It occurred to me today that a wonderful moment in Sam Mendes' American Beauty, one which I actually recall on a day to day basis, may have been pretty significant; and if not significant then certainly representative. Ricky, obsessed by documenting the everyday and the beautiful, shows Jane (Thora Birch) a short piece of film – in it, a white plastic bag is whipped and rolled around by the wind. Somehow, Ricky, Jane and Mendes convince their audience of its overwhelming beauty: I certainly am always caught up in the gorgeousness of the mundane when I watch. "It helps me remember. I need to remember," says Ricky.
I think Ricky's need to capture is significant, and maybe even sparked in myself a need to do the same. To create merely by documenting is appealing to the artistically lazy, after all. His panic is resounding – he can't bear for that moment – any moment, it sometimes seems – to go unrecorded. Whether it's access, mere zeitgeist or the digital age which has brought it about, the need to document seems to be stronger now – friends turn into paparazzi, work colleagues blog what they've eaten for dinner (artfully posed with laundry pile cropped out, no doubt), while Facebook and Twitter allow a certain distillation of self until one merely becomes a redhead who drinks Pimm's, wears blue nail varnish, and enjoys the music of Fleet Foxes. And these distillations are so much easier to swallow than your real self. Describing oneself in 160 characters might make us sound better (there's certainly no room in there for awkward contradictions, sad moments, regrettable actions, embarrassing moments...) But isn't that a bit of a shame? In framing ourselves are we doing ourselves an injustice? Is the cropped out laundry pile the really interesting bit?
I'm reading Sebastian Faulks' On Green Dolphin Street at the moment, and incidentally totally loving it. I've just read a moment where Charlie lounges under a Southern French tree and muses upon a biography. He becomes rather philosophical and gives his thoughts on writers thus:
"From what he could gather from novelists' own diaries and letters, the urge that was common to them all was a need to improve on the thin texture of life as they saw it; by ordering themes and events into an artistically pleasing whole, they hoped to give to existence a pattern, a richness and a value that in actuality it lacked. If after reading such a novel you looked again at life – its unplotted emergencies, narrative non sequiturs and pitiful lack of significance – in the light of literature, it might seem to glow with a little of that borrowed lustre; it might seem after all to be charged with some transcendent value."
This rings so true to me - what, after all, do we do in any art at all, but reflect portions of life and in framing, cropping, distorting or reflecting them, attempt to make them look beautiful? And why? Because sometimes when we see them again, we really see them, and they really do look beautiful. Look out for that plastic bag. And now, in the social media age, we do it to ourselves. We hope that in framing our quirks and pretty intricacies, photographing our beautiful moments and drawing attention to the activities we feel define us, when we live them, breathe them, share them, they will seem beautiful to us and ours, and from beauty we will find happiness.
Here's hoping.
