How beleaguering life can be – how we can feel we’re a nuisance, that we’re taking up other people’s space – how we fear that if anyone saw our divided selves, our true selves, if they could hear the sick or corrupted thoughts that inevitably invade our minds, then we would surely be prosecuted. There is, as we all know, the life we live versus the life we want. Or, perhaps to put it more accurately: there’s the life we want and the life that’s sold to us. As we wander this barren wasteland that occupies us during the lowest of moments, desperately trying to find a way out, it’s easy to believe whatever wonderful existence is being advertised. Or perhaps the culprit is something much simpler, much more human and universal: this feeling we deserve happiness, or at least don’t deserve with whatever shit we’re stuck with. Usually we’re stuck in poverty – maybe it’s an impoverished back account, but deeper than that, it’s often an impoverished soul. How do we fix it?
The problem is that…well, we don’t know what the problem is. The problem cannot be spoken, and even if you try to explain it, you can never quite describe the emptiness you feel. It requires someone to see you, to ask you, to accept that you, like everyone else, are complicated, are worthy of love despite your darkness. But even the thought of accepting such unconditional love is scary. So instead we take what we believe to be the easier path: we push that darkness away. We push away the bad, and try to project the good. It tears at our very fabric, and we know this will happen, but we push away and project nonetheless, needlessly hoping that this time it’ll be different, that it’ll stick, that we’ll inherit goodness and happiness and love, that the tragedies of life that have always befallen us won’t continue to befall us again – only to discover that the more we embrace the promise of the good, the tragedy of the bad is only further exacerbated.
It’s so easy to get caught up in this banal battle, to let time slip away as you effectively push away those who are ready to love you, to shroud yourself in darkness and emptiness. I see George Eastman struggle with that battle in A Place in the Sun, a movie that begins with a billboard telling George that he’s an “Eastman,” that he deserves more than what life has given him thus far, that happiness isn’t something you work for but is instead gifted to you for being a good person. Montgomery Clift’s performance is a feat in capturing the silent, strenuous battle that swarms us in our lowest moments, in showing how impossible it can be to convey a struggle that, ironically enough, everyone else understands. Angela and Alice, each played with melodramatic perfection by Elizabeth Taylor and Shelly Winters, represent two sides of the same coin – Angela embraces life because she can, and Alice feels trapped because she is – they embody two different realities we often feel is outside our control, yet is entirely dependent upon us. Angela asks George, who at one point runs away to deal with a maddeningly depressed Alice, “You will come back to me? As soon as you can?” The tragedy is that George doesn’t realize he can answer with “yes,” that he can have the life he wants, the life he’s too scared to admit he deserves – that even after paying for his mistakes and reckoning with his lies and confronting his fragmented self, there will be someone there waiting for him.
