The Impossible

I recently watched "The Impossible" while struggling to get through a red eye flight (why do I keep booking these?  I can't seem to remember that I can NEVER sleep on planes and that it's routinely a miserable experience.  Here's hoping that writing and publishing this will strengthen my resolve not to do it again).


The movie was--well, moving.  Sitting on a dark plane surrounded by hundreds of sleeping strangers in the early hours of the morning, I found myself weeping for the dead and the anguish of the survivors and shuddering at the horrors of extensive injuries.  I can point out what I think are some flaws in tone or story-telling, but I thought that the acting was great and the portrayal of the catastrophic tsunami was pretty amazing. I came home and looked it up on wikipedia and imdb and was unsurprised to see that the reviews were mostly good, but that it received some criticism for "white-washing", or telling a story affecting people of minority ethnic or racial groups with white actors to appeal to a mainstream white audience. It caused me to reflect on my impression of the movie and ask myself if I agreed; while I determined that I did not, I found this argument to be compelling and worth addressing.

I asked myself, what if the movie went about telling a story of a Thai, or Sri Lankan, or Indonesian family who suffered loss and injury in the tsunami?  For starters, the essential nature of the film would be different.  The exposition would require more detail to give the western audience the necessary background to understand something about the lives of the characters, leaving less time to explore the nature of the catastrophe and its aftermath.  The filmmakers would also need to find a way to hook the audience into relating to people whose lives are so different.  The movie would then shift in tone from being about the tsunami's destruction and the fragility of human life, and become an exploration of how we are somehow unable to feel the same compassion for people we identify as different (dare we admit that in the unexamined parts of our consciousness, we even consider inferior?) from us.

We would be forced to face our own assumption that when people in the developing world, who don't have our same conveniences and cultural norms suffer, that it is less meaningful, less real, less important.  This is a difficult truth.  It is worth asking hard questions about why these films don't get made--why we as consumers don't want to consume them, really, since I'm sure that the studios would be happy to produce something sure to be lucrative.  And while we probably know--or have a good sense for-- the answer to that question (art that is hard on its audience is not generally popular for mass consumption), we should be asking ourselves what can be done to change that--even in small ways.

But in the end, "The Impossible" is telling one story, based on true events suffered by a real family. While it does portray a disaster that disproportionately affected southeast Asians, and not European tourists, we should be outraged at our failure as a society to want to tell--or more importantly, to want to see--such stories rather than at how "The Impossible" cannot tell every story, or convey every political and social message that we believe should be out there.  We should look closely at how we view tragedy, and if and why we may feel greater shock and sadness when people who look more like us--whether because they are white, middle-class, from the developed world, English-speaking, etc.--are harmed or killed or suffer than when people who are different endure the same.  But it seems unfair to penalize one film, written and produced to tell one specific story, for failing to address all these collective wrongs.

Reasons to Run

I am not much of an athlete.  Naturally mediocre in both strength and speed, I don't do myself any favors with my lack of discipline and dislike of physical discomfort.  But even with my limitations, I have found exercise to be both pleasurable and healing over the years, although in different phases of life, it has had different purposes.

As a child, I loved the idea of being fast.  I read every Marguerite Henry book I could get my hands on and became obsessed with horses, a creature built for speed.  I would run everywhere and imagine I was Florence Griffith Joyner (I actually think the cheesy music on that link perfectly describes the soundtrack in my 10 year-old brain as I would run).  Schoolyard games always included running: various forms of tag, butt's up (which, ever the good Mormon girl, I dutifully referred to as "bum's up"), and imaginary games that always involved running--we were unicorns, we were riding horses, we were running from the bad guys, we were flying through the air. My mother loves to tell about how she would pick me up from school and I would be completely disheveled: clothes dirty, hair escaping my pony tail and plastered to my sweaty forehead.

It was in high school that I objectively learned that I was an above-average high school runner, and nothing more.  There's nothing like a stop watch for forcing you to face reality.  I was disappointed, but by that time my identity as a bookwormish nerd was set, so it wasn't as devastating as it might have been.  I enjoyed running and winning races (which happened rarely once I transitioned from junior varsity to varsity), but it really was more about the world of track--the friends, the meets, and the pleasure that came from watching people who WERE really great.  I came to love the sport, and I will still yell myself hoarse at a high school track meet.

In my twenties, I almost never ran.  When I started college, hurdling and sprinting were no longer practical exercise options and I had long decided that I was uninterested in longer distances.  I also had noted, in chagrin, the superficiality that strangely runs through certain subcultures of BYU, my undergraduate university, and in rebellion I stopped wearing make-up and refused to work out because it seemed like many women's motivation was solely to make themselves attractive enough to be considered dateable.  As a result, while I always loved walking everywhere I could, the habit for regular exercise was completely gone for the better part of a decade. 

 Finally, at about 30, I started running because I could feel my body settling into middle age, and I wanted to fight it.  Unfortunately, I never shed the pounds that I imagined would melt away as soon as I was into a running routine, but I did finally find what it felt like to be in shape and able to run several miles comfortably.  What I learned was that while my body didn't physically change as much as I would have liked, as I grew stronger, I began to see my body as a tool, not an object.  It felt wonderful to feel my calves contracting as they left the pavement, my arms pumping, my abdominal muscles tight in supporting my form. That being said, I am not fast: my limited ability as a high school athlete was in hurdles and jumping, and I tend to be even more mediocre in endurance than in power.

Now I run as a prescription for an ailing and troubled soul.  I wake in the middle of the night and feel panic at what I have not yet achieved.  I feel fear that it is too late to make something meaningful of my life--that I've botched it irreparably.  I worry about things I've said, things I should have done but didn't, perceived or real offenses, professional inadequacy, and the fact that in worrying, I am missing valuable sleep and therefore less likely to accomplish all those things I feel I should.  For whatever reason, I find that running can somewhat mitigate that paralyzing rushing in my brain.  I don't know if it's the endorphins, the rhythmic pounding, the transfer of mental to physical pain, but it can bring momentary, sweet relief.  So for now, when I don't want to go I remind myself that it is my prescription.  Running: drug without side-effects?

Kafkaesque

Until this week, I had never read any Kafka.  Any.  Ever.  I had lived in Prague, Kafka's home town, almost daily walking past the apartment where he was born and the building where he had attended school, both ostentatiously advertised by historical markers, and yet I had only read a few pages of one story before deciding I found his work unsavory.   I finally read a collection of his stories this week, including famous works like "The Metamorphosis," "In the Penal Colony", "The Judgment", and perhaps less famous, but what ended up being my favorite group of stories, "The Hunger Artist."  I was surprised to find that this time, I not only liked Kafka--I liked him a lot.  I concluded this with a sense of relief because so many writers and thinkers I had long admired held Kafka in near reverence (I regretfully admit that I find I want to have similar opinions to people I admire).  In what way had I changed since my last attempt?  I'm not entirely sure, but for some reason I found the ambiguity, the darkness, the nightmarish strangeness, the abrupt non sequiturs in conversation, to no longer be off-putting and pointlessly bleak, but rather a powerful and uniquely bold manner of portraying what it means to be human--the alienation, loneliness, despair, hope, doubt--by abandoning realism as inadequate to the task.  With relief, now that I've actually read (some of) his work, I can finally wrap my head somewhat around the word "Kafkaesque".  Confronting what I bad previously dismissed as "unsavory" about human character, including my own (and there is something deeply ironic and self-mocking in his stuff), is no longer so daunting, although it has not ceased to be disturbing. 

Red or Blue

When I was a child of four or five, red was my favorite color.  I was even Little Red Riding Hood for Halloween one year in a nod to my enthusiasm for all things red.  One day, I asked my mother what her favorite color was.  To my chagrin, she explained that she really like many colors, but that her favorite was probably blue.  I was devastated.  I couldn't articulate it at the time, but I felt that our different opinions divided us somehow--that our inability to agree on what was most beautiful in color drove a wedge between us.



As I grew older, having the same opinions about things as arbitrary as colors became less and less important. Having friends with some divergent ideas became interesting.  But there is still something important about how we connect and feel tied to one another based on similarities of opinion: Our good friends like the same music or books we do, and it confirms a pleasurable feeling in our gut that this person is a good match for us--hence the expression "something in common", which describes that feeling of recognition you get when you find you have the right combination of similarities, like you're home, understood, and somehow not really totally alone.

A recent email conversation with a friend remind me of this recently with the Supreme Court's rulings on DOMA and Proposition 8.  People I love and care about are on both sides of the issue--and I feel a sadness over how divisive this has become.  Of course it is connected to something much more sensitive and profound than colors; those on one side feel a religious duty to protect the notion of marriage and society they believe is ordained by God, and those on the other side feel compelled to protect a marginalized group from injustice and discrimination.  It's hard--perhaps impossible--to reconcile the openly moral judgment of the former against the latter's stance that they deserve the same rights and freedoms.  But I still can't help feeling like there could possibly be some middle ground where the conversation should be somehow safer and more accepting of difference.  I don't think opponents of proposition 8 could entirely escape the hurt and anger they might feel, but perhaps they could see that the intent of all proponents of prop 8 wasn't necessarily discrimination based only on fear, and acknowledge that even those supporting it might feel conflicted.  Likewise, perhaps the proponents of proposition 8 could openly admit understanding for why the other side is so offended, explaining that the response would be justifiable when looking at homosexuality from a completely different stance.  (Because opposition to gay marriage is becoming increasingly unpopular, I actually feel like this second scenario is currently more common, not because of any inherent moral superiority on the side of the pro-prop 8 faction, but simply due to their situation as being in the minority).  This would buck the current cultural trend of bitterly divided political discourse, but how healthy and powerful would it be to actually talk to each other with the intent to understand; so much of public discourse now is merely posturing for one's own supporters--we love hearing our own opinions echoed in the most eloquent discourse, in a more articulate or artistic voice.

Back to the colors of my childhood--I gradually stopped loving red.  Feeling that the red/blue disagreement was an insurmountable obstacle to having a deep connection with my mother, I promptly convinced myself that I liked blue better.  I was so successful that to this day I prefer blue to red.  And I sometimes still wonder how many of my opinions I have arrived at because I have sacrificed, consciously or not, ideas I have arrived at independently for those of the people I most admire and love--not to impress them, exactly, but in order to feel like we are one, and that I am not alone.