#8: "Well, I say, f*#$ therapy!"

If you've been keeping track, I turned 30 and completely laid this project to rest only 7 posts in.  Around Thanksgiving, I figured maybe I could finished it before the year is over.  I'd have to average a little more than two posts per day.  Unlikely to say the least.

The age of 30 itself is an arbitrary milestone--as random a number as 27 or 44.  And so I will eschew all goals and deadlines for this project and merely write them as time and inspiration permit.  People who think I was overreacting to this birthday fail to realize that dissatisfaction with one's life, i.e. a crisis, can come at any age, that it need not be qualified by mid- or quarter- or other timeline defining term.  As I wrote of in the previous post about "Freaks & Geeks", the trepidation of coming-of-age stories for those high school students resonated with me more fully not until my late twenties.  In that same manner, the sadness of Miles Raymond--a failed writer in his forties, two or so years removed from a divorce--hit me where I lived in Alexander Payne's Sideways.


Sideways takes place during a weekend trip through the California wine country as Miles helps best friend Jack celebrate one last hurrah before he gets married.  For Miles, a wine aficionado, the trip is simply to enjoy the wine and relax away from his job as a middle-school English teacher.  For Jack, it's an excuse to get away and sow his wild oats before finally settling down.  That particular relationship loudly rang true for me when that movie was released.  At the time I had a bit of a falling out with a close friend, whose selfishness reminded me of Jack's. While I was busy being like Miles--wondering if my writing will ever get read or if that girl will ever like me back, my friend was like Jack--wild as ever, in what would also be the lead up to his inevitable settling down (though I don't know if anyone, including himself, knew that at the time).  Since Miles knows wine country like it was his own backyard vineyard, he has his favorite places--including a favorite restaurant/bar and, more importantly, a favorite waitress, Maya.  In typical fashion, he sort of secretly pines for her, but doesn't give it more than a second thought, dismissing the idea that it could even remotely happen between them.  Jack, on the other hand, picks up the first hot bartender he eyes and also, later, a not-so-hot waitress, well, just because I guess.  That dynamic is not a far cry from that relationship with my friend.  In an article reacting to the critical reaction of the film, New York Times critic A.O. Scott discusses one of the major differences between the two friends:

The contrast between him and his friend Jack is partly the difference between an uptight, insecure epicurean and a swinging, self-deluding hedonist, but it is more crucially the difference between a sensibility that subjects every experience to judgment and analysis and a personality happy to accept whatever the moment offers.

It can sometimes be difficult to enjoy much of life when you are prone to critique it in some measure, even more so when that critical acumen isn't just applied to wine or movies or society, but piercingly onto yourself.

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The great scene in the film, or at least the one that seems to get the most discussion, is a conversation between Miles and Maya after they have what is essentially a double date with Jack and Stephanie, one of the servers at a winery.  Back at Stephanie's house, while she and Jack sneak off for a little nookie, Miles and Maya talk about how much they love wine.  It's simple to understand that, while they pontificate (elegantly and touchingly, I should add), Miles and Maya are really talking about themselves.  Again from Scott:

Criticism always contains an element of autobiography, and it is not much of a leap to suggest that more than a few critics have seen themselves in Sideways.

A couple of years back I discussed on this blog a similar issue, asking what movies define you.   What we like, the things we watch and listen to, the things we read and buy, go a long way in defining us and how we present ourselves to the world.  It's why we hold these objects so personally, why we wear them as some sort of badge of honor.  It's also why we are embarrassed to admit to liking certain guilty pleasures.  So even outside of the critical or scholarly realm Scott suggests, our consumption of culture as merely patrons of the arts is an almost autobiographical pursuit.

The argument for mindless entertainment, whether it be insignificant pop music or tent pole blockbuster summer movies, is that it allows us to escape--to get away.  But I think the reason we fervently like certain songs or movies or TV shows or books is that it affords us some kind of connection, not just with something out in the world at large, but one with ourselves.  Good or bad, it has a resonance that belies the apparent fleetingness of what passes before our eyes and ears.  It has a way of galvanizing and distilling the things about what makes us, in the end, human.  And like a fine wine, it can be enjoyed with friends, give solace in a quiet moment by yourself, and, in the elite instances, often gets better with age.