Welcome to Crazytown, Population: Me

Anxiety is creeping back into my head (my stomach, my fingers, my teeth) and setting up shop lately. It's a demon I battle, or don't, all the time. A few years ago I started having what I think were panic attacks on a fairly regular basis, at that time usually triggered by concerns about my children. I would obsess, endlessly, about possible ailments, scour google for symptoms, and turn every cough or bump or stomache into something that had to be monitored every second. I knew enough to know that my behavior wasn't healthy, for myself or my children, and after a particularly harrowing day when I had to flee my desk and take shelter in a conference room, hyperventilating and callling my wife every five minutes to check my kids for symptoms of some horrible malady I happened to read about that morning on WebMD, I admitted I was powerless and made an appointment with my doctor and got myself a ticket on the Lexapro train.

I also tried to address what I felt were lifestlye issues contributing to my state-of-mind. Way too much work stress, unhealthy lifestyle, guilt about not spending enough time at home, a kind of early (hopefully) mid-life career crisis, lack of exercise, internalizing and taking responsibility for other people's unhappiness, the constant, crippling fear of my own mortality. I took real steps to try to get my mind right: huge career change, renewed focus on nutrition and exercise, an intellectual exploration into my own thought patterns, a commitment to tell the truth to myself and really listen to the world around me, a rigorous accounting of how I actually spent my time and what it actually gave me back. And all those things helped, a lot. I genuinely feel like I've made progress toward becoming a healthier and more useful force in the universe. And I think I'm easier to be around, I think I'm connecting with people and a deeper and more meaningful level, and I'm generally not freaking out about every minor hiccup.

Except that I kind of am, again, now. The shooting, stabbing pains in my stomach, toes, chest, teeth have started to come back when one of the kids gets the flu. The sleepless nights, the strange panic out of nowhere triggered by the most minor thing, even a version of a full-blown panic attack sitting on a bench at Legoland with my kids a week or so ago, staring at every face that passed me by and seeing only aliens, feeling like a prisoner trapped in my own self-pitying skin, fully and completed alienated from the "normal" moms and dads and cousins blissfully buying cotton candy or laughing with each other, fighting my own contempt for their happiness, convinced that I am unable to function in peaceful day-to-day way, constantly uncomfortable in my own skin, a gift of heredity or karma or chance that I'm sure I've now passed on to my own children. Desperate for RELEASE, which I invariably seek in food, or alcohol, thereby further sabotaging the hard work I've started to do to get myself back where I need to be, spiraling further down into the selfish hole of alienation, building more walls between myself and the world around me.

And all the while murmuring to myself: KEEP IT TOGETHER, KEEP IT TOGETHER, KEEP IT TOGETHER. Don't give in to this. Figure it out. You're stressed out about work. You're stressed out about your son starting kindergarten. You're stressed out at the distant prospect of maybe having to move some day. You're stressed out about money. You're worried that you're not present enough for your wife and children. These are all real things, but they are manageable. They are the stuff of living your life, and you WANT TO LIVE YOUR LIFE. You just don't want to do the hard work of getting your mind straight, part of you is just desperately seeking an excuse, you're letting your laziness disguise itself as craziness, you're just putting on a mask. KEEP. IT. TOGETHER.

And that's what I'm trying to do. Looking for all the world, most of the time, like regular old Tom, quick with a joke or a rant or whatever you need, mostly calm, mostly happy. Fake it til you make it. KEEP IT TOGETHER.

And how are you?

Loving the Messenger

I work in the film industry.

It feels strange to write that down. I’m 35 years old and what I’ve really always wanted to do was make movies. I was the kid who memorized the listings in the TV guide and could tell my mom’s friends exactly what would be on every channel every night. I was the kid who stayed up late at night when I was 14 reading Pauline Kael anthologies. I was the kid who obsessively listed the top 10 Woody Allen films in his journal, changing the order every few months, experimenting with putting Zelig ahead of Purple Rose of Cairo and wondering if Annie Hall would always be number 1? (The answer, of course, is yes).

 But that kid became a man who didn’t make movies. That kid became a man who wrote press releases and then managed people who wrote press releases and spent years trying to convince himself that there was something beautiful and universal about video compression technology or semiconductor equipment manufacturing and it was enough just to love movies, to eat them and breathe them and dream them but to go to work all day and do something else.

 And then one day my friend, who unlike me had the courage to do what he loved a long time ago, invited me in. He said: just stop doing that. Come up here and make movies, with me. Like Peter Pan at my bedroom window: you don’t have to grow up. You never did, who are you kidding? I have some faerie dust, let’s go get Captain Hook. And I said yes.

So, now, I work in the film industry, seven months and counting. And I pinch myself when I wake up every morning and get in my car and drive for 2 hours and am still kind of amazed when I get here and find out that we’re still in Neverland.

My friend, Peter Pan, produced a movie recently called The Messenger, before I got here, when he was at a different company. I knew about the movie when he was making it, I heard the stories and understood what he was trying to do and rooted him on, from afar. I never read the script but I understood the context of the movie from my secondhand exposure to his world, which is now kind of my world too. And now the movie is here, done, finished, ready to be presented to the universe. And I just watched it.

 So maybe that’s all a way of saying that I may not be the most reliable narrator when it comes to describing this movie, if that’s what you’re after. I am probably not, strictly speaking, objective. But I am a guy who knows how to watch movies, and that’s the only way I can think of myself, even now. And I just saw a beautiful fucking movie.

The Messenger is about Casualty Notification Officers, which means the U.S. Army officers who have the unenviable job of informing loved ones when a soldier has been killed in combat. Ben Foster and Woody Harrelson play the two officers, and Samantha Morton plays a widow with whom the Ben Foster character makes a strong and unexpected connection.

The first thing to say about The Messenger is that it is a Great Movie. Let’s just get that the fuck out of the way so I can breathe a little. It is in there, now, in my consciousness, it is part of my cinematic memory, part of the language I will forever use to describe what is possible in the medium. It’s in the canon. That’s the level on which this movie demands to be discussed and evaluated.

 There is a quality that runs through all the movies I really love that I’ve never been quite able to exactly name. Sometimes I think it’s empathy, or compassion, but it’s more than that—empathy and compassion are products of it, but it’s something specific to the medium. The movies I love understand the power of the camera to put us inside a moment, and they take that power very seriously. Which means that every moment they offer is worth being inside of, if that makes any sense. Great movies drip with authenticity, even if those movies are fantasies, even if the worlds are invented and unreal. They capture a moment in movement, and by doing so elevate it to a kind of observed and therefore ever-so-slightly heightened reality, in which we recognize our world for what it is: complicated, intoxicating, brutal, beautiful, frightening, heartbreaking, holy.

That’s what The Messenger does, in what feels like a million different ways. I know that when people see this movie they will talk first about the acting, about Ben Foster and Woody Harrelson and Samantha Morton and Steve Buscemi and Jena Malone. And they will be right to do that, because the acting is extraordinary. And they will talk about the subject matter, of course, there will be a dialogue about how this is or isn’t a “war” film, and there will surely be an appreciation and analysis of the way the movie treats a very specific kind of grief and honor and survival. And that’s all there, too, and worthy of discussion. And the writing, the line the script so deftly walks when portraying scenes of unadulterated pain and grief, scenes where one false word would take you out of the film altogether and never let you back in, the pitch-perfect tone of the dialogue throughout the whole film. That’s there, too, and again it should be recognized.

But what I find extraordinary above all else about this film is the way it succeeds in creating an undeniable reality in which these scenes play out, in which these lives are lived. This is truly a movie that locates the universal in the specific, which I offer as the highest kind of praise. It’s an instinct we recognize from religion, I think, and of course from Art—a way of finding unity in the particularity of experience.

That particularity comes from the acting and the writing and the directing and the power of the content, but it also comes from what we’re shown and what we hear. When I think about the movie now I think about the sound of AM radios in cars bleeding into the half-heard music coming from inside a house as the car pulls up, the sound of children playing the way children actually play, the image of a little boy taking a yellow ribbon off a tree, the sight of a lone piano bench on a lawn next to a moving truck.

What all of that adds up to is a movie that breathes and sweats and laughs, a movie that is alive and asserting itself in front of you. And that can be uncomfortable, because we’ve grown used to thinking of movies as things that sit apart from our experience, things in which we escape. This movie offers no escape. It offers something much better, in my estimation: it offers an invitation. It offers a way in. This movie is a knock on the door.

Which is to say: the experience of this movie is inseparable from its subject matter. The Messenger is about a lot of things, on the surface. It’s about grief and survival and friendship and honor and kindness and redemption. It is unexpectedly funny and warm and intensely emotional and gripping at the same time. It is a movie about damaged people who have to deliver the worse news possible to other human beings, and it’s about what those people do to survive and how kindness and love are choices that anyone can make, at anytime, and it’s about how those choices are made, how we get to them, in very specific ways. It’s a movie about acts of courage and heroism on sunny summer days standing at clotheslines and sitting on fishing boats and drinking in neighborhood bars.

In other words, it’s a movie about how we live our lives, all of us, all of us who have experienced trauma and grief and sadness and taken solace in laughter and love and music and friendship, all of us who worry about how we will raise our children and help our friends and find meaning in our own lives. And in this sense it is an intensely optimistic movie.

 The title of this movie describes the main characters, of course, sets out for us what their jobs are in a stark and declarative way. But the title is also something larger than that, it is a description of a role that all the characters serve for each other to one degree or another, and it is a role that, at the risk of sounding too precious about it, we all play every day. We are all messengers, after all, and what matters is the message we bring. So implicit in the title is also a question: what message does The Messenger bring? The answer, I think, is a simple one, but one we all need to hear right now: Choose love. See it through. Feel the pain, keep your eyes open, see it through. And choose love.

minor output

I don't have the intellectual energy to sustain a narrative today, so I'm going with the tried and true "Notes and Observations" format that served genial small-town newspaper columnists so well for decades. Anyone remember newspapers? They're what movie gangsters would use to wrap up dead fish.

--I experienced what I can only describe as a minor panic attack on Friday evening at Legoland, which I think may be the perfect place for a minor panic attack. It's a long story  but the question that provoked it, and the question that remains in my head, a little bit, is: What if I'm not a good father?

--I never really responded to Peter Pan when I was a kid. It seemed too...cute, maybe? Too neat? I liked my fairy tales a little messier. But now, at 35, I love it. I guess that one isn't too hard to analyze, actually. 

--Sometimes movie trailers are so good that I don't want to see the movie because I know there's no way they can sustain the brilliance of the trailer. Two recent examples: A Serious Man by the Coen brothers and Where the Wild Things Are. I can't figure out how to hyperlink, but go to the Apple trailer site and watch them.

--I had a bad weekend with food, the kind of bad weekend that can re-awaken cravings I thought I had willed away, the kind of bad weekend that can erase progress if it's implications aren't resisted. I am resisting, albeit weakly. But I am resisting. 

--The cognitive marching orders I've given myself lately are: Call it what it is. Even if you're only talking to yourself. Always try to call it what it is. Don't let yourself pretend you didn't know what it was. Take away that option. 

--I'd like to think I'm magnanimous by nature, that I tend to always see the good in people. Lately I've made a kind of crucial discovery: that's not actually my nature. I'm kind of cynical and pessimistic in a lot of ways, instinctively, and I have to do a fair amount of work to get past that, and that's the reason I tell myself that I'm magnanimous by nature and I tend to always see the good in people. It's my way of working to get there. Fake it until you make it, as the group I should probably be a member of says. And it's true. I've made real progress exercising my empathy muscle, so much that it almost looks like it's always been there. 

--I can drink a frightening volume of single malt scotch in one sitting without getting too drunk. I could be a competitive scotch drinker.

--I feel that it's time to discover a completely new genre of music that I've never listened to and lose myself in it. Afro-jazz, maybe?

--I love to *come home*. It almost makes going away worth it. 

 

Execution Dependent

I've been working in the film industry for the past seven months and part of my learning curve has involved getting used to the industry-specific jargon that flies through the air in every meeting. Prior to this job, I spent 12 years working in technology marketing and communications, so I think it's fair to say that I've gained invaluable experience when it comes to wading through minefields of bullshit business-speak in search of a trenchant point. I'd have to guess that the world of high-technology pretty much sets the curve when it comes to private sector jargon creation, arguably coming in third overall behind academia and the military. But Hollywood is pretty high up on the list as well. For example, if a piece of dialogue is too obvious or cliched it's "too on-the-nose." That one tripped me up for awhile. How can something be "too" on the nose? It's either on the nose or it's not on the nose, which I think is the whole point of the original (non-bastardized) phrase. 

One piece of film industry jargon that I'm kind of obsessed with lately is the phrase "execution-dependent," which roughly means that the success of a given idea depends on how well the movie actually ends up being made. Now, at first glance it seems like everything should be execution-dependent, right? In order for the movie to be good, it has to be well-executed; well-written, well-directed, well-shot, well-acted, etc. But the coded information implicit in that phrase has to do with the bankability of a concept--it's a way of quantifying risk when people are deciding whether or not to invest millions of dollars in an idea. If something isn't execution-dependent, it means the idea is so marketable and commercially appealing that even the worst version of the movie it inspires is still likely to be successful. Kick-ass muscle cars that turn into huge robots, plus a super-hot chick, for example, ain't that execution dependent. It's straight cash money dollar bills. A Dickensian tale about an orphaned Indian slum boy who flashes back on his life story while playing a TV game show that he hopes will reunite him with his long-lost slumgirlfriend, on the other hand, is pretty damn execution dependent.

The way I've heard the phrase used most is an expression of concern about the level of talent required to make a given project successful. Rather than saying "I'm not confident that your team can pull this movie off," you say something like "it's a great concept, we'd love to give you a bunch of money to go make it, but it's a little too execution-dependent for our risk portfolio." 

I am both repelled and excited by this phrase and it's repercussions, is my point, and I've found myself thinking about other areas of my life in a similar way. My grand change-of-life diet and nutrition plan, for example, is extraordinarily execution-dependent. Conceptually, I'm on solid ground. I've got it down, philosophically, emotionally, spiritually and intellectually. I know exactly what I need to do and at all looks beautiful and liberating and life-changing from here. The problem, such as it is, comes in the execution. Ain't that a bitch.

I haven't exercised this week, in other words. I worked out three times last week and I'm still eating the right things and I'm losing a bit of weight, but I can't seem to get myself on track to take it to the next level with real rigor. Discipline!! Self-control!! Get your ass on the treadmill! Execute!!