I have far too many pieces of unfinished writings floating about on my computer. I’ve decided to put them online for anyone’s viewing pleasure, and it also helps me feel better about not writing as much as I would like. I think reading these items from my past will spur me on to better things, because I remember writing because I loved it, and because I thought I was good at it – and then I let life get in the way. To life I say, “Leave Me Alone, I Just Want to Write.”
Now that I’ve got that out of my system, here’s the first of some items From the Vault. This is a finished piece, a paper for a college class no less (Movies & Cultures, a most excellent class with a most excellent professor, Dr. David Gaines). Our task was to write a paper on “The Movie That _____ My ______,” where we, obviously, filled in the blank.
I just reread this paper, and thought there were more than a couple of phrases I liked, and was even surprised that I could have written anything like that. So I’d like to share. It’s a little long, especially for blogging, but what do I care?
The Movie That Clears My Pathway
by Blake Atwood
Movies & Cultures
Gaines
December 5, 2000
To this day I have no idea why a twelve year old boy and a few of his friends would pay seven dollars per person to watch a two hour drama about an aging Oxford don and author who meets a younger woman who loves his books, marries the woman to obtain her legal English citizenship, then falls in love with the woman, but only to lose her in the end to cancer. The movie I have just pitifully described is Shadowlands, the true to life story of Christian author C.S. (“Jack”) Lewis’ May-December romance with Joy Gresham. In retrospect, I think the only reason we went is because we all knew a little of Lewis’ writing and our parents approved of the movie. What I most remember about this movie was that one scene in particular made me cry, as much as my twelve-year-old stereotypical façade of emotionless masculinity desired to hide that fact from everyone around me.
During my first viewing, as I was merely a boy myself, all of my empathy went toward Joy’s young son Douglas. The scene that bedewed my eyes occurs after Douglas’ mother has died. Douglas and Jack are sitting on a bed in an attic and Jack has yet to speak to Douglas since his mother’s passing. Douglas sobs, “I sure would like to see her again.” Jack replies, “Me too,” and they both begin to weep. I began to weep. This scene may have been the first time I recall where what I felt overrode what I knew. In other words, I knew this was only a movie (though based on a true story), yet I felt the boy’s pain. That experience was my first empathetic moment of connection with a ‘fictional’ movie character.
During my second viewing of Shadowlands, I see more of myself in Jack than in the boy. In Jack I see a reflection of who I was, who I am, and what I may yet become. My second viewing called me back to the first time I had seen the movie. Waiting eight years between viewings does that – I believe this is what we call nostalgia. My first viewing was as part of a dating group. In other words, each guy had a certain girl to sit by, or so I recall. During my most recent viewing, I continually noticed Jack’s prepubescent-like state of awkwardness while he is first getting to know Joy. He quickly fixes his hair when her back is turned. He rubs his hands together and fidgets with a corkscrew when he wants to ask her something incredibly important, something akin to “Uh. Me Jack like you. You like Jack?” Watching Anthony Hopkins act as an old man with youthful inhibitions took me back to my own first few years of dating. I suddenly realized that not only did I act that way, but I continue to act that way. Certain women do tend to sever the brain from the mouth, leaving only various functions of the involuntary nervous system in working order. And so, with my second viewing I empathize with Jack.
I have heard it said that the longest trip some people will ever take is only a two-foot journey. Persons traveling this road are entwined in the tangles of their minds, locked in the cages of their brains, or caught within the confines of their craniums. The road they travel is the road between the mind and the heart. As I began to look more closely at this movie, and Jack in particular, I saw the road I am currently traveling and a clearing of the pathway. For example, Jack constructed a world unto himself, a cottage of comfort and content. Surrounding himself with books and knowledge, words, ideas, and professors, Jack lived a safe life. An especially pertinent dialogue evidences this fact. Joy questions Jack, “Reading is safe isn’t it? Books aren’t about to hurt you?” I fall into this category, staying safe with intangibles. Jack replies, “Why should one want to be hurt?” Joy’s sharpness cuts, “That’s when we learn.”
Moving solely in the labyrinth of his mind, Jack knows and espouses so much about life but knows so little about living. How I would love to write someday as Lewis once did, to possess the mind that Lewis once had – but oh how I would not want to be adorned with the grayness of wisdom only to learn I had never truly lived! One of the repeated phrases in the movie is a true quote from the real Lewis. “Pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” “Pain” is an easy word to speak until it manifests itself in experience (or until it is shouted through the megaphone), and experiences are easy to evade if one lives confined within one’s mind. One American woman, sneaking through the perimeter wires surrounding Lewis’ heart, annihilates his world of intangibles. As she leads, so begins the journey from Lewis’ head to his heart.
The truest realities are often unrecognizable because we refuse to believe they are true. They are so extra-ordinary that we become blinded by everyday banality to their true beauty. We do not stop to smell the roses along the pathway. So we pass reality by and strive to thrive on the hopes and dreams and loves and losses of others, often through friends, books, television, or movies. Vicarious living is no living at all. It is more parasitism than anything else, yet this defines Jack’s relationship with his books and his learning, his safety net of thoughts. Another repeated quote within the movie is this: “We read to know we’re not alone.” Jack, near the end, questions, “Do we love (others) to know we’re not alone?” Here we see Jack beginning to press his nose to the rose.
In a touching scene in which Joy and Jack are outside for one of their last times together, Joy tells Jack that “The happiness now is part of the pain then. That’s the deal.” Jack does not understand what she means until she has passed away. Joyless Jack suddenly sees what he had missed all along. The experience gives a depth of meaning to “happiness” and “pain” no words could describe. In a scene I may be forcing too much meaning upon, the bed-ridden Joy dies in Jack’s study surrounded by his books. Their love has finally uprooted his world of knowledge; this world is replanted within the reality of experience and both grow in harmony, nourishing each other (or as I presume, since the real C.S. Lewis wrote numerous books even after his wife’s death, including Surprised By Joy, the book responsible for most of this movie). In the last statement of the movie, we hear Jack’s concession. “The pain now is part of the happiness then. That’s the deal.” Now he understands “Pain” through experience, and not merely “pain” through words and definitions. So ends Jack’s journey, but only to begin again. For the road from the head to the heart is a road eternally traveled.
I have yet to experience true, deep, lasting love, and according to the movie’s main theme, I have yet to experience lasting pain (a la Bob Dylan in ‘Not Dark Yet’ – “Behind every beautiful thing there’s been some kind of pain”). Still I know what the words mean, and have some vague notion of what they appear to be from what I have read in books or have seen in media. But I cannot truly know these intangibles until I have experienced for myself the tremendous love accompanied by its antithetical pain this movie so beautifully depicts. This movie clears my pathway precisely because it shows who I am – a student content with books and knowledge and thoughts and ideas. This movie clears my pathway because it shows who I may become – an aged professor more worried about the connection of thoughts in my head than the relationships with people in my life. This movie clears my pathway because it shows me who I could become – a wise man in love with an intelligent woman, experiencing life first-hand, viewing the world’s reality through suffering and through love, from one end of the spectrum to the other, recognizing that life can be described in so many words and yet still be meaningless without the experiences that give conviction to one’s words.
The journey from the head to the heart begins as circumstances force movement, either toward emotion and experience or thought and vicariousness. Jack concludes, “I was given a choice as a boy, and as a man. The boy chose safety; the man chose suffering.” Will you pass by the roses because they have thorns, or the woman because she has mortality? Or will you pick them up despite the risks and take them with you down the road to life-truly-lived? It’s a question I will ask myself for years to come.
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