This little exchange from The History Boys came to my mind after watching this film…
Timms: I don’t always understand poetry! Hector: You don’t always understand it? Timms, I never understand it. But learn it now, know it now and you will understand it… whenever.
There are films and bits of films that you don’t really get when you first watch them. But then, at all sorts of random times, something sparks them back to your memory and you find that you not only understand the film better but also yourself or your situation. They become part of the apparatus, the vocabulary by which we understand ourselves and our lives. That’s been my experience, anyway.
I think All The Real Girls is meant to be watched as poetry. It’s an attempt at a realistic depiction of the rise and fall of a relationship between people and all their baggage. It’s a film about things between people. There’s not really a nice neat story arc – it’s more a series of vignettes of the different phases of the relationship. Some are more successful than others and there were bits that I just didn’t really get but there are some beautiful scenes that tackle the real highs and lows and complications and intricacies of two people trying to understand each other and themselves within and through a real (non-Hollywood) relationship.
Like poetry, this is a film that I can imagine watching in a years’ time and it resonating differently. It’s nice to watch a film and know that you haven’t heard everything it has to say first time round.
Made in 2008 and starring Paul Dano post Little Miss Sunshine and There Will Be Blood and Zooey Deschanel pre Yes Man and 500 Days of Summer, I’d hoped for more but this turned out to be a very average version of all those films about two quirky (slightly crazy) people bored with their lives and trying to find their place in the city who collide in a messy relationship while their dysfunctional families exist only to offer a dash of extra quirkiness for them to play off and to keep us interested.
Given that this is a film that has been made and remade over and over (mostly) by young, American and male film-makers, this version doesn’t really bring anything new or interesting in the way that some others do.
The two main characters, particularly “Happy”, don’t feel developed enough and so I ended up feeling they were quite inaccessible to me and therefore didn’t really engage with their fates. This, the jumpy plot that takes us from one quirky indie set-piece to the next with scarce continuity and the random guy who, for completely unexplained reasons, appears throughout the film to try to kill Paul Dano left me, by the end, with my own sense of queasiness and ennui to match those of the film’s main characters!
One of the things I’ve been thinking about since watching Inception is the power of ideas. Here are two quotes I’ve been thinking on…
What’s the most resilient parasite? An idea. A single idea from the human mind can build cities. An idea can transform the world and rewrite all the rules.
The seed that we planted in this man’s mind may change everything.
There are thoughts that we might wish we could un-think – lines of enquiry that we reach the end of only to find conclusions that make us wish we’d never started. Perhaps sometimes it’s true that ignorance is bliss or at least more comfortable. Perhaps it’s be better to strive to be happy than to be right. We all live inconsistently anyway so why not choose inconsistencies that allow us to live fulfilled rather than desperate?
But is that even a choice we can make for ourselves? Often ideas come like an infection. Small, nagging doubts that what we thought might be true may not be (as in Inception’s “what if everything you know isn’t real?”) that start as almost unnoticed seeds but can grow into consuming thoughts that transform our entire internal model of the external world and either enhance or impair our ability to live and thrive in it.
However, we don’t seem capable of choosing only the ideas that enhance – partly because we struggle at the time to identify which ones they will turn out to be – but the whole process of cognitive behavioural therapy is based on the idea of choosing what weight to put on the things we believe about ourselves and our individual and social place in the world.
We all believe both true things and false things about ourselves and we believe each of them to a greater or lesser extent depending on our current circumstances. Large factors in how I see myself are my aspirations for who I want to be in the future and the way I think other people see me in the present. We are all more or less insecure as we go through life, with imperfect knowledge of how people see us or how external factors may change our situation.
The success of CBT seems to be in allowing us to choose to put more faith in the good things we think about ourselves and dismiss the bad things as not true. Whether or not the good or bad things are actually true takes a back seat to finding a position that allows for happiness. Maybe this apparent internal dishonesty is ok though, not least because the person we seem least able to be objective about is ourselves.
P.S. Everyone should go see Inception while it’s on the big screen (at least once)
The Hangover was (apparently) the blockbuster comedy of 2009. 4 guys go on a crazy stag-do in Las Vegas, things get out of hand and hilarity ensues as the following day they try to piece together the night before the morning after. There were two highlights in the film for me – a tribute to the casino scene from Rain Man and the strange pause in otherwise fast-paced action where Ed Helms (who’s great in the US version of The Office) sings a song about tigers’ dreams. Otherwise standard buddy/road movie and quite American humour.
The Wave (or “Die Welle” because it’s a German remake of an American TV movie) however is a bit more thought-provoking. Inspired by the (disputed) true story of a sociology experiment in dictatorships getting out of hand on a school campus, the setting of this remake in Germany gives it an extra resonance. A class of kids, cynical that anything like the fascist regime of the Nazis could ever happen again in their country, are convinced by their teacher to start a movement. Over the course of the week, they elect the teacher as “fuhrer”, choose a logo, a name (The Wave”), a uniform and the movement begins to take on a life of its own as people begin to be identified as “in” or “out”.
Although the progression of the movement in the film seems a bit unlikely and the conclusion of the film is much more dramatic than the conclusion of the real events it was based on, it’s still an interesting parable about the dangers of assumed superiority and how easily we can fall into excluding tribe behaviours.
The position of “I’m right, you’re wrong – you should do/believe what I tell you to” is, in my opinion, the thought process that has most often led people down a path of war or oppression. Not just religious faith but racism, communism, etc.
The faith/atheist debate (like many debates) just becomes more and more polarised with both sides often so entrenched that people on both sides don’t even listen to each other any more.
At the moment I feel that all I (or anyone) can say is “it’s been my experience that…” and to go further than that to claims of absolute truth is to overstep our ability to perceive. I think this fits quite well with the below from 1 Peter 3…
“Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect”
Living in this uncertain, analogue world where things don’t fit nicely into little boxes is much less comfortable than the happy certainty of believing I’m right about everything though!
After great performances in 500 Days of Summer, Brick and Inception, I thought I’d go back and see what else Joseph Gordon-Levitt did after 3rd Rock from the Sun…
The Lookout introduces lots of bits of story that look like they might develop into something interesting but then, for the most part, they don’t and it ends up being a mediocre heist movie. That’s why you’ve never heard of it.
Mysterious Skin on the other hand is a film about an emotionless male prostitute set in the late 80s that includes aliens (it makes sense in the film), a paedophile baseball coach, AIDS and a rape. Not happy viewing, indeed hard to watch in parts, but brave, honest, compelling and in the end quite moving.
The problem with people (always a good way to start a post) is that we seem to like things that agree with our pre-existing view of the world. This is an experimentally provable effect called “confirmation bias” and there are all sorts of neat experiments that have been done to demonstrate that this is often how we work.
It seems to be the case that a huge part of who we are and the way we behave is based on who we’re expected to be or even our own perception of ourselves. Sometimes it’s as though we live by the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves (I’ll do this because I’m that kind of person but I would never do that because that’s not the way I am).
Even the way we think about and relate to other people is profoundly affected by whether we identify them as “someone like me” or “other”. An interesting experiment was done in which a group of students sat a test where they were presented with a biography of Rasputin and then asked to write an essay about him. Unbeknown to them, for half of the students the test papers had been tailored so that in the biography Rasputin’s birthday was the same date as theirs. The rest were given Rasputin’s real birthday as a control group.
Strangely, the group who thought that Rasputin shared their birthday were much more sympathetic in their assessment of him and tended to paint him as a misunderstood character who’d been unfairly demonised by history. Something as simple as sharing the same birthday immediately predisposed these students to be kinder in their treatment of him. How can we trust our ability to make judgements about anything when we’re so easily swayed by seemingly insignificant factors?
Also, I now can’t think of Rasputin without thinking of this video – Ra-Ra-Rasputin, lover of the Russian Queen…
This is largely an exploration of things in my head. Much of what I write is thoughts in progress and may not make sense or be rationally defensible.
I may not think the same way today as I did yesterday and I almost certainly don't live consistently with large chunks of the things I say. You probably don't either.
Priniciples make hypocrites of all of us in the end but that shouldn't stop us from trying to find some to live by.
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