sane crazy people

-
My final post for Ironing Board Collective went up today. It’s almost embarrassing how much brain space guest-blogging took up, and how sad I am that I will now have to devote my brain to other things. Or maybe you’ll just see more style-related, photo-filled posts here at Bread and Bread. Just a little warning. Anyway, my post is about high school fashion designers. They’re pretty great.

I am hoping that this moving-on thing will be good for my wallet and the overcrowded closet AK and I share. Seriously, I can’t keep buying clothes. I have shit I need to save for. 1) Car. 2) Baby. Not necessarily in that order.

Speaking of pathologies, this weekend AK and I saw Take Shelter, which is maybe the best movie I’ve seen this year (although The Future is up there) and definitely the best movie I’ve seen about mental illness. Curtis works on a construction crew, loves his wife and daughter (who is deaf and awaiting cochlear implant surgery, insurance willing), and is starting to have intense nightmares and midday hallucinations about an apocalyptic storm.

In other movies, one of the following would happen:
1) He would go from sane to batshit roughly overnight, and the movie would be about his saintly, long-suffering family.
2) He wouldn’t be crazy after all—an apocalyptic storm would come, and he’d be a hero.
3) He would be crazy, but he’d also be spectacularly good at math. Or able to talk to dead people. Or at least a tortured artist.

I won’t tell you exactly what happens in Take Shelter, but it’s none of the above. It’s a movie about a very sane person dealing with the fact that he’s crazy, if that makes sense. Although I’ve never (knock on wood) had hallucinations, my recent brush with a handful of anxiety disorders would lead me to believe that the movie is very realistic: There’s one part of you that’s grounded in the world everyone else lives in, and you know that you’re simply freaking out for understandable experiential and biological reasons. There’s another part of you that is absolutely convinced that the slightly darkish area on your back is not a spot your sunscreen missed at Emily’s pool party but a melanoma that will be reabsorbed into your body and grow to the size of a malignant football, like that lady you read about in that magazine. And the second part of you says to the first, Yeah, but sometimes even paranoid people are being followed.

When Curtis has a dream about his dog attacking him, he doesn’t go after the dog with an axe (because that would be crazy). He builds the dog a pen in the yard. Later he finds the dog a good home with his brother. Curtis is a highly responsible crazy person, which makes him more likable and the movie more terrifying—because he does everything right and it doesn’t stop the crazy.

A couple of critics on KPCC complained about the last scene of the movie, but AK and I agreed it was a beautiful piece of poetry in an otherwise uber-down-to-earth movie. You can read the scene as a metaphor for how his family will be dragged into the waking nightmare of mental illness, or for how they will lift him from it. Either way, none of them are alone.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

soleil for a day

-
Image
1. cirque love Since starting gymnastics at age five—or at least since reading Geek Love in college—I’ve wanted to run away and join the circus. Actually, the problem was that I wanted to join the circus but I didn’t want to run away. How fortunate, then, that AK found out about Cirque School , where you can lea rn the trapeze arts without ever leaving L.A. She gave me a class for my birthday, which I finally redeemed last night (after reading up on it, I decided it sounded kind of hardcore, and that I needed to build up some flexibility and upper body strength before going—I’m not sure that happened, but a month passed, I was a little closer to reuniting with my left splits and I was itching to take the class). The classes are held at Absolution L.A. , a small West Hollywood studio walled with honey-colored wood and stocked with pilates machines, trapezes, a climbing wall, red vinyl chairs and other items of expensive-looking fu rn iture. It reminded me, I told AK later,
Read more

seasons of love

-
Image
Everything Cheryl does, she’s totally joking and completely serious.             --AK 2,628,000 minutes 2.6 million moments so dear 2,628,000 minutes How do you measure, measure five years? In new jobs , in boob jobs , in blog posts, in cups of coffee In coffee, more coffee, in coffee, and tea In 2,628,000 minutes How do you measure five extra years? How about love? How about love? How about love? Measure in love Seasons of love 2,628,000 minutes 2.6 million plans gone awry 2,628,000 minutes How do you measure public places I’ve cried ? In grants that I wrote, and novels on the side   Facebook rabbit holes are no source of pride It’s time to kiss Dashaboo Though he’s sticky with jam Let’s celebrate, remember five years Of making people deal with who I am Remember the love Remember the love Remember the love Measure in love Rent rent rent rent reeeeennnnnnt! In diapers, in houses In homies , in couples t
Read more

tops of 2023

-
Image
Recently one of my therapists (plural) told me I talk too much. Well, technically she said that while doing EMDR, she needed to interrupt my highly intellectualized storytelling more, so that we could prioritize reprocessing rather than letting me tip into re-experiencing trauma. And she said it very nicely. But a little part of me heard "You're too much for your therapist, and now you have failed," and of course that kind of thinking is why I'm in therapy. Today I listened to this episode of This American Life, in which Yousef (above, with his family), an incredibly determined, kind, and good-humored Palestinian man, talks about how his two-year-old son wants "a thousand kisses" before going to bed. He laughs and says he doesn't mind. In nearly the same breath, he says he regrets having kids, because what's the point of having children if you can't protect them? I wanted to jump through my car radio and hug him, or some other useless action, be
Read more