Do you know what occurred to me?
You're just a kid, you don't have the faintest idea what you're talkin' about.
After more than 25 years since its release, there’s something particularly painful about
listening to Sean’s iconic speech to Will in Good Will Hunting. The set up still is the
same, after a not so successful first encounter, the weary psychologist and the troubled young
man come together again in a park where the latter’s veneer of superior intelligence is
effectively disarmed through a simple speech about the importance of actual lived experience.
Michelangelo, you know a lot about him. But I'll bet you can't tell me what it
smells like in the Sistine Chapel. The words are undeniable timeless, relating to
anyone anywhere who is, in some way or another, existing in survival mode; alive but
not living. Holding themselves back. And you wouldn't know about sleeping sitting
up in the hospital room for two months, holding her hand, because the doctors
could see in your eyes, that the terms "visiting hours" don't apply to you.
But the thing that makes this monologue hit so differently today, and the reason I keep
returning to it, is that it feels like we’ve only moved further away from this kind of meaningful
living. Now, I don’t want to make light of the specifics of Will’s situation; his poverty, his
trauma, but I also can’t help but watch him going to work with his best buddy, hanging out at bars,
going to ball games, goofing around, you know, watching him exist in that broader time and place
just before the internet would change everything, and feel an even deeper poignancy in what Sean
is talking about. Like so many others that grew up with the internet, and that are growing
up now in an almost completely digital age, I spent much of my youth, probably too much,
in front of a screen. Not necessarily alone, but still isolated. Having everything within
reach, yet still experiencing it all indirectly. A life lived vicariously through intermediaries.
Not all of this was bad, of course, but it’s a balancing act. And it took me many years to
realize just how much the balance was off, and that no matter how informative or constructive
the vicariously experienced life can be, it can never fully replace the directly experienced one.
It's been about 15 years since I first saw Good Will Hunting. Now, I do know what it smells like
in the Sistine chapel, I’ve seen many beautiful places, transformative places. Most of them
weren’t even that far away. I also know now what it’s like to sit in a hospital room holding
the hand of your loved one, which is a story for another day. The point is, Sean’s words definitely
opened my eyes to the real meaning of experience, of the nature of wisdom and knowledge, and,
in many ways, of the essence of life itself. And perhaps above all, he underscored how
easily we can miss out on all of this, how easily we can fools ourselves that we have
seen it all, that we know it all. We can spend a lifetime living in that pretense, never truly
knowing the world, never truly knowing ourselves. Unless you want to talk about you, who
you are. Then I'm fascinated. I'm in. For that’s ultimately the real reason to care
about all this, right? It’s not about collecting random bits of experiential trivia about places
and things that you can’t read about online or in books, it’s about deepening your own inner
being, it’s about forming your character, getting to know yourself. It’s about becoming a person.
Decades earlier, Ingmar Bergman’s Persona already presented a beautiful articulation of what
is here referred to as the hopeless dream of being. The entire movie feels like an unsettling
fever dream, at once alienating and intimate; drawing you in, only to strip you down, and leave
you dismantled. But as much as the cinematic techniques that achieved this experience, you
know, the unconventional camera movements, the deliberate blocking of the actors, the sound
design, the editing, etcetera, have been applauded and deconstructed over the years, I feel the
words themselves, the language that is used here, has gone somewhat underappreciated as a
vital ingredient in the greater whole. It leads into the broader question here; why do
movie monologues even matter so much to me in the first place? Why dedicate an entire video
to them? After all, cinema is a visual medium, right? As opposed to literature or a stage play,
monologues should matter the least here. It’s like director Denis Villeneuve recently said; “I don’t
remember movies because of a good line, I remember movies because of a strong image … Pure image and
sound, that is the power of cinema,” a statement that recalls similar sentiments from other great
filmmakers, like the Hungarian master Béla Tarr for example, who doesn’t believe movies are
about stories at all. “It's mostly picture, sound, a lot of emotions. The stories are
just covering something.” And you know, I agree. There is a unique potential to cinema in
capturing the human experience beyond what we can express in words, but while it is true that this
experience is one of image, sound, and emotion, it’s also one of language, and more specifically;
of the performing of language. For when it comes to all the monologues that deeply affected me,
that I have come to carry around in my head like mantras to be repeated over and over again, it’s
not just the words themselves that made an impact, it’s also the context in which they were spoken,
and the performer which they were spoken by. They're not real. You get that,
right? None of it is real. It’s been 3 years since the movie Pig came out,
but I still often think about that restaurant scene in which Nicholas Cage’s character
just pierces right through this other guy; a chef who looks like he’s achieved great
success, but who in reality is just living a lie, trying to conform to some image of who he
thinks he should be, without truly being anyone. Every day, you'll wake up, and there'll be less
of you. You live your life for them, and they don't even see you. You don't even see yourself.
Again, the words spoken are undeniably timeless, and beautifully capture a story that, at
its heart, is about passion and attention, and about how easily we can lose sight
of what’s important by mistaking empty calories for nourishment, subsequently finding
ourselves hungry in a world of plenty. But there is just something about the way Nicholas Cage
delivers them, both direct and unrelenting, yet also strangely heartfelt and empathetic, that
gives them that extra layer of gravitas. Like, he’s not trying to get a win, he isn’t
looking to shame this guy. He genuinely wants to make him see, make us see, what he is saying.
We don't get a lot of things to really care about. Sometimes, truth is best conveyed by presenting
it straightforwardly and unavoidably, leaving the audience no space to ignore or to misinterpret
it. This can be somewhat confrontational, like when trying to point out how that shell
you’re hiding in, that pretense that you think you can safely live in, isn’t just tragic
and detrimental to your sense of self, it is also futile, bound to break apart;
But the direct truth can also serve to add pathos and emphasis, to help you understand
the importance of certain experiences, like a young romance that has come to an
end, and is about to determine someone’s relation to love for the rest of their lives.
Right now you may not want to feel anything. Maybe you never wanted to feel anything.
But feel something you obviously did. This conversation between a father and his son
comes from the ending to Call Me By Your Name, the story about a young man named Elio who just
experienced his first love. Set in 1980s Italy, the whole movie has this beautiful dreamlike
atmosphere that just transports you into what almost feels like a different realm, which is
perhaps why it is all the more important that at the end of it, when the summer is over, and
the reality of heartbreak sets in, there is this grounded moment with his father who, as the camera
pulls in and the background noise is drawn out, calmly and thoughtfully reframes his son’s pain
and vulnerability not as a defect to be fixed, but as a profound quality to be cherished.
Right now there is sorrow, pain. Don’t kill it, and with it the joy you felt.
How I loved you. Terrence Malick’s To The Wonder is a strange
movie, one in which the story, insofar as we even speak of a traditional narrative here, is almost
entirely performed through imagery, body language, and scattered thoughts. It’s a movie that feels
out of time, completely unbound from convention, which is probably why it still is such a
polarizing work; people seem to either find something unique within it, something they
connect to deeply, or they find nothing, and bounce back on its complete absence of the
cinematically familiar. Me, I’m somewhere in the middle. It’s not my favorite Terrence Malick
movie, but it has still left a lasting impression on me nonetheless, which, somewhat ironically
given the movie’s many, many beautiful shots, is mainly because of one of its monologues.
We wish to live inside the safety of the laws. We fear to choose. Jesus insists on choice.
Unlike in Good Will Hunting, Pig or Call Me By Your Name, Malick doesn’t put his grand speech
center stage, instead it just kind of fades in, with the words floating somewhere in
the periphery of the wider soundscape, until eventually being drawn out completely by
seemingly irrelevant noise. This is intentional however, for it reflects the larger thematic
struggle that the movie is about, mainly; the disconnection experienced by Ben Affleck’s
character Neil, about him not being in touch with that which matters most, with that which
gives him meaning and purpose. As Jon Baskin wrote in his review; “Never has Malick created
a figure so mute, so obscurely weighted down, as Neil. In conspicuous contrast to the never-ending
movement of the female characters who orbit him, his most characteristic action is to stand and
stare, as if watching the film of his own life.” Now, I was going to immediately circle
back to the monologue in question here, but it was at this point in the script
that a weird realization dawned on me; this is Terrence Malick’s Fight Club. Ok, not
exactly of course, but bear with me for a minute. There is a particular kind of modern commentary
in Fight Club, which the movie boasts through a variety of monologues that you surely remember;
Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we
can buy shit we don't need. For a slightly more updated version, you might
also remember Elliot’s ranting in Mr. Robot; I'm not saying anything new.
We all know why we do this, not because Hunger Games books makes us happy,
but because we wanna be sedated. Because it's painful not to pretend, because we're cowards.
Both speak to a kind of temporal displacement that many people, especially men,
seem to experience in today’s society. We're the middle children of history, man. No
purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual
war... our Great Depression is our lives. They certainly hit on some truth. After all,
if the words didn’t resonate they wouldn’t have been remembered. But as much as I can connect
with their general commentaries, aside from briefly making me feel cooler and edgier, these
monologues have never been truly transformative for me. They didn’t end up giving me a meaningful
path forward, like; they offered a diagnosis, but no real antidote. Because no, Tyler Durden’s
anarchistic cult of space monkeys pretending to have achieved some form of enlightenment
and liberty is, by the movie’s own account, not the answer either. And this is where To
The Wonder did make a difference, or at least; gave me a different, more eloquent perspective
that turned out to be far more constructive in actually achieving some kind of growth.
Malick too shows us the disordering effects of modernity and the way it’s obscuring our
natural connection to the earth, and to true sources of meaning and purpose. In fact, it’s
a recurring theme throughout his filmography; The world’s gone to the dogs. People
are greedy. Keeps getting worse. In his works, this fundamental conflict is
framed as one between the way of the world; materialistic, selfish, dominating, and the way
of grace; of love, compassion and meaningful engagement. Neil, who works for an oil company, is
no ambiguous product of the former, of the modern world. Lost in a haze of failing relationships
and affairs, he stumbles through life aimlessly, chasing some vague desire that never truly
materializes, and that he therefore is never truly able to fulfill. Going back to Baskin’s
review; “Neil has never known what he wants, only that he wants.” And as such, as the review
continues; “[he conveys] the mystery and the inexhaustibility of the Western male’s longing,
divested of particularity and even of conscious motive: truly Weber’s ‘specialists without
spirit, sensualists without heart.’” Though this might read as a condemnation, there is also
a hope here in the acknowledgement that there is genuine longing, a genuine capacity for Neil,
and for all men, to be moved by love, beauty and meaning; it’s just in conflict with the ways of
world, and with the fantasies of social status, and grandeur it offers in particularly to men,
as The Tree of Life also makes more explicit. I wanted to be loved because I
was great, a big man. I’m nothing. And it’s on this note, that Niel’s priest, a
secondary character in the movie, at one point gives a lecture that might as well have been aimed
directly at Neil, and that he could have learned from, if only he was listening. “We wish to live
inside the safety of the laws.” – the priest says, referring here not so much to actual laws but
rather to the broader notion of conventions, comforts, and other artificial obstructions,
false promises and temporary sedatives getting in the way of true meaning – “We fear to
choose. Jesus insists on choice. The one thing he condemns utterly is avoiding the choice.”
To choose is to commit yourself. And to commit yourself is to run the risk, is to run the risk
of failure, the risk of sin, the risk of betrayal. He goes on to explain that Jesus can deal with
all of this, that forgiveness is never denied, and that if you make a mistake you can repent,
but, and this is the part that has always stuck with me, the part that is almost erased by
background noise and must be paid active attention to if you want to even properly
hear it; “But the man who hesitates,” – he says – “who does nothing, who buries his talent
in the earth, with him he can do nothing.” Now, I don’t consider myself a religious person,
but I do find the language and symbols of religion useful as a metaphor. And so even though it
might demand a bit of translating for an atheist or an agnostic person, I think there’s great value
to be found here. Because for starters, to invoke scripture, or any ancient text or philosophy,
is to implicitly remind yourself that whatever particular struggle you are going through is at
its heart, a timeless one, one that is rooted in deeper, more fundamental issues that aren’t solely
predicated on the current state of society. In fact, another way to arrive at this conclusion is
to simply go back in cinematic history, which by now has been around long enough to prove that many
of the what we see as specifically contemporary problems have actually been around for much
longer. The famous monologue at the end of Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator for example,
which was released well over 80 years ago in 1940, may as well have been written yesterday;
Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into
misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that
gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and
unkind. We think too much and feel too little. To be fair, the temporal distance from which
these words are now spoken to us do allow for a more pessimistic interpretation; namely that
this simply means that society still is bad, maybe fundamentally bad. But to me, and this is
where we get to the second reason why the words of the priest resonate so strongly with me,
and the most important thing that separates Malick’s commentary from that of a Fight Club
or a Mr. Robot, is that the universality of this struggle signifies that the real achievement
of purpose and meaning is not so much determined by the state of the world around us as much as it
is determined by our own willingness to take true responsibility for our place in it. In other
words, it’s not just a question of life advice or personal happiness, it’s not just about we
want to do, it’s also about what we have to do, about what is demanded of us. And as such, the
words transform into a question of morality. The director’s cut of Kingdom of Heaven is
not just one of my favorite historical epics, I also believe it’s a genuine masterpiece when
it comes to exploring moral philosophy. Balian, the protagonist, is a character in search of
goodness and virtue. “What man is man who does not make the world better?” – he has engraved in
his workshop. He finds guidance in the principles of knighthood; a code of honor that in its
own right, is already worth remembering; Be without fear in the face of your enemies.
Be brave and upright that God may love thee. Speak the truth always, even if it leads to your
death. Safeguard the helpless and do no wrong. And yet, when I think of Kingdom of
Heaven, it’s another monologue that my attention is drawn towards, one that adds
a vital context to why principles like the ones proposed by the knighthood are so important.
Remember that howsoever you are played or by whom, your soul is in your keeping alone.
In this conversation with King Baldwin, the king prepares Balian for the socio-political
game he is about to enter into, which is pretty much the same game that we all have to take
part in, by reminding him of the more important, the more existential conflict that lies hidden
beneath the surface, the conflict that arises because no matter what our place in life is,
each human being possesses a fundamental inner freedom that cannot be compromised unless we
let it, and that therefore imbues us with an innate demand for personal responsibility.
Even though those who presume to play you be kings or men of power. When you stand
before God, you cannot say, "But I was told by others to do thus," or that virtue was not
convenient at the time. This will not suffice. What he explains here are basically the
principle-based ethics from philosopher Immanuel Kant, which to put it simply; propose that what
is morally right is not determined by the outcome of an action, but rather by the intention that
preceded it, by the principle that was being adhered to. There is obviously a lot more to it
than this, but for the purposes of our discussion here, what matters is that it’s a philosophy that
strives for a pure conscience, one that doesn’t allow us, as Balian is eventually confronted with,
to do a little evil to achieve a greater good. It’s a kingdom of conscience, or nothing.
It’s definitely one of more extreme ethical philosophies, and also one that, despite having
such a seemingly simple premise, is deceptively complicated when it comes to actually bringing it
into practice, which might be the real reason why I’ve always been so fascinated by it. For to
hold one to those principles that, on paper, would lead to a kingdom of conscience if
everyone would follow them, don’t always seem so consequential, or even righteous
when placed in a real world context where such moral simplicity is just never the case.
If God gives us free will, we're responsible for what we do, what we fail to do, aren't we?
Take A Hidden Life for example, another Terrence Malick movie, which beautifully explores
the rather rigid Kantian beliefs and their implications through the true story of Frans
Jägerstätter, a man who refused to serve in Nazi Germany, and who was prosecuted for it.
I want to save my life, but not through lies. By being confronted with a choice between
evil or death, A Hidden Life examines the at times impossible complications of
trying to live by one’s own conscience, and the real cost that doing so might have.
I find no one to turn to. Nothing enters my soul It shows how that which compromises our core
beliefs, that which we can reasonably argue to be evil, might very well be that which is lawful,
it might be what is commonly practiced, commonly believed, or even, what is commonly valued in a
country, a culture, a religion or ideology. And more than that, especially in our modern society,
that which we see as evil, or at the very least, that which compromises the principles that we
would otherwise want to uphold, is very likely that which we, in some way or another, are already
partaking in, and that which feels increasingly difficult, if not downright impossible, to
separate ourselves from, even if we were willing to make significant personal sacrifices.
As such, it’s hard not surrender ourselves to a kind of fatalistic relativism, you know; the idea
that nothing we do makes a meaningful difference, that any attempt of doing something would only
end up making us a hypocrite anyways, and that it’s therefore better to just ignore it all, to
bury our talent in the earth, and to go back to distracting ourselves with the superfluous, go
back to putting up walls, chasing after material gain, false ideals and empty philosophies.
But at the same time, it’s also precisely because of this prevailing sentiment, this ease with
which we can fall back into inaction, unawareness, unbeing, that I find myself coming back to these
movies, back to the words of all these monologues, and to the strength by which they are
delivered, to shake myself out of apathy, to remind myself of what truly matters, what it
is that I’m called upon to do, called upon to be; in personal relationships, in the causes
I believe in, in my general faith in and connection to the world and the people in it.
And whatever form that takes, from more concrete action as an individual or as part of a greater
collective movement in pursuit of systemic change, or a more abstract leap of faith, the dedication
to a belief or an ideal, for me it all begins with We rip out so much of ourselves
to be cured of things faster – You have to struggle with yourself.
… that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty - You’re sitting on a winning lottery ticket -
… and have less to offer each time we start with someone new.
… You’re too much of a pussy to cash it in. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than
cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. I dishonored it all I didn’t notice the glory.
They don’t even know you – You shall love, whether you like it or not.
… because you haven’t shown them. You do what’s in your heart son you’ll be fine.
This video, of course, but barely scratches the surface when it comes to covering all the great
monologues that have, and that still are shaping our worldview, monologues that stir our emotions,
and that we come to carry around with us wherever we go. On this note, there is a wonderful
monologue in Frances Ha, written by Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, which talks about
the strange but beautiful experience of being in a relationship, but which really points to that
general idea of each of us walking around with our own secret worlds of meaning and connection;
It's that thing when you're with someone, and you love them and they know it,
and they love you and you know it… For the rest of the monologue, I’d highly
recommend you check out the full movie, which is now streaming on friend of the
channel and sponsor of today’s video; MUBI. MUBI is a curated cinema streaming
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