Portrait Of An American Family

For all of it's trappings of Cold War politics, 80s settings and technology, and espionage, at it's core, season one of The Americans revolves around one central question.

How much can I trust the person I share a bed with?

Spycraft and marriage have things in common. They’re both games of trust, of making decisions in the face of uncertainty and ambiguous evidence, games where reliable information is the most valuable currency.

Phillip and Elizabeth have been together over 20 years. But things keep coming up from new developments to old flames. Passion ebbs and flows.

And the questions keep coming up:

To what extent can one of us make unilateral decisions for what he/she believes is the other’s own good?

What is the statute of limitations on old lovers and the road not taken?

Can a lie told 20 years ago be used against us today?

What are you telling people outside our relationship about us? About me? Do those people have our best interests at heart?

Do the years we spent together count for something when things aren’t working now?

In a relationship where both of us are having sex with other people, what counts as a betrayal?

What do we tell the kids?

Perhaps the biggest question is this one:

What makes a marriage a marriage anyway?

Phillip and Elizabeth have made no official vows, gone through no ceremony.  Their commitment is a professional requirement, not a personal commitment. They report to different bosses, have different priorities. They sleep with other people.

On the other hand, they live together, raise their children together, work together. Officially, they are married. They live a married life.

Is their marriage real? Some days it seems like it is. Some days it seems completely false. There are times they both believe what they have is real…but they don‘t always both believe it on the SAME days.

Like Syrio Forel, their’s is Schrodinger’s Marriage, not a lie, but not completely true either.

Phillip and Elizabeth Jennings spend their lives being pulled in many different directions. They are constantly trying to serve the demands of multiple masters from their bosses, to the other relationships in their lives, to each other, to the demands of their own conscience. They are two individuals trying to make their way in the world, juggling and balancing their needs with the conflicting needs of those around them.

And they’re trying to do those things while both depending and being dependent on another person who is walking a parallel, but different, tightrope of their own.

Which, I suppose, makes it as real as any other marriage out there.

Thursday the 12th

The axe was an old friend, and Jason spent the morning with it, chopping firewood until his shoulders ached. He stacked it neatly by the cabins and when he was finished, he lay in the sun on top of the picnic table. When the sun got high enough and bright enough that he could feel it even through his closed lids, he draped one arm over the eyeholes of his hockey mask to shield his vision.

It was a beautiful day.

His favorite time of year was the week before the counsellors arrived. He had the camp all to himself. There was enough to do to keep him occupied, but not so much to do that he ever had to rush. He could work leisurely and enjoy the stillness, the solitude.

In the afternoon he went through the campsite, testing the light bulbs. When he was done, he put the new bulbs on a shelf in the supply shed, as close to the back as possible.

As he left, he noticed the door wasn’t closing right. He inspected the latch, the frame. A rusted hinge was the culprit, he decided.  It needed replacing.

He tested the door again. It was okay, just a little sticky. Good enough for this summer, but he made a mental note to look at replacing it next year. As he rose, he stretched out his back, circled his shoulder a

He spent the rest of the afternoon wiping down surfaces, taking special care to with the kitchen. When he was finished, he put his cloths and bucket away and went through the camp, gathering up any dirty dishes he might have inadvertently left, washing them and putting them carefully away in their place.

With nothing to do in the evening, he sat on the dock with his machete on one side of him and his battered copy of Birds of North America on the other. He dangled his toes in the waters of Crystal Lake and watched the sun set. On the other side of the lake, loons warbled.

He watched them land on the water until it was too dark to see and then he rose, picked up his boots and machete and stretched out his back before lumbering towards the woods. It was still early, but he wanted to get a good night’s sleep , for tomorrow, the counsellors would arrive.

It was going to be another beautiful summer.

The Game Of Life

With my team ahead by two with four point one seconds remaining, I'm fouled.

If I make these two free throws, the game is out of reach. We win. I get my win bonus AND a hefty performance bonus besides.

We need this victory. Our team is at .500 and in the loaded Western Conference, we can't afford to fall further behind. It's been a frustrating stretch, but we're in position to win this one.

All I need to do is make my free throws.

Free throw number one hits the rim and takes a couple hopeful bounces before tumbling away from the net. Clunk.

I rush free throw number two and this one isn't even close.

The Rockets take possession. They need a two pointer to tie, a three to win.

Improbably, they make the three. Game over. We lose.

Defeat from the jaws of victory. I'm first stunned, then infuriated.

I take a breath, manage to stop myself from slamming the controller down with frustration, and with a slow calm that I don't actually feel, I reach out, turn off my Playstation, and go to bed.

Where I lie seething.

*  *  *

Of course that cheating goddamn-it-to-hell CPU will have the Rockets make that unlikely three pointer. Just like they magically steal the ball or have my teammate step out of bounds catching my pass every time I get close to making my goal of a quarter without a turnover.

I hate you, NBA2K12. You're a stupid, too-hard, unfair game and I regret paying ten dollars to salvage you from the previously played bin.

Once my fury at the game fades, I turn the anger on myself.

Why didn't I pause the game before taking those free throws? Why didn't I save the game when we was winning so if I missed the free throws, at least I'd be able to go back and try again? Why the fuck am I lying awake thinking about a damn video game?

I close my eyes and digital players dance along the inside of my eyelids. I'm tempted to get out of bed and play another game to redeem myself, but I know if I do that, not only will I be up until three in the morning, I'll be compounding my frustration playing in this state. When I'm angry at the game I get overaggressive and foul on defense or try and force passes on offense and turn the ball over.

The madder I get, the worse I play. The worse I play, the madder, I get. And the madder and worse I am, the less willing I am to do the one thing that will break the cycle: Turn off the game.

* * *

I suppose I should hate this game.

Certainly there are things about it I hate:

I hate that I suck at it.

I hate that my player in the game starts out bad and needs to improve as he goes, which puts me in the horrible position of needing to play well to improve my player, but in order to play well I need my player to improve.

It's reminds me of comedy. The most difficult shows--the ones with bad lighting and sound or swarms of hecklers--happen at the beginning. So not only are the situations bad, you're at a point in your career where you have the least experience and ability to handle them.

I hate the injustice of play perfect defense for 22 seconds, only to have the faster, stronger guy getaway from me and buries and improbable three-pointer. My grade goes down. No credit for the 22 seconds of awesomeness.

I hate that my passes are so frequently intercepted just because.

I hate the amount of buttons you have to master and how easy it is to press the wrong one leading me to pass to the wrong player, call for the ball instead of screen, pass instead of shoot.

I hate the way it grades you as a teammate. I lose more from failure than you gain from success so I end up paralyzed at the thought of making a mistake, not wanting to touch the ball at all.

So, yes, there are many things I hate about this game.

 But somebody once said, "how you do anything is how you do everything," and if that's the case, NBA2K12 is great training for...well, everything.

The best part is, there is nothing at stake. At any point, I can delete my file and start the game again. Or quit without saving. Even if I couldn't...it's just a game.

There is no real money at stake. My livelihood does not actually depend on making free throws, real or virtual.

But while there are no real consequences to failure, I still react emotionally as though there were. I get angry. I get greedy. I get fearful.

I get to examine my emotions in a low stakes setting I get to feel frustration. I get to see how I react when I feel I've been wronged.

I get to practice handling those emotions.

After all, the fear I feel when I have to shoot free throws is the same fear I feel when a friend, lover, or co-worker asks me to do something I believe is beyond my capabilities. The frustration I feel when a pass is intercepted is the same frustration I feel when a bus is late. The anger at myself when I hit the wrong button is the same as the anger I feel when I misplace my keys.

This game is training for life.

Just like everything else.

"We All Get Older, Too, And Quieter..."

"There's still so much to see."

Loved this article on the San Antonio Spurs, aging, changing tastes...and Steely Dan.

Check it out here.

Defining Gravity: Outer Space as Inner Space

I probably should have chosen a different title for this post. That Wicked song is going to be stuck in my head for the rest of the day.

Still, Gravity is a strange title for a movie that takes place in an environment where there isn't any.

Or is it?

The secret, perhaps, is to not watch Gravity as a disaster movie about an astronaut lost in space after debris from a ruined satellite destroys her shuttle.  Instead, we examine it as a movie about psychology...outer space is in fact inner space.

There's a lot we could talk about.

We could talk about the simplicity of the movie. Eighty eight minutes. Very few characters and minimal development of those characters. Long, slow takes instead of frantic cutting. To paraphrase, Dolly Parton, "It takes a lot of complexity to look this simple."

 We could talk about the rebirth motif. Gravity contains two rebirth scenes: the one in the space station where she floats in the embryo like a fetus in the womb and the end of the movie, when she emerges from the water, mud, and plants to stand unsteadily on her two feet, millions of years of evolution compressed into just a few moments. Each of them comes after Stone has reached a point of hopelessness.

We could talk about the focus on talking. Kowalski mentions maintaining a constant stream of communication; he doesn't care what they talk about, so long as they are talking. We see this again later in the movie when Stone's distress call somehow reaches an Inuit fisherman in Greenland (*). Neither of them are able to communicate any meaningful information to the other...and yet, they are still talking.

We could also note how much dialogue in the movie takes place, as the characters call it, "in the blind"--characters talking but being unsure if anyone is actually listening or hearing. Kowalski to Mission Control. Stone to Mission Control. Mission Control to Stone during the rescue sequence. Stone to Kowalski. Stone to herself.

Is it about prayer? Is it about hope or faith that someone is out there? Is it about how saying the things out loud makes them more easy to deal with? Or do these questions even matter? Maybe it's just speaking to that same part of our psychology that writes in journals and confesses to bartenders in foreign countries--that sometimes the act of communication is more important than whether or not we are actually communcating. 

And speaking of prayer...

 We could also talk about the repeated appearance of articles of faith. Among the dead astronauts and abandoned space stations, we see a lot of artifacts, references to where people put their faith: A Jesus picture and a Buddha statue appear, but so does a photograph of a man's family...not to mention a lingering shot of, um, Marvin the Martian.

Interestingly, we never see any such artifacts among the live astronauts, possibly for two different reasons. Kowalski finds his faith in the moment; he talks during multiple moments about the beauty of the space around him. Stone, on the other hand, has nothing.

In fact, let's talk about Stone. Because it's through her, and through her relationship with Kowalski that we find the pot of gold at the end of Gravity's rainbow (sorry, couldn't resist).

"You're gonna have to learn to let go."

Like many of us, Ryan Stone is a person holding on to a lot of things. She holds on to her desire to fix the transmission card even after it is safe to do so. She holds on to her fear of the situation she's in. She holds onto the guilt and grief over her daughter. She holds on to the fear of loss.

When we think of 'letting go,' we often think of it as a metaphor for death or giving up on something or someone. We rarely think of how it relates to life.

But in this case, it is.

We see this most explicitly in the scene when a despairing Stone prepares to kill herself by releasing the remaining oxygen from her space capsule.

It looks like Stone is letting go, but she's not. She's still holding onto control, this time by trying to control the way she dies.

Earlier in the movie, when Kowalski tells Stone she needs to learn to let go, he's telling not telling her to give up.

He's telling her to let go of the things that keep her from living. No matter how long or short that life may be.

"Where you go, I go"

Matt Kowalski is a handsome. He's an astronaut, an adventurer, and a storyteller. He has brown eyes.

He's also something else.

Matt Kowalski is a case study in the power that comes with acceptance.

He has a bad feeling, but he doesn't fight the badness. Bad or good doesn't matter to him--he treats them with equal aplomb. He brings up the space walk record that he wants to break, but he is  comfortable whether he succeeds or not. He has preferences, but he is not tied to them.

Many of us resist acceptance because we believe that it means submitting to whatever life brings. We fear that acceptance will take away our motivation to act, to defend ourselves, to right injustice. How will I motivate myself if I just accept things? If I'm content with whatever happens, what will get me out of bed in the morning? We confuse acceptance with passivity.

Kowalski shows us how we can accept and still act. If anything, Kowalski's equanimity makes him MORE effective, not less. When Stone is trapped by focused on what she wants to do with the module, Kowalski sees the debris coming and prepares to act. While Stone is rendered ineffective by fear and the gravity (there's that word again) of the situation, Kowalski sees what is possible and acts accordingly.

Yet while Kowalski is pragmatic, he is never cold or clinical. He rescues Stone. He never loses his temper with her or barks orders. He remains gently encouraging throughout. Kowalski is also the one who remembers to look in on the rest of the shuttle crew and makes the decision to retrieve Sharif's corpse.

Kowalski is compassionate, accepting, effective...oh yeah, and he looks like George Clooney.  If we met him on the street, we would think: who can live up to that? But he's not a person. He's a personification of Stone's--and by extension of all of our--capability for finding those qualities in ourselves.

As the dialogue makes clear, Stone has brown eyes too.

Where we go, acceptance goes.

 Three times Stone is saved by this acceptance personified. Once when he finds and binds himself to her. A second time when he shows her how to let go. And a third time when...well, that's a hell of a story.

Gravity

In the end, Stone re-enters Earth's atmosphere, and for the first time in the movie gravity asserts itself, pulling her landing craft downwards. For the first time, she is being pulled by gravity.

And yet for the first time, she is also free of it.

She is in a dangerous situation, but it is no longer holding her down. She does not know what will happen and there is no Kowalski to save her.

But he accepts her options: burn up in the atmosphere or survive and have a hell of a story to tell. Either way, she says, "No harm, no foul."

She is free.

And after she lands, after she emerges from the ocean and stands on her own two feet, she walks away...perfect in her relationship with gravity.

(*) For those interested, the director's son made a short spin-off film called Aningaaq that shows this scene from the fisherman's perspective.

The Walking Dead

I've known about 'The Walking Dead' since the comic came out in 2003.

One thing I hated about it was the title. It seemed so on the nose.

A zombie story called 'The Walking Dead?' That's like calling 'Ocean's Eleven' 'George Clooney, Matt Damon & a Bunch of Other Famous People Rob A Casino.'

The other day somebody else mentioned something on a movie forum that blew my mind.

Oh, they said. That's cute.

You thought when they called the show 'The Walking Dead,' they were talking about the ZOMBIES?

Mind blown.

Take A Look At The Bad Guy

There's a secret to a good villain, and it might not be what you think.

When we think of iconic villains, we tend to think of the cool ones: Boba Fett. Michael Meyers. Tywin Lannister.

But in many ways, cool villains are not villains at all.

In one sense, they are failures as bad guys.

Because the secret to a great bad guy isn't that he is bad.

The secret to a great bad guy is that he makes you want to see the good guy win.

A great villain is not the bad guy you love to hate. He's not funny or cool. He (or she) is profoundly unlikable. He is the bad guy you want to see fail.

Boba Fett is a great character, but he's not a great villain because he is cooler that most of the good guys he faces. We end up cheering for him.

Not only that, he's tough and competent and single-minded and courageous and professional. How can you complain about that? You can be opposed to him, but you can't really dislike him.

That's why I think LeBron James is a great real-life villain.

He's not just a great player. He's also a great player that is easy to dislike. There was the controversy over "The Decision," an hour of television where he picked the team he was going to go to when his contract ended. There was his behaviour during the 2011 finals when he and Wade mocked Dirk Nowitiski's cold as well as his speech to the haters about them 'having to go back to their lives.' There was his tendency to disappear or shrink from the moment during crunch time in close playoff series.

All of that makes it easy to see LeBron as a man who is spoiled, arrogant, and entitled. And since most of this behaviour happened before he won a championship, it was easy to see him as someone who hadn't earned the right to be arrogant, especially given his tendency to disappear in close games.

We could see him as a choker, which made him even easier to dislike.

In short, he could be profoundly unlikable.

But being a villain is about more than that, and LeBron took things one step further.

When people talk about LeBron James' basketball greatness, they sometimes point to the way he
 makes his teammates better. But I've noticed something else about LeBron.

He also seems to make his OPPONENTS better (*).

You couldn't say that about Michael Jordan. When Jordan's Bulls were done with them, Barkley was a guy who wasn't quite good enough and Malone was a choker.

But LeBron's opponents?

Until 2013's conference finals, I couldn't name a single Indiana Pacer. I thought of them as the Trailblazers East.

The year before, he made the Celtics, who had been written off as washed-up seem a title threat and nearly made a star out of Rajon Rondo.

Last year's Spurs looked more like a championship team than ANY of the Spurs teams that actually won the title.

And two years earlier, for six games, we all thought Dirk Nowitski was the Greatest Basketball Player on the Planet.

Who else could make a seven-foot tall German, not just into the hero?  Who else could make a seven foot tall, sharpshooting first ballot Hall-of-Famer into an underdog? The San Antonio Spurs have been written off as a boring team for fifteen years despite unfathomable success. Who else but LeBron James and the Miami Heat could turn them into the most dynamic team ever put together?

A true villain, that's who.

LeBron James is the Ric Flair of basketball.

I'm glad he's here for us.


(*)The 2012 Oklahoma City Thunder are the exception that proves the rule. Before the Heat series they were the Next Big Thing. Afterwards--even before the Harden trade--they Weren't Who We Thought They Were.