1. Gibbs and Debbie are forming a strong bond and it's giving Gibbs a growing sense of security in his new home. While Debbie knits and checks out things online while sitting at her computer on the couch, Gibbs often presses next to her. Gibbs needs a lot of sleep and is very comfortable sleeping next to Debbie.
2. Bridgit, Bill, Diane and I enjoyed a couple of hours or so in a session on Zoom. At one point, conversation came around to the movie Between the Lines. Bill and Diane watched it last night and they found little of redeeming value in the characters. In discussing their perspective, we all talked about how movies change for us over the years as we age. Bill and Diane agreed (I think) that if they had seen Between the Lines when I did, nearly forty years ago, their response to it might very likely have been very different.
I realized, as we talked, that when I saw the movie in 1982 -- and it's still true today -- that I felt a strong connection to the limbo these characters were in as young adults in their late twenties, early thirties. They were casting about in their love lives, sex lives, work lives, everything. The movie's title, Between the Lines, is more than a newspaper reference. I think it's also a metaphor for the in-between stage of life these characters are in -- they are unsure of themselves, caught between adolescence and mature adulthood.
I was living in a similar limbo when I saw the movie. I know, especially when, a few months later, my wife's and my marriage fell apart, that I romanticized the way I was casting about, romanticized the pain I felt. I tried to persuade myself that all of my insecurity, outbursts of passionate soliloquies, both in the classroom and with friends, and carelessness in my relationships with others were signs that I was really alive, that I felt things, that I was struggling, that it was almost noble to not really know what I was doing with my life and to be suffering.
I think I looked to Between the Lines as a confirmation that I wasn't alone in my somewhat rootless ways, that these characters near my age in Boston were also ricocheting between being responsible employees at an independent newspaper that was in limbo, a newspaper caught between the lines of independence and corporate takeover and feeling unmoored in the uncertainty of their social lives and love lives.
In 1982, and in the following years, I was a mess.
These characters were a mess.
I related to them strongly.
That in between time in life was messy for many of us when we were young. When I worked as a college instructor, I saw that it was messy for most (all?) of my students. Today, I see people in my immediate orbit of life who are in their late twenties and early thirties who are also, if you will, between the lines. Add to this, friends of mine who tell stories of similar struggles with identity, sexuality, sex, relationships, what work to do, where to live, spirituality, and the other demands of life they see in young people they are close to in their families or in their social circles and it becomes pretty clear that casting about as an emerging adult is a fairly common experience.
As I already wrote, when my life was a mess back in the 1980s, I romanticized the experience of suffering and misery (although I didn't wear Goth clothing). As I've grown older, I've been more critical of the stupid and harmful things I did back then and have felt frequent remorse.
Watching Between the Lines in 2020 doesn't necessarily relieve me of remorse, but I do feel some relief in knowing that what I experienced is common and staying in touch with those messy years helps me be a bit forgiving of myself and a whole lot more understanding of young people today who also cast about, who also often feel confused, overwhelmed, and lost.
3. During our ZOOM conversation about Between the Lines, it was almost inevitable that we would also talk about The Big Chill. All four of us have had different responses to this movie at different times in our lives. Debbie and I watched about half of it tonight. Watching another movie about young-ish adults casting about started to depress Debbie, so we turned it off. I'll pick it up later, on my own, and finish it.
When I watched this movie for the first time in early 1984, I owned a copy of The Return of the Secaucus 7 and had watched it at least ten times. It wasn't fair of me, but I kept comparing the two movies and thought The Big Chill was a lesser movie.
In 1984, I couldn't believe that these upwardly mobile characters had ever been protesters in Ann Arbor about fifteen years earlier. I couldn't believe they once held the ideals they spoke about having held in their college days.
Tonight, however, I realized they might very well have been idealists in college, but that over the years they had experienced a big chill, a cooling off of their idealism, and had decided to live in pursuit of careers, wealth, success, and acquisition. In many ways, despite their affluence, within themselves they were casting about in the course of this movie, much like the financially strapped characters in Between the Lines. Their affluence has not delivered them from the grief of loss, from confusion and disappointment and failure in their love, sex, and married lives, or from having past experiences haunt them. They doubt whether the lives they are living can be fulfilling.
I'll leave it at that until I've watched the last half of the movie and see if these thoughts hold up.
Here's a limerick by Stu:
What’s not to like about rocks?
They’re great unless found in your socks.
You can throw them or stack,
Climb on top with your pack.
Or skip ‘cross a pond on your walks.
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