I’m taking on the challenge of writing one essay a week in 2017. My essays will be formulated to answer a question or prompt. My weekly essays, regardless of topic, will be exploring the boundless nature of essays and what this particular form makes possible.
What Movie has Deeply Impacted You? Essay 2
Back in the day, circa 1990, when Demi Moore’s acting – not her personal life – made headlines, she played Molly Jenson, the love interest of the tragically-murdered-in-a-NYC-alley-after-watching-MacBeth, Sam Wheat played by the flawless Patrick Swayze.
Ghost came out when I was in the 5th grade and became an instant favorite. The plot is that Sam Wheat, though dead, cannot move out of the limbo between life and death, not until he helps solve the mystery of his murder and protect Molly from a similar fate.
There’s a scene in Ghost early in the movie when Molly and Sam are sitting in bed, when Molly asks Sam if anything is wrong, suspecting (erroneously) that he is rethinking their decision to move in together. After initial resistance to talk, he finally gives a brief but emotional confession of what is bothering him, “I don’t know. It’s a lot of things. I just don’t want the bubble to burst. It just seems like every time something good in my life happens, I’m just afraid I’m going to lose it.”
As a kid who was entranced by the film effects, Demi Moore’s new bob cut, the iconic pottery scene, and Patrick Swayze’s…well, just Patrick Swayze, I didn’t understand that part very well. Why worry about something ending? Why worry about a potential burst and not just enjoy the bubble?
Watching movies that formed my childhood as an adult brings strange pleasure; a mixed bag of offering and reminders of age. Watching Ghost again reminds me how that at one time, not that long ago, really, I didn’t know how to worry. It dawned on me that the developmental bypass of certain cinematic themes- sadness, listlessness, communication barriers, fearful anticipation of the unknown – has passed and, now, my acute understanding of these themes means I am no longer a child. It means that the thin layers of resilience I once enjoyed in my younger years have transitioned into a radar of perceptions. I worry now, so much more than I ever did before…marriage, children, Sallie Mae, digital footprints, gravity, social perception across fiber optic glass. The anxiety is ephemeral in topic. My children, my partner, my health…my family, my friends, their health. Other people’s lives have always held a grip on my conscience, but as the years parade, its grip has strengthened.
Living well doesn’t seem as important as living justly. And when you prioritize justice, people think that that pronouncement means you know what that means and the prescription for living as such came sewn on your skin. I don’t have any instructions. Living well, I’ve begun to learn, means living synonymously with trying to live justly in the painfully unjust world. I worry I’m not, though, and wonder if trying is enough. I worry that I am in a bubble, positioning me to be both grateful and resentful.
And, of bubbles: I’m afraid of the bubble bursting, too. With my family’s recent move to calmer, more deeply peaceful times, with the clarity that has bounded into my periphery, with the prolonged and sustained love between my life partner and myself. With my parents cracking jokes and my nieces and nephews miracle bones growing with every soccer kick and pool lap. With every finished meal that ends with two kisses from my healthy children. With age, with age. I feel how sweet it all is.
I worry about the bubble bursting, too. Because I have never been happier and I won’t want to think that the moment I am living is a price to pay for something coming over the hill.
Enter abundance and prayer. Enter hope and remembering community. Enter, enter, enter.
I remind myself that there was a line in the movie that crossed generational lines and I profoundly understood it as both a child and as an adult. It’s a promise:
“It’s amazing, Molly. The love inside. You take it with you.”
Thank you, Patrick.
You take it with you.
What drew me to the essay as a child was its reliability; like a religion assuring me the form would hold all my internal wandering. A certain logic of the lines made me feel safe. I suppose, as a child writer, I needed that kind of guarantee. What seduced me as an adult, though, was the inverse: the revelation that the rules could, actually should, be abandoned. Writing is worshipping and traditional, unexamined forms of prayer like the essay sell an illusion of safety. Ironically, liberation is in the abandonment of rules and the literary embodiment of formless, freestanding nudity.
Lisa Factora-Borchers 