Tara Ison - Reeling Through Life - How I Learned to Live, Love and Die at the Movies

Then, Garp . I saw The World According to Garp in 1982, and for the first time I truly saw a writer writing. 104Young Garp announces he’s going to be a writer in order to impress young Helen, who is a reader, not a writer, but announces she’ll only marry a writer, and a real writer at that. (Helen echoes Yuri’s Tonia, here — Garp, a wrestler, asks if she’d ever marry a wrestler, but Helen replies only if it were a wrestler who’s also a writer, a real writer.) Garp immediately tells her he spends a lot of time imagining things — it’s part of his training as a writer, a real writer. Later, when a different girl he’s sleeping with asks Garp how he knows he’s going to be a writer, he replies with enviable assurance:

GARP

It’s just something you know.

GIRL

What are you going to write about?

GARP

My life, once I’ve experienced enough.

I expect we will now see Garp go on to have meaningful experiences, but we just cut to Garp, sitting in his room, facing the typewriter. I’m waiting (yawn) for the archetypal montage — the eating of a sandwich, the seconds of typing, the bottle of beer, the pacing. Perhaps he’ll throw the typewriter out the window, he’ll bemoan (yawn) how it’s all falling apart again. I dully wonder what he possibly has to write about — even he knows he hasn’t experienced enough. All those generic, fleeting images of writers have gone flat and mystery-less for me. Garp looks out his window, through the slats of Venetian blinds; he blinks and sees his neighbor playing jazz; blink , the memory image of his playing as a child at his grandparents’ beach house (!); blink , he sees himself wrestling; blink , he’s running across a field with Helen, trying to recapture hundreds of loose, escaping pages whirling about. It’s the oddest beginning to a writing montage I’ve seen, and I perk up, just a bit.

He goes for a walk in the city; movers are trying to get a grand piano into an upper-floor apartment window; there’s a couple getting out of a cab and arguing; there’s a glove lying in the gutter. We’re suddenly back with Garp at his typewriter, and suddenly the couple are in his head, fighting about their relationship; the man is then hovering four flights overhead, playing the hoisted, dangling piano; the woman is begging him not to jump; the man tosses down to her a glove as a token of love, and it symbolically lands in the gutter. Garp is taking these bits and pieces of life and weaving them into a story; we’re inside his head, we’re seeing him do this. It’s the first visual depiction of the writing process I’ve ever seen; it’s like snapshots of cerebral impulses, clicking the pictures he sees in his mind. It doesn’t involve words, it can’t —this is a movie, we’re here to watch images, not to read — but it’s a quilt of impressions, a weaving together of images stitched into narrative. It’s Rumpelstiltskin; it’s profoundly generative; it’s photosynthesis, gleaning nourishment from the very air.

This is writing, I think! This is what a writer does, how he does it. I get it, for the first time, and I feel hope. You don’t need to go to Europe or have wild adventures or tap the lifeblood of a mysterious and suffering stranger’s soul — just look out the window, look around you, observe the glove in the gutter and fancy how it got there, speculate on the strolling couple in crisis. Create experience out of that; insight into the human condition is just seeing, then connecting the dots. And being able to witness this excites me — it has finally morphed in my mind from theoretical discussion to tangible process and form.

Garp’s first book confirms he’s a Real Writer; he and Helen marry, buy a house (not a beach house — no need for a beach house, not for a real writer !), and all is well, but: Garp’s mother, Jenny, has also written a first book, which becomes an enormous cultural phenomenon, and from this point on the writing’s over; we’re suddenly back to the paint job, to the quandary about sable coats. Garp becomes increasingly concerned with his mother’s fame at the expense of his own. “Nobody is buying my book!” he complains, “I’m starting my second and the same nobodies are going to line up not to buy that one, too,” while his mother’s book is being translated into Apache. Helen tries to console him — he’s an artist, Jenny is merely a cult of personality, but:

GARP

I don’t want reviews! I want an audience!

And we never see him write again. The movie turns cloyingly domestic: Taking care of kids, extramarital affairs, hanging with a transgender buddy. I’m disappointed in him. He has one more writing flurry — a book about a young traumatized girl, and writing becomes, briefly, an explicitly political act. My admiration for him is refueled; he is compelled to tell the story of this one girl because she cannot tell it herself, and I find that noble and worthy. It’s a small cause, perhaps, the recording and thus saving of one small life in a world full of Nazi-size evil, but sweet Garp gets all riled up about it, and it confirms my suspicion — that all the Lara and lily poems, the retreat into navel-gazing introspection, the logging in of mere ordinary people’s lives, doesn’t really count; a real and serious writer takes on Real and Serious things, bigger than one’s petty self.

But it’s just a flurry. His identity, his calling as a writer, is over.

HELEN

Do you miss writing?

GARP

No, not at all. If I do, I’ll start again.

I feel betrayed; Garp’s definition of himself as a writer is too casually elastic for me, too slippery. Isn’t there destiny involved? Where is his dedication, his passion, his commitment to Art? Doesn’t he want to save the world, join the Pantheon of the Gods? Why doesn’t he get his ass in the chair; he’s supposed to be a writer, and a writer writes; why doesn’t he just do his job?

But this line of thinking becomes increasingly uncomfortable to me. It isn’t fair for me to take it out on Garp; I don’t have a leg to stand on here. And, I remind and console myself, he does die young at the end. Maybe that’s what kept him from becoming a real writer, from fulfilling all that looming, burdensome potential.

I graduated college with my BA in English literature, emphasis: Creative Writing — the lie that appears on my transcripts — and took a job at a property development company in Westwood for $18,000 a year. I was relieved to have found a job and equally terrified this was the fence my life was now teetering on. Peep: I’m a writer— I still wanted to assert that at dinner parties, but I knew I had no right. I was merely one of tens of thousands of English lit grads and Creative Writing emphasizers, and there was no beach house in sight, no handsome literary lover to dig me a dinner of clams. But two months later a friend and I sold a screenplay we’d been working on nights and weekends, and I leapt — stumbled? — off that fence onto another one, a higher, prettier fence, one that felt more like a pedestal, if you were willing to look at it the right way.

So, I was a screenwriter. I told myself it counted. I bought an expensive linen vest that looked a bit Edwardian and bohemian writer glasses; I bought my first computer to replace the IBM Selectric and process all those screenplay words, a laser printer, a copy of Syd Field, brass brads and reams of three-hole-punch paper to stack in my writing space . When my partner and I wrote at my house, I remained assertively in pajamas and bathrobe. But being a screenwriter isn’t so much a literary enterprise as a social one; it’s talking a lot about writing. It’s going to pitch meetings and story meetings and talking to death about plot points and act breaks and character arcs; it’s going to screenings and long, overpriced lunches with other screenwriters to piss and moan about development hell. It’s meeting your agent or producer for dinner at Spago and trying to feel like you’re Jacqueline Bisset at the Algonquin. I told myself I loved it, all of it, and much of the time I did.