We live in a world where certain people, once they have been given the power to “speak” and use it to destroy lives out of pure malicious intent, have created a world where even after "minor" stumbles—say, throwing in their entire stake betting on a pathological liar—they hope that given time, people will “forget” the truth and “remember” the lies if they push them long enough. A world based on lies and self-serving fantasy where there is no justice save for that which they reserve for themselves is the kind they want us to believe is a “better” world.
Of course, you can’t alienate the co-sponsors of whatever fantasy you live in by making them feel “guilty” about that world they’ve created. Take for instance Rosanna Arquette, who went from what director Mike Hodges says in his audio commentary on the Arrow Video Blu-ray release of Black Rainbow (a rarely seen film even then, but definitely an interesting psychological horror/thriller) as the “It Girl” of the time, but now who is what Megan Reynolds in Jezebel referred to as the “memba her?” girl.
Rosanna hasn’t done much of interest to me since 2000, according to my video collection and IMDB, which was the year The Whole Nine Yards was released, which I recently added the Blu-ray version to my collection. There are a lot of actors who made their name for themselves back in the Eighties during the “Brat Pack” years, but among the female actors (are we not allowed to use the term “actress” nowadays?), Arquette hung around a wee-bit longer than most, but in today’s boring politicized atmosphere, there just aren’t that many roles available for quirky (older) women anymore.
But not that Arquette hasn’t tried to stay “relevant,” or at least until 2019, when she locked her twitter account after receiving “nasty” replies to this tweet:
I don't know how much "thinking" went into that. When I first read that, I thought she was just being another self-indulgent white woman upset that she could be accused of “racism” when she was another—what was that song John Lennon wrote to "impress" that self-absorbed Yoko with? “Woman is Nigger of the World”????
Admittedly there was “context” to Arquette’s political commentary (after hopping on the Harvey Weinstein accusation bandwagon), frequently making anti-Trump comments (calling him a racist), and referring to children housed in “concentration camps" on the border before deleting that tweet (why?) and that she would “never stand for the flag” anymore.
Arquette claimed that the FBI had “advised” her to lock her twitter account after people questioned her “sincerity,” although like that Evan Rachel Wood FBI letter, many believe she made that up too. There seemed to be a lack of "courage" in her "convictions."
But all that
would be in her future. On the Roger Ebert website earlier this year, “one of the most genuine
coming-of-age stories” set in the 1960s amid social change. Madden further asserts that “It is one of the
few films to explore the liminal space between high school and adulthood” as
“kids” who may have once been best “friends” or something more personal, but where one party no longer
even knows, or wants to be seen in the company with, someone who is not moving on
to “higher” circles, say into college.
It may also have racial aspects: a Hispanic high school friend of Jewish white nationalist Stephen Miller recounted receiving a phone call from Miller, who said they couldn’t be “friends” anymore; Miller had come under the influence of far-right extremism of a variety in which veneration of race "purity" did not permit “fraternization” with non-whites, and particularly with “Mexicans.”
In the absence of such paranoid thinking, high school is supposedly a place where individuals who inhabit disparate places on the social and economic scale are "equal," or at least have an equal chance to "succeed" in the world. Thus the most “popular” or those occupying the higher social rungs may not be the brightest bulbs in school; they might be star athletes, the “prettiest” girls or merely the best dressers:
“Tough guys” and “mean girls” may hold as much “respect” as those at the top of the academic class. Drug dealers, delinquents, truants and low achievers all still have the same “chance” in life if they choose to get their act together; they may even be "cool" in their own way. The only people who seem to have no “place” are those who don’t belong to any group, are isolated and have no friends.
Sayles wrote in American Film that in Baby high school “is the last bastion of true democracy in our society, where you have classes and eat lunch with the guy who’s going to be picking up your garbage later in life, to the year after, when she goes to college and runs into the fact that he’s going nowhere. It’s about class in America, and where the divisions are. It’s about the how certain things are possible in high school, but when people enter the real world, they become impossible.”
Madden notes that even though Sheik is beginning to realize he is a dressed-up “nobody” washing dishes, a lip-syncing “singer” and petty thief, Jill in college realizes that in a way she has also become something of a “nobody” too among superstars-in-their-own-minds, no longer at the top of her class academically or socially, or the star of school plays (she is told to “forget” everything she was taught in high school drama class and is left off the cast list); the male Princeton student only thinks of her as an “easy” lay and "shoots" her down when she is forced to ask him if he wants to go to a dance with her, and she ends up with the hippie crowd smoking pot, and up in smoke along are her fantasies about being “special.”
And yet even then Jill is still thinks she is far “above” Sheik socially which she tries to "explain" to him...
...and despite having the “prom” dance they were denied in high school at the film’s end (which Jill is OK with because Sheik would be the "best-looking" and "best dressed" guy there, and she will "impress" her classmates), we know they both know they will likely never meet again, because "thinking" causes this awareness of "social status." But even her classmate and the other Princeton guy (on the right) who didn’t shoot her down can’t help but notice that, in the absence of "thinking," these two would be happy:
In the between
all of that Sheik, having lost his “singing” gig (which Jill, upon seeing it,
was less impressed with than were the older people in the bar) and quitting his dishwasher
job, is told that all he wants in life is to get married and have kids. What is wrong
with that, he wants know. After all, wasn’t that the way of the world forever? Except for how human beings sheltered, fed and claimed
“territory,” they are no different than other animals, right? Of course, some humans just prefer to be "lone wolves" and not have to be concerned about how other humans "rate" them on the social scale, but they don't really "count," or are even deemed "dangerous."
But humans have always had this “problem”: they can “think” these "deep" thoughts that makes some of them think they are more "special" than others of their species, this need for those on the so-called "higher" social strata to "impress" their "peers," an issue those on the "common worker" strata don't seem to trouble themselves with; after all, to warehouse workers, those working in the office don't do any "real" work.
Other animal species, according to Walt Whitman, seem perfectly "happy" not being burdened with questions of social status or the need to impress others of their kind with the ownership of "things" or trying to justify their existence:
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and
self-contain'd,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of
owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of
years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
It isn't such a great thing to "think" too much (I think), especially if it makes you unhappy. Rosemary Kennedy was developmentally "slow," but mainly in comparison to her siblings, which made her "aggressively unhappy" according to one relative; although told she suffered from a serious case of depression because she couldn't "keep up," her father, Joe Kennedy, eventually decided that a lobotomy would "help"; instead it merely turned her into someone who could no longer think or have dreams (or control her own bladder).
Rosemary lived another 64 years like this under the care of nuns in Jefferson, Wisconsin at the specially-built for her "Kennedy Cottage." Was she "unhappy" during those years? Only if she had the ability to "think," which was unlikely since after the "surgery" she had the mental and physical capacity of a two-year-old. Of course she was never allowed the "choice."
Meanwhile, in Baby Jill’s
“dream” is to become an actress (which is a kind of fantasy world as well), but she can’t even get on the cast roster, let
alone the lead role. When asked to “emote” from anything in her past
experience, the only thing that means anything to her is her relationship with this
“crazy guy” in high school, whose “future”—if he can stay out of jail—is to
become a garbage man like his father.
So we don't really know where Jill is going, and it may not be anywhere much higher than where Sheik is going within their separate social sets. According to a Washington Post story, also posted on thesmallbusinessblog.net a week ago, only 27 percent of college graduates work in a field in their degree, and 34 percent are working in jobs that do not even require a college degree.
The accumulation and use of money, if your brain is wired that way, can make fantasies come true, although money itself can be a fantasy if you are not very good at saving it, or have enough to invest in stocks that may or may not rise in price, or waste it on lotto tickets hoping for that big pay day that probably will never happen.
According to a Brookings Institute story in 2019, American households held assets and wealth in the triple-digit trillions, which was more than five times as much as the total goods and services produced in the U.S. in a year. “Almost three-quarters of aggregate household assets are in the form of financial assets—namely stocks and mutual funds, retirement accounts, and closely-held businesses. Real estate makes up the vast majority of nonfinancial assets.” China, by comparison, produces nearly double the goods and services as the U.S., meaning that its wealth is locked up in more “tangible” assets.
But then again, money isn't "everything," at least not until you are looking in rear view mirror of life. According to Fortune, while Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are watching their billions disappear by being busy giving away their wealth in their philanthropic enterprises, others—like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, have seen their mainly stock-based wealth take relatively huge hits of late during the “rout” of tech stocks; last year, Zuckerberg saw his Meta stock nearly halve in value.
And stock-based wealth isn’t “real” money anyways; it
has value on paper, but it isn’t actual “cash,” which is the only real “liquid”
asset that the vast majority of people in this country have, and in a country with
an increasing wealth gap, just some more than others. A high percentage of households don't have enough "liquid" assets to hold them over for 3 months in an income emergency, and 40 percent can't cover a $400 bill at any given moment, unless they have a credit card that isn't already maxed-out.
Anyways, I’m
sitting here watching this man talking to himself (or to some unseen companion), gesticulating with these weird hand gestures, obviously someone who has mental health issues. I suspect,
however, that within his fantasy “world” he is perfectly content, somehow. After all, he still has that terrible "gift" of "thinking."
In the 2001 film The Emperor’s New Clothes, which posits that Napoleon escaped from St. Helena with a lookalike left in his place, but after returning to Paris, he insists that he is the real Napoleon but almost everyone he tells this to thinks he's nuts. He is taken on a visit to an insane asylum populated by men who imagine they are Napoleon, which makes him decide he’s happier living the simple life with a woman who prefers him just the way he is "now."
After all, what’s the point of living if not to live "happy"? We've got too many people in this world who live to be unhappy (Amber Heard, gender and race politics activists), the "feeling good about feeling bad" syndrome. Me, I might not be as "bright" as my half-siblings, but I never thought they were "better" than me, and I’m doing what I want I always wanted to do (just not being paid for it), so I am not particularly unhappy, which you can't avoid when you have to think too much.
If you "think" about it, doesn’t everybody, in some way or the other, whether
rich or poor, do essentially the same thing? They wake in the morning, they
pretend to be somebody that means something to somebody other than themselves
for a few hours, maybe shoot the breeze for a few hours with friends at a bar or someplace,
go home and hope that someone is still there if they have a family, and go to sleep. Isn’t that the
reason why people don’t really care what happens to this planet, and
whatever happens, happens? But then again, if we didn't have the "mania" of owning "things" to make us "happy," then at least the planet won't dry up as quickly.
Well, we want to pretend our lives to “mean” something more than that, don’t we? I suppose that is the curse of being given the “gift” of “thinking.”
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