The end of First Reformed, explained!

[Ed. - This post has (duh) spoilers for the movie. So if you haven't seen it, you might want to go explore some other corner of the Internet.]

Yeah, that headline was clickbait. I actually can explain the end of First Reformed. But to understand it, you're going to have to bear with me for a bit. Because there are quite a few theories floating around out there.

This most obvious is that what we've witnessed is a straight-up, Flannery O'Connor-style moment of grace. Toller shucks off the dark night of despair and surrenders to capital-H Hope symbolized by Mary and her unborn baby. The evidence for this interpretation is that this is literally what we watch happen with our own eyes. Anything beyond it is emotion and conjecture. And let's not forget, it mirrors the advice Toller gave to Michael at the beginning of the film. "Courage is the solution to despair, reason provides no answers."

Then again.

It could be the last sixty seconds are Toller's death dream before he gets sucked down to hell as punishment for self-selecting out of the gene pool. There's tons of evidence for this theory. Schrader himself said the climax was purposefully shot with different lighting and reduced ambient noise, which gives it a different texture than the rest of the film. And the abrupt cut in the middle of Toller and Mary's kiss sure does make it seem like it was all a dream that had to end because (in this interpretation) Toller'd just finished chugging a tumbler of drain cleaner.

Or it could be the entire movie is a metaphor. All the way through. No one is meant to be seen as a human being. The pastor is planet earth. The alcohol is pollution. His doctor is the scientists begging us to stop accelerating towards our own extinction. And Mary is the God we are all hurtling toward due to the apocalypse we seem to have consciously opted into.

And then there's a religious interpretation. Toller will step into the life that should have belonged to his dead son (who was named Joseph, in a move that's hit-you-on-the-head-with-a-hammer obvious) and raise a new messiah with Mary. This explains why Michael thinks the baby's a girl, but Mary tells Toller she's actually having a son. And that intimacy ritual? How is that anything other than a reenactment of immaculate conception?

Poke around on Reddit and you'll find a fifth theory. Mary was a classic noir villainess, a femme fatale who murdered her nervous-wreck hubby and seduced the substantially more godly and slightly more stable village pastor. The evidence for this is that Mary is creepy AF. She performs physical intimacy rituals with men she's neither physical nor intimate with. She claims she found and then re-hid Chekhov's Gun - errrr, Michael's suicide vest - before re-finding it later. And she's creepy AF because she's creepy AF. She levitates, man. I mean, when I saw Michael's body it crossed my mind, "Hey, maybe Mary blew his head off."

And that's the point. First Reformed is not like Mulholland Drive, where you leave the theater wondering what just happened, go to a coffeeshop, talk a bit and suddenly it all makes sense.

At the end of First Reformed an interpretation will suggest itself to you. And in it, you will reach a revelation about the way you see the world.

And then the other theories will come creeping in, spiders each spinning their own little webs. And through these webs you will explore your own capacity for imagination and empathy. And learn not just what you believe happened to Toller, but what you believe will happen to all of us when our day of reckoning finally comes.

Our relationship is happening all the time

[Ed. - I recently had to send a "see you later" email to a very special group of people. The sentiment is important enough that I wanted to share it here, too.]

 At the end of the 2002 movie Laurel Canyon, blithe spirit Jane asks her straightlaced son if they’re “ever going to have a real relationship.” He replies, “Here we are – having it.”

It’s tempting to believe that to build a relationship, you need to schedule quality time. Sneak out for coffee. Share a secret. Celebrate a birthday. Plan a goodbye toast.

But all the moments we spend together are meaningful in equal measure. Sitting in the conference room. Standing in the elevator. Shuffling in the kitchen. These aren’t hurdles to some other, better relationship. They are the relationship. And they are happening all the time.

I hope on Monday you pause to appreciate the divine nature of mundane moments. And instead of resenting or numbing them, imagine them all as part of the same single sprawling sea, immeasurable and immeasurably important.

This is your life. And here you are – having it. Together.

"This is the story of every band..."

My first interaction with Virtue wasn't necessarily positive. I couldn't get past the fact that the owner of the coolest voice in rock insisted on ironically auto-tuning every other word. "For fuck's sake, Julian, why won't you sing?" I thought and that was it. I moved on.

A few days later I read an album review in Stereogum. Actually, it's not much of a review. It's more of a long-read meditation on what it's like to get older. I'm going to try to sum it up, and I'm going to fail, but here it goes:

When you're young, you form a band. Eventually that band becomes a trap you can't get out of without ruining everyone else in the band. So if you're any type of non-sociopathic human, you don't leave. You just kind of coast for the next few... holy shit... decades.

The band in question is, of course, The Strokes. But what I couldn't get over was how Nelson wasn't just writing about The Strokes or Julian or even The Voidz. He was writing about every band, every business, every partnership everyone has ever been in. Hell, some of the paragraphs could've been about a marriage.

I went back and listened to Virtue again. It was like I was listening to a whole new album. Then I read the article again. (And at 11,000-ish words, that's a commitment.) Then I listened to the album. Then I watched some Voidz videos and tried to teach myself a few of the riffs. Then I read the article and listened to the album and that's basically been how I have been spending all my free time recently.

It's probably a stretch to say that Virtue means as much to me now as Arena did in 1984. But it's pretty important.

Do you want to be told no?

I believe most people go through their lives subconsciously looking for someone who'll tell them no. That way, they never really have to take ownership or accountability for their output. There was always someone holding them down, something inhibiting their greatness.

If you were given the chance to create anything you wanted with no oversight, would you take it? Are you sure? Because if it's not fucking amazing, you'll have to admit that maybe you just aren't very good.

What the astrologer told me

I once worked the front desk at a gym. And the maintenance guy lived in the boiler room. The owner let him stay there because he had a second job as her astrologer, and she couldn’t let her astrologer go homeless.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Anyway, that man once taught me something, and I’ll share it with you. We were talking about, oh, I can’t remember. It was twenty-one years ago, after all. But I said, “No one likes to be bossed around.”

And he said this:

“No. You don’t like to be bossed around. But lots of people love it. You just hate it so much, it's baked into your brain. You can’t imagine anyone living any other way.”

I’m a lucky guy. Not everybody can pinpoint the exact moment they developed empathy.

"All our misery is better than the abyss"

[Ed. - This post mentions scenes from The Midnight Promise, The Papers Of Tony Veitch, and Eight Million Ways to Die. No spoilers per se, but enough info that if you really want to be surprised, you ought to skip it.]

Even the best lives are stupid. You're born into a situation you have no way to choose and no power to change. You spend your weekdays getting ready for a job you'll probably hate, and your weekends chasing girls who'll probably hate you. You grow up and work yourself rotten, only to come home to a mess of bills informing you the money you thought you made was never really yours. And at the end, you die.

And that's if you're lucky. You're not, you get born in the middle of a genocide. You have to wield a machete by the time you're six.

What makes crime fiction so important is the value it places on existence. Life must matter if a detective is willing to plow through disgusting scraps of evidence purely to ascertain the circumstances of its end.

Every mystery has its eureka, when the puzzle becomes a portrait. But the best also include an affirmation that all the misery of the preceding pages was merely water and every life is worth living.

That's how you get the genre's enduring images. Jack Laidlaw pulling a small, old woman from a cab queue to dance to the random notes made by a homeless man's harmonica. Matthew Scudder standing up at his Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and bursting into tears, admitting the nature of his soul. Isabella telling Crockett, "Leave now. Life is short. Time is luck."

Time is luck. Never is that clearer than when you wade among the dead.

Nowhere, in any book, is the affirmation so unforgettable and moving as in The Midnight Promise, the first and only book by Zane Lovitt. The book is compiled from ten loosely related cases solved by Australian private inquiry agent John Dorn. The first couple are mild and slow and devoid of much in the way of actual crime. The mysteries get grittier, the violence more sickening, and Dorn more desperate as he searches to satisfy his self-centered death wish.

But oh, those final pages! Dorn gasping, body burning, soaked by blood and denial, paused in the throes of a futile gesture that has meaning only to the extent that it reminds us to hold on to our hopes and fight against all death, even in the face of certain defeat.

I gave The Midnight Promise four stars on Goodreads and then, after a couple weeks of dreams and thought, went back and re-rated it up to five. And then I sat down to write this post. It's a book I won't forget. One that screams loud, all our misery is better than the abyss.

These three things will define 100% of your success

[Ed. - I've given this talk to just about every intern class that has ever walked through the doors of Karsh Hagan, but never bothered to write it down. I'm publishing it for anybody who might find it interesting. Crossposted to The Denver Egotist.]

Think about the person you want to be in three years. I'm not talking about your lifeplan here. Just the medium-term future. Three years from now. Do you have a clear picture of who that person is, what job they have, what they stand for? If not, your only job is to figure that out. Leave this room immediately and go do that.

But let's say you do. There are only three things that are standing between you and being that person.

I hate to tell you this, but the first one is luck. Many of you are too young to understand just how important a role luck plays in your life. Maybe you never will. For now, take my word for it. If you leave this room and get hit by a bus, you're fucked. That happens. And there's nothing you or I can do about it. But this is the gift I can give you. I can take it off the table. It's at least one-third of your success and you don't even have to think about it.

The second one is your innate talent. The spark you were born with. Now, you are kind of responsible for making sure the talent you have syncs up with the life you want. (I could say I want to be an NBA superstar in three years, but I'm 40 and I can't jump, so that's not going to work out for me.) But if you have an honest understanding of your talent and if it ladders up to your dreams, you can forget about that one, too.

Which means the third one is the only variable you actually have control over. And it is how hard you are willing to work. Work is how you turn talent into skill. Work is how you turn skill into a career. I would encourage you to work on all fronts - planning, networking, creating, learning, everything. Do it with passion. No facet of your life is going to take care of itself. Put in the time. If you want to be a great creative director, put in the time. If you want to be a great surfer, put in the time. If you want to be a great parent, put in the time.

So my advice to you is to quit listening to me ramble and get out there and work your ass off. It's all you got.

The problem with effort

The problem with effort is that as you progress towards the top levels of any given skill set, you have to work exponentially harder to see incremental improvements.

Imagine a novice guitar player. It takes him a month or two to learn a few open chords and soon he is strumming his way through a selection of campfire classics. This is enough for many people to label him a "guitarist." The next level of musicianship requires him to learn moveable chords, pentatonic scales, and a few hammer-ons well enough to work them seamlessly into songs. This requires a bit more effort. But within a year or so, 90% of people will nod their heads and say, "Hey, you're pretty good at guitar." To get to the next level, he has to learn some theory, to study major and minor scales and their relationship to chords, to spend hours with a metronome, and to integrate this knowledge so fully it becomes instinctual. It may take years. Yet to the untrained ear, it doesn't sound terribly different from what our imaginary guitarist was playing before. He soldiers on and spends a decade mastering sweep picking, tapping, and palm muting. But he finds these techniques are only usable for a few seconds of any given song, and most listeners don't recognize them anyway, lumping them all into the category of "Playing Guitar Real Fast." A virtuoso - Vai, Gilbert, Buckethead, Bumblefoot - has invested tens of thousands of hours developing skills so refined that only a tiny fraction of human beings can possibly appreciate them.

In P. H. Mullen Jr.'s Gold in the Water, swimmer Sergey Mariniuk is puzzled by the same phenomenon. He finds he only needs four hours of training every week to achieve speeds that guarantee him a slot on his country's Olympic team, but he'd need upwards of 20 hours of weekly training to knock another three seconds off his time. A 500% increase in effort to achieve an almost immeasurable increase in speed. He decides the added struggle is not worth it. After all, what's the difference between seventh and sixth place?

It's not that effort is bad. It's that it is most efficiently applied to learning new skills, not refining existing ones. This is the exact opposite of the way most of us lead our lives. We jump and sweat, trying to reach the next plateau, never realizing that amazing things are easily within our grasp if we're willing to walk in an entirely new direction.

[Ed. - I am not sure I agree with my own post here. But it is an idea that has been rattling around in my head for awhile and I enjoyed writing it. I think that I think that excellence has some intrinsic value. And while effort may not be efficient, it is still worthwhile.]

A tweet may not be the truth...

I thought a comment I left on AdFeak merited it's own post here. AdFreak was writing about a planner who'd been fired and publicly pilloried by StrawberryFrog, in part because he posted "casual, flippant tweets" while he was on leave from the agency due to allegedly imaginary family emergencies:

While I can't comment on this situation, I can say there have been times I have consciously kept my tweets and blog posts upbeat, even though my life was anything but. Our digital selves are not necessarily accurate, blow-by-blow accounts of our days. They're more like highlights that have been edited for a diverse audience of people who may not want or need to know about the rougher patches of our lives.

Sometimes tweets are a bit like kisses. They may not be the truth, but they are what we wish were true.

Won't misery make angels?

The horror movie retells the story of sin, penance and redemption. The moral is always that conventional lives are safe lives, and those who stray will be tortured until they find a way to redeem their sins.

The plot of the modern fairy tale - and specifically the Disney film The Princess and the Frog - is almost identical to that of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Wrong Turn, Hostel, and the Friday the 13th sequels. Tiana is a moral girl, working two jobs and saving her pennies so that one day she can open her own restaurant. One night, she's offered a shortcut. A frog promises her riches in exchange for a kiss. (Oh those talking frogs!) Tiana sells her virtue and is instantly given, not money, but the body of a frog. The two frogs are chased into the swamp, where they are hunted by alligators and tormented by voodoo spirits. Eventually the frogs fall for each other and discover long-term love is more important than worldly temptations. Their marriage washes away their sin. And their first kiss as man and wife is rewarded by a return to human form and the good graces of their parents and community.

Compare that to any of the movies I mentioned earlier, in which good kids' sexual desires lead them off the beaten path, where they are tormented by inbreds and slashers and must suffer until they find their way back to civilization.

These days, children gain knowledge of sex and violence before they're even out of diapers. Sin assaults them from every commercial and magazine cover. It's easy to say that is causing the redemption story to creep into tales meant for younger children.

But it's not true.

It's more accurate to say that the cycle of sin, penance and redemption is part of the human experience. It is something we live with at every age and in every circumstance. It is something we experience not just as horny teenagers but as four-year-olds pouting in timeout for eating too much candy, as celebrities making tabloid headlines for VIP room dalliances, as quarterbacks stepping onto the field after short stints in the slammer, and as middle managers working the weekend to make up for a Thursday afternoon on the golf course.

Our culture believes that suffering cleanses. Isn't that the lesson that our fictions have ground into us since birth? Is it any surprise that we blithely watch as mankind burns? That we do nothing upon hearing of starvation and genocide? That we accept poverty and war? That we brush off the serial killers and head for the sports scores? We shrug it all away. And no wonder. We've been taught that misery makes angels.

Something I found that I wanted to share

While researching "The genius of changing the question," I ran into this quote about the moral of the movie Frailty:

If there actually is a God, and he talks to you, run as fast and far as you can. You may not be able to escape, but there is nothing else to do. If God is looking down on us, the one thing we should all pray for is that he never does anything, never speaks to us, and that no one ever knows it, because he is one sick son-of-a-bitch.

I need a word that I am not sure exists

Art, action and experience inflict themselves upon you. You are moved, are amazed, are changed, are wowed. But what's the word for what you have done by purposefully seeking out situations that affect you? If, say, you fly to Guatemala to tour an ancient temple and you sit at that temple top watching the sun drop down over the rainforest, you can say you were awed by your surroundings. But there ought to be a way to state that you have actively put yourself in a situation that had the capability to awe you.

What's the word? The closest I can come is wanderlust. But that's a noun that relates closely to travel. And I want a verb that means "to deliberately seek out people, situations, actions and things that amaze and change you." What's the word? What's the word? What's the word?

Life as strategy vs. life as tactic

In the almost unbearably intense movie Cube, a group of strangers find themselves trapped in a 14x14x14 foot room that proves to be just one cube inside a much larger one. As they proceed up and down, left and right from room to room, they discover fatal booby traps and mathematical clues that may help them find a way out.

For me, the movie is about mindset. Some of the prisoners want to stop and think about their predicament. Who would have the means to build this structure? How would it be constructed? And what purpose could running people through the cube serve? They believe that answering these meta questions will help them develop a strategy for escape.

Other prisoners believe that the cube, like all things in life, must be finite. Keep plunging in one direction and they are bound to hit the edge - and an escape hatch - eventually. Pondering bigger questions is at best a waste of time, and at worst will make you miss something that is right in front of you. Like General George S. Patton said, "Good tactics can save even the worst strategy."

I haven't seen Cube in 10 years, but I think about it all the time. Nearly every time I hit an obstacle, I remember that I can look for higher meaning or solve the puzzle in front of me. I can ask, "Why?" Or I can determine, "What and how?"

Swimming is exactly like life

When you get in the pool, you sink. So you start beating your arms and legs around like crazy, inching forward and trying like hell not to drown.

The guy in the next lane is going much faster than you, so you assume that he's just a lot better at beating his arms and legs around than you are. But one day, you realize that he's not beating his arms and legs around at all. He's found a different way to play the game. A way to work with an element that should by all rights kill him. A way to stay balanced and graceful after fatigue and panic set in. A way to enter an alien environment and instantly become a native.

The day you realize these things may be the most important day of your life.