Day: February 28, 2016

I went to see Anomalisa in Williamstown, Mass. The movie is a series of minor miracles and surprises, from the emotional depth of the animation to the Kickstarter campaign that funded it (more than 1,000 names on the credits list) to its continuous evolution from disturbing to uncomfortable to warm, tender and even heartbreaking.

Charlie Kaufman’s movie explores what it means to be human in the modern world. Perhaps it is apt that there is no human in the film, just richly animated characters who are meant to mirror the disconnection and inhumanity of life in the Corporate Nation. This is absolutely not a movie for everyone, much of it sailed right over my head, and I was dying to see it, giving up a long hike in the deep woods on a warm and sunny day. As I thought about it, talked about it with Maria and my daughter, went back and read about it, it began to take shape.

But when I left the theater, I turned to Maria and said “I have no real idea what that movie is about. Do you?” She didn’t, either.

While I love to think about movies, I had to think a bit too hard to understand that this radically unique, inventive and puzzling movie was trying to tell me. Michael Stone is a customer service expert who lives in Los Angeles and has traveled to Cincinnati to give a speech about customer service, and this, to me, is what Kaufman is really getting at in this movie.

He is also a jerk, selfish, angry and cruel. The fact that he writes best-selling books about customer services is telling.

Customer service is corporate speak for we will pretend to give a shit about you, but good luck getting real help or actually knowing anyone.

Everyone in our new world tells us the same thing – they love us and care about us, but almost all of us feel screwed and helpless whenever we have to deal with them. Part of this is because customer service reps do not represent customers or service, they are cannon fodder, at the bottom of the corporate food chain, voices and powerless bodies thrown between us and the avatars of greed and profit, safe in their private planes and boardrooms.

As  Stone arrives in Ohio, he squirms and bristles with customer service. From the yakky and intrusive cab driver to the desk clerk to the bartender and creepy hotel general manager and bellman, Stone is in a world where everyone looks the same, has the same color eyes, talks the same. They all make him uncomfortable by their relentless, obsequious and false pretense of worrying about him.

He immediately calls his wife, who he clearly doesn’t care about, and is forced to talk to his son, who he doesn’t care about either, and then calls up a former lover that he hasn’t seen in a decade and who confronts him with his cruelty, dishonesty and heartlessness. There are precious few reasons to like this hero or care about what happens to him.

When he meets the very different Lisa, who has come to Cincinnati to hear him speak, he finally meets someone who doesn’t look and speak with everyone else, and he falls madly in love with her.

Stone is a neurotic and damaged narcissist who seems forever on the edge of a breakdown. We realize after awhile that the problem is not them, but him. He is disconnected, he sees everyone as being the same, but he is the one who is falling apart, who can’t see anyone in the world clearly, and is being torn apart by his sadness and confusion. He is the problem.

The film is a strange and unsettling conversation about love, loneliness and community.  Many of the critics called it “heartbreakingly funny,” but I have to say I did not smile or laugh even once.  It was not funny at all, and I found it cold and disheartening. The movie is meant to make us uncomfortable and it succeeds.

There is nothing wrong with that – it is an incredibly inventive movie – but the reviews did suggest something different to me, a poignant romp through the terrain of love and longing. I think it is better described as a horror movie about the symbolism of disconnection, customer service, and the arid cultural landscape of a world in which no one in authority is ever reachable, known or speaking the truth.

Michael Stone is a sick puppy, who hears a lot of awful voices in his head and has some nightmares straight out of Franz Kafka. I felt like I was attending one of those academic film discussions I was just not smart enough to fully grasp. I was not in sync with this movie, even though Kaufman is famous for not being comprehensible (I love his other films). A lot of people love this movie very much and are hailing it as both brilliant and groundbreaking.

At the end (I won’t give away the ending), nothing seems resolved, or even articulated. There is no resolution I could get my hands on.

“Anomalisa might be bizarre, surreal and far out, but it always feels paradoxically real, grounded and deeply true,” wrote on reviewer who gave the movie a 100 out of 100 rave.

There is some truth to that review, but it is also true that Kaufman pretty much abandoned us to figure out this movie on our own, you are just as like to leave the movie theater scratching your head as being deeply moved. Eggheads and academics will gobble it up and fight about it for years.

I sometimes think of our back porch as a kind of farm HQ, there is so much going on there.  At first, we thought we would sit out there on cool summer evenings, but the barn cats and chickens beat us to it, they are usually there. Flo likes Ed Gulley’s milk can chair, and Minnie loves the box that Maria made for her. Maria’s garden flourishes right in front of the porch.

The Fiber Chair is there, and an old milk can from the first Bedlam Farm. Plus my old “Books” sign and a new “Heal” sign from the Open Houses.

The sun was strong yesterday and the spirits of the farm had gathered. So much energy on the back porch.

It was about 30 years ago that my first wife and I lost two children to a rare genetic disease. They were not known or seen by anyone but us and some doctors or nurses, they never came home, never got a chance go grow up, only a handful oe people ever knew that they existed at all. They are not in any graves, and I’m really not certain that anyone but me marks their very brief lives and deaths in any way.

It was my first experience with so personal a loss. They perhaps set me on a life-long search for an understanding of mortality and grief, long before I am as close to both as I am now.

My two lost children were on my mind when I became a hospice volunteer, I wanted to understand grieving and death in a more thoughtful way. As with most things involving death, most people don’t want to know anything about babies conceived so long ago, and why should they? It used to make me mad to think that if I don’t mention them – and I don’t – there is really no trace or marker or ritual to acknowledge that they existed at all.

Rituals are important in grieving, I have seen that again and again. And I don’t have any for my children. But I was never a stranger to death after they died.

Accepting mortality, I have learned, does not guarantee that I will die at home in my bed with the people I love standing by to say goodbye, with time and opportunity and a clear head to make peace with my life, my God, my self, Maria, or the host of demons and spirits and angels who have followed me through life.

It is a conceit to believe that just because you are willing to think about death that you can conjure up the way you want to die. Hardly anyone gets to do that.  I have friends who have dropped dead on the street, been murdered by mentally ill people with guns, been hit by buses, stricken with cancer, died in traffic accidents, crashed in planes,  fallen off cliffs on hikes.

In his book The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, the author Sogyal Rinpoche wrote about this Western hubris, he was surprised at peoples’ attitudes about dying. Many of the people he spoke with, he said, live either in denial of death or in terror of it…”Many people,” he wrote, “believe that simply mentioning death is to risk wishing it about ourselves.”

I saw this again and again in hospice work.

Often I was instructed by social workers to never mention hospice, family members were often enraged at the idea that their loves ones might die, or that anyone might accept that as an inevitability. So many times, people on the edge of life clasped my hands when we were alone and told me how ready and eager they were to leave, they were tired or in pain. Don’t tell my son, they would beg, he doesn’t want me to be a quitter.

And as I left, the son or daughter – there was always one, in every family – who sought me out in the face of an overwhelming  and contrary reality to say their Mom or Dad was a fighter, they would be fine, they would never let go, they would heal.

It as so hard for these people to summon the will and strength to leave the world when the people they cared about insisted it would not – could not – be permitted to happen. Hospice nurses would often urge loved ones to tell their patients it is all right to let go. They needed to hear it.

Adversity is the shadow of us all, it is no stranger to any human being living a full life.  A long-time reader, now a friend, messaged me this morning that she is leaving her beloved home of 30 years. The great recession made it too costly to stay there any longer, her husband is ill, she is preparing to leave her beloved California sun and move to rainy Oregon.  It is cheaper there, and rainy. Adversity is making this a wise decision, she wrote, she is learning to let go and is beginning to get excited about a new adventure, “once the universe has wrested my hands away from the familiar comforts.”

They call it radical acceptance, and I hear open and enlightened patients in hospice speak of death the same way, the next chapter, a great adventure. “I might as well accept it,” one dying man told me, “I can’t stop it.”

If we can’t always control how we die or suffer adversity, we can improve the odds by being aware of it and thinking about it from time to time and speaking about with the people we love, so everyone can begin to face it, since everyone will have to deal with it.

In hospice work I learned that the best help is sometimes no help. It is listening. I could never change reality, wipe away the pain, eliminate the suffering. I could only say I was sorry and offer to help and acknowledge how much it can hurt. There is  really not much else we can do.

Whatever you do, wrote Rinpoche, don’t shut off the pain, accept it and remain vulnerable.

“Because it is in fact trying to hand you a priceless gift: the chance of discovering…what lies beyond sorrow.”

It does not take a shrink to know why we hide from death it makes us feel unbearably vulnerable sometimes. It is easy to do in America, the marketers who control our culture and media and the politicians who set the tone for our civic dialogue see death as a taboo and a heresy. Old people have vanished from our popular culture, they are warehoused in dispiriting homes and centers and hospitals where they die out of sight and away from everything they know and love, the dead are also ghosts banished from public sight or consciousness.

But I believe Rinpoche is wise.

When I think of my two lost children – I celebrate their birthdays and commemorate their deaths every year, and will for the rest of my life – I see the great gift they have given me, the opportunity to understand what lies beyond sorrow, and that is life.

There is no bigger gift than that.