"I'll Have What She's Having..."

We have lost the sophisticated and enlightened humor of the great Nora Ephron at the young age of 71.  She wrote the classic "When Harry Met Sally."   Who is not familiar with Meg Ryan's fake orgasm scene and the middle-aged woman at the next table (played by Rob Reiner’s mom) telling the waiter "I'll have what she’s having."  She also wrote and directed "Sleepless in Seattle" and "You've Got Mail" among others.  Her last film was “Julie and Julia.”  She was great friends with Meryl Streep, who said at her memorial service “she was a breathtaking original.”  

Nora Ephron’s writing is a sure-fire recipe for laughter, in my book.  She was devoted to Manhattan, cooking and her family including the wonderful husband she finally found after a disastrous marriage to a philandering Carl Bernstein. She was also a strong feminist.  I knew very little about her until now, after she’s gone.  The more I read the more I admire her humor, her courage and her love of both reading and writing.

Newsweek and the New York Times both had good articles about her.  She came from a family of writers, both parents eventually ended up alcoholics.  Her mother famously told her, "Everything is copy." She turned many of her experiences from a bad marriage to the disappointments of aging into highly amusing scenes in her books and movies.  (I loved her hilarious book of essays from 2006 called "I Feel Bad About My Neck.") 

A life well-lived, ending too soon with a terminal illness.  Here are a few quotes attributed to her that I found interesting.

"I try to write parts for women that are as complicated and interesting as women really are."

"Reading is one of the main things I do.  Reading is everything.  Reading makes me feel I've accomplished something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter."

Some quotes from a 1996 commencement address to the young women at Wellesley:

"Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim."

"One of the things people always say to you if you get upset is don't take it personally.  Understand:  every attack on Hillary Clinton for not knowing her place is an attack on you.  Underneath all attacks are the words:  get back, get back, get back to where you once belonged.  When Elizabeth Dole pretends that she isn't serious about her career, that is an attack on you.  Any move to limit abortion rights is an attack on you--whether or not you believe in abortion.  The fact that Clarence Thomas is sitting on the Supreme Court today is an attack on you."

How refreshing--the idea that it might actually be appropriate to take it personally, to get angry and fight back. 

Farewell to Nora, an inspiration to women and particularly to those who know how to write and to laugh out loud.

Merrily, Merrily, Merrily, Merrily, Life is but a Dream

Ever drifting down the stream--

Lingering in the golden gleam--

Life, what is it but a dream?                    

                        Lewis Carroll

I’m plowing through Stephen King’s Dark Tower series this summer and just finished book four, “Wizards and Glass.”  A key theme and phrase in these books is “there are other worlds than these,” and there are many instances in the series where characters move in and out of worlds and times in a dreamlike fashion where death is not an absolute and people are never quite who they at first appear to be.  Also, I recently saw Christopher Nolan’s “Inception,” in which Leonardo DiCaprio plays a thief who can move in and out of his own and others’ dreams—but when can he be absolutely sure he’s not dreaming?

In both of the worlds created by these fantasies a person to some degree is able to choose his dream.  In the Dark Tower, Roland the Gunslinger seizes  opportunities to move between worlds (or are they dreams after all?) in his obsessive search for the Tower.  In “Inception,” DiCaprio’s Cobb character moves between dream worlds as easily as pressing a floor button in an elevator, choosing to invade the dreams of others and even plant ideas in those dreams with dangerous and tragic results.  In the end he must choose to return from a dream he’s having trouble letting go of but which he knows is destroying him.  And in the end, is his chosen world just another dream, albeit a happier one?

It seems our experience of life is defined by our perception of it, so we can choose our dream—but it’s so damn hard to keep that in mind (as is the case when you are actually dreaming, especially during a nightmare).  It’s difficult to be mindful that we have far more space and choice than we perceive, and that we can choose to swim up through the murky water toward the surface and the light rather than succumb to the illusion we’re drowning. 

The other thing it’s hard to keep in mind is that everybody else is in their own dream, in various states of unconsciousness or wakefulness, and that their dreams are not yours, or vice versa. 

Nothing is quite what it seems on the surface.  If we’re not awake enough, we box ourselves and other people in with assumptions, “truths,” “limitations” that are not real.  If only we could have a way to jog the memory like Cobb does in “Inception”--to spin the little top to help us see what is real.  On the other hand, if we’re happy and at peace, isn’t that all the real we need?

Up in the Air

Since none of my family members have the remotest interest in seeing a film about people getting laid off or business travel, it was ironic that I finally was able to see the film “Up in the Air” in my hotel room while on the road last week. George Clooney plays the part of Ryan Bingham, whose job takes him on the road 340 days each year meeting with employees to tell them their jobs have ended, relieving their spineless managers from the task. Ryan loves his job, has traveling down to a fine science (there’s an amusing series of scenes demonstrating all his tricks for getting through an airport efficiently), and strives toward his goal of earning 10 million miles on his airline loyalty account. He is a pro, in that he possesses a rare talent: the ability to look a person in the eye and with fairly consistent (although regrettably not 100% consistent) success convince that person that losing their means of support and sustenance is after all not a great misfortune and catastrophe but in fact represents a brand new day filled with fresh opportunity and hope.

The title “Up in the Air” describes not only where the main character spends most of this time, but also where he leaves people after his visits with them, as well as his own state as the movie progresses.

Ryan Bingham has spent most of his life thinking mainly about himself and how to get what he wants rather than connecting with people he really cares about. But as events unfold he shows some signs of change when he starts to actually fall for a kindred soul who is just as seasoned a business traveler as he is. He also decides at the last minute to attend a niece’s wedding where his one skill, see above, comes in handy to save the day.

But ultimately Bingham ends up facing the same kind of loss he’s been imposing on others – a huge change in his job that will result in no more travel as the company experiments with conducting exit interviews via teleconference. He can talk the talk – but can he walk the walk and find the pony hiding in the pile of manure?

See for yourself – let me know if you liked the movie.

Wild Things

So I know you’re all asking yourselves, “Should I take my grownup to see ‘Where the Wild Things Are’?” I know you’re thinking, “My grownup enjoyed the book—we read it together often enough—but will the film version of the Maurice Sendak classic really be suitable for grownups?”

Spike Jonze’s back story on Max’s wildness got to me. Max is a lonely kid with a good but distracted mother, an older sister who breaks Max’s heart to be with her friends, and a father who’s left the family behind. This is a kid with overwhelming energy and emotions, but also a kid with great heart and a need for love and boundaries. After a particularly beastly scene with this mother, Max in his wolf suit sails off to a distant land where the wild things are and discovers several huge monsters, each with an oddly civilized name like Carroll, Douglas, Ira and Judy. Each wild thing plays out an emotion (feelings of anger, abandonment, alienation, shyness, regret, resentment, love, aggression) and they interact in all the ways a family does—meaning that they have great power to work together, help each other, and of course hurt and destroy each other as well.

Max convinces the wild things that he has special powers that make him uniquely suited to be their king, and they build a fantastic fort together.  The wild things are all parts of Max himself, as well as Max’s family, in a kind of Jungian fantasy. Where the wild things are, a mother’s love can literally swallow a boy whole to protect him and only reluctantly regurgitate him up again when the danger is past and he complains that he’s having trouble breathing.

The wild rumpus is great fun, but over time things become complicated as they will when various personalities and needs interact. It is harder to be king than Max had first imagined (after all, every prior king has eventually been eaten up by the wild things), aggressive war games end up causing pain, and in the end he realizes what he really needs and sails back home to have a late supper with his mother, who’s very glad to see him.

Ultimately this is a movie about almost everything that matters, so I do recommend it for discerning grownups. Would I say it is too dark or scary for kids? Maurice Sendak explains how he would answer this question in typically wild fashion: "I would tell them to go to hell. That's a question I will not tolerate ... If they can't handle it, go home. Or wet your pants. Do whatever you like. But it's not a question that can be answered."

All righty then.

Synecdoche

I saw Charlie Kaufman’s film “Synecdoche, New York” last night – a complex, image-rich movie about a playwright in a severe mid-life crisis, trying to find truth in his work and relationships. The term “synecdoche” is interesting: it is a type of metaphor in which either part of something is used to refer to the whole thing, or a general class of thing is used to refer to a part or a sub-class of the whole. One example of synecdoche is the usage of a single characteristic to distinguish a fictional character—e.g. calling a character “Bright Eyes” or “Brown Shoes” – usually done when the observer doesn’t know or care what the name of the other character is. Other examples might be “suit” for a businessman, or worse “empty suit” for an incompetent businessman, or “gray hair” for an older person. I remember once at work recently talking to a large financial customer about their mainframe applications and requirements and asking who in their company could tell me more about their current needs. “You mean the gray hairs?” responded the brash young New Yorker. Ah well.

Another example is Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players."

Anyhow, as I apply this to the film, the main character Caden Cotard (played by the gifted Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a playwright who has had some level of success in regional theater in Schenectady, NY (get it? Schenectady/Synecdoche). He is suffering from a mid-life crisis in which everything seems to be falling apart including his own body and his relationships with his wife and daughter. By the way, Cotard’s Syndrome is a mental illness in which a person has the delusion that he is already dead. Although his wife takes their daughter and leaves him, Caden ends up winning a monetary award that lets him work on his masterpiece play. As the film progresses there are more and more dream-like sequences—he hires actors for his new play, but then seems to be hiring actors to play the roles of important people in his real life. Eventually he finds an actor to play his own role, and with greater insight than he himself seems to have.

The love of Caden’s life is Hazel, who lives in a house that is always smoke-filled and burning. Even when we see her purchase the house she thinks aloud with the realtor about whether she will end up dying in the fire—strolling contemplatively from room to room as flames flicker through a window or in a corner.

Caden’s four-year-old daughter Olive, who he loves dearly, remains four in his mind long after his wife and her lesbian lover have spirited her off to Germany and she has grown up to be a tattooed erotic dancer whose flower tattoos are dying as she does and who has, inexplicably, a German accent. In the end, each character including Caden himself is defined by a particular characteristic (here’s one of many cases where synecdoches seem to come in) but at the same time we see how limiting and artificial those definitions are, and that in reality each character has layers and depths that we can only begin to understand. A few words in shorthand from the director to tell the actors who they are or how to be seem more and more inadequate.

I think Caden in his mid-life crisis feels trapped by these limitations he has applied to himself and others around him. In the end of the movie when he’s much older as is Hazel, there is a beautiful, golden scene in which they are briefly able to move beyond these limitations and their love shines through. But of course life is short and there is a price to pay for choosing to live in a smoke-filled house afire, or loving someone who does. They only grasp what is truly important and real at the last possible moment.

Eventually, Caden takes on the role of his ex-wife’s cleaning lady Ellen, and the actress who was playing this role becomes the director, guiding his actions through a small earpiece he’s been provided. The last instruction he gets is simply, “Die.”

Let me make it clear that these observations only touch the surface of what is going on in this very complex film – it is definitely worth seeing and will generate some good conversation.

I just saw the absolutely marvelous new Pixar film, "Up." It has an elderly widower in it with black-framed glasses who reminds me greatly of my father in his last years. The theme of the movie, that every closed door results in another new one that opens--that the adventure is never over if you can let go of what you have lost--is uplifting. The animation and colors are marvelous. The love story at the beginning is very moving. See this movie!