Tuesday, May 04, 2010
Revolutionary Road
Revolutionary Road is such a sad story, but also so reflective of the way too many people live their lives - basically according to the scripts and narratives they have inherited about what a "good" life is. And regardless of whether that "good" life actually fits them or not, whether they are awakened and energized within that life, they often do their darnest to fit the mold anyway.
The great thing about this movie is how clearly the cost of such conformity is demonstrated. The leading woman (Kate Winslet) who for the sake of silence and 'peace' sets herself and her unrelenting desires aside. The neighbor man who settles (in every sense of the word) with his wife all the while pining for the wife of another. And the old man, who literally chooses silence by turning down his hearing aide rather than listening to the droning of his wife - though there he continues. All of their pain and misery oozes, no, explodes throughout the movie. The screams of anger, resentment, hatred are so powerfully demonstrated, acted on screen, that one can almost taste the bile that must remain in their mouth after such release.
All of them all the while trying to tweek their own internal narrative and desires in order to fit within the larger one of conformity.
How often humans seem to settle - even while the volcano of the desires within us is bubbling just below the surface and even after the volcano bursts out in boiling flames refusing to be further contained and suppressed of life and expression - still we settle. We place a blanket of denial over the boiling flowing lava in order to step over it and pretend it is not there, oozing all over the kitchen tile burning our feet through the blanket...and still we force ourselves to walk on it, refusing to acknowledge its existence in order to salvage the miserable, settled, box-conforming life that we are too scared to leave behind. We'd rather burn our feet in the same unholy place of undesire, than dare the unknown. We choose death over the life-inspiring holy ground to which our desires lure us - the lure that bubbles up from deep within the sacred that is at our core.
Not I, I say, not I!
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2 comments:
Nor I!! I love how you use lava as a metaphor for the pain of conformity!!! The last paragraph of this post is AMAZING!
heehee (blush)
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