Last night I watched Moonrise Kingdom, a Wes Anderson movie set in Rhode Island in 1965. I know Anderson gets flack for his, typically, all-white casts, or the focus on the eccentric within the elite, but I do consistently like his films despite this. After a long discussion of the types of movies I like after watching, I realized that his films often fit into the framework of providing "impressions" of plot, time, places and characters, without much development in any of these fields besides what the viewer needs to know to follow the story. The viewer works to fill in gaps to string together a more coherent story while watching. But, just as in reality, there's very little that does make a complete, neat little story arc in our lives - we fill in the details for it to be so in our attempts to understand and make sense of a world that doesn't.
Looking to other movies I also really enjoy, there exists the same pattern of impressions, rather than strict development. For the longest time, my favorite movie has been Amadeus.While not historically accurate, the presentation of Mozart as a flighty genius that burned too brightly and thus, too quickly, rings true. The narration by rival composer Salieri reveals all of our darkest feelings of jealousy, hatred and desires to control. Even though the viewer can clearly see how manipulative and selfish Salieri is, being privy to his thought process, we cannot help but empathize to some degree because we have all felt the same. And for Mozart, who is supposedly the main focus of the manipulation, our questions of who he was as a person and how he was able to write so prolifically are left unanswered. We see an impression of a troubled young man, clearly a musical genius, but with a penchant for drink and self-destruction. His inner thoughts are not accessible to us.
Much like anyone who is venerated for a great skill or feat, our conception of how they must be does not jive with how they are in actuality. In fact, as many celebrities will attest to, I'm sure, their most devoted fans (and stalkers) are suffering under a delusion that their heroes are infallible, when in fact, as the humans they are, they eat, sleep and shit, just like the rest of us. That's the funny tendency we have as humans - to venerate certain people that we admire for particular qualities that make up the myriad of those which we all possess. When we meet these stellar beings, our conception is wholly false, due to the fact that they are clearly NOT representative of reality or any real person. In an interview with Hunter S. Thompson, he remarked that people would always come up to him and wait in anticipation of him doing something "crazy" whether he was sipping coffee in a hotel lobby or on a drug bender.
These pressures extend beyond the famous - we often hold our loved ones hostage to conceptions we have of them, rather than facing the reality of who they are, which is their mundane, daily existence, the one we live through too. We would all benefit from living to learn in a less expectant way, but with a continual inundation of immediate gratification, it will be harder to do so without conscious effort.
