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?

Of Conversation and Culture

This weekend, I sat at a bar next to a lovely lady from Pittsburgh. I know she was from Pittsburgh because when I ordered my steak Pittsburgh style she said, “What’s that? I ask because I’m from Pittsburgh.”

We talked for a while about the differences between the North and the South in general and Pittsburgh and Panama City in particular, which was nice—spontaneous conversation is one of the reasons I sit at the bar when I eat alone.

We talked about how nice and friendly most folk around here are, and, given that, how shocking the racism is, and then she said, “We don’t have culture here, but we have the beaches.”

And I was like whoa, now. Wait just a minute, Pittsburgh. We have culture.

I had just returned from a book signing at Seaside. My new novel, “Double Exposure,” like all my books, is about this area. That’s culture. Jason Heddon and the college’s wonderful theater department are performing a play of it in November. That’s culture. Seaside has the REP and Sundog Books and art galleries. That’s culture.

Wewahitchka has The Tupelo; Apalach, The Dixie. That’s culture.

Last weekend, we had the 10th Annual Gulf Coast Writers Conference with #1 New York Times Bestselling author, Michael Connelly—and many other talented authors, agents, and editors besides. That’s culture.

Panama City has the VAC—the wonderful and only-getting-better VAC thanks to Linda MacBeth and the invested staff and volunteers who are working so hard. That’s culture.

We have Heather Parker’s Art Coop and Bay Arts Aliance and the Marina Civic Center (and the highly diverse and entertaining shows of this summer’s Backstage Pass series) and The Martin and Shakes By the Bay. And that’s culture.

We have local writers and photographers and painters and filmmakers and poets and musicians. And all of that is culture.

We have “The News Herald” and “The Entertainer” to cover all this culture, writers and editors like Jan Waddy and Tony Simmons, who work hard to keep the community informed about all the cultural haps and local artists’ works. Speaking of which, have you noticed how amazing “The Entertainer” looks? And how it keeps getting better and better. Well done, Jan!

We have a lot of good radio stations, but my favorite, WKGC, 90.7, is a great place for culture—music, arts, literature, news, and jazz and blues as good as any being broadcast anywhere.

This past weekend, I was out and about for Thunder Beach, and saw many displays of culture—including very cool performances by Twice Daily at Pineapple Willy’s and Steve Wiggins and friends at Edge Water.

Beauty and art and culture, like love, are actually all around. Easy to miss, but there nonetheless.

And if all this weren’t enough, we have the enduring excellence of the Kaleidoscope Theatre. On Sunday afternoon, I sat in a nearly full house, and saw a powerful performance of “To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday,” directed by Jason Blanks and featuring a talented cast of local actors, including Martin Hendrickson, Frankie Hudson, Tanya Ericson, and the warm, charming, funny Ray H. Stanley.

We have all this culture—and a whole lot more (I’m just recounting what I’ve seen recently, not attempting to be exhaustive).

We have all this, plus we have the world’s friendliest people and most beautiful beaches, the majestic Apalachicola River, the acres and acres of pine and oak and cypress of Florida’s Great Green Northwest and the splendid species—endangered and not—who call it home.

We have all, ALL this, AND we don’t ever have to shovel snow!

You might say we have it all.

But you’d be wrong. We could use more culture—more art, more literature, more concerts and plays and exhibits. And we could stand less thoughtless, tacky, greedy development, less racism (and sexism and homophobia and all other forms of xenophobia and ignorance so often on display), less pollution and more protection of the very land and animals and people that make this a place, for me, worth writing about and fighting for.

We may not have it all. But we do have a terrible, awful lot to be grateful for—culture and natural beauty.

Take a moment and thank those you see making art, beauty, and love. Thank them for the sacrifices, for their steadfastness to their vision, for working day jobs so they can, for creating and producing when they’re exhausted, for enriching our community, for doing all this—and constantly hearing there’s no culture in our area. And for this last, you may want to give them a big ol’ bear hug, too.

Lost and Found Light: An Appreciation of Michael Connelly

Michael Connelly writes about things lost—lost innocence, lost life, lost love, lost and missing persons, lost souls, Lost Angeles, and, most of all, lost light.

He can do this because nothing is lost on him.

He is a quiet, deliberate man—as much Pinkerton as reporter—continually taking everything in.

Harry Bosch, Connelly’s cop is a man intimately acquainted with loss. He lost his mother when he was only eleven years old. He’s lost partners and fellow foot soldiers, lost victims and predators, and, little by little, he’s losing his city and maybe even his own soul.

Harry Bosch inhabits a world so dark even the light is lost.

It’s a world he’s familiar with and at home in. In Vietnam, he was a tunnel rat with the 25th Infantry Division who specialized in making his way through the Vietcong’s underground maze of absolute blackness.

In honor of my friend and in homage to his complex character and concepts, I wrote the following passage in my new novel, “Double Exposure:”

“Glancing down at his camera, he pulls up the information for the last image. According to the time and date stamp encoded in the picture, it was taken less than two hours ago.

“The murderer had been finishing up about the time Remington was unloading the ATV and talking to Heather. And hearing what he thought were screams. He wonders if, like lost light, the horrific screams had been trapped in the swamp until someone had arrived to hear them.”

I have not mentioned this to anyone—including Michael—until this moment, and didn’t know that I ever would, but I felt it an apt example of the ubiquitous influence and impact of Michael Connelly and Harry Bosch on contemporary crime fiction.

It may well be that Harry Bosch is in the dark searching for light—the light at the end of the tunnel or some lost light trapped in the claustrophobic tube with him—but I think it more likely that Harry Bosch is that lost light. As if some of the lost light from his time in the tunnels in Vietnam clung to him, Harry is a faint, lost light in a city of oppressive, overwhelming darkness—a darkness more than night.

Down the dark, mean streets of LA, people grope around, night-blind, bumping into one another, doing damage, and the best that they can hope for is help from a tunnel rat from Vietnam, a lost light bearer.

Interviewing Michael this past weekend as part of the 10th Annual Gulf Coast Writers Conference, I was reminded just how gifted he really is.

Back when I was in college, we’d sit around in my lit class and discuss what we thought poems and stories meant. More often than not, when we’d concluded our analysis, I’d think there’s no way the author ever intended half of what we got out of his or her work, but occasionally, you could tell no matter what you took from a work, the author had intended it—and much beside that you didn’t get.

Years later, listening to filmmaker commentaries on DVD, I was struck by writer/directors who fully intended everything I got out of their films and far more that I completely missed.

The thing is, regardless of the art form—book or film or whatever—the author or artist who consistently produces emotionally resonant and thought-provoking work, isn’t doing so by accident.

Michael Connelly’s books are meaningful—mean so much to so many—because he takes every opportunity, uses every name or location or event or description to communicate something. Harry Bosch’s name is significant (he’s named after the 15th Century Dutch artist, Hierynomus Bosch)—more so as the series continues. His house, propped precariously on the side of a mountain, is a metaphor—as is the jazz he listens to, the relationships he’s involved in, the lone, lost coyote way he operates as an outsider within his own department, and every single space of what used to be Raymond Chandler’s, but is now Michael Connelly’s Los Angeles.

The Bosch books are about being in a dark tunnel journeying into light—an arduous, treacherous journey that is slow and painful and costly. Connelly knows what Milton knew, and what Harry and his many fans are learning—that “Long is the way, And hard, that out of hell leads up to light.” And this deep, this dark, lost light is all there is—all we can hope for—as we stumble around with Harry during his long day’s journey through the night.

A Very Fine Feast

One of the first and most important decisions a writer makes is point of view. We ask ourselves—Whose story is it? Who will make the best narrator? Does this story work best in the first person or third? Or as something else entirely? Determining who narrates a story determines the outcome of the story.

The choice Charles Baxter made for his novel, “The Feast of Love” is an ingenious one. There are nearly as many narrators as there are characters in the book—each one given the opportunity to tell his or her story like only he or she can. Instead of scenes utilizing multiple third person points of view, each character recounts his or her feasts and famines.

Late one night, a man wakes from a bad dream and decides to take a walk through his neighborhood. After catching sight of two lovers entangled on the football field, he comes upon Bradley Smith, friend and fellow insomniac, and Bradley begins to tell a series of tales--a luminous narrative of love in all its complexity.

We meet Kathryn, Bradleys’ first wife, who leaves him for another woman, and Diana, Bradley’s second wife, more suitable as a mistress than a spouse. We meet Chloe and Oscar, who dream of a life together far different from the sadness they have known. We meet Esther and Harry, whose love for their lost son persists despite his contempt for them. And we follow Bradley on his nearly magical journey to conjugal happiness.

Charles Baxter is both the author of the novel and a character in it. Once Bradley suggest that Baxter write a book titled, “The Feast of Love,” he begins to interview the various people Bradley suggests, allowing them each to tell him (and us) their stories—stories that intersect and intertwine and reveal the complexities of life and relationships. Baxter being the author of the book and a character in it is only one of many doublets. “The Fest of Love” is not only the title of the book Baxter is working on, but a painting Bradley created. Bradley is not only a man and a main character, but a dog—his dog, named after him by his wife. Sound complicated? It is a bit, but only a bit.

Charles Baxter is a wonderful writer. “The Feast of Love” is a well written, insightful, generous book. The characters who people it are interesting and real and engaging and complex. I highly recommend this book. Get it. Read it. Enjoy. But . . .

“The Feast of Love” should be called “The Feast of Relationships.” Sure, I know why it wasn’t. It doesn’t have the same ring. I get it.

If you’re a regular reader of this column, then you know how much I believe in love, how there is nothing higher humanity can aspire to, how it is what God is. Love is absolute and unconditional. It’s a choice, a lifestyle, a philosophy, a way of being in the world.

“The Feast of Love” is a feast of passion, of romance, of sex, of entanglement, of friendship, of need, of divorce and remarriage, of like (and of falling in and out of it)—something not possible with love. Sure, love can be present in passion, with feelings, with like, with infatuation, with sex, but we shouldn’t confuse these things for love. Often the most loving, most altruistic acts we take involve the least in the way of warm fuzzy feelings. Love is action, not feeling.

Is love present in “The Feast of Love?” Sure. But as is always the case, it is contaminated by desire and passion and selfishness and like and sex and infatuation and the rest. Nothing for it. It’s the human condition—which is what this book is about, the fascinating, fragile, phenomenal feast of the human condition, and our absolute need for connection.

Baxter’s book has also been adapted into a warm, charming film by director Robert Benton (“Kramer vs. Kramer” and “The Human Stain”) starring Morgan Freeman and Greg Kinnear.

Here’s how the movie is billed by the studio:

Bradley (Greg Kinnear) believes in the power and beauty of true love. He’s good at falling in love—just with the wrong women. He’s hoping that his relationship with sophisticated Diana (Radha Mitchell) will have a happier ending than his first marriage to Kathryn (Selma Blair). Bradley’s friend Harry (Morgan Freeman) is happily married to Esther (Jane Alexander), but they are dealing with the loss of a different kind of love. At the same time, Oscar (Toby Hemingway) and Chloe (Alexa Davalos) are busy falling in love at first sight and starting their life together even though the odds are against them.

Good stuff. Enjoyable. Fairly faithful adaptation. But again, love isn’t something you fall into or out of. It’s not something you lose. And though it may seem so, it’s not a simple matter of semantics.
Feast on this fine book. It makes for a truly great meal. Then, if you still want more, have the film for dessert.

A Maddening Silence

Increasingly, we’re living in a world where nobody listens.

There’s so much noise, such a continuous assault on our senses, that we have to create filters just to survive, but sometimes we filter out too much. Sometimes, we’re not really listening to the important things being said and not being said to us.

It’s as if we have an inverse form of ADHD—instead of letting everything in equally, we’ve stopped letting in much of anything at all. Of course, this is due in part to the rampant narcissism and self-involvement of our time, but I really do believe the deafening levels of noise, the sheer volume of stimuli have overwhelmed us to the point of living defensively—like little monkeys with our hands over our eyes and ears and minds.

Not so in the era of AMC’s “Mad Men,” when television was still novel (on only for a few hours a day), people read, and the assault known as advertising and entertainment wasn’t nearly so ubiquitous.

There is much to recommend about “Mad Men”—the characters, the sets, the sleek sexiness, but perhaps what is best about it is not what’s in it, but what’s left out.

The makers of “Mad Men” have mastered the art of silences.

Like the white space on a page of text, and the way it shapes the reading experience, the well-placed silences in “Mad Men” are exquisite and excruciating.

And it’s not just the silences, but the overall quietness of the sophisticated drama. There’s very little music, very little noise, just people talking—and not—so much so that commercial breaks are even more jarring in their intrusion than usual.

Set in 1960s New York, the sexy, stylized drama follows the lives of the men and women of Madison Avenue advertising. The series revolves around the conflicted Don Draper, the biggest ad man (and ladies’ man) in the business, and his colleagues at the Sterling Cooper Advertising Agency. As Don makes the plays in the boardroom and the bedroom, he struggles to stay a step ahead of the rapidly changing times and the young executives nipping at his heels. The series also depicts authentically the roles of men and women in this era while exploring the true human nature beneath the guise of 1960s traditional family values.

“Mad Men” is one of the most existential dramas to ever air on TV. All the characters are vaguely aware something is missing, something isn’t right, but for Don the feeling is anxiety-causing acute. We are given a front row seat to the lives of men and women trudging around the abyss, the quietness of their lives, the many silences around them, an outward manifestation of the noiseless void inside of them.

Relish the quiet and silence of “Mad Men,” get caught up in the spectacular set pieces and the turbulent times, and, most of all, the complex characters. As you do, remember, if it appears nothing is happening, look again. It’s all there—only it’s in the subtext. If you only hear the text you’ll miss it. If you only see what’s on the surface, you won’t perceive most of what’s happening—the bulk of the berg moving these people is below the surface. Way below—where the current actually runs in a different direction.

If you haven’t tried “Mad Men” or tried it and weren’t immediately smitten, try it again. Still yourself from the frenzy of Twenty-first Century America’s frantic pace, shut out the din and noise and sound and fury that is modern, manic, shallow culture, and embrace the essential silence at the heart of “Mad Men.” Listen. It is the center of Job’s whirlwind, and out of its utter emptiness, truly transformational truths can be heard—but only if we are still and quiet and linger to listen.