So here I am, in my room on a Saturday morning. There are so many things that I've wanted to write about for a while now, about my introversion or my past four years in film school or the month I spent doing construction work, or my thoughts about christianity. These days I feel like I am on some sort of summit where no hardships exist, granting me ample time to reflect on what to me were these major events in the past four years of my life. I wanted to compile these events into coherent essays but it just sounded like too much work so maybe if I let myself ramble I can say what I want to even if it's in no particularly coherent order.
I've been thinking about how comparable I am to many characters in fiction as of late, all of them anti-heros in one way or another. One of them is the protagonist in Flowers for Algernon when he loses his intelligence. Although my higher education felt pointless, I do think all that paper writing gave me a certain ability to write well. Reading papers from two years ago is quite embarrassing, because now I can identify the flaws in my writing.
But now it has been several months since I've written anything, and I have not read a book in years, so my brain is starving for good words and sentence structures. So here is my apology to the reader and to myself should I ever actually post this horror of a blog post.
Another person I've compared myself to recently was the protagonist in American Psycho. I saw the film a couple days ago. The good new is that our differences are greater than our similarities. For one thing he is a really social person. He wants to fit in, unlike me. I want to disappear into the background whenever possible. But what struck me about the film was the final shot when he was amongst his friends, and he stared into the camera as it zoomed in on his eyes. The voices of his surroundings faded away and he said something like "nothing was evil, nothing was good". He was desperately trying to share that he had killed a bunch of people but no one seemed to care.
I'm not sure if everything horrible he did was real or not. But in that final scene I could relate to that sensation of feeling distance from everyone and that almost specifically american horror that Batesman was living in. Psychopath or not, I certainly feel within myself something evil and wrong but also simultaneously the feeling that no one else cares to acknowledge or bear this evil with me. There is no condemnation, but there is no encouragement either. I used to think that I was just on another frequency than every one else and as a result I couldn't tell them how I really felt.
One time a friend asked me if I wanted to walk around some mountains with him. I said sure, and asked what to me was a very important question: do you think people can really connect to each other? Which I guess sounded like a vague or rhetorical question to him so he didn't answer. I had to find out on my own: no, there was no connection. A week of walking around and I still felt as socially autistic as ever. I've found that if I manage to corner people (like Batesman does) I can get them to acknowledge me but it irks them. People are like these omniscient and gyrating eyes that see everything, but sometimes its hard to tell if they are ever looking at me. So I ask them, can you see me, and they respond with a sigh, yes Luke, we can see you.
Another person I've thought about in relation to myself is the protagonist from the first season of Fargo. All I could think about after seeing the first two episodes was "what a nightmare!!!" what a nightmare! Not just because he murdered his wife, but because of who his wife was, and because of how horrible his home decoration was and how lifeless the American streets were that he walked on. It was everything. And somehow, I feel like I lived there, or somewhere near there. I assume a lot of people have talked about the symbolic significance of the hammer and the emasculation of the main character in modern times where emasculation is a growing concern for males everywhere. It is certainly something I think about.
Let me pause. I hope the reader does not think I feel like a psychopath because I am only referencing mentally ill or purely evil people as people I feel like. I think that hurting others is horrible but the way in which these characters are tragic outliers resonates with me.
The protagonist in Fargo goes on to own his life in a caricatural style. Its really fascinating to witness his transformation from wimp to evil mastermind, but in terms of relatability I certainly stayed with him at his wimp phase. I can already see everyone's gyrating eyes sigh and say "You're not a wimp, Luke. Go get a job."
I've felt at war with myself regarding this for forever. I just don't know where I want to see myself on the wimp/evil mastermind scale. I certainly don't want to be an evil mastermind. I actually feel like fragility is somehow part of my nature, and that I need to accept that as a part of my life. Please see previous blog posts to learn more about my fragility. There are several specific moments in my life where I felt this (in all likelyhood unfair) sense of emasculation. I heard in a podcast that men in general have fragile egos so maybe I'm not alone in this regard.
I've always felt like a secondary character in someone else's movie, like that one guy that eats cake in Ever After. Does he even talk? He falls in love which is nice. To me that was how I always wished my life could go. Whoever was the main character could walk on water with Da Vinci's boat shoes and I could quietly slip away from the narrative with someone special. The handful of candidates for this someone special tragically always happened to be human beings, not silent cake eating beauties who could just cast me a smile and we could move on with our perfect and symbiotic lives.
One time a girl stacked coins on my thigh while we were hanging out. Much to her chagrin, I'm sure, I wasn't capable of holding a conversation, so this was her attempt at connecting with me. To me the moment held great symbolic significance. I can accept to myself that I basically amount to a tasteless modern art piece that serves no better purpose than to stack loose change on, but for some reason whenever others acknowledge this truth, my ego gets in the way and I take offense and I'll never talk to you again. Of course, I'd never talk to you again anyway because I'm a mobile and emasculated statue but now the silence has a certain gravitas to it.
I have also witnessed people like the devil who enters the protagonists life in Fargo. People who have full ownership of their lives and then that I try to emulate. It never works out, just like in the the show. I jumble my words and honestly why am I spending more than three minutes talking to this person lets go play Pokemon. When it comes down to it, after words and words and thoughts and words about big words like sociopath and emasculation I'm just a really really quiet person. Every other month I surprise myself by my own introversion, so much so that I am not truly sure how deep it goes. Sometimes I'll go weeks without talking to practically anyone and be fine. This quietness saturates every portion of my being, making it hard to dissociate, say, my masculinity or my words or my thoughts or my life choices from it.
Funnily enough, these mastodons of humanity who I could enumerate on one hand have on two occasions asked me: "who are you, really?" like I'm a mystery. One time at the end of a school year I was having breakfast by myself and one of these surhommes sat across from me saying, "the semester is almost over, but I'm going to figure you out, Luke". Little do they know that I'm just an anti-social bigot but their gyrating eyes are so good and pure that they can't even comprehend something like me.
It's hard to think of introverts in film. In fact, I am almost convinced there is no such thing, only extroverts in disguise. Wouldn't it be funny for an extroverted protagonist to discover that woah, he goes out too much and that he'd be happier if he stayed inside and played video games. I get real offended by representations of introverts in films (my own minority group huzzah) but the crazy thing is they don't really exist! The hero in garden state was just on drugs. The man in Her was just going through a divorce.
In order to go further I can't really rely on cinema for adequate comparisons. I already wrote about something that needed to be written about, that walking around mountains episode (not featured on this blog - maybe I'll post it anyway even though that seems kind of lazy) but one event that marked me was, as I was sitting alone on a rock half a day's walk from Interlacken, Switzerland next to a riverside, my NASB Backpack Bible in my pocket, I saw a mountain in the distance clothed in clouds, making it look a lot like what people see when they think of heaven. I beheld heaven... and felt nothing.
Years later I was listening to a sermon by John Piper. He was saying that the problem isn't that we want joy but that we are small people seeking small and petty pleasures. He said to go look at God's creation or something to that effect.
Whenever I talk to good evangelical christians I always kind of feel like the kids at the end of Lord of The Flies, when the adult catches them ritually killing each other and the man says with a nervous smile, "you're just putting on a good, show, right, like a play, right?" Christians can't sigh exasperatedly at me like everyone else. They have to remain optimistic even though I'm not evangelising or participating in a bible study or memorising bible verses. I've felt this way from teenagers to youth pastors to peers who don't understand how I can be in their church or their Friday night worship service and still call me a christian. "You're not really that anti-social, right? It's just a play, haha..."
But it's just a feeling. Anyway, when I'm out of their line of sight I don't think they really think about me anymore, which is fine because that's what Christ did: he addresses the issue at hand. Sorry I'm complaining so much about my experiences with Christianity. Clearly I should suck it up, talk to some people, go to church et cetera. But I beheld heaven and felt, well, nothing.
Not that I mean literally heaven! And please don't think that I'm going through teenager christian angst phase in which I listen to mewithoutYou and scoff at Rick Warren. Because I've been through that already. I'm not saying I don't consider myself a christian anymore. Its just that I'm so introverted, which is something christians never are either. We are the light of the world shout it from the rooftops thousand foot crutch salt of the earth... but I talk to people or climb mountains and don't feel any better for it. When I leave my (current) school or when I have lunch I see groups of students huddled together. If I can't conceive why people could possibly want to live in such constant proximity, how can you understand how telling people anything be it that Jesus Loves You or I like your shirt is like eating unsalted crackers, how seeing Europe or Chicago or wherever feels the same.
So that's my tirade about Christianity done for now. My introversion is my everything, the shell I crawl deeper and deeper into, the bell jar that encapsulates me. It is the Kevorkian knot that is too thick to cut: where does my introversion end and just straight up selfishness begin?
Something strange about myself is my tendency to cut off relationships in my life. There is a reason I only have like twenty friends on facebook.
A film about the hero becoming an introvert would be weird, but imagine one where he shuns all his friends! This is outside of anything I've ever heard of in fiction or reality. "Your just selfish", the spinning eyes say. That's all. But that can't be it, right? I need to believe that I'm a good person. It keeps happening.
I remember being six and thinking that my only real friend amounted to one person. I remember in middle school spending four long years ignoring the first friend I made. I felt so bad that later I tried to find his address in the yellow pages and put a wax sealed letter of apology in his mail box. I never found his house so I read the letter out loud with God as my witness, hoping for forgiveness.
One weekend I built up so much hatred for someone I flat out told them look I don't know why I get this way but I hate you. He took it pretty well. In college I befriended someone that slowly became my worst nightmare. He would show up at my work study or outside my window like a villain in a horror movie. He was going through a difficult relationship and all his friends had graduated so I was the only person he could talk to, which he needed to do a lot. Thankfully he is around real friends now I think.
I remember one time our community college was having a film showing. The film was Wreck-It Ralph. As a video game fan I was interested in it. It was a disappointing film to be sure. But that's beside the point. I remember siting at a table eating popcorn, trying to watch this movie.
Three people were sitting around me, because there were no chairs available. None of them were watching the film, and they didn't really know each other, but they all knew me, and wanted to spend time with me. In that moment, I felt like some sort of prophet. With these people sitting at my feet. I guess they liked modern art.
When I transferred to film school I made no friends through my major at all. I thought it would be easy to make friends with people who had common interests. I had finally made it. Here I was, with people who liked art and spoke my mother tongue. For the first time I could connect with people like me.
The only friends I made were a group of students that I met at a Christian worship service. Guess what... they became that same nightmare that I eventually cut off altogether. But for two years, I was their friend. I ate their food. I played board games with them. My fear and loathing was dormant. But eventually it surfaced.
It is not true that the cast of Persona 4 were my best friends in college. My brother and sister were. They were the only good thing about those four years, as far as people go, or when I occasionally dissociate the others from their nightmares and remember the occasional good things that happened. These days I don't make friends. Not that I want to! I don't want to live through the experiences that my life has been plagued with up to now.
No comments:
Post a Comment