As I'm sure nearly everyone in the developed world knows, Disney just released The Lion King as the next installment in their current strategy of "Let's demonstrate why our movies work better in animation." Well, okay, that line might be a little bit harsh, but it does feel particularly true in this case. Look at this side-by-side of "Hakuna Matata." It's not bad, necessarily. The CGI is very impressive, and I can definitely see the argument of people who say this has the potential to change filmmaking as we know it. The problem, though, is by making the animals as life-like as possible, it greatly limits their abilities in a musical format. There's a reason nobody stages Cats with actual cats, you know? I haven't seen this new Lion King yet, but I have read that this clip is pretty representative of the movie. To boil it down, this is a great technological achievement. As a storytelling or even entertainment achievement? Maybe not as much. All of this circles back a bit. Over at The Ringer, Shea Serrano wrote a piece to remind us just how thoroughly solid and airtight the original movie is. I'll definitely admit that I just generally like reading his work to begin with, but his writing style is just perfectly married to a piece like that.* *I'd also point you to a piece he wrote about seeing the new Grinch movie with his sons. He does a great job of building this list, so I won't rehash his points here. But there is one particular passage he wrote that I have not been able to shake, as much as I might want to. I'll let him tell it: The way Simba begs Cloud Mufasa not to leave him. A thing I did not see coming as I aged into adulthood was the way my perspective would change while watching movies. What I mean is: The first time I watched The Lion King, I was 13. I very easily and clearly saw myself in Simba, and understood a lot of the stuff he was experiencing, in part because he was the star of the movie and that’s the point but also because I had only ever lived my life as someone else’s son. When I rewatched it to write this article, I felt myself more drawn to Mufasa, who, at his core, was just a dad and a husband who was trying to take care of the people he loved. Watching Mufasa didn’t make me feel like I was watching my own dad die anymore, like it did when I was a kid. Watching Mufasa die made me feel like I was watching myself die; like I’d somehow let my own family down; like I’d left my wife and sons to fend for themselves; like I was no longer there to love them and care for them and protect them. It was immeasurably more heartbreaking this time around. You remember the scene. Still, maybe you haven't seen it since 1994. Here, refresh your memory. It really shouldn't be a surprise, I guess, that this is the part that he me hardest. These last couple years have hit pretty hard in the circle of life. As I've stated many times, I don't deal well with mortality anyway. There have been a lot of reminders lately that it's closer for me than I really feel comfortable with.
For most people, their first experience of death in the family is likely to be grandparents or even great-grandparents. The reason for this is fairly obvious, there's an age factor. When you are young, it still feels removed from you. There is a generation or two in between. It's sad, of course, but it doesn't feel so personally threatening. But then some years pass. Then, suddenly, it's your parents' generation. That feels a lot more immediate. I'm not looking forward to when I start hearing about my classmates' natural deaths. My mom hasn't lost of her brothers yet,* but one of those brothers just lost a wife last year. My dad's side has been hit fairly hard. Out of eleven of them, there are only six of them still alive, several of them have lost spouses, and I understand we're about to lose another one very soon. *She's the only girls out of eight kids. This is all coming off the heels of Kristine losing her grandpa on her dad's side. I have also had several friends and old classmates lose a parent just in the last three months or so. It also puts the time in perspective, at least for me. A quick Google search tells me my Grandpa Bushue died in 1994.* He was 65 when he died. At the time, that didn't seem that weird to me. For one, I didn't really know anything about dying. That was the first death I really had to deal with head-on. For two, he was my grandpa and he seemed old to me. Even in my memory now, he looks old to my eyes. But, upon further reflection, I can see how short a time that is. My own dad is just a few months short of 63. Maybe it's just me, but he doesn't look nearly so old as my memory of my grandpa, and he's still going along more or less as I've always known him to, other than he doesn't play as much catch has he used to. *I had no idea that year was going to come back up until right at this very moment. I wasn't trying to be overly clever by linking this to The Lion King, I promise. That doesn't mean I can't see that he's aged, of course. I have a very clear memory, from back when I was in high school, sitting in the living room with my dad. Just kind of all at once, I realized his mustache was almost completely white. My dad was bald way before I was born, but I also realized the hair he had left on his head didn't have much color left, either. It had probably been like that for a long time, or at least trending that way. I never saw it until that moment, though, and I'll admit it scared the fuck out of me. That might have been my first real personalization of mortality. It's not just that generation getting older that has been a reminder of the full circle. The generation coming up behind me as been a reminder as well. My sister-in-law, Katelyn, did manage to land a good full-time job. But, now that she is making her own money, she has suddenly been thrust into the realization that she has to sink or swim. She just moved out of her college apartment and into her dad's, which prompted a lot of tears and her barely being able to sob out, "My whole social life has to change." All Kristine and I could say was, "Well, yeah. It is." I don't think she fully realized, at least not in that moment, that we both went through the same thing. Of course we both had so much more robust social lives during that time. All of our friends were close, we had pretty minimal responsibility or supervision. College is a fantasy world of chasing whatever flight of fancy seems interesting with hardly any repercussions, and you get to do it with some of the coolest people you ever meet. But then the party ends. Everybody moves away, and suddenly there are responsibilities. And responsibilities means paying a lot of money. So while the full-time paycheck is so much more than your college-self might have needed, those bills pile up quick. It is so hard to get yourself established, and I think she's realizing that. Even with a better landing spot than Kristine or I ever had. I can definitely tell you that part straight out of Wabash up until I'd say finally getting on at Purdue full-time was the most miserable I've been. Some of that is documented here, but adjusting to having all these pressures and obligations while spending 40 hours a week doing something that seems meaningless at best, or just soul crushing at worst. Yeah, it's horrible. I couldn't say all that while she was crying, though. All I could muster out was "Well. Yeah." It gets easier, of course. Even during those miserable years, Kristine and I got married and finally started living together. That was a good thing that might have even been life-saving while I went through my eight months of unemployment. I started this blog, which kept my writing skills at least somewhat in practice during an otherwise pretty barren point in my life, creatively. But, goodness, compared to the Wabash years, or Kristine's Purdue years? We aged practically instantly as soon as we got our degrees. So, life cycles on. The good parts, the hard parts. Those long stretches of mindless routine. It isn't easy, and yes, the past continues to hurt. Knowing there is hurt coming, well, hurts. "Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something." All that. I'm still not an expert at any of this. I don't have any idea when I become an adult. I still don't feel like one, and maybe I'm not. I've heard nobody is truly grown up until they've lost their parents. If that's the case, I hope I still have a very long way to go. Goodness, this has turned into quite the long post, hasn't it? I'll finish this up soon, but let me tell one more story. I think I've written about it before, but I'll try to tell it quick. I had a professor at Wabash, Dr. Campbell, who I had for quite a few classes, and we really clicked. I liked him a lot, and I spent a lot of time visiting back with him as a new alumnus, most talking about how he, too, remembered how hard it was to get established, but how life has a way of working out. So keep the faith, keep working, all that. I went back to his office one last time not long before he retired. We talked about meeting up some time in Carmel, keeping in touch. I also really clearly remember him talking about leaving Wabash after so many years. "It doesn't feel like 35 years, but it's not a blink of an eye, either," he said. What he didn't tell me was that he was battling cancer. He would die just two years later. His death hit me hard. It was just around the time where I really felt like I was getting my life fully together. And I never got to tell him. He never got to see me make it. He never got to see me start finding my literary groove again and start making serious moves into teaching myself. I think he would have appreciated my roundabout path back to the classroom, which I'm still trying to chart. I can so easily imagine, like Simba, wanting to tell a Cloud Dr. Campbell "Wait! Wait! I have so much I need to tell you! So much I still want to ask!" But then he would be gone, just as quickly as he was there. And if I feel that way about an English professor I had for a few years, I can only imagine the sorts of things I'd feel when it came to a parent. Comments are closed.
|
Archives
March 2022
|