"Hunter-32, Hunter-32, this is Fanboy-7 requesting confirmation of target, are we clear to drop payload, over?"
"This is Hunter-32, target confirmed. Fanboy-7 you are clear to drop Some Personal Shit."
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There was a quote from a movie I watched recently, one featuring the budding comedic genius of Adam Scott alongside the J.K Simmons called
The Vicious Kind, which was ultimately a film about people making their choices, and subsequently living with said choices. And it's not a pretty film. There's pretty people, but you get to see the
ugliness inside them. It's not that popular, but I'm positive its on Netflix.
Any Adam Scott fan should check it out, because his performance is the best thing about that movie -- you haven't seen his acting range until you've seen
The Vicious Kind. Some awesome accompanying songs from Radical Face, who's amazing, to compliment the raw, bare energy of this character drama.
I'm telling you about this because I watched
Argo at Rainbow Cinemas on Front and Jarvis a few hours ago; caught the late show after 8 hours of studying today for my midterm tomorrow, that I don't partcularily care about now that I've retyped my five weeks worth of notes. You know, I took Science Fiction for the hell of it, not even sure I'd get the credit. But I took it to learn something. And my professor -- but she likes to be refered to as
Doctor -- opened her mouth the first week of class and ever since then she's chipped away at the only thing I really love in life. Thanks, university.
I mention
The Vicious Kind firstly because of a quote that's pretty potent in thematic significance that JK Simmons' character says to his son (the one who is
not Adam Scott-misogynist-crazy-version).
"Sometimes people do things they know they are wrong, but they just do them anyway. Because doing the right thing would be too painful."
Thematically, that movie was strong as hell. This quote doesn't relate to the film, it directly relates to my life personally, and (indicating that the writer did their job with this specific line) every other person that watches this film. It's almost a
universal truth, in my humble opinion.
We are humans. We are capable of thinking intelligently -- but intelligently doesn't necessarily mean an objective moral structure of right and wrong dictated by some scripture, or rulebook, or words uttered by a mentor, mother, father, or teacher.
Thinking intelligently is dictated as to what that individual considers intelligent. People are intelligent in different ways, we're wired like that. We can read people well, we can have powers of social manipulation, we can study and memorize with outstanding capability, we can gush out charisma on a whim, or we can sit in a room and ponder life's questions, and be able to actually figure some things out without losing our minds. We are all intelligent in that regard. Some people just use their intelligence stupidly.
I'm being coy because I see it in the real world. Here's where I go into
Argo, that, by the way, is Ben Affleck's best film he's ever made, and proves that the man has artistic and directing talent that surpasses a lot of people older than him in the big industry. I won't spoil the details, but I found the themes of the plot centered a lot around the relationship between
fiction and reality. Story and life. The fake and the real.
That quote from
The Vicious Kind? That's something pretty real. The way it was constructed and manufactured to be communicated to you?
Complete fabrication, but it's more real of a sentence you'll here coming out of someone's mouth (let alone JK Simmons') than you've probably ever experienced in your life. I know that's the case for me. While the way it was said is fake, unsurmountably an illusion made by a team of people, what's being said remains true to the core. That is the essence of
theme, probably included in the definition of it when relating to storytelling.
But the medium is the message, as they say. What is reality but another media that we percieve the world through? I mean, this day and age, the lines are blurring -- how are your
eyes not just another screen you see the world through. How fake is that? How real? My point is, reality can be extremely fake -- it can fool you into believing things, trick you into feeling things, uproot your understanding of things, and change the trajectory of your emotional state, mental state or physical state in a minute, even a second.
We never trust reality, and we rarely trust the characters (actual people) that inhabit that neverending show of
This Fucking Life. Unpredictably breeds the desire for reassurance of purpose and direction. Something
true amidst all the chaos of fakeness...
Stories.
Argo told me that reality and fiction go hand-in-hand in the human experience. One will drive the other, under a symbiotic relationship. Stories can save lives. They can inspire entire passions. They can sooth pain, create excitement, generate genuine emotion. Make those endorphins run rampant through your neuroses. Fire the receptors.
Feel something true. It's the drug without the side-effects.
The side-effect of partaking in the experience of a story, is learning something about yourself and the world around you. That comes from a construct of imagination and hard work, made for an audience that craves the drug of feeling and emotion. You sit in a darkly lit room and pay eight dollars for candy and pop for that. You set your DVR in the morning for that. You wait a week for that and complain about it and then come back every week after, for
that.
So what's more real? The reliable versus the unreliable. What you can touch, taste, smell, or
what you can feel -- not just on the surface, the superficial experience. The interior, intrinsic. The sinking pits in your stomach, the butterflies, the goosebumps and the lightness in your chest. The
true.
We say, "life is sometimes like a movie" because of those feelings that are generated. I ache for the day that my life can resemble the fiction that I read, watch, and play. For a fraction of my existence, there's a structure and a cadence to the rhythm of my actions -- that plot points emerge that I can read and analyze and piece together into a fulfilling final act. Roll credits. Happy ending. And there we go.
Sometimes people do things that are wrong... because it makes them feel things more
real than their realities. It alleviates the pain of being stuck with the reality that we have, and take that solace, and that escape, of the possibility of getting something more. Of feeling something else. Feeling like in the movies.
Feel like the
characters we so blatantly worship in boxes with blinking lights and strings of data pieced together for a two-storey blank canvas.
I say this to my friends who are going through a tough time, or a tough break-up, or a tough day.
"Characters are what people want to be." - Anthony Suen, Self-Righteous Modern Messiah
Characters, at their core, have definable, categorizable qualities. They have the perfect balance of flaws and virtues. The weighing of their beliefs against their vices, and a carefully planned out exploitation of those elements to create their path towards their end goal. An objective -- characters have that consicous or subconscious
dramatic need that
always pushes them to go that extra mile.
People? We're reflections of the lives we inhabit. The realities we're stuck with. Our objectives can change on a whim or a bad night out or a worse morning after. They can be as simple and insignifcant as getting a fucking job or as vague and unattainable as changing who the fuck you are as a person. There's no defined path, no grand writer building our character arcs. As much as we want to be a puppet with a purpose, there are no strings attached to what we have, right here, right now.
The wind has purpose, it blows currents and temperatures to where they need to be and stabilize our climate, hopefully for a bit longer than scientists posit, but they do what they're told to because nature tells them too. So, not even "feeling like the wind" in being aimless and ungrounded in your desires is a fitting analogy. You can "storify" anything with symbolism and meaning because that's our biggest vice as a humans -- we embody the qualities we want, or rather the qualities we can't have, in absolutely everything that exists. Again, that's how we're wired.
Reality is worse than wind, it has no course, and no currents that it follows, no crowning namesakes that you can identify and plot on a map. Personal experience is being in a dark room with oven mitts, earplugs, and a blindfold on trying to find that proverbial needle in a room full of shit-all.
Okay, I twisted that one a bit. But my analogy ("storifying", woo!) gets to how story and life, reality and fiction, need each other on a basic level, in our
brains and thought processes. Stories plop in that lightbulb with the hanging little string, that you can pull in that dark room full of nasty stuff, and the one singular needle that could very well be your
very own dramatic need.
It grounds us. Anchors us. Much like many of my close friends do. My post a few posts ago talks about not letting go of your past for anything, because your past defines who you are right now, and will inform who you are going to become in the future. The
past is your story. History, personal or as public as the entire world's existence, is one big stage play. The world's a stage, just like Shakespeare said.
And we, The Players, are stuck acting for as long as we're on it. So you stick together -- you make the most of the story you're in. The reality and the fiction that you're creating parallel to each other. So when you do the things that are "wrong", you have The Players to anchor you back to the "right" path.
JK Simmons' character is right, in some regard. And
Argo as an entire movie has it right too -- it's painful to do the right thing -- the thing that a
character, and not a
person, would do. Not what your friend would do, your father, your mother, your siblings, the person you slept with, your ex-boyfriend, your secret lover, your teacher or professor, your past crush, your boss...or you.
We struggle to be that character we wish we were. The ideal version of ourselves. The camera-ready, script-memorized, fully
in-character fictional representation that always made the right choices, the decisions that turned out well for everybody, the paths in life that lead to the least people hurt, and the most smiles made. The one with a destination. A destiny.
But no, we don't have that privilege, or that luxury. We cope with reality against the hope for something fictitious to occur. Our dramatic need is to survive the lives we live with the ability to say, you did it the way you wanted to. There is control out there, control that you and I have, and it's sitting in reality, waiting. It's not fake. Not like everything else around us, out there.
Story versus life. Reality versus fiction. The make-believe versus to actual. What's the damn difference?
Me and you. Your experience and my experience. What's inside there, past the organs and the brain signals. The butterflies and the daydreams. It's not about difference, it's about similarity.
There's a story in everything and everyone. Just pick up a pen and write it.
