Desire, Movies, and the American Man

Jason Segal & Ed Helms in
Jeff Who Lives at Home

I watched two movies recently that got me thinking about desire and the American man. The first was "Safety Not Guaranteed" and the other was "Jeff Who Lives at Home." The first movie is about a quirky and mismatched group of journalists who journey to a small coastal town in Washington State to find out who submitted a strange and provocative want ad seeking a partner for a time travel adventure. The second is about two brothers who both appear to have lost their way in life. Throughout the movie, fate seems to bring them together a number of times in order to restore and repair broken relationships, including the relationship of the brothers.

Neither of these films is really about the primary plot. They have an exploratory realism that articulates some of the unspoken malaise of modern life. In both movies, there is a sense that these characters forgot to pickup life's instruction manual, or that they missed the boat to the exciting life that was promised to them somewhere along the way. What is brilliant about these movies is that they do not purposely explore these themes, they just mirror life, at odd and unexplained moments.

Jay & Mark Duplass

Both movies have a connection with the Duplass brothers, Jay and Mark. I don't know much about them, but it seems that they have written, directed, and produced a number of movies together. Jay is primarily a writer and director, and Mark is primary an actor, but they have both done a mixture of jobs in their movie and TV careers (often from Jay garage/office in his home). To say the least, they seem to be highly creative and talented men. In their movies they explore themes of longing, desire, innocence, lost innocence, hope, despair, ambition, lost ambition, faith, and doubt in the  American male psyche. Gavin Edwards, in his NYTimes article about the brothers, argues "their body of work forms a vivid portrait of 21st-century masculinity in all its stunted absurdity."

A few years ago, a male friend tried to explain to me the pressure to succeed that he felt growing up. He had always been told that he could do anything, and in the midst of all of that pressure, he never figured out who he was or what he really wanted. The power of the Duplass brother movies is that they poke and prod at this strange and wondrous existential angst of the American male. The great irony of our age, they seem to be saying, is that real life is not about the grand or the heroic event or adventure. As John Lennon once sang, "Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans." One might even say that these movie-making brothers are trying to say, "live the life that is before you, it will be more extraordinary than you might expect." Or, in their off-beat style, they are just making movies that they enjoy, and isn't that the point.

"A prisoner of hope"

Dr. Cornel West

Rob Bell was just at our school a few weeks ago, and I had the privilege of interviewing him. At one point, he quoted Dr. Cornel West. The context of his proclamation was around optimism, primarily that hope was not the same as being optimistic. Furthermore, that he could not get away from hope because he was a prisoner of hope. 

I was very intrigued by this quote, so I decided to find it. (Don't you just love the internet!) The quote comes from a commencement address at Wesleyan College 20 years ago this Spring. (By the way, this whole website is a good reference for other inspirational commencement addresses.) Here is the speech in full:

• "An Abiding Sense of History"

In essence, Dr. West argues that we, especially as Americans, need to recover an abiding sense of history. History teaches us that we constantly strive against evil but also that evil and injustice has consistently been a part of history. Regardless of the situation, hope has remained. But hope is not optimism or some kind of overriding feeling. Hope is knowing what is right, good, and just and acting on that conviction. Hope opens the future for something different, even if that is not what we know or see. Here is my favorite quote, and the context of the line that Bell referenced:

... there is a need for audacious hope. And it’s not optimism. I’m in no way an optimist. I’ve been black in America for 39 years. No ground for optimism here, given the progress and regress and three steps forward and four steps backward. Optimism is a notion that there’s sufficient evidence that would allow us to infer that if we keep doing what we’re doing, things will get better. I don’t believe that. I’m a prisoner of hope, that’s something else. Cutting against the grain, against the evidence. William James said it so well in that grand and masterful essay of his of 1879 called “The Sentiment of Rationality,” where he talked about faith being the courage to act when doubt is warranted. And that’s what I’m talking about.
     Of course I come from a tradition, a black church tradition, in which we defined faith as stepping out on nothing and landing on something. That’s the history of black folk in this country. Hope against hope. And yet still trying to sustain the notion that we world-weary and tired peoples, all peoples in this society, can be energized and galvanized around causes and principles and ideals that are bigger than us, that can appeal to the better angels of our nature, so that we, in fact, can reach the conclusion that the world in incomplete - that history in unfinished, that the future is open-ended, that what we think and what we do does make a difference.