choice-tired part 1: Stalker
Venn diagram overlap of Stalker and Terms of Endearment. Am I the first person to compare these two?
Picking up where we left off in last week’s list where I mentioned going to Vidiots twice that week. Since they opened I’ve seen 11 movies there. Whenever a friend invites me to see something I say yes, regardless of what it is.
I have choice exhaustion—do you? And the more decision-tired I am, the more down I am to let a place with programming I trust or a friend with taste I admire lead me somewhere I wouldn’t take myself… that’s what led me to see the two classics, Stalker and Terms of Endearment in the same week. Have you seen either? Cannot think of two more opposite movies, yet I loved them both.
When Stella invited me to see Terms of Endearment and I didn’t know what it was about… or that it would make me cry so intensely. It hit me in so many different emotional areas including but not limited to the complexity of only-child daughter/single mother dynamics to aging; it became a cathartic release. Luckily, it is also hilarious so I could disguise my lingering sobs under the loud laughter.
A few days earlier Captain had invited me to see one of his favorites, Stalker. As I mentioned seeing the two critically acclaimed films in close succession, I found a through line between them: love. As gooey and earnest as it sounds, to me both movies show the complexity of love and the flexibility required to endure it.
Or what Iris Murdoch meant when she said:
"Love is the extremely difficult realization that someone other than oneself is real."
Every time I’ve been in love has made me feel more real—as in more alive. Feeling a live human being’s eyes observing me, reminds me that I’m in a body too instead of the disassociating I’m prone to when alone. It’s nice feeling connected; when someone wants to know if I got home safe, etc. Perhaps what I’m describing here is intimacy, which I often confuse with love.
To me, intimacy is opening yourself up enough to be seen as you truly are by another person and paying attention enough to see into them too. And love is doing that and wanting to continue despite what you see.
The through line between intimacy and love is how both make me feel more alive, perhaps because the closer you become with someone the harder it is to think about losing them.
Everyone I know or love will die, which means they exist and so do I. This harsh reality is just under our noses at all times, but we ignore it mostly until we lose someone or almost do and are forced to confront the delicacy of existence head on. Both the films viscerally invoked this melancholic feeling of our existence. In the theater those evenings, I wasn’t disassociating or double-screening, I was embodied in the chair, emoting in public. Watching their stories unfold on the screen broke open the hard shell I’ve grown around my soft, gooey, emotional insides, and once the shell was cracked by crying for the characters, my own pent up feelings got let out too.
We build up shells for protection but eventually we have to open up, and let our soft parts out.
The title character "Stalker" in Tarkovsky’s 1979 masterpiece has an inner monologue that includes:
”For softness is great and strength is worthless. When a man is born, he is soft and pliable. When he dies, he is strong and hard. When a tree grows, it is soft and pliable. But when it's dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death's companions. Flexibility and softness are the embodiment of life.”
Determining when to add protection and structure or when to add flexibility and openness is perhaps one of the great challenges of existence. I’ve had periods where I’ve been so rigid and dogmatic about everything from boundaries to work to eating. Then the pendulum would swing to the other end of the spectrum. Similarly I’m always having trouble vacillating between what I hold in and what I let out and when and to whom, as I wrote about here and here.
A couple years ago I attempted to turn Let It Out into a magazine. The concept was a place to share what I called *Soft Stories* which I defined as: the stories that reveal our most vulnerable, tender selves. The stories we don’t usually tell in a job interview, to acquaintances, or on a first date. Most times we don’t even share the entirety of them with our closest friends.
We may not even have the self-awareness to notice them in ourselves until we have some time to slow down. They’re the parts of ourselves that can make us feel isolated, embarrassed and less adequate—and sharing them is how we connect.
While the magazine never came to fruition, I’ve been listening to and telling Soft Stories left and right.
Sharing does lead to intimacy but first you must get honest with yourself in order to be able to share vulnerably with another person. Though self-awareness is the first step to connection and change, it is (unforch) merely a step. I often mistake becoming aware of a bad habit or pattern with releasing or changing it, yet it’s merely step one.
That’s not to say it’s not the most critical and challenging step towards personal growth; however once you have self-awareness, you have to change or else you’ll feel discomfort when you continue the behavior. I’ve often wished to become un-self-aware so I could continue a bad habit in blissful ignorance. But often that discomfort becomes the fuel to activate a shift. Pain is the best motivator I have to look inward and to surrender or ask for help.
I wrote about this at your wit’s end state, rock bottom state here:
To me, Stalker is a story of three people in this state, forced to look within. We’ve all been there, where there’s nothing left to try other than self-examination to uncover the secrets, shadow, and subconscious beliefs blocking a way forward. Often in that we need outside help, in the form of a therapist, trusted friend, or (in the film) the character called “Stalker.”
The title character is the only one able to lead others through a mysterious “zone,” space, now heavily guarded by the government after a meteorite fell there. It is full of death traps, but also contains the “room,” a place where the wishes of one’s subconscious come true. So, Stalker becomes the person people turn to for hope. The film follows the two other named characters, the “Writer” and the “Professor”, navigating the zone with “Stalker” as their guide.
The zone is the one place where Stalking has power as a leader and he’s really guiding people to introspection and connection.
We see the characters develop a deeper understanding of what is their own and what’s not—a theme that I relate to. As I watched them contemplate their values and assets, I contemplated my own. And the narrowing that occurs as we age of what is possible for us creatively and personally—like I’m never going to be a prodigy or a super young mom. And while there’s grief in this, there’s also a relief in a fewer options on a multiple choice question (choice tired) and a what is meant for you will not pass you-esque way.
It’s accepting our current situation and understanding that discomfort brings a contrast necessary for us to be able to distinguish our preferences. Or as the Stalker’s wife puts it in the closing scene:
”If there were no sorrow in our lives, it wouldn't be better, it would be worse. Because then there'd be no happiness, either. And there'd be no hope.”
Yet again thank you to Captain for today’s topic… next week more on Terms of Endearment …until then… here’s the latest episode with returning guest Jessica Lyda, which was recorded mere moments before Capt picked me up for the movie and oddly covers some of the themes discussed here.
More very soon,
KD
PS.
If you too, are choice-tired, and would like an eclectic list as your guide... you’re in luck… today’s list is of all the movies I’ve seen at Vidiots so far…in order of seeing them:
Paris, Texas
9 to 5
To Live or Die in LA
Harold and Maude
Poltergeist
Some Like It Hot
The Virgin Suicides
Drugstore Cowboy
Stop Making Sense
Stalker
Terms of Endearment
Latest episode:
This week, Jessica Lyda returns. The way that she works with people is hard to articulate, but she explains it well in this. Jessica has facilitated healing sessions with thousands of different people, from celebrities to therapists to shamans to skeptics to me! We talk about: what to do when nothing is working, how to handle feeing stagnant, toxic relationships, setting boundaries, people-pleasing dynamics, overwhelm, catching ideas, and much more … let us know if you listened…
