#360 Musings Beyond the Bunker (Wednesday May 25)
Good morning,
A few weeks ago, I witnessed two tales of single men dealing with life after having missed out on the opportunity to marry when they were younger. The first was the Broadway remake of Company, the classic, genre-shattering musical by Stephen Sondheim that contemplates the complications of married life, juxtaposing the single protagonist celebrating his 35th birthday with his trying to figure out the lives of his friends, the “crazy married people.” In this version, the male lead of Bobby is now a female version—Bobbie. I’m sharing perspectives on this and other theatre next week….
KID/ADULT DISCOVERY DRAMAS
The other is a movie about a single man who never found the right match. The story is one of the genre of a grumpy man forced to spend time with a child, helping the child learn more about the world and, in turn, learning from the child. Among the greatest of this genre is True Grit (either version). Tom Hanks’s News of the World and The Tender Bar, with Ben Affleck, are other great ones (George Clooney’s Midnight Sun is, in my opinion, a failed attempt—just a pondering, downer mess with a predictable twist).
C’mon C’mon now joins the list as one of the best in the adult/child friendship drama category. It is an affecting meditation on children, journalistic inquiry, the challenges of adulthood, sibling conflict, mental illness, and parenting. The protagonist, Johnny, is a bachelor uncle, who conveniently happens to be a journalist conducting interviews of children. These interviews are attempts to understand kids’ views of life and their expectations of the future. Real interviews conducted with children in different cities are interspersed through this seemingly simple, but ultimately quite complex, story of what kids think and how they perceive their world.
The plot begins familiarly. Parent needs unattached, cynical relative or friend to help out parenting for a while. In this case, Johnny is enlisted by his estranged sister to “babysit” Jesse, his nephew, while the sister leaves town to deal with her husband’s bipolar disorder. The central concept of the film is watching a single man becoming a temporary parent to his nine year-old nephew, all the while learning as much about himself as about the child. Jesse is a complex young man, with flashes of maturity and wisdom, mixed-in with childhood silliness, insecurities, and fantasies.
The story got me thinking about the ineffable magic of parenting and relating the movie to my own experiences in this experiment in which every single parent, regardless of the number of books they read or lectures they attend, is but a rank amateur. There is nothing to prepare one for the myriad possible ways in which the world unfolds with these evolving bundles of inquiry, exploration, and contradiction.
A CHILD’S MUSINGS
In one early scene in the movie, Jesse explains his wild belief that trees communicate with each other through fungus tubes under the ground. To Jesse, the trees are not passive and static—they are interconnected and communicative. What looks peaceful, simple and unwavering above the ground turns out to be highly complex below the surface.
When I heard this, it hit me like a lightning bolt, as Brad had been discussing with me his idea of a novel centered on the notion that trees communicate with each other through their subterranean connections. In his fictional world, all knowledge, wisdom and the experiences of the world are bound-up in the trees. These trees were not merely repositories of all knowledge; they were sentient beings that serve as sentinels and guides that outlive the stories they retain. Brad saw the information communicated by the trees as not merely “stored” in each tree but that the trees themselves analyze, evaluate and inter-relate the information. This information, it turns out, is not just knowledge of the corporeal world, nor the history of the civilization, but the compendium of all the stories of all the people who ever lived. Because of the below-ground interconnection of the trees, this knowledge is communicated to other trees that also retain that knowledge, in order that the data doesn’t depend upon the continuing health of any single organism. In this world, all thoughts, ideas and experiences end up in living repositories of this information, retained for generations and throughout history; everything lives on.
WHAT IS SAVED AND PASSED ON
Science has developed complex ways to retain massive amounts of information “in the cloud,” forever resident in “server farms,” but data lacks depth without human analysis and interpretation. Little Jesse in the movie and Brad in his cogitations share the notion that information—particularly information about people, their experiences, and their dreams, can only exist within the context of “living” retention and transmission.
The idea that all experiences and accumulated knowledge—both great and insignificant—continue to live for eternity, is comforting in the permanence it gives to what otherwise would otherwise be the fleeting days of individual existence. Analyzing our past and deciding how to transmit that information to future generations has become a cottage industry in America. We are engaged in a debate in this country about how we teach our past. It seems there are polar opposite views of what must be taught—what the history is that we should pass down. They miss the point. Beneath the surface, there is not a single source—a single point from which everything else grows outward. Rather, beneath the surface and in the past are complex root systems that are interconnected and, while seemingly different, are joined together as part of one larger organism. We fight about curricula without the acknowledgement that several threads of meaning and interpretation can be interwoven to create a more accurate representation of what was and how it informs how we would want the world to be.
Meanwhile, we struggle to understand our personal stories as well. People send saliva samples to be read; oral histories are being recorded; public records are being dissected, all with the goal of figuring out who we are and how we fit in.
In the end, perhaps we are the trees. Every time someone does an internet search to find a ship manifest containing an ancestor’s name, each time someone gets back the results of a DNA test, every time we read another history or historical novel, we are trying to get “beneath the surface” to find more information to provide depth, context, and meaning to the world. There is no single narrative—rather complex streams of ideas and events that together bring us to where we are. How we go forward can only be achieved by nurturing the entirety of the root system.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
But back to the movie. C’mon C’mon is a movie that all parents and aspirants to parenting really should see. It is layered, complex, and sometimes unfathomably profound—like its subject—children. See it.
As for Company, go on-line and google Elaine Stritch and/or Patti Lupone singing “Ladies Who Lunch” and Dean Jones and/or Neil Patrick Harris singing “Being Alive” for a real treat.
Have a great day,
Glenn
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