Mardi knew a woman who loved romantic comedies. Everytime she saw one, she would break up with her boyfriend at the time. She loved romantic comedies, but she couldn't reconcile her life to them. Reality didn't live up to what she saw in the movies, the romance she could have, the whimsy she was missing. I know people who get nervous about fiction, even more so about the movies. They think you'll be like Mardi's woman, you'll fly high into the magic, then crash land back into the real world.
I'm with those people sometimes. I get an urge to go to the theater then rebuke the notion. That's frippery, I'll tell myself, that's foolishness. Don't get yourself whipped up into that nonsense, not when things are the way they are out here. Don't convince yourself you can disappear into the make-believe.
When I'm with those people, I don a black bonnet and thick, ugly socks. I chop off my hair, crease it down the middle, and don't take care of my hands. I'm a pragmatist. PRAAAHHHHHHGGGG...
But I'm not really one of them.
I remembered that last night, when I slipped out of the movie theater having caught the 7:15 showing of Happy-Go-Lucky, the new film from Mike Leigh.
I'd been having a crummy day, got off of work and just slothed out on the couch all afternoon, and Kellam came home in the middle of it, witnessed my sloth. I flared with shame, shocked by it. I was ashamed and pissed off, at him and at myself, because Kellam would never sloth out on the couch in the afternoon, and that makes him a stand-up guy. I'm not the stand-up guy that he is, and I don't have the balls to act like that's just fine with me. Now I know that some people are just do-ers, they do, not because they're smarter or wiser or more mature or anything, they just DO stuff. But so what that I'm not really a do-er, I know they're not better than me, I know this.
But, like I said, yesterday was a pretty crummy day, and at that moment, to get caught by a do-er not doing anything seemed like the most humiliating, damning thing in the world. So, quickly and unconvincingly, I jetted, slipped away, mumbled something about needing to do something urgent downtown, something really important and intellectual. Ha.
I went to see a movie called Happy-Go-Lucky, and into the movie, I didn't soar or disappear. I just sat there, back-of-the-theater girl, and remained in myself, with myself, as I watched another story unfold.
Happy-Go-Lucky follows its heroine, Poppy Cross, through her mish-mash life, a life colored and sparkling with glitter, tempera paint, and leopard print boots. She tromps around town, smiling into the gentle breeze, tipping her hat to strangers, teaching children how to fly and shout about in migration celebration. I was, at first, appalled. She's so cheery! She's so flippant! Her jokes are so lame! I wondered, if I knew her, would I hate her.
But the film turned on my low expectations, that happiness is a frail shell, that a woman such as Poppy can't really be who she appears to be. My poor imagination demands that a good story must steal away the trappings of happiness and reveal Truth. (Truth, of course, being despair.) But to the credit of the filmmakers, things don't go my way. Poppy is steadfast. She remains steadfast, bright-colored and kind, not only in the nest of care and familiar love she has built for herself, a sort of Poppy-world, a world a lesser storyteller would never leave, but also into the world that I know, that you know, that is inhabited by angry people, little boy bullies, lonely homeless men, women fraught with worry, heavy with child. Poppy remains steadfast into a world where the boundaries are sketchy, where you don't know what's what, where there is confusion, but maybe goodess, rage, but maybe hurt.
And so the trappings of happiness were not stolen away from Poppy, not the way I went in demanding. Instead, in time, they wore off like a coat of paint, rubbed down, lived in. And what was revealed was, indeed, truth, but not despair, not at all. The truth revealed turned out to be Joy, a kind of joy I've seen before, a joy I recognize in my mother, cultivated and worked at day after day, chosen again and again in the face of angry people. It is a joy worked for, a joy sought after, a joy decided upon.
I understand wariness of fiction. If fiction was just flights of fancy, I'd eschew it, too. But I see things sometimes that fly against fancy, bird against a bird, things that dig into a reality I recognize, things that say, Hold Up. Wait a second. Look- This is what you're for.
photo: Robin Shwartz
