You Make My Heart Sing

I’ve never cared much for kid movies. The ones I’ve endured, I’ve done so for my children, and even at a young age, they picked up on the fact that Dad spent a good deal of time in the lobby during the feature presentation.

Over the years, I’ve been subjected to Power Rangers, Pokemon, a pig named Babe, and dozens of Disney animated fairytales because they’re what my children wanted to watch, but this past weekend, with a little time on my hands following a book signing, I went to the theater right by myself and watched “Where the Wild Things Are.”

I didn’t do it for my children, but the child in me.

“Where the Wild Things Are” is an adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s classic children's story, where Max, a disobedient little boy sent to bed without his supper, creates his own world—a forest inhabited by ferocious wild creatures that crown Max as their ruler.

I’ve done a bit of adaptation—both of my own work and that of others—and know just how difficult it is to translate a work of art into another medium. There’s a real art to it—an art on brilliant and beautiful display in Spike Jonze’s and Dave Eggars’ work here. They have taken the ten sentences of Sendak’s beloved book and created a psychologically sophisticated and emotionally resonate film.

With an economy of words and some wonderful images, the book allows us to project our own particular wildness into the story (like all good stories do), to use our imaginations to fill in the spaces, to cast ourselves in the role of Max or one of the monsters, but the film largely does this for us, fleshing out characters and relationships and events, leaving few narrative gaps.

Some say music sooths the savage beast, and it’s true, but Max shows that story is far more effective. With child-like abandon, he spins tales that mesmerize the monsters. In fact, the power of story is one of the most significant and profound themes of the film. The entire work is a story, of course, but then there’s the story Max overhears his mom telling on the telephone, the story he tells her later as he’s settling in for bed, and the story he tells himself—the one that is his entire adventure. Story allows us to safely explore our wild sides, it comforts and heals and helps us make sense of the world. Our imaginations really are the most wondrous and wild things of all.

Max discovers much during his wild adventure—experiencing the pain of separation, the grief of loss, the solitude of leadership—but nothing he learns is more important or profound than the fact that even (or especially) Wild Things need mothers. As king, Max realizes just how difficult it is to be a parent—and how lucky he is to have one. In fact, the only thing keeping Max from complete anarchy, from being as lost and as damaged as the Wild Things is his mom. With a loving mother, a little Wild Thing can be a caring leader. Without a positive maternal influence, Wild Things too quickly become monsters that smash and destroy. We, like Max, need a mom—and not just in personal, but in public life. Our country and the world would be better if our sexist, male-dominated culture would make room for Mother (Mother God, Mother Earth, Yin, a celebrated and appreciated public feminine presence) and wouldn’t attempt to force a type of masculinity on women in positions of authority and leadership.

The Wild Things in Max’s mind (actual facets of Max’s personality) continually do damage. There’s a good deal of destruction in the film—particularly by Max and Carol—and it comes from their inability to deal with the strong emotions they experience. In Max and his Wild Things, we finally have a kid in film who is fully formed—wild and unpredictable, resilient and vulnerable, wild, yet ultimately domesticated.

Where are the Wild Things? Inside us as much as Max, and, like Max, we need to let them out occasionally so they can run and roar. Sure, this can be done literally—plenty of people out there howling at the moon every night—but there are endless ways to take a walk on the wild side including and especially art, and you could do far worse than reading or seeing “Where The Wild Things Are.” Figurative destruction is almost always better than actual, but a little wildness and even demolition all along is better than the catastrophic kind that inevitably explodes out of repression. What I’m saying is there’s a beast beneath our breast, and we need to let it out to breathe occasionally. So now, let the wild rumpus start.

My Long Happy Love Affair

I fell in love in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1994.

It started out as a one night stand, but blossomed into a passionate love affair that has been happily going on for fifteen years now.

In honor of National Coming Out Day (and with love and support for all my GLBT brothers and sisters), I’m going to use this column to confess my love for a man.

I first fell in love with Richard Curtis while experiencing his delightful film, “Four Weddings and a Funeral.”

I was alone in Tulsa with a free evening, and had been hearing good things about this indie British film sweeping the states. The theater was packed, and though I’ve never liked group dates, the presence of the crowd was powerless to prevent me from finding a soulmate.

Though his films are often laugh-out-loud hilarious, he has a smart, witty way of capturing moments that are both realistic and wildly romantic. His characters are multi-faceted and complex, and easy to identify with, but mostly they are charming. He writes about good, guileless everymen and women trying to connect, trying to matter, wanting to be everything to someone. As one of his characters offers in his toast, “True love. In whatever shape or form it may come. May we all in our dotage be proud to say, ‘I was adored once, too.’”

“Four Weddings and a Funeral” follows the fortunes of Charles (Hugh Grant) and his friends as they wonder if they will ever find true love. Charles thinks he's found his best chance with Carrie, an American he meets at the wedding of a mutual friend, but, as Shakespeare said, “the course of true love never did run straight.”

Romantic comedies, like most genre works, often fail to get the critical recognition they deserve (though “Four Weddings and Funeral” did receive an Oscar nomination for Best Picture), and are instead, dismissed out of hand for being unrealistic. And, of course, there’s no dearth of crass, clichéd examples of so-called genre works, but like James Lee Burke or P.D. James in the crime fiction field or Cormac McCarthy in the western field, Curtis represents the very best of the genre—he’s so good, in fact, he transcends genre categorizations.

Speaking about this unfortunate reality, Curtis said, “If you write a story about a soldier going AWOL and kidnapping a pregnant woman and finally shooting her in the head, it's called searingly realistic, even though it's never happened in the history of mankind. Whereas if you write about two people falling in love, which happens about a million times a day all over the world, for some reason or another, you're accused of writing something unrealistic and sentimental.”

Weddings and funerals are seminal moments in life—a time to live and a time to die, a time to rejoice and a time to mourn, and Curtis uses them masterfully for both laughs and tears.

Perhaps the most piercing moment of the film is at its only funeral when the deceased man’s lover quotes a W. H. Auden poem.

Upon leaving the theater, so moved, so in love, so heady with the world-fading-oneness that love (and infatuation) brings, I drove straight to the first bookstore I could find and bought Vintage International’s edition of the Collected Poems of W. H. Auden, and when I pulled that book off my shelf while writing this, I discovered a bookmark from Novel Idea Bookstore, 7104 S. Sheridan, Tulsa OK, fifteen years later still marking the page with this poem:

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

My love affair with Richard Curtis has only intensified over the years—through “Notting Hill,” “Love Actually,” and “The Girl in the Café,” but it all began fifteen years ago in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with “Four Weddings and a Funeral.”

Richard Curtis has my highest recommendation, and in future columns I will share with you what is just so singular about each work, but for now I’d like to invite you to a wedding—a few weddings, in fact (and a non-weddings and a funeral). If you missed the film or just haven’t seen it in a while, do yourself a favor and find it. I’m about to watch it again for what must be nearly the fifteenth time, and can think of no better way to celebrate my fifteenth “Four Weddings and a Funeral” anniversary.

The Lie that Tells the Truth

House says “Everybody lies.” It’s the central tenant of his medical practice as it relates to patients and staff, and over six seasons and hundreds of patients, the truth of his most fundamentally held conviction has been proven time and again.

But what if “Nobody lies?” That’s the premise behind Ricky Gervais,’ “The Invention of Lying.”

What would the world be like if no one in the history of humanity had ever told a lie?

Well, according to the film, it’d be a dreadfully dull, downright depressing place. Movies would merely be non-dramatic retellings of historical events and an advertisement for Pepsi would go something like: “Pepsi—When Coke’s not available.”

And then what would happen if one person developed the ability to lie?

Gervais, the award-winning creator and star of the original BBC series “The Office” and HBO’s “Extras,” co-writes and directs this romantic comedy, which takes place in an alternate reality where lying—even the concept of a lie—does not exist. Everyone—from politicians to advertisers to the man and woman on the street—speaks the truth and nothing but the truth with no thought of the consequences.

But when a down-on-his-luck loser named Mark suddenly develops the ability to lie, he finds that dishonesty has its rewards. In a world where every word is assumed to be the absolute truth, Mark easily lies his way to fame and fortune. But lies have a way of spreading, and Mark begins to realize that things are getting a little out of control when some of his tallest tales are being taken as, well, gospel. With the entire world now hanging on his every word, there is only one thing Mark has not been able to lie his way into: the heart of the woman he loves.

“The Invention of Lying” is far less funny and far more thought-provoking than I expected.

Gervais is charming and likable, Jennifer Garner is understated, and, as always, vulnerably beautiful, and there’s an essential goodness and sweetness to the film.

But don’t let the mild comedy and sweet nature of the film fool you. It’s asking some very challenging questions about truth and lies and story and meaning.
“The Invention of Lying” seems to say that lies—at least the imaginative, non-malicious kind—are absolutely essential for humor, story, creativity, and civil social interaction.

It’s true, you can’t have most forms of humor and jokes without lies, and you certainly couldn’t have stories.

The best of our stories—whether in religion, philosophy, history, and most especially literature—are lies (made-up stories) that tell the truth. In fact, nothing gets at truth quite the way lies (or stories) do. The power of story to speak to us on our most human level, to convey truth to us about ourselves and others and the universe is transformative. We are our stories.

We are the stories we believe—about ourselves and the world.

There’s a seminal moment in the film when Mark delivers a message from God. Like Moses at the foot of Mount Sinai, except with pizza boxes instead of stone tablets, Mark tells the naïve, highly gullible, but essentially guileless people what the “Man in the Sky” who controls everything expects of them and what they can expect from him after they die, if they live the right way. It pokes fun at a kind of simple, superstitious, thoughtless religion that far too many people follow.

Many people wrongly make distinctions between what is true and what is fiction, but fiction is true—or can be very, very true. True, not in a shallow, literal sense, but in a deeper more profound way.

We have elevated reason and logic and the scientific method of what is observable actual/factual above all else, and in doing so have forgotten how unreliable observation and “facts” are, how inadequate they are at speaking to the human heart and experience, and how much we miss out on. The truth, as the film demonstrates, is not just surface and literal, but subtle, nuanced, complex, often sublime.

Based on this hyper materialist view, metaphors and fictitious stories are untrue. This means everything we can’t observe, touch, test, prove is untrue, that every made up story is false.

This is at the core of the fallacy of Fundamentalism. Shallow adherence to beliefs that can only be taken one way—literally—miss what is far, far more important than if the stories actually happened. And, of course, this makes their religion true and everyone else’s false. Instead of myth being true, non-literal stories, myth begins to mean false and is how other people’s religion is referred to.

Are the parables of Jesus false because they are made-up stories? I don’t think so. In fact, if lifted out of the ways they have been forced to fit certain theological constructs and instead, heard and understood in as close to their original context and meaning as possible, I don’t think we can find anything more profoundly true.

It’s why I write fiction. To tell the truth—or at least to explore it, search for it.

If fiction is the lie that tells the truth, I’m a professional liar.

The truth is, I try not to lie in my personal life or in my imaginative one. Just don’t ask me if those jeans make you look fat or if the gift you gave me was really what I wanted.

The lies I tell on the page are actually an attempt at getting at the truth—to explore, expound on, experience—a non-literal, truer than true truth. In other words, I try to tell stories that are, like “The Invention of Lying,” true though they never happened.

Ultimately, most all Mark’s lies are of the non-malicious variety. He tells tall tales meant mostly to comfort and entertain. In the end, he can’t bring himself to lie about what’s most important to him—even to get his way, even when to do so would get him what he most wants in all the wide world. May we all be as honorable with the lies we will and won’t tell.

I think if you go see “The Invention of Lying,” you’ll be mildly amused, but made to think, and I think that’s a good thing. Would I lie to you?