Hi guys.
So it’s been a busy psychological week! For my fellowship, I’ve begun the entry of a never-ending set of data I helped collect in Viet Nam in May. My fellowship advisor has given me and my data entering partner/classmate unheard-of permission to take data home to work on it, which is dreamy. Data entry may not be terribly glamorous, but data entry *from home* is a pretty amazing luxury.
Much more exciting: at the very generous, gracious invitation of one of my professors, I delivered a lecture in schizophrenia for his undergraduate Abnormal Psychology class on Wednesday. There were seven whole students in attendance! It was SWEET.
Seriously though. It was pretty awesome. I’ve wanted to teach psychology for a long time, and this is the first time I’ve taught a real live class. Even if I didn’t have the most abundant audience in the universe, it was really fun preparing and delivering a lecture—especially about such a dramatic, interesting topic. Because schizophrenia is one of the oldest recognized mental illnesses, there’s more extensive research on it than many other disorders; I got to talk about brain changes in schizophrenic patients, heritability studies, childhood-onset schizophrenia, and family dynamics that lead to increased relapse rates. It was really cool!
The BEST part of the lecture was that PEOPLE ASKED QUESTIONS. Not only did they ask questions, but those questions met three crucial parameters which make for a fabulous teaching experience:
1) Their questions indicated they were listening to the words coming out of my mouth,
2) Not only that, but their questions indicated that they were *curious* about the topic at hand, and
3) I actually knew how to answer their questions!!
Me teaching FTW!!
As if that weren’t enough, I also think I’ve actually had a mini-breakthrough on my master’s. I’ve been feeling really intimidated by the prospect of writing my thesis proposal. However, I recently discovered/remembered/finally let it really sink into my brain that all my proposal has to be is essentially the introduction and methods portion of the research article my thesis will eventually be. So basically I have to write a miniature literature review (based on literature I’ve already read) and specify my selection criteria for the research that will be used in my meta-analysis. This will still take a decent amount of work, but having a concrete idea of what’s expected to me—and feeling like I know how to complete it—is a huge relief. I’ve already written a very rough draft of the introduction, and plan to finalize my selection criteria in the next week or two.
Hold me to that, please.
So I’m where-I-grew-up home again to celebrate my little sister’s birthday. Last night I decided to go see a movie, since I rarely go to theaters at where-I-live-now home, where movie tickets are way more expensive and theaters are a bigger pain to get to, since I don’t have a car. Based on many positive reviews and my love of its three headliners, I decided to see “The Kids are All Right” (2010). It was a marvelous decision.
“The Kids are All Right” tells the story of a lesbian married couple, Jules (played by Julianne Moore) and Nic (Annette Benning) and their two children, Joni and Laser (Mia Wasikowska and Josh Hutcherson). Laser becomes interested in meeting Paul (Mark Ruffalo), the man who served as his and his sister’s anonymous sperm donor. He and Joni meet him, and hilarity/drama ensues.
This is a film of startling, vivid intimacy—not just in terms of the closeness with which it considers its characters, but also in terms of catching moments of intimacy that feel breathtakingly, painfully real. There is a rare reality in the fleeting gestures of affection between Nic and Jules that makes you feel the weight and temperature of a hand, the gentleness of the stroke of another’s hair, the firmness of a kiss and embrace. The mothers speak to their children and each other in what at times seems like their own personal dialect, with carefully crafted phrasing and selected words meant to serve as scaffolding for the emotional environment they’ve constructed, instilling love, open-heartedness, and tolerance even as they attempt to negotiate conflict. These moments and details stand in contrast to the myriad little snips and chafings of their long-standing marriage, proof that no two people could ever be perfectly suited to a lifelong partnership. Yet the two kinds of moments reinforce each other. When late in the film Jules proclaims, “Marriage is hard!”, she summarizes what the movie has already artfully laid before its audience: marriage is both beautiful and (nearly) impossible. Without being pathologizing or pollyannaish, “The Kids are All Right” shows us a union that neither strains toward “perfection” nor wallows overly in its shortcomings. Through portraying a partnership between two imperfect people who nevertheless love each other very much, the movie serves as a revisualization of what an ideal marriage looks like. Life is long, marriage is hard, and for a partnership to survive its members must remain mindful of and ready to forgive themselves and each other.
To be fair, part of the reason this movie cuts so close to me is that I saw little glimpses of my life in it. I saw my brother in some of Laser's moments, and saw my could-have-been/alternate universe life at the beautifully filmed college that looked to me so much like Stanford (actually Occidental, I believe), which I applied to and my father attended. Not to mention that as a child of divorce, any examination of the complexities and perils of marriage—particularly one that attempts to explain how, in spite of adversity, a marriage can last—is bound to hold my attention. I don’t know how generalizable my experience of the film was, but for me it felt intensely, personally relevant.
The acting in this movie is pretty delightful. Something about the joint acting effort of Julianne Moore (who I always love) and Annette Bening is completely intoxicating to watch. Their beautiful faces (Bening’s is refreshingly lined and yet still radiant) are infinitely communicative, flickering with emotion, processing thoughts, choosing whether to react or stay silent. I’ve seen relatively little of Mark Ruffalo, but something about his performance in Blindness (2008) made him seem instantly likable. He has a genuinity I find very appealing, and it didn’t fail here. Josh Hutcherson does emotionally muted boy very convincingly. He was very fun to watch.
All that said, I think the biggest acting surprise of the movie was Mia Wasikowska. I was almost to the end of the movie before I realized that she was Alice in Tim Burton’s horrendous remake/sequel of “Alice in Wonderland” (2010), and had an experience much like the first time I saw Natalie Portman in something after the new “Star Wars” movies. That experience was something like: “Wow, she’s actually not bad!” and then: “George Lucas/Tim Burton ruins EVERYTHING.” I don’t mean to unduly compare Wasikowska to Portman (who I really think is one of the best modern female actors), but you get the idea: put her in a decent movie and don’t make her talk in a stupid, fake-sounding accent, and magically the audience can see that she’s actually quite talented.
I know I’m probably not making many friends by criticizing Burton, but seriously, I could not be more over that guy. We get it. You're dark and weird. Can we move on now? Can we evolve already?
It’s not enough that his remake of “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” (original 1971, remake 2005) was an abomination, an utter cinematic heresy against Gene Wilder and all that is good in children’s film. It’s not enough that he’s stolen Johnny Depp from us over and over again, forcing Depp into complicity in his assault on cherished characters from classic films. No. He has to go on to make an “Alice in Wonderland” that is so utterly bored with itself it makes a mockery of its own name. It’s “Alice in WONDERland”. Where in God’s name was the wonder?? When does this cinematic barbarism stop??
Thank goodness Mia got the chance to act in something else, because otherwise I would’ve just assumed she sucked, just like I once foolishly thought of Natalie. Tim Burton is foiled!
Anyway. I came out of the movie into a gorgeous summer storm, with fat drops of rain, hot gusting wind, and lightning flashing behind the mountains I could see from the escalator exiting the theater. With the exception of my family and a very few friends, these storms are what I miss most about home. Well... that and the Mexican food. In any event, it made for a really nice after-film digestif.
All that being said, the movie (perhaps fittingly?) wasn’t perfect. Infidelity is such a commonly-exploited mechanism for stressing a marriage in film (or any other storytelling medium really) that it can feel unimaginative. This particular attitude of mine is probably the result of watching too many Woody Allen* films, and to be fair to this particular movie, it certainly contains a pretty inventive iteration of adultery. Beyond that, I also wasn’t completely satisfied by the film’s conclusion, since it didn’t satisfyingly resolve (or leave unresolved) its major conflicts. What happens to Paul? What happens to Nic and Jules? While I certainly buy into the whole “life isn’t about the destination; it’s about the journey” thing—which seems somewhat to be the mentality of the movie—that just doesn’t really work in cinema.
But the journey *is* pretty lovely. I gave the movie a 4.
And with that, I’ll sign off. See you soon!
<3
* = Woody Allen has a history of sexually exploiting women and of being a hand-wringing apologist in support of men who sexually exploit women. I no longer support his work.
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