Friday, June 12, 2015
“I’ll see you in my dreams” indeed.
So I said to Mick (quoting from his review of the film), “Mick, you’re right: I thought about Blythe Danner’s Carol for days after. She ‘brings a history of emotion to’ the entire story.”
Then I said to Mick, “This glorious little movie has that authenticity I can’t get enough of. ‘Unforced and true’ life itself has enough romance, comedy, tragedy, and irony (Shakespeare’s four seasons of life).”
“Intelligent dramatic art gives us the ‘honesty and virtue’ that we too often lack in life.
“Let’s have more of life be unpretentious art,” I said to Mick.
However, life is often pretentious in its blasé presumptuousness, while trying to make art may lack all pretense for the artist, but seem pretentious to blasé frivolity.
This can create a very pretentious situation, if not a maddening one. A great example—one that’s difficult to appreciate 50 years later—was the situation of Brian Wilson in those times when The Beatles, Pink Floyd, and the like were getting surreal, and Wilson (just as talented, perhaps far more) was trapped in LaLa land.
Mick’s review of that—“Love & Mercy”—is beautiful.
So, I said, “Mick’s beautiful review is exact about creativity, as is the movie: showing an authenticity that’s rare. The ‘unbound power of the artist in his element’ is easily driven by vapid dailiness into senses of surreality that can be unbearably lonely. The cliché of artistry and madness exists because most life is frivolous, which can become unbearable for intensive talent. Mick gets it, and the movie gets it. ‘Love & Mercy’ is truly a movie for we who supposedly grew up during the ‘60s, when ‘mind blowing’ wasn’t flip, was easily no fun, and yet was often enough profoundly moving.”
Well, I mostly said that, revised a little here. My ’60s and ’70s were as personally dramatic as Wilson’s (but without the products or helplessness—let alone fame, which I’ve never wanted).
Untold stories, how many there are—and so many not worth telling that are told anyway, pretenses that are put in our face (i.e., aggressively marketed).
The worth of one’s story is inassessable to one’s life. Humility is always prudent. Also, giving time to looking back can inhibit time for trekking forward (though psychoanalytic thinking is fun).
