strengths. It’s a common enough theme in movies about artists – Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels, for one, which is all about a comedy director who twists himself in knots trying to prove he can be a serious director of dramas. So maybe a little bit of your self-awareness – and self-satisfaction? – would have saved those guys a lot of mental anguish.
I still think it’s a dumb philosophy on life, though.
This article appears in October 10 • 2008.
