Perhaps pain is not all it’s cracked up to be, but then, neither is positive thinking.
THERE was a lot of buzz around Steven Soderbergh’s Full Frontal when it came out in 2002, although the movie seems to have disappeared from public awareness since.
It was one of those “day in the life” vignette movies with a full ensemble, this one being of a group of people whose connection to each other was that they were to attend a mutual friend’s birthday party that evening. I remember being impressed by the acting, but wondering what the whole point was.
Then at the end, a single scene stood out and punched me right in the solar plexus, figuratively speaking.
In it, the character Carl (David Hyde Pierce) speaks of his wife Lee (Catherine Keener), a disjointed woman who is suffering from some inner turmoil, which, if I remember correctly, came about after she discovered he had been unfaithful. They had patched up their marriage, but things had never been the same since.
“Have you ever seen a dog get hit by a car, but walk away? There’s this impact, and you know something terrible has happened to that dog, but it walks away and it doesn’t seem to even realise the implications ... ’ cause it just goes on. But you know that something terrible has happened inside this dog.”
Many years before I saw this movie, while on the road, a stray ran across the highway and despite some heroic braking and manoeuvres by my friend who was driving, we felt a bump and heard a yelp.
My friend immediately drove to the shoulder, but all we saw was the dog scrambling away, seemingly unhurt, into the wilderness, beyond our help. But from the impact, we both knew something was broken inside. That poor animal may have shrugged it off, but it was there, biding its time.
And Full Frontal made me wonder how many of us go through life as seemingly normal, fully functional members of society, but with a broken piece inside of us. Most of the time, we may be completely unaware of this flaw. There’s no piece rattling about inside, just a dead silence.
We shrug off life’s trials and tribulations pretending they have made us stronger, while in effect there may actually be a flaw in the keystone. One day, that arch is going to come tumbling down.
That child abuse victim who does the same to his children; the United States postal worker or college student who finally flips out with a fully loaded automatic rifle; the rape victim who can never seem to form a stable relationship; the guy at the public service counter who starts shouting for no apparent reason; the tortured soul who finally decides to end it.
How much did American poet Sylvia Plath suffer from her English poet husband Ted Hughes’ infidelity before she finally decided to stick her head in the oven? And what caused the woman he was having an affair with, Assia Wevill, to take her own life a few years later, as well as that of their four-year-old daughter?
How many people live their lives with very little awareness of the hurt they’re nursing inside? How many people live their lives with very little understanding of the hurt they’re causing or have caused others?
Or, as Billy Corgan put it in his usual agonised manner in the Smashing Pumpkins song Stumbleine, “And nobody nowhere understands anything; About me and all my dreams ... Lost at sea.”
In one of my first columns for StarMag, in August of 2007 (The good in hurting, bit.ly/W8V2E), I wrote about how the trials we go through define us as a person, and how some of the best art and literature have come from people who have undergone such experiences. I wrote that “We are at our most profound when we’re in pain.”
Blame it on the younger me of only a few years ago. Perhaps I was being unduly optimistic. Perhaps, to garble the Bard’s writing, there is nothing noble about suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
So what if Plath produced her best poetry after her already troubled life took a turn for the worse? Was the price worth it, to her or her loved ones? Is great art, in whatever medium, worth such a tragic price?
There are so many broken people out there. How can we ever hope to reach out to all of them, especially when so many are oblivious to the time-bombs ticking on inside of them? Even people who want to help will not be able to reach in that deeply to help the most tortured souls.
If that person is aware enough to seek help, counselling can help, at least with some of them. But even counselling may prove too superficial and inadequate in other cases. All it can do is dress the wounds so that that person can play a functional role in society, and hope the wound will not re-open or fester.
And for those unthinking people who ignore the consequences of their misdeeds, or falsely believe that they would be redeemed by so-called truisms such as “time heals all wounds”, think again. The damage you’ve done to other people may be deeper and darker than you’d like to assume.
A. Asohan, Digital News Editor at The Star, has friends who still suffer “dark episodes” years after being betrayed by someone they trusted.
