My Two-Cents: Death, Taxes, Etc.
One of my favorite movies as a kid was Little Miss Sunshine. I still get extreme nostalgia whenever I watch it – as I’m instantly transported back to a family movie night in my basement at home. This feeling is so poignant that I don’t find myself watching it a lot; I can’t handle it! There is Carbon monoxide, Nitrogen Dioxide, Cyanide, and the far more potent gas of nostalgia. It makes my stomach tingle and turn in a way I can’t quite put my finger on – and that’s why I despise it. But recently, I went against my better intuition and watched this movie. And there were a couple of parts that stuck a cord with me.
Towards the end, Steve Carrel’s character gives a short monologue to his nephew – who was mute for most of the movie but begins talking again. On another note, his first word after his 9-month self-proclaimed silence was FUUUUUUCKKKK, which I thought was valid. And easy to resonate with – these people knew how to make a relatable movie! Back to Carrel’s monologue –
Dwayne : I wish I could just sleep until I was eighteen and skip all this crap-high school and everything-just skip it.
Frank : Do you know who Marcel Proust is?
Dwayne : He's the guy you teach.
Frank : Yeah. French writer. Total loser. Never had a real job. Unrequited love affairs. Gay. Spent 20 years writing a book almost no one reads. But he's also probably the greatest writer since Shakespeare. Anyway, he uh... he gets down to the end of his life, and he looks back and decides that all those years he suffered, Those were the best years of his life, 'cause they made him who he was. All those years he was happy? You know, total waste. Didn't learn a thing. So, if you sleep until you're 18... Ah, think of the suffering you're gonna miss. I mean high school? High school-those are your prime suffering years. You don't get better suffering than that.
Maybe this bitch was onto something. There’s also the possibility that he wasn’t. (That’s the debacle of probability – it’s 50/50! It either happens, or it doesn’t. Which signifies 50/50, in my deep-diving, poor-witted statistical analysis.) This movie is the full package cinema experience: the miasma of nostalgia it drenches me in, the biting humor, the existential unraveling of its characters. Like this gem —
Richard: Sarcasm is just losers trying to bring winners down to their level.
Frank (sarcastically): Wow, Richard, you've really opened my eyes to what a loser I am. How much do I owe you for those pearls of wisdom?
Frank wasn’t the only one who was (1) a sarcastic asshole and (2) learning something against his will. On this rewatch, the wisdom pearl that stuck with me was the good stuff is really the shitty stuff.
We like to think in absolutes. We like constants. And according to Benjamin Franklin, there are only two: Death and Taxes. But I’m willing to bet that Ben — who was too busy trying to get struck by lightning, or at least that's all I remember about him from K12 — missed a few.
The third constant? Bars. No matter where you go, bars are always the same. The same dim lighting, the same questionable life choices unfolding in real-time. This is both a gift and a curse, depending on your outlook and your average level of intoxication. (It would have been a gift for Ben, as he wouldn’t have spent so much time standing in the rain with a metal pole if he discovered his local tavern and brandy. )
The fourth? Misery. In some way or another, you will experience it. You can’t outrun it. It will chase you down like a cop after a donut. (Which reminds me — the next ns2c post will be about the negative consequences of stereotypes!) And when it catches you, it will feel exactly how you expect — miserable. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe Little Miss Sunshine wasn’t just nostalgic; it was spot on. The worst moments — the ones we want to fast-forward through — are the ones that end up meaning the most. And that’s why nostalgia hits so hard -- it forces us to sit with what we’ve survived, what shaped us, and what we’ve left behind.
And to that, I say FUUUUUUCKKKK
