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

At one point a visiting Famous Writer booms to a packed auditorium:

FAMOUS WRITER

Everyone has a great idea. But how do you get from there to here? What is the bridge from the water’s edge of inspiration to the far shore of accomplishment? It is the faith that your story is worth telling. .

at which point Grady passes out. He’s lost the sustaining oxygen of faith, the ability to glean any nourishment from the air.

GRADY

Books. They don’t mean anything. Not to anybody. Not anymore.

He means they don’t mean anything to him , not anymore, and I’m feeling they don’t mean anything to me, either — it is all over. I can’t let the writing mean anything; it’s too crushing a weight. But we’re both lying; the books and the writing still mean everything to us, and we both know it’s too late. We’re both already crushed.

But there’s also (damn) hope. Grady winds up with the woman he loves, but that isn’t it. He gets past feeling threatened by his young student — he applauds wildly on hearing James’s manuscript will indeed be published, he paternally passes the Wonder Boy torch — but that isn’t it. And he’s over feeling he has nothing to offer as a teacher:

GRADY

Nobody teaches a writer anything. You tell them what you know, you tell them to find their own voice and stay with it, you tell the ones that have it to keep at it, you tell the ones that don’t have it to keep at it, too, because that’s the only way they’re going to get where they’re going. .

but that isn’t why.

There’s hope because late in the movie, the 2,611 in-progress pages of Grady’s second novel (the only copy he has) go flying to heaven, literally; they’re snatched up by a ruthless wind and scattered like the weightless leaves of paper they are. (I see Garp and Helen, running to catch those escaping, whirling pages.) I feel panic — this is the ultimate nightmare! The labor of seven years, all those exquisite words, all those perfect sentences, gone ? Grab those pages, quick, don’t let them go! — but Grady just stands there; he just watches. He lets it all go; the burden is released, it floats away like end-of-the-day balloons.

It makes him happy. Perhaps those pages were “lesser”—it doesn’t matter. Perhaps they were brilliant — it still doesn’t matter. He wrote those words and sentences once; he can write them again. He can write other words and sentences; he’s a writer. He goes back to work. (And, regrettably, throws away the bathrobe — that might work as a symbolic gesture, but I refuse to believe it was necessary. The bathrobe is still a legitimate perk.) He is a hero; he is a wonder boy; he is a writer who simply gets back to work. The pressure and promise of that make-it-even-more-glorious second novel — or the third, the fourth, or your first book of essays — is the dark side of the paint job; it’s the false lure of the beach house and the sable coat. It’s the tease of You did it once, you don’t have to do it again , and all this can still be yours. It’s all about being a Writer, and it doesn’t have anything to do with writing. Stop crying about it.

So, I’ve bought into the cinematic image of the Writer — the abbreviated moments of typing that magically create Art, and both the charmingly furrow-browed struggle and the illusion of ease. So perhaps the movies have soft-soaped me with all that crap. And it’s still hard to confess to the emotional investment — it’s too scary, you’re too easily exposed to Dash’s dismissal, to the lash of Nathan’s whip, to the banishment to an icy Siberian steppe. But the Real Writer, the Serious Writer, is simply the one who writes. Who keeps writing. Who keeps at it, beyond the montage — for whom the writing is the story, not the musical interlude.

And if it’s always going to be terrifying, I tell myself, if the faith of having been able to do it before so you can surely do it now gets wiped out like an Etch A Sketch each and every time you sit down to write, fine. That’s just the way it is, so stop crying about it. Or go stand on a rock. Or quit — no one will miss you.

And if you’re always going to feel like a fraud, crouched on the floor of your closet among the Mary Janes, no matter how published you get or however many nice reviews, fine. So go put on the lumpy cardigan or linen blouse, if it helps (it does); take a day trip to the beach, stroll the sand and furrow your own brow, go for drinks at the Algonquin the next time you get to New York. Put on some balalaika music and batten the door against wolves. Nothing wrong with keeping a newsreel of those alluring writer images flickering in front of you; go pin them up in the writing space of your mind.

And the writer’s job isn’t to save the world; it’s just to keep the faith, and to write. To be a humbled Sullivan and get back to work. The lily and love poems are indeed revolutionary — they make “just living” worth the fight; the story of your mother’s death becomes everyone’s story, a touchpoint for the universal experience of grief. And thank God for every moment of mindless joy we can get. And maybe it doesn’t even matter if the writing’s any good; in the true moment of writing, in the focused, absorbed, committed moment, there are no reviews, no audience, no paint job, no handsome or beautiful lovers fighting over me, no sable coat, no beach house, no being feted, no mountains to move. Who knows if the looming potential even exists, or ever did, or ever will be fulfilled? It doesn’t matter. In the moment of the writing, in the warp and weft and forging ahead of it, I’m earning the right to exist on the planet. For just that moment, I’m saving myself.

I hope Julia would approve.

98 Julia (20th Century Fox, 1977): screenplay by Alvin Sargent, based on the memoir Pentimento by Lillian Hellman; directed by Fred Zinneman; with Jane Fonda, Vanessa Redgrave, and Jason Robards

99 Reds (Paramount Pictures, 1981): written by Warren Beatty and Trevor Griffiths; directed by Warren Beatty; with Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, and Jack Nicholson

100 The Shining (Warner Bros., 1980): screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Diane Johnson, based on the novel by Stephen King; directed by Stanley Kubrick; with Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall

101 Rich and Famous (MGM, 1981): written by Gerald Ayres; directed by George Cukor; with Jacqueline Bisset and Candice Bergen

102 Doctor Zhivago (MGM, 1965): screenplay by Robert Bolt, based on the novel by Boris Pasternak; directed by David Lean; with Omar Sharif, Julie Christie, and Geraldine Chaplin

103 Sophie’s Choice (Universal Pictures, 1982): screenplay by Alan J. Pakula, based on the novel by William Styron; directed by Alan J. Pakula; with Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, and Peter MacNicol

104 The World According to Garp (Warner Bros., 1982): screenplay by Steven Tesich, based on the novel by John Irving; directed by George Roy Hill; with Robin Williams, Glenn Close, and Mary Beth Hurt

105 The Big Picture (Columbia Pictures, 1989): written by Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Michael Varhol; directed by Christopher Guest; with Kevin Bacon and Martin Short

106 Sunset Boulevard (Paramount Pictures, 1950): written by Charles Brackett, D. M. Marshman Jr., and Billy Wilder; directed by Billy Wilder; with William Holden and Gloria Swanson