Just a few quick thought as I stick my head up for some air…
I saw "Sideways” on Saturday afternoon with The Girl. We popped down to the Cineplex that’s about a 15-minute walk from my apartment. Except for the couple in front of us, we were the youngest two in the crowd. For those of you who don’t know the basic gist, imagine “Swingers” if the two protagonists were pushing mid-forties and without the fortune of self-delusion. The language of “Sideways” consists of misdirection, outright lies, and syllables uttered simply to fend off reality. These two men talk to create bubbles around themselves, bubbles they hope are impregnable yet shatter effortless once punctured in one place.
The “hero” of the piece (a term used so loosely I needed to put quotes around it) is a failed writer. Or so he thinks. He spends the majority of the movie defining himself by his failures: primarily, his divorce and his unpublished book. He at one point tells his compatriot-in-delusion (and I’m paraphrasing here), “Half of my life is gone and I’ve got nothing to show for it.” In short, like so many people, he considers himself to BE nothing because he feels he has DONE nothing.
All of this resonated with me not because I’m a balding fat forty-something. I mean, come on, I only just turned twenty-nine. Still balding and sporting some pudge, but not with half my life over. (Which might mean I’m more pathetic than this character in question, but let’s not delve into that quite now.) No, what echoed from the screen into my psyche had more to do with a dichotomy I’ve been dealing with, along with so many others my age. What do I hold more important: who I want to be or what I want to do?
I consider these things separate, although I recognize that the two can overlap someone or even completely. For those defined by vocational success, the two are mutually inclusive. For those people, who they want to be is defined entirely by what they want to do. Achieve your goal in the latter, and simultaneously achieve the former. This overlap need not be greedy. The desire to be a doctor can be either altruistic or self-indulgent. One can equally define self through a non-profit job as a Wall Street job. But nevertheless, these people define their sense of self through their occupation. When asked who they are, they answer, “A lawyer/pharmacist/professional athlete.” They do not answer, “A father/mother/sister/friend.”
Now, those who define themselves as who they are would answer the question thusly. They might amend these definitions depending on how good or bad they are in that position, but their 9-5 life won’t factor into their answer. Their overall happiness might be affected by their jobs, but they are not essentially defined by that position. Their sense of self comes from what they do away from work.. The job is a means to an end for them; for the “want to do” crowd, the job is the end.
Now, of course it’s not as black-and-white as this, but it’s a useful enough starting point, I think, to talk about the two primary ways people define themselves. (Some people might define themselves by their “My Two Dads” collector mugs, but that’s a statistically insignificant portion of the population, I think we all can agree.) The protagonist in “Sideways” spends a majority of the movie mixing the two up considerably. This mix-up (applying the lack of vocational success as a marker of personal insignificance) forms an almost paralyzing stranglehold around his character. We as the audience are an impartial jury that can listen to several characters tell him (to his face no less) of all his inherent personal attributes, but the unpublished novel serves as his personal albatross and as his greatest roadblock to personal fulfillment.
Watching this movie, and picking up on the little hints of dialogue sprinkled throughout the film, one gets the sense that the unpublished novel was/is an attempt to fill the gap rendered by the divorce, and only through the ultimate rejection of the novel can the illusion built up by the protagonist finally be shattered. And shattered it is: immediately following the news of its rejection by the publishing house, he raises a hellish ruckus in a winery. We have in him a man who lied to himself about his own self-definition as a form of self-preservation but found the lie to be so antithetical to his own nature that the weight proved too burdensome.
And that’s a lot of annoyingly large words, so before this turns into some Masters’ thesis, but here’s the thought I had during the film, and one I had beforehand as well: it’s not so much a matter of right and wrong, this “want to be” versus “want to do”, so much as knowing for oneself which you are. At some basic level, and in the majority of cases, one has to choose a path ending with one of those two options. Doesn’t mean the former can’t have a satisfying and even busy career; doesn’t mean the latter will forever be doomed to eat solitary dinners surrounded by Ikea furniture. Just means that at some fundamental level, one has to make that choice to know how to make the thousands of little choices along the way. Only by having a clear goal of what’s more valuable allows one to not be stymied by the business of everyday living.
Neither is easy; both are painfully difficult. I know this not simply from personal experience but the experience of, oh, everyone I’ve ever talked to in my life. The work involved in being a good mother is as time-consuming and draining as the work involved in being the CEO of a company. There’s no safe path, just an intuitively correct one. I think that, due to my nearly decade-long exposure to those for whom vocational prestige was all-important, I long considered my ultimate goals/aspiration on a more personal scope to be frivolous, naïve, maybe even inconsiderate…inconsiderate of my parents who sunk all that money into my education, inconsiderate to any girl I might want to take to a nice restaurant, inconsiderate to any children I might one day to provide for.
In the end, I think most of us want that happy marriage of “be” and “do”, where what one does to support oneself in the economic reality of the world lines up in perfect harmony with one’s definition of self. And I think this is precisely the reason why the world has so many starving artists. Or, hell, decently well-fed artists. Because the word “artist” can answer either question. It can be what one is, or what one does.
I’d like to think “writer” fits into this category as well.
I’d wager a few hundred thousand bloggers might agree.
I’m not going to end on some sappy self-affirmation note here, no “But I’m so happy I followed my heart” crap, because honestly, you don’t care, and I’m totally fine with your apathy. If you haven’t figured out where I sit by now, you might as well stop reading the site altogether, because you’ve missed the point. I just felt like doing what I usually do around here: talk about something I see in the everyday, something that’s affecting us all, and have the hubris to think my two cents might matter to two of you.
Put simply: what I do is not who I am. Probably forever, that will hold true. Even if someday I’m paid to throw a few thousand words a week into a word processing program, that will still hold true.
I’m a son.
I’m a brother.
I’m a guy who loves a girl.
And I'm fairly drunk on being all three.
That’s me.
Who are you?
Posted by Ryan McGee at November 30, 2004 12:01 AM