• Home
  • Blog
  • News
  • Events
  • About the Author
  • About the Book
  • Bookstore
  • Reviews
  • Press/Media
  • Contact
  • Home
  • Blog
  • News
  • Events
  • About the Author
  • About the Book
  • Bookstore
  • Reviews
  • Press/Media
  • Contact
D.R. Ranshaw

D.R. RANSHAW

Carpe Diem

3/12/2018

0 Comments

 
Picture
“Au contraire… he is the person you wanted to be… who is less like me.  The Jean-Luc Picard you wanted to be, the one who did not fight the Nausicaans, had quite a different career from the one that you remember.  That Picard never had a brush with death, never came face to face with his own mortality… never realized how fragile life is or how important each moment must be.  So his life never came into focus.  He drifted for much of his career with no plan or agenda… going from one assignment to the next, never seizing the opportunities that presented themselves… And no one ever offered him a command… He learned to play it safe… and he never, ever got noticed by anyone.”
 
FYI, Jean-Luc Picard is the captain of the starship Enterprise in the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the quote above is from an episode titled “Tapestry.” Picard begins the episode mortally wounded during a terrorist attack, awakening in a blank white nothingness and informed by a practically omnipotent being named simply Q --- whom he’s encountered several times before --- that the captain is dead… Q is God… and they get to spend eternity together. Given that Q is, despite his enormous powers, rather an infantile narcissist at times (is there any other kind?), Picard is less than enthusiastic about this turn of events --- and he emphatically disagrees with Q’s claim to be the Almighty.
 
Without going into too much detail about an extremely well-written story, suffice it to say that Q sends Picard into his own past to allow the good captain the opportunity to change it, thereby assuaging his regret at one event in particular. It’s a fantasy I think every single one of us has had at one time or another: if I could only go back and change that one moment, things would be very different. And so they would. Just not necessarily in the way we would like to think they would be. In Picard’s case, changing the one event makes him into a very different person from the one he remembers, and he’s not at all pleased with the change… which results in Q hauling him back to the blank whiteness and delivering the speech above. The episode title makes the point that a person's life is a tapestry, and removing or altering just one thread can profoundly alter the entire tapestry. 
 
Now, there’s a couple of Moments of Truth and Clarity for you (the phrase is mine, bestowed on my young scholars when I show them several episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and then have them write essays based on the themes present in each story): first, that all the people and events and moments in our lives combine to make our own, unique tapestries, and second, that we tend not to realize how fragile life is or how important each moment must be. We all know the cold, incontrovertible fact that each and every one of us is going to die each day. That’s an immutable truth. But we don’t like dwelling on such things, so we convince ourselves of the fiction that our death-day isn’t going to happen… well, forever.  So we tend to waste a great deal of time doing things that we eventually look back on and realize weren’t very profound. Which isn’t to say that we always need to be doing deeply profound things, of course. The need for downtime, for recreation, is there for all of us. But I think most of us would also agree that we spend a great deal of our time doing really silly, inconsequential things.
 
So what do we do? Two things, I think. First, be conscious of the moment: realize that this day is unique and too precious to be wasted on things you don’t care deeply about… or worse, wasted doing things to “kill some time.” We need to be aware of each day as an opportunity.
 
And second, resist the urge to become sidelined because of fatigue or frustration. It’s an easy thing to do.
 
As Jack Lewis said in his marvelous book The Screwtape Letters, a peculiar thing about humans is that we seem to think the time we experience is our own to do with as we please. In reality, time is not something we can make, or retain… rather, it is a gift given by God.

0 Comments

Bleakness Unchained

3/5/2018

0 Comments

 
Recently, I wrote about redemption in stories (you can read it here), and after watching a film that ends on a note with absolutely no redemption --- no resolution, either, while we’re talking about it --- I was left thinking about… well, let me back up a moment and fill you in.
 
Friday night at our house is a night to cocoon. The week’s “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” are (hopefully) behind us, and we can rest secure in the knowledge that the next day is Saturday, which means a pause in the week’s frenetic activity. I should add a word of explanation here: my wife and I are both career teachers --- she works with elementary kids, while my scholars are of the high school variety --- and while working with pre/post adolescents is rewarding, it’s also both mentally exhausting and emotionally draining. Hence Friday night being a time to relaaaaxxxxxx.
 
Frequently on those Friday nights, we curl up after dinner to watch a film, and so it was this weekend. While our viewing choices aren’t always light ‘n frothy, we’re also not always of a mind to watch anything too… well, what shall I say? Grim? Un-redemptive? So you may find it amusing that this week I chose for us to watch The Florida Project, a film released in October 2017. (In my own defense, I had merely heard a glowing radio review of the film, which, unusually for me, led me to go out and buy a copy.)
 
Why would you find my choice funny? Well, for those unaware of The Florida Project, it’s an unrelentingly grey and gritty portrait of grinding modern poverty (ooh, nice alliteration) as seen through the eyes of Moonee, a six-year-old girl living with her young mother Halley in a rundown Florida motel near Disney World. Moonee and her friends are… well, essentially, they’re feral children, parented by adults possessing almost no parenting skills, since they’re only just out of (probably grim) childhoods of their own. Halley also has no job, no real marketable skills and no idea how to escape the cycle of hopeless poverty she and Moonee are mired in. Willem Dafoe is marvelous as the world-weary but caring manager of the motel, and the actors playing Moonee and Halley are also excellent. But it ain’t a happy story… as a film, it’s kind of the anti-Pretty Woman, where Julia Robert’s prostitute is rescued by Richard Gere’s wealthy saviour. But then, Pretty Woman is really just a dressed-up fairy tale; there aren’t any wealthy saviours in The Florida Project and there’s certainly no happy resolution. It ends (spoiler alert) with Moonee being apprehended by child welfare authorities after Halley has resorted to prostitution in a desperate attempt to come up with money to support them… and Moonee, devastated, bolts and runs off with her closest friend to Disney World because… well, we’re not entirely sure why. One last time with her friend? A brief escape from reality? Mindless panic? Whatever the reason, the final frames show them running through ‘the happiest place on Earth’ (yeah, I know that’s technically Disneyland in California, but I’m assuming Walt would want to extend the moniker to its Florida twin as well), which under other circumstances would be funny, but here, given how Moonee’s life is rapidly disintegrating (as is Halley’s), the irony, intentional or otherwise, is a little much.
 
35 years ago, Paramount released a film titled simply Testament. It, too was a gritty tale, dealing with the aftereffects of a nuclear war in which a mother attempts to hold her family together as they all slowly sicken and die of radiation poisoning. Like The Florida Project, Testament is an absolutely superb film… but you can’t help wonder why anyone would make it, much less why people would knowingly go and see it… unless they’re in the mood for a good dose of there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I. Is it thought-provoking? Yes. Is it instructive? Certainly. Is it, on one level, a refreshing change from the mindless drivel film studios tend to foist on us nowadays? Without a doubt. But is it entertaining? Well… yes, it is, sorta, but not Saturday-afternoon-matinee-with-popcorn entertaining. I guess it depends on what you’re looking for.
 
Look, you say impatiently, you can’t necessarily have it both ways: simultaneously thought-provoking AND entertaining. Ah ha! I reply, but do we need to leave our audience without redemption and resolution? How would you have felt if The Lord of the Rings ended with Sam and Frodo still on the slopes of Mount Doom? There they are, our two intrepid heroes, gazing dully up at the tunnel to the Sammath Naur, where they can finally, after indescribable suffering and toil, destroy the Ring, and… the film fades to black?
 
Real-life situations don’t always end with happiness and resolution. I get that. Life has a way of being both messy and unresolved. But… do we want our stories to conclude that way? Schindler’s List was a grey and gritty film… but it had both resolution and redemption. We could at least leave the theatre feeling… somewhat hopeful.
 
Like I said, I guess it depends on what you’re looking for. I’d be interested to hear your comments.

0 Comments

    D.R. Ranshaw's Blog

    Copyright 2015-2025. All rights reserved.
    ​
    Author of The Annals of Arrinor series.  Lover of great literature, fine wine, and chocolate. Not necessarily in that order.

    Archives

    May 2025
    April 2025
    March 2025
    February 2025
    January 2025
    December 2024
    November 2024
    October 2024
    September 2024
    August 2024
    July 2024
    June 2024
    May 2024
    April 2024
    March 2024
    February 2024
    January 2024
    December 2023
    November 2023
    October 2023
    September 2023
    August 2023
    July 2023
    June 2023
    May 2023
    April 2023
    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly