Adaptation

As I predicted, the start of the school year has eaten my lunch. I wish I could get to the point where I could do the job of professor like a nine-to-fiver, just pulling stuff from the file, walking in, wowing my students, then walking out to live my life until the next time class met. Everyone told me it would take several years to get to the point where I felt comfortable with the job. But even now in year six I am living panicked much of the time. I’m very uncertain if I’m cut out for this. But I’m getting side tracked. What I started out thinking here is that passion can only be suppressed for so long. Teaching and the subjects I teach are a passion, but I have others that must be squashed down and locked in a trunk in order for it to happen. Then all of a sudden, they will no longer be refused, the lock springs open, and I must deal with them. Last week I sat on the pinnacle of a stone wall-cum-gateway for eight hours in order to get a great shot of a B-25 being pulled out of a nearby lake. How could I spend all that time with the chaos of a new school year and the time swallowing challenges I am facing in my personal life? Sometimes a person just has to do something. The opportunity won’t be denied or maybe the prospect of applying one’s skill to that opportunity in hopes of something worthwhile coming of it that will bring personal fulfillment or perhaps strokes to a starving self-esteem. Anyway, I got some pictures. A local artist may be using one as a basis for a painting. The museum curator wants them. Cool. And today, for the first time in a few weeks, I feel the overwhelming need to write again. This time about a movie I watched last night:

“Adaptation” with Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, and a fellow named Chris Cooper whom I have not heard of before or since but seemed born to this earth to play the role he had. The first time I saw this movie it weirded me right out. Recently my wife has developed a fixation on orchids. In my reading stuff she’s been writing and looking at pictures she has been finding I remembered something about a movie that had an orchid as a central element. She expressed the desire to see it and finally, yesterday, after looking at an online movie database for help, I was able to remember what it was. So we watched it together. The thing that attracted me to the movie in the first place was an inkling that it had a unique script structure. Indeed it does. In some ways I was expecting something similar to “Memento” in terms of out of the box writing. It does deliver although in a very different way. It is a story about the writing of a film screenplay based on a book. The script is for the movie you are watching, so it all folds in on itself and is very non-linear, though it’s not nearly as confusing as “Memento” in which you have to “get” what’s going on, which seems to happen all at once and then you can absorb the story. “Adaptation” looks a lot more normal but then there are these moments that are like looking at an Escher drawing where one can’t quite figure out which reality is real as both appear normal but there is no way they can co-exist. It is a brilliant piece of writing.

Back when I was in film school we were all eager to operate movie cameras and sound equipment and to get our hands on film to edit. But the great, nebulous thing was a good script. Nothing else matters if there is not a story. And that was the hardest thing. The terror over the looming senior project requirement was never about the ability to accomplish the film, but to come up with the story idea. The terror of the blank page. An irony of the movie I watched was that the exquisitely crafted script was all about a script writer consumed by his inability to deliver on the great honor and privilege he had been given being hired to do the job. The characters in the film are all extreme caricatures, but I saw so much of myself in several of them. That, in my opinion, is what good literature does. It shows us something of ourselves and of the human condition and helps us process some of it: passion both bottled up and unbridled, compassion and loneliness, pride and humiliation, intelligence and inanity, discipline and going to seed, constriction and flow. This movie has classic Hollywood staples, tried and true sellers in the marketplace: violence, drug abuse, sex. It has situations far out over the edge where we would never go. Probably not the kind of thing a Christian college professor ought to be consuming. But I find myself enchanted by the characters like those in a loved book. This is film as literature and worthy of its messiness. Life is messy. We don’t have to dine on sewage, but sewage is part of life that must be dealt with. We could be like an animal rights proponent who refuses to think about where the styrofoam trayed, plastic wrapped steaks and chicken legs in the grocery store come from. Or the clean freak who never considers where the stuff in the toilet goes after it gets flushed. But somebody has to deal with this stuff out of our sight. And if we want to understand life deeply, sometimes we need to go there. That’s my opinion anyway. Many disagree. I acknowledge that it is a dangerous way to live.

Anyway, this movie made me think a lot about passion and love. And I’m left pondering a question that prompted me to sit down and write this. A quote from the end of the movie in the traditional spot in the script where the moral of the story is inserted stated, “you are defined by what you love, not by what loves you.” I kind of felt like somebody had reached into my torso, gripped my spine, and shook it a couple of times. And I hadn’t remembered that at all from the first time I had watched. Part of me resonated, “yes, that’s a big part of my problems.” But then I jumped to another view. I love Jesus because he first loved me. That is scriptural and that is my personal experience. And it seems to be opposite to the message of the movie. (Imagine that?) It sounds backwards, but it may be in the tension of paradox that on some level I think there is some truth there. I so often wait for someone or something in life to love me, to love what I have to offer, my contribution, my ability, my product. But that waiting is for the most part futile. At best it’s a source of morsals to a starving man. The things I love may have no use for me. I may have absolutely nothing to offer them that they need. But they are my choices, my passions.

I am also having to wrestle, once again, with the seeming disparities of my passions and the calling I believe God has put on my life. I want to be obedient to pursuing that calling and I believe it a worthy spending of the currency of my life, ie: years, devotion, toil, pain, hardship, sacrifice. There seem to be promises in scripture that if we chase after God the right way, these things will come to a confluence of an integrated life. I’ve heard countless sermons that told me this was what “He will give you the desires of your heart” meant; my desires would become His desires for me and thus, would be met. To some extent, this has proved true. But to a great extent, I have to admit that either I am not there yet, or I passed it by and missed it.

I was also thinking this morning about old people. Why are old people so often quiet? They have been around and have experienced so much, one would think they would be the ones with something to say. But it’s usually the young ones clamoring for our attention with profound revolutionary talk – with in-your-face stuff to contend with. I wonder if the old ones who have been there, done that, and come back beat up realize that there are no ears for what they have to say, so they keep it to themselves. Part of me knows I haven’t grown up yet – doesn’t even yet know what I want to be when I do grow up. But part of me is feeling very old.