Miscellaneous

Free Will, and other odds and ends

By jeremyblachman

SNL's digital short on Saturday, about old people and the movies (my favorite topic!) was very funny.  You can watch it here. 

Also, fun fact, my first couple of weeks in LA, the sublet I had was in the apartment of the new SNL cast member, Casey Wilson.  It was a Craigslist thing, totally random.  And it actually turned out she was good friends with one of my friends from college, and was also in an improv class with another friend.  Small world.  I thought she was funny on SNL.  Also, she had a bunch of movie scripts in her apartment when I was subletting, so I got to read the upcoming Jason Segel / Judd Apatow movie "Forgetting Sarah Marshall," which had a funny script but I've seen the trailer a couple of times and I don't know what happened.  The trailer looks pretty weak.  The trailer for the new Adam Sandler movie, "Don't Mess With The Zohan," about an Israeli soldier turned hairdresser, looks pretty funny.  I've been (this is a sad thing to do) DVRing the movie trailer show on HDNet and speeding through them occasionally.  Seems like mostly uninspiring upcoming movies, unfortunately.

I've been reading a lot of (unproduced) movie scripts the past few weeks -- there's a list that comes out every year  of the top scripts, as voted on by industry execs.  The NY Times ran a story about it here.  I was able to get my hands on a whole bunch of them and have read about 40 of them so far... one that has been sticking in my head is a script called "Will" by Demetri Martin, which I thought was brilliant.  But a lot of Demetri Martin's stuff is brilliant.  Anyway, the script is about an alternate universe where "Earth" is "produced" -- as if Earth is a television show, and we are all actors in it, and coincidences in our lives are all scripted, and the landscape is controlled from some external source, and so forth.  And in this alternate universe, there are "life writers," who script out everyone's lives, which for most people is pretty straightforward because we have the same conversations, about the weather and sports and politics and the dishes and the laundry and whatever.  And there's one particular life writer who wants to get the chance to write a "major life" -- Einstein, Plato, etc.  I'm not going to give away the movie, not that you'll remember this post in three years if this movie gets made and comes out, and where the movie goes isn't my point anyway.  What I thought was really interesting was the notion that most of us live "ordinary lives," that are easily scripted and we do predictable things and it's all very easy for these life writers to write.  But then there are a handful of these "major lives" which break the patterns, and go beyond.  That somehow they're off the grid. 

And obviously I don't want to read too much into this, and Demetri Martin probably isn't trying to make the point I'm taking from the script, but this notion of the ordinary lives and the major lives really got me thinking -- and the past two days I've ended up in two different conversations with friends about it.  When I was a kid, and I expect for many kids, you look at the people doing important things in the world, and they seem somehow off the grid -- off the grid, incidentally, is a term I'm applying to this, it's not from the movie script -- and that the President, or the Supreme Court Justice, or the guy writing episodes of Doogie Howser, or the general manager of the Mets -- that these people are special, and are part of some slightly elevated plane that means they are different from ordinary people and that's why they've ended up doing awesome and important things.  And that to aspire to be, say, the President, is silly, because whoever's supposed to be the President will become the President, things will happen to him, he'll end up on that path, and it'll be fated to happen.  I guess I'm saying I believed really strongly in fate as a kid.  I'm not sure I still don't.  But definitely growing up I had what I remember as sort of a blind faith that the people who are supposed to do great things end up doing great things, and the people who don't end up doing great things just weren't meant to, and aren't as special.  This is probably not the most healthy way for a nine-year-old to view the world. 

I've blogged this before but not in this context -- I lost the district spelling bee in fourth grade on the word "halibut" and was pretty crushed by it (I mean, I was over it by the next day, but at the moment I lost, I was pretty crushed by it).  Not because I thought I should know how to spell halibut -- I'm still convinced it was a significantly more difficult word, because of its foreign-ness to a nine-year-old, than the ultimate winning word in that spelling bee, "refrigerator," which I absolutely knew how to spell at the time, without question -- but because I was worried that losing the spelling bee meant I wasn't supposed to have won it, meant I wasn't as special as I hoped I was.  I'm not sure I would have articulated this that way at the time, and maybe I'm just imposing revisionist thoughts on my nine-year-old self, but I'm pretty sure my nine-year-old self would agree with this analysis.

In any case, I think I had a point here somewhere....  The scariest thing, to me, about getting older and realizing I am quickly losing the ability to insist something in my life will be different "when I'm an adult" (and I mostly use this excuse for small things, like, "when I'm an adult" I'll save receipts and be a lot more organized in my tax planning than I am, or "when I'm an adult" I'll own real kitchen appliances and be able to make my own ice cream, or "when I'm an adult" I'll go to art museums and actually appreciate the art and take time to read the placards and look at the pictures and feel like I'm gaining something from the activity, or "when I'm an adult" I'll buy a couple more pairs of pants) is realizing that things are probably not as fated as I once thought.  That there are smart, talented, good, decent, terrifically deserving people, in all sorts of arenas, who don't end up with the lives they would dream of, and that all of the people who do end up with lives that, as a kid, I would have put on some higher plane, all of those people are not necessarily the ones who a world with full information would put there.  And that even if someone could make the argument that with full information, person X should have life Y, there's not necessarily somewhere to make that argument, and the people in positions of power may not themselves be the perfect people, and that really, in the end, we're all just left to fumble through and do the best we can and craft the best lives we can craft out of the circumstances in which we end up.  Whatever those end up being.  And that there doesn't necessarily ever reach a point where you settle into the "when I'm an adult" life, because even "adults" have problems and concerns and disappointments and worries.

If I did have a point somewhere in there, I've lost it by now.  Sorry.  Okay, let me try to find it again.  Major lives vs. ordinary lives.  I look at someone like Barack Obama, and it's both heartening and disheartening to realize he is (almost surely) just a person.  He is a person who has made a series of decisions in his life, and used some underlying talents and intelligence to take him from decision to decision, and has ended up in a position to run for President.  He doesn't actually seem "off the grid" to me.  He just seems like a smart and charismatic guy who went to good schools and had a great amount of ambition and got elected to the state senate and so forth.  It all seems reasonable.   Extraordinary, but reasonable.  It doesn't seem like magic that he's running for President.  The general manager of the Texas Rangers went to my high school and graduated a year before me.  I didn't know him, I have no recollection of him.  But his path, also, seems like it probably hasn't been magic, it's just been good fortune and talent and ambition and happenstance.  So I'm faced with feeling real doubt about my nine-year-old self-conception of the world.  That most of us are probably just on the grid, and things happen or they don't happen, and we do have some amount of agency in determining our paths and it's not all fate, but there are also elements of luck and good fortune, but the people in enviable positions are just people.  And some of them are awesome people and some of them aren't, and some, in a world of full information "deserve" the lives they have, and some people don't.  And maybe it's not in fact a world split between ordinary lives and major lives but just lives.

Okay, turns out I actually didn't have a point but just ended up rambling for a few paragraphs.  This is what you get, commenter "78" for posting a comment that I should blog more, and not just about what my grandma thinks of movies.  You get gobbledy-gook where I somehow make the point that my nine-year-old self didn't know everything, not that anyone at the time necessarily thought he did.  If "Will" gets made, you should go see it, because it really was a terrific script.  Also, "Passengers," a science fiction kind of thing by this guy Jon Spaihts.  Which was not of a genre I usually respond to, but I thought it was terrific.

Full post as published by Jeremy Blachman's Brand New Weblog on February 25, 2008 (boomark / email).