Life's Like a Movie

Life's Like a Movie

Article by Charles E.J. Moulton

***

"Life's like a movie, write your own ending. Keep believing, keep pretending. We've done just what we set out to do. Thanks to the lovers, the dreamers and you."

- Jim Henson, "The Muppet Movie"

***

We loved "The Muppets". Like "Dallas" on Saturday evenings, "The Muppets" on Friday evenings were a must. We watched the show with Rowlfe the dog and Sam the eagle and Miss Piggy, me and my folks sitting on a fold-out-couch that we called Clothilde. You see, everything had a name in our home back then. The clock was Gustaf. The car was Ludde and the couch was Clothilde. Our friends. The things had to go. The memory remains. Like in the movies, the memory is what counts. It's the stuff that dreams are made of.

Making a family date to go see "The Muppet Movie" in the cinema when it came out was a given. It was when my life became a road movie. Fozzie the bear and Kermit the frog driving in their car toward Hollywood singing "Moving Right Along" became our theme song. My Dad and me, whenever we were on the road, made it our Club 31 theme song.

The finale of the movie seemed so fitting for me. "Life's like a movie", they sang and I thrilled at the idea. And as I watched all the Bond movies in the non-stop cinema in Gothenburg, I began realizing that I felt like all the superheroes I loved.

By the end of "The Muppet Movie", Kermit the frog and his Muppet friends sang words that made an impression on me. Life was like a movie, they sang. From then on, after that day in the cinema with my Mom and Dad, I saw truths in movies everywhere and I saw the truth in storytelling persay. I saw that writers brought bits of themselves into their stories. Like in all creativity, I realized art always mirrored reality. The Mona Lisa might have been a reflection on Da Vinci's inborn femininity.
Stonehenge an hommage to the Gods and "Stairway to Heaven" Jimmy Page's bridge between paganism and religion. In fact, every decision everyone made was creative. Researcher Desmond Morris claimed that the most boring accountant at some point had to choose a tie. In all the deep philosophical issues, the spiritual awakenings and life lessons that I have been honored to obtain, I had seen that all that I had gone through was universal for every person. Every marital problem, every teenage crisis, every midlife problem, it was experienced by everyone. When we tell stories, we tell them for everyone.

Aren't we all a little bit like Ethan Hunt? We are all Lone Rangers out on our own little "Mission Impossible", fighting our cause, trying to solve an issue that gave us goosebumps as children and sent us into turmoil. So we battle our own inner villains and try to find our peace in the end. We dive into our subconscious to find out when we started becoming so complicated and search for the right moment when our lives skewed into this tangent. If we find the moment, does the problem dissolve or do we have to decipher it like a ticking bomb and if so, do we take off the mask and reveal our true identity, turning Ethan Hunt into Tom Cruise? If so, do we then sing "Charades" from "Grease 2" as an encore?

We are indeed "Maze Runners", runners trying to get out of the labyrinth.

In some ways, we are also "Alice in Wonderland". We fall into holes of guilt and retribution, schizophrenically discussing with neurotic personalities and trying to cure them with diabetic treats.

But we can also describe ourselves as little Marty McFly's, our weaknesses creating little involuntary sidetracks into alternate realities. We don't have to go "Back to the Future" to find that out. We might even be little George McFly's, at times total losers misunderstood by our friends, laughing at jokes no one understands and at other times successful professionals serving our tennis balls like Wimbledon winners. Or are we insecure car mechanics like Biff Tannen or arrogant golddiggers like Biff in his alternate reality? Or as crazy as Doc Brown? One moment can define our lives as the moment we decipher. The moment the almanac was robbed or the moment the fuze line got penetrated by an arrow.

If deciphering the moments that sent us into turmoil are the reasons for the dramatic narrative, can we find ourselves in weird situations like Charlton Heston in "The Planet of the Apes", realizing we travelled into our distant future, misinterpreted by bigot judges, fighting doomed causes? This might give us reason to scream back at those damn filthy apes, trying to escape the apocalypse.

We might want to visit the world of "Yesterday" in that reality where The Beatles never were famous, being able to revive songs of love in a parallel reality that never saw them.

Maybe we meet someone that flabbergasts us like no one ever has before. But our families will have nothing of the liaison. And so we end up sacrificing ourselves like Jack and Rose on the "Titanic".

Or perhaps we met that certain someone while our spouses were away, meeting on the "Bridges of Madison County". Perhaps we remember that encounter for the rest of our lives precisely because it was fleeting.

Fleeting is also the summer romance of high school teenagers. Were you about 17 years old when you were on the beach in Malibu with your sweetheart and were you equally surprised to see that sweetheart in your high school later that year? Well, then you might have been singing about your "Summer Nights" and that this sweetheart was "The One That I Want". Maybe you even put some "Grease" in your hair to look good enough for her.

Or were you a pampered southern belle who just couldn't get the right guy because of your temper, even bossing around the greatest man you ever found until he "frankly couldn't give a damn"? Maybe you had to fight for his love if he wouldn't be "Gone with the Wind".

But what if we keep on running? Then we will be like "Forrest Gump" making friends in high places and giving people ideas for slogans as we run.

As we comb through the stories from films, we realize that stories go in circles. Hamlet is actually James Dean. Casanova Petrucchio is James Bond without the Walter PKK. The plot changes. The stories are the same. It boils down to love.

And we are left with Lex Luthor's words in Richard Donner's "Superman" from 1978. A man can read "War and Peace" and see it as simple adventure novel and someone else will read the ingredients of a chewing gum wrapper and unravel the secrets of the universe.

If it were about what culture has a high social status, then life would look very different. Some of the greatest mass murderers of history were academics and some of the most healing souls on Earth didn't have any diplomas. Mozart was called incompetent. Fred Astaire couldn't dance, according to the critics. Back in the 1980s, the group Spandau Ballet were downsized as mediocre pretty-boys. All of the members were trained musicians and their song "Through the Barricades" was an hommage to a deceased friend in an attack on Northern Ireland. Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Elton John, Mika, Neil Sedaka, Annie Lennox, Billy Joel and Barry Manilow are all artistic academics. Having said that, some of greatest works of art in history were created by people who never ever set foot in a school and whose art started out being ridiculed. Is classical music really the way we should judge all other music? Is Shakespeare really the epitome of theater? Why can't we ourselves decide what is high art? Mr. Mister's "Broken Wings", originally written about cocaine addiction, entails the most beautiful lines in music: "Take these broken wings and learn to fly again." And in the video, we see Richard Page's face blend in with an eagle landing in a church. This from a man who grew up singing religious music in his parents community.

When you encounter fear with love, the monster becomes a teddy bear and the story you tell ends with a sunrise. And the fear becomes an illusion.

What would your movie be like?

Your inner hero thrives and rides into the sunrise just like Indiana Jones. In the end, we are all the heroes of our own spectacular blockbuster.