The New Obstacles

All you need to make a romance is a guy, a girl, and some obstacles.

Obviously, there’s a bit more to it than that, particularly if it is to be done well, but I’m playing off of Jean-Luc Godard’s famous comment that “all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun,”

I began thinking about true love’s obstacles after watching “Bright Star” and “Romeo and Juliet” on the same day.

“Bright Star” is Jane Campion’s 2009 film based on the last three years of the life of poet John Keats and his romantic relationship with Fanny Brawne.

The version of “Romeo and Juliet” I watched, my favorite Shakespeare adaptation and one of my favorite all-time films, is Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 masterpiece staring Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey.

The many obstacles to love faced by the most famous teenage lovers in history are well known—their star-crossed connection doomed from the jump because their only love sprang from their only hate, their secret marriage, Romeo’s killing of Juliet’s cousin, Juliet’s forced marriage to another man, and so on and so on until they are both dead. As obstacles go, these aren’t at all bad. Not at all.

Of course those of John Keats and Fanny Brawne are pretty impressive too. The two are of different classes in a time when that kind of thing really mattered. He couldn’t afford to marry, couldn’t support himself, let alone a wife. And finally, he catches his death of cold and is sick for a lengthy period and then, well, what the movie.

I found “Bright Star” moving and passionate, smart and romantic. Jane Campion is a fantastic director and, as usual, she has made a stunningly beautiful film.

This was the first time I’ve seen “Romeo and Juliet” in HD and it was exquisite. The forty-three year old film holds up extremely well. As far as I’m concerned there will never be a better Juliet than teenaged Olivia Hussey. I first saw the film when I was maybe eight or ten and was so moved by it that I was sick for days afterwards.

Both “Romeo and Juliet” and “Bright Star” are intensely romantic and tragic, and as in the case of our own epic adventures, death has the final word. And though I believe as the “Song of Songs” says that “love is as strong as death,” as far as we know and as far as we can see it is the insurmountable obstacle of this life and, therefore, its loves.

Classic love stories have classic obstacles—cultural taboos, such as class, caste, money, power, race, religion, gender roles, sexual orientation, etc.—powerful enough to keep all but the strongest soul mates from their fates.

But what do we have today? What possible credible obstacles do modern members of educated, liberal democracies have? For many of us, the dragons of class, race, religious, sexual, and financial impediments have been slain. What’s left?

What are the new obstacles?

As enjoyable and inspiring and moving as I found the two films, I found myself thinking more about the new modern obstacles and concluded that in the absence of outward, societal obstacles and taboos, we have created our own, largely internal ones for the narratives inside our heads and the postmodern stories we tell and live.

The new Capulets and Montagues and cultural taboos are neuroses and narcissism, ambivalence and the tyranny of too many choices. External demons have become inner ones. We don’t have impediments as much as issues. Abandonment issues. Daddy issues. Mommy issues. Commitment issues. And on and on issue ad infinitum.

And I don’t think it’s a coincidence we have these now that we don’t have the others.

Newfound freedom causes a vacuum that the insecure rush to fill.

Most modern romances, with the exception of Richard Curtis’s brilliant “Notting Hill” which was about the new and very modern obstacle of celebrity, are more about ambivalence than much of anything else, about self-involved characters who are afraid, who really don’t want relationships. Sure, they want sex, they want interaction, but not intimacy, not strings, not entanglement, not love, not commitment. And I think this is a case of art imitating life, of our modern stories reflecting our modern condition, of avoidance and ambiguity, of fear and ambivalence, of a new level of self-centeredness, of external obstacles being replaced by internal issues, whether real, imagined, or invented that net the same result—the tragic thwarting of love. But it seems far more significant and substantial when the obstacle is that of an entire repressed culture than a character merely being unable to make up her mind.

My Not-So-Guilty Pleasure

The film editor of Crime Spree Magazine, Jeremy Lynch, asked me to contribute an essay to a series he’s running about guilty pleasures.

After I agreed to do it and began to think about it, I realized I don’t really have any. Guilt, like shame and fear and envy and hate, is a negative, mostly useless emotion. I experience remorse when I realize I’ve been wrong (which is often) and do my best to take responsibility for it, repent, and attempt to rectify the situation. But I associate guilt with feelings produced by cultural and parental programming, voices of shame inside us that don’t lead to change, but only to continual condemnation.

I’m in no way saying I never feel guilt. I do—even the negative, waste-of-time kind. But I do my best to identify it and eighty-six it as quickly as possible.

I live a very deliberate life—one, as much as possible, from my soul, by my design, based on my callings and convictions, not those of the culture around me. In this, I feel a deep kinship to Emerson, attempting to be and not conform, to, as he said, “Be, and not seem.”

Given this, and my conviction that, as Emerson said, “genuine action will explain itself,” I try neither to do anything because of how it looks or apologize for anything I do—and this includes movies. But, when thinking of guilty pleasures two genres come to mind—romance and horror.

I don’t feel guilty about the films I enjoy in either genre because I’m very selective, but both genres seem to have an inordinate amount of inanity and insipidity, movies deserving of the guilty pleasure moniker.

For my not-so-guilty “guilty pleasure,” I choose a new horror movie.

Last Thursday I drove over and took my soon to be twenty-one year old daughter to the midnight showing of “Scream 4.”

And you’re thinking, surely I should feel guilty about that, right? Well, I don’t. Not even a little. And here’s why: Not only is “Scream 4” a smart, funny, self-conscious, suspenseful meta-art masterpiece, but well-made suspense-based horror movies are something I’ve used to connect with my daughter since her early adolescence when I had to tell her what parts to close her eyes during.

In the fourth “Scream” installment, Sidney Prescott, now the author of a self-help book, returns home to Woodsboro on the last stop of her book tour. Unfortunately, Sidney’s appearance also brings about the return of Ghostface, putting Sidney, her old friends, Gale and Dewey, along with her teenage niece Jill and her friends, in danger.

I don’t care for horrific or shocking images, don’t like to be subjected to what has come to be known as the torture porn. But I do love suspense—the art of “Psycho,” the German Expressionism and relentless tension of the original “Halloween”—the Hitchcockian brand of anxiety that causes an audience to forget to breathe. And I appreciate smart, well-written scripts. “Scream 4” has a bit of both of these—along with humor and hipness to spare.

Like the original, and to a lesser extent the other two sequels, “Scream 4” works on a lot of levels, but is perhaps at its best when exploring genre. It not only looks at horror genre conventions in general, but at the micro sub-genre of “Scream” itself. At one point I thought, I’m sitting in a theater watching a movie in which kids inside a movie are watching a movie based on a movie based on a book based on a movie—and in the process the characters are not only talking about the other movies, but the one they’re in.

If you like smart, hip, fun, suspenseful horror with all of the pleasure and none of the guilt, treat yourself to “Scream 4.”

The Pursuit of Happiness

“All happiness is in the mind.”

I found this bit of wisdom in my fortune cookie as I was contemplating the elusiveness and evanescence of happiness—partially because of certain circumstances and situations in my own life and partly because of the thought-provoking second act of “Into the Woods,” which I had the privilege of seeing at Gulf Coast State College this weekend.

The production was masterfully directed by the Rosie O’Bourke , skillfully conducted by Rusty Garner, and performed by some incredibly well-trained students in the school’s extraordinary program.

The second act of Stephen Sondheim’s brilliant musical opens with every character, all of whom are taken from Grimm’s Fairy Tales, having gotten what they wanted, what they wished for—all of them in the midst of living happily ever after.

Of course, there’s a dissatisfaction beneath their seeming happiness as dissonant as the music accompanying them.

The entire production they’ve been in pursuit of happiness, of what they each thought would make them happy, and now they have it and they’re learning a lesson so true it’s a cliché among clichés—true happiness isn’t getting what you want, but wanting what you have.

The prince was far happier pursuing perfection than possessing it. Cinderella realizes there’s a world of difference in wanting a ball and wanting a prince.

Where does happiness come from? What is it?

Some seem to think it’s found in the comfort, freedom, and security money affords.

Some say it’s to be found in more spiritual pursuits.

Others, that it’s found in finding a mate—a soul mate to share everything with—including the oneness and nirvanaic oblivion of sex.

Some say it comes from non-attachment, from letting go of everything, of only being fully present in the present moment. But as two characters that break their vows and give themselves to each other discover, even living in the moment can be defensive and over-determined. As the peasant woman points out following her tryst with and abandonment by the prince, “But if life were only moments, then you'd never know you had one.”

There’s not much we can do about the pain involved in life, but much of how much we suffer over it is up to us. Suffering takes place when our minds demand for things to be different than they are. Acceptance is the key that unlocks peace. Peace is the doorway that leads to happiness. And, as my fortune so wisely pointed out, this all takes place inside of us. The serenity prayer says it all. We find true harmony and contentment when we truly let go of those things we have no control over.

At the moment I broke open my cookie and withdrew its timely message, the unhappiness of a few close friends was lodged in my solar plexuses like the broken tip of a blade. One definition of love is that the happiness of others is essential to your own. So even when we’re happy—or would be—the unhappiness of those we’ve invited into our hearts can bring great unhappiness crashing down on top of us.

When’s the last time you were truly happy? Probably wasn’t the result of having everything you wanted. Wasn’t because the world suddenly became a kind and loving place.

I’m reminded of the line from “The Two Jakes,” the underrated sequel to “Chinatown.” When Kahn asks Jake if he’s happy, Jake responds, “Who can answer that off the top of their head?” “Someone who’s happy,” Kahn replies.
Embrace the pursuit. Be grateful for the struggles and soul-deepening difficulties of life.

True happiness comes from meaning—having meaningful lives, from being connected and contributing, from having meaningful relationships and meaningful work. It’s hard to get much happier than having a purpose, feeling a sense of calling about what we do, and sharing it in profound ways with others. This is love. This is happiness—or at least its pursuit, and as the characters of “Into the Woods” all too soon and too late discovered, the pursuit of happiness is happiness itself.

This past weekend, I spoke at a writers’ conference in Fort Walton Beach with one of my publishers. Toward the end of our session, while taking questions from the audience, one of the attendees told us he had been writing for ten years and had only received rejections. He then asked us what was wrong with the publishing industry, why was it so broken it couldn’t see there was money to be made from his books, adding that he knew the only way to get published was to know somebody, to have an “in,” an unfair advantage.

At the conclusion of the session, I spent some time talking to the keynote speaker of the conference who had slipped in about half way through our presentation. He is truly a fantastic writer, a bestseller, and a great guy. He is also someone who not only teaches the craft of writing, but continually works to improve his own.

As we talked, he mentioned how, when he first started writing, he wrote four novels over ten years and couldn’t get any of them published. He shared with me how he didn’t give up, how he worked hard and learned his craft, and how it paid off with his fifth novel—the one that launched his brilliant career.

He didn’t give up, he worked hard, didn’t make excuses, and he broke through, got published, and has done very well. Unlike the angry young man that has yet to attract the attention of an agent, the successful writer didn’t blame his failure on a corrupt, nepotistic system.

I have a lot of writer friends (lots of friends working in all the arts) and not one, not a single one—was helped because they knew someone. They’ve worked hard, paid a price, and earned everything they’ve ever received.

Later in the weekend, I had the privilege of observing the work of and talking to a visual artist. She is a working artist, making a living and her way in the world by living the artists’ life. We spoke about the romantic notion some people have surrounding art and its creation. She, like the best and most productive artists I know, is living an unassuming life dedicated to creating, to improving, and to supporting her work the best way she knows how. She doesn’t have a huge studio or expensive equipment. She has a table—a dining room table. And on it, she makes amazing art. And she does this day after day, week after week, year after year.

Both artists—the bestselling writer and the successful visual artist—are living the artist’s life, one of continual creation, humility, evolution, overcoming self-doubt and drama and criticism with the dignity of discipline and dedication. They continue to produce good work because they work hard. They don’t merely strike the pose of an artist or talk about art. They work hard to create it.

Living an artistic life is like living any kind of life. There are no shortcuts. Hard work and humility are more important than appearances and connections. Imagination, creativity, and dedication are more important than talent and intelligence. And attitude and approach are more important than anything else.

Crying Out of the Depths

Nothing captures cries of the soul quite like poetry.

Cries of longing, cries of ecstasy, cries of agony, cries of love, cries of despair, cries from the depths.

Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord.

Poetry is the language of love and lovers—and the God who is love, whose very essence and being is love, the one from whom all love issues. Because of this, in the best of poetry it is difficult to discern whether the lover being lavishly loved in verse is human or divine—and in the very best, it’s impossible.

This is nowhere more evident than in the work of Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī, a 13th-century Persian poet and Sufi mystic, who 800 years after his death is the bestselling poet in America and Afghanistan.

Rumi’s ecstatic utterances are spiritual and sensual, earthen and eternal—effervescent with eroticism. He exhorts us to . . .

Be foolishly in love,
because love is all there is.
There is no way into presence
except through a love exchange.
If someone asks, But what is love?
answer, Dissolving the will.

He insists we . . .

Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy,
absentminded. Someone sober
will worry about things going badly.
Let the lover be.

We should do this because . . .

Lovers find secret places
inside this violent world
where they make transactions
with beauty.

And reminds us that . . .

*Love is from the infinite, and will remain until eternity.
The seeker of love escapes the chains of birth and death.
Tomorrow, when resurrection comes,
The heart that is not in love will fail the test.


Are the above lines about a human or divine lover? Is there a difference? If we perceive them properly, don’t all loves and lovers ultimately become sacraments, vessels through which the divine loves us, through which we love the divine?

Love opens us, causes us to bloom into our best selves, not only dissolving our wills but all illusions of separation, leading us into oneness. When lovers become one, they are not just one with one another, but will all things.

*With the Beloved's water of life, no illness remains
In the Beloved's rose garden of union, no thorn remains.
They say there is a window from one heart to another
How can there be a window where no wall remains?

Of all the people translating Rumi into English, I most highly recommend the poet Coleman Barks. A wonderful poet in his own right, Mr. Barks translations of Rumi’s work burn with a fire that scorches the soul. Recently, I have been reading and rereading “Rumi: Bridge to the Soul,” but I also recommend, “The Essential Rumi,” “The Soul of Rumi,” and “Rumi: The Book of Love”—all beautifully rendered by Coleman Barks.

So the next time you find your soul crying out of the depths in ecstatic agony, I suggest you invite Rumi and Coleman to join you.



all verse translated by Coleman Barks except
* translated by Shahram Shiva

Lincoln Lawyer Rolls into Theaters

Ten years ago, Michael Connelly sat beside an attorney at a baseball game who told him he operated out of his car—that with forty-plus courthouses in LA, mobility was more important than anything else.

That was all it took for Michael’s mind.

I used to think Michael Connelly had the mind of a reporter and the soul of a novelist, but the more I think about it, I’d say he has the mind and the carefully honed craft of a professional reporter and the soul of a lonely jazz sax player in a small out-of-the-way bar in the middle of the night. The former shows in his excellent plotting and satisfying stories, the latter, in flourishes—riffs if you will—scattered throughout his books, observations and insights about the city of angels and demons and the angles and demons who inhabit it. This is most true of his Harry Bosch series, but also shines through in his first Mickey Haller book, “The Lincoln Lawyer”—now a film starring Matthew McConaughey.

Mickey Haller is a Lincoln Lawyer, a criminal defense attorney who operates out of the back seat of his Lincoln Town Car, traveling between the far-flung courthouses of Los Angeles to defend clients of every kind. For him, the law is rarely about guilt or innocence — it's about negotiation and manipulation.

A Beverly Hills playboy arrested for attacking a woman he picked up in a bar chooses Haller to defend him, and Mickey has his first high-paying client in years. It is a defense attorney's dream, what they call a franchise case. And as the evidence stacks up, Haller comes to believe this may be the easiest case of his career.

Then someone close to him is murdered and Haller discovers that his search for innocence has brought him face-to-face with evil as pure as a flame. To escape without being burned, he must deploy every tactic, feint, and instinct in his arsenal — this time to save his own life.

The movie is good—always entertaining, often engrossing—and I highly recommend it. It’s best where it’s most faithful to Connelly’s excellent novel, weakest where it strays—particularly in the ending, where a riveting climax in the book is inexplicably made more pedestrian in the movie. Still, all and all the movie is one of the best things at your local movie house at the moment, faithfully capturing the gritty city—the sprawling slum where pretty people do ugly things.

The film also provides McConaughey with his best role in a long time—to which he responds with his best performance since maybe he played another defense attorney in John Grisham’s “A Time to Kill.”

See the film, but more importantly, read the book it was based on—and for other entertaining legal thrillers with more twists and turns than Mulholland Drive, check out all of Michael Connelly’s Mickey Haller books: “The Lincoln Lawyer,” “The Brass Verdict,” “The Reversal,” and “The Fifth Witness.”

Each of these, like every Michael Connelly book, is like a trip led by a brilliant, trusty old tour guide whose night job is jazz musician.

Arise My Love

“The Adjustment Bureau,” which has moments reminiscent of “The Matrix” and “Dark City,” is at heart a romance far more than sci-fi flick. In fact, its use science fiction and fantasy elements only serve as obstacles for its lovers and as catalysts for philosophical explorations of fate and free will, ambition and amorousness.

As I sat in the theater watching the lovers fight for their fate, battle forces beyond them, passages from The Song kept echoing through my mind—as did “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” another film that brought to mind The Song.

The Song (or Song of Songs) is a book of Egyptian love poetry found in the heart of the Hebrew Bible. It’s provocative and profound, sensual and sexual, powerfully capturing both the desires of lovers and the hostility of others to them and their love.

The world is hostile to love and lovers. It has been ever thus.
In The Song, the lover calls to her beloved saying:

Arise, my love,
my fair one, and come away;
for now the winter is past, the rain is over and gone.
The flowers appear on the earth;
the time of singing has come.
Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.

She has been searching the city for her lover and experienced firsthand just how cruel the heartless townsmen can be:

I run out after him, calling,
but he is gone.
The men who roam the streets,
Guarding the walls,
Beat me and tear away my robe.

The lovers only hope is to flee to the countryside, to find a garden so they can be alone—away from the callous, commerce-driven city, away from those who find love, superfluous, frivolous, worthless.

Lovers retreat into one another—not only because each is the other’s first best sanctuary but because there is often no other safe place.

As Rumi puts it:

Lovers find secret places
inside this violent world
where they make transactions
with beauty.

This is some of what I was thinking as David Norris chased Elise Sellas and agents of the adjustment bureau chased them both through the city.

On the brink of winning a seat in the U.S. Senate, ambitious politician David Norris (Matt Damon) meets beautiful contemporary ballet dancer Elise Sellas (Emily Blunt)—a woman like none he's ever known. But just as he realizes he's falling for her, mysterious men conspire to keep the two apart.

David learns he is up against the agents of fate itself—the men of the adjustment bureau—who will do everything in their considerable power to prevent David and Elise from being together. In the face of overwhelming odds, he must either let her go and accept a predetermined path…or risk everything to defy fate and be with her.

Lovers facing obstacles to be together may be the oldest plot in the history of story—or at least second behind adventure tales of the hunt around cave fires. But the obstacles—whether agents from the adjustment bureau or mundane things far less dramatic—aren’t just conflict-producing plot points but examples of art imitating life. Most lovers know only too well just how difficult it is to make love stay.

And what of choosing a lover, choosing to love or not? Or any number of other decisions we make, or think we do, every day? Do we have free will? Are we truly free? In the world of the movie, we’re not. Unseen forces influence and adjust. It’s an interesting notion. Even a nonconformist iconoclast like me often questions how free I really am. And you don’t have to believe in fate or full blown determinism to see how way leads to way, how every choice limits subsequent choices, how our paradigms and worldviews and cultures and educations and families and religions, like the agents of the adjustment bureau, exert enormous, often unseen influence on us.

One of the more intriguing questions raised by the film concerns coupling and accomplishment, happiness and ambition. Does being in a fulfilling relationship cause us to be less driven, to do less with our lives? Does love makes us lose our edge? Fill a crevice without which we fill with other often obsessive pursuits and passions? David is told that if he and Elise become each other’s neither will live up to their considerable potential, that to become her lover means forfeiting the white house and the opportunity to change the world.

This is something I’ve wondered about nearly as long as I can recall—am I limited as an artist by my happy childhood and love-filled life?

Perhaps a better question is so what? So what if David and Elise do less in the world? So what if the mundane aspects of life together make them more mundane as people? I’m not convinced it does—or has to—but so what if it does? What of love? What of what it produces in our souls, the mark is leaves on us that is anything but mundane? Isn’t that worth the white house and any number of accomplishments? And what if love is all there is? What if love and lover are all—everything and anything else a distraction, an illusion, a poor substitute?

Again, Rumi:

Be foolishly in love
for love is all there is.

There is no way into presence
except through a love exchange.

Love and lover live in eternity.
other desires are substitutes
for that way of being.