Shelter From the Cold

Icy complaints:

1      days are short,
2.       3 AM wake-up alert: I think we forgot to bring the garden hose in before the frost—but, hey, where is it, did somebody steal our garden hose?!
3.       and the cold gruel we eat for culture.

           We ventured to the movie theater on Christmas day just to get out of the house, but also because we heard that Adam Sandler did a fabulous acting job in Uncut Gems and from what I saw he did. But I only lasted 25 minutes in. Twenty-five minutes trying to find a place in my psyche where I wasn’t bombarded by unrelenting ugliness and human desperation with no hope of redemption.

I left Paul there, and while I was looking for a place to land in the theater lobby to wait out the movie, a green lit game room with digital bells and spinning lights, I stepped on a spit out piece of gum and while cursing that, felt the thrum of an incoming message. Paul: where are you? I’m coming out too.

I read a piece in Salon the other day that claimed Hallmark movies are the kind of stuff they made in Nazi Germany—the fascism of white supremacy where the mating problems of a couple of privileged people magically do add up to a hill of beans. The only non-normative people of color in the story are on the sidelines cheering on the white folks who don’t have enough sense to get together.

I’m not advocating for the unreality of Hallmark, but neither am I a big fan of having my face pushed into the abyss of despair. Neither of them offers truth or even ambiguity which is the point of art, isn’t it? I can’t find the humanity in a character whose biggest problem is getting back to her big city marketing job any more than I can find the humanity in a character who compulsively bets 40K he doesn’t have on a sporting event. Drop dead, both of you.

I think that the proliferation of Marvel and franchise movies and stale shoot-em-up television shows has made us forget that stories, fiction, are the stuff of our lives. Yes, the stories must be entertaining, but recent entertainment is measured in vials of adrenalin or adherence to a dogma, either left or right. They don’t cater to our need to engage our morality, challenge our philosophies or empathize with the other.  Where else do you have a chance to do that except in fiction?

A friend of mine, a successful men’s fashion writer, told me he reads fiction to learn how to live his life. It seems to me that’s what missing in our stories now: a blueprint for how to live our lives which stories have traditionally given the culture. When a famous soap opera (Days of Our Lives? I think) went off the air a few years ago, the critics bemoaned the fact that now people wouldn’t have uncomfortable life scenarios to measure their own lives against. People who in real life had strong negative opinions about a gay couple moving into the apartment upstairs, had to confront their now-conflicted feelings about seeing a gay couple they really loved in the soap opera moving into someone else’s upstairs and getting guff from the neighbors. That’s how progress is made. Imagination. Challenging assumptions. Stories are a safe place to try out complicated feelings and integrate new information into our worlds.

Even now, when I think of where I get my opinions of right and wrong and human nature, the first evidence that presents itself is fiction: To Kill a Mockingbird, The Man Who Would be King, Genesis. It’s never a supreme court case or scientific studies which are just accumulations of data. It’s stories where we find our truth, where the data is formed into a meaningful tale that the soul can understand.

I’m wishing us all stories that entertain and enlighten. Wish me well and have a great new year.

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