So, before the literal shit(storm) hit the fan for James Franco, I’ve already started binge-watching all of his filmography. All of it. Yup. Always thought the man was hella talented, so I’m still recovering from the news and allegations.
But that’s not my point.
Amidst my choices, I had this Hulu show, “11.22.63”, with not only Franco in it, but also Sarah Gadon, who I recently had the pleasure to watch on Netflix with the hunting “Alias Grace”.
So, matching my double obsession for the material (a Stephen King novel turned into a binge-watchable show) and the actors (again, Franco and Gadon), I took the opportunity of streaming it all and miserably ended by crying me a river after three days of “123movie and chill”.
As Eric Folkerth wrote on his blog WhenEFTalks, “The basic premise of the book/show is that a man in our time is given the ability to travel back through time to 1960, […] where he attempts to stop the assassination of President John F. Kennedy”, inevitably and dramatically reshaping history and his own life, too.
The show was absolutely a jem: all the actors’ top-notch performances, as well as the alluring reconstruction of a nostalgic past and a surprisingly believable alternate reality, made this little sci-fi/noir/drama more enjoyable than expected.
Thing is that, it emotionally proved me a little. Without spoiling it for you, I can tell you that by the end of the show it is likely that you feel you are rooting for all the wrong people and all the wrong causes just because you really think that everyone deserves an happy ending (“everyone”, namely, Jake Epping alias James Franco)
I bursted into tears in a very specific moment: when this precious poem I’m now posting was read out loud in a room full of people unaware of its meaning (watch the show to decipher my sentence).
The poem goes like this:
We did not ask for this room or this music.
We were invited in.
Therefore, because the dark surrounds us,
let us turn our faces to the light.
Let us endure hardship to be grateful for plenty.
We have been given pain to be astounded by joy.
We have been given life to deny death.
We did not ask for this room or this music.
But because we are here, let us dance.
Cowritten by Stephen King and Screenwriter Bridget Carpenter, the poem “We Did Not Ask For This Room” is an original for the show and it’s an incredible way to end a truly masterful work of photography.
As the poem opens,
“We did not ask for this room or this music.
We were invited in.”
As soon as I heard this very first verse, I thought “Man, this shit really resonates with me.”. Indeed, these first 60 characters mean that none of us gets to choose where, when, how long and to which extent we will live. Nobody gave us the possibility to choose our family, our loved ones or our simple preferences. We were casually “invited in” to the big party of Life.
Scary, uh?
Scary is that it seems we have no agency over our existence. I know.
But it’s not entirely like that. The thing is more nuanced. We have the opportunity to choose.
My dear Justine Levy wrote in her “Nothing serious” that Life, rather than a huge constriction, “is a rough draft, in the end. Every story is the rough draft of the next one, you cross out, you cross out, and when it’s almost right and without any misprints, it’s over […]”.
You see? Our agency is that we get to narrate our own story and we get to cross out some parts of it. We are the only ones that, by the end of our personal novel, will know how bad the draft was and how good we got to make it not for others, but for ourselves. We cross and cross, without making the bad disappear, but rather appear on a different form: a doodle that surrounds impressive paragraphs of joy.
The key is that we have to understand that no one is really forcing us to enjoy “this party” all the time. That we may feel suffocated by the absence of oxygen on the packed dancefloor to enjoy more our sigarette when we’ll get outside in the freezing January air. That it’s OK to just hate the music and some of the guests to really cherish the fact that the DJ mixed at least one decent song or that you met someone who’s worth your time and attention.
At the end, the point is that, yeah, we are here, right now, just by chance.
“But because we are here,” wrote King, we should “let us dance.”.
Or doodle.
alexis from da blog 