Find Something You Love And Do It For The Rest of Your Life

I was almost thirty years old when I went to see a movie by myself in Toledo, Ohio that low-key changed my life. My friend Bruce had recommended it. It was called _Rushmore_ and it was this up and coming filmmaker named Wes Anderson.

Max Fisher was a terrible student at a private school who somehow managed to create amazing clubs, stage broadway-level plays and save latin for the love of his life. In a particularly outrageous scene, a billionaire industrialist who admires Max asks him: "What's the secret, Max? You seem to have it all figured out."

Max pauses only a moment before offering: "I guess just find something you love and do it for the rest of your life."

Like Max Fisher, I always felt that school should come in second place after the clubs that I was forming during recess lunch and during after-school-care. In primary and middle school, I created singing teams, baseball teams, horse enthusiasts, writers circles, soap-opera-recording-audio-teams, play productions and a small coterie devoted to bringing down the neighborhood bully who we called the "Cap Boy." In high school, I became much more devoted to lavish theatrical production once our tiny school decided they couldn't afford the fee for the director who had been staging our shows. I recruited peers and adults and we ran late night rehearsals, we re-wrote the script we were given, added special effects with scrims and rope ladders and a back story that made the whole thing worth performing and (of course) cast myself in a laugh-inducing minor role.

I felt, too, that I had found something that I loved and why bother with menial things like school or existing human categories of experience when I could just organize clubs and put on shows.The outrageous problem is, of course, that Max is what? 15 years old at the most? He isn't old enough to even know what he loves and any proclamation he makes about "the rest of your life" has to be held quite loosely.

And herein is the beautiful problem with Wes Anderson films: It isn't held loosely. Not at all. Max Fisher makes the argument that "I wrote a hit play!" And we saw it. It did actually seem like a hit play. Standing Ovation, Slow Motion Curtain Call, A Glorious Moment of Splendour.

And really everything about Rushmore happens at the apex of Max's imaginatively glorious self perception. Even when he falls into a hard knocks depression -- his costume, his job, his persistence -- they're all like a romantic version of the worst possible version of "dark night of the soul."

And I loved this. I loved the idea that a filmmaker could craft a heightened reality that privileges the best version of the very-flawed protagonist's imagination. (It persists in ALL of Wes Anderson's films.)

There's a truth to this mode of depicting the gap between reality and fantasy that is far superior to Leo in Titanic or Bruce in Die Hard or Robert Downey Junior in Ironman. In Anderson's films the fantasy is held too close to the (less desireable) reality to be misunderstood as "real."

This heightened realism invites us to celebrate imagination, celebrate our own somewhat flawed, somewhat glorious imagination.

And honestly, heightened reality in films is one of the best kinds of films for me. There are of course endless examples, but if I had to invite you to consider a few that would allow you to feel more understanding and empathy of the troubled soul that is me? They might include _Fanny & Alexander_ by Ingmar Bergman, all of Wes Anderson's films for their jocular sense of humor as they face the darkness of human fallenness, all of Roy Andersson's films (_You, The Living_ pictured above is one of these) for their laugh out loud deadpan treatment of the bleak existentialism of humanity, all of Pedro Almodovar's movies for their blatant excess and melodrama as a portal to all the ways that our lives are, in fact, melodramatic, _8 1/2_ for Fellini's delightfully excessive, slightly narcissistic rumination on midlife and the ever-present haunting, embarrassing, and beautiful past.

Today's thing of value is films that use a heightened reality to invite us to understand our own lives differently and use art as a mode of transcendence in the face of all the things that feel daunting.

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