The Bucket List & The Writer's Oath

So yesterday we talked about the primacy of love and how the best part is the anticipation - the yearning for it and how that needs to be built in to your script on every page so that we just - can't - hardly - wait to see the couple you know, be a couple. And stuff. Library scene in ATONEMENT. Oh my goodness, pass me some ice.

Today the Wave-inatrix thought we'd take a 180 - or is it? - and talk about death and dying. By rights, all Rouge Wavers should, in solidarity with all which is intelligent, clever and authentic, go throw a nice, ironic as hell bucket of paint on any billboard you see for the lamentably god-awful BUCKET LIST. A terribly trite, completely cliched, skin-deep look at what you'd do if you knew you were dying - and you were super rich!

Recently, I spent some time with a good friend whom I hadn't seen in awhile. I knew she had cancer, but I hadn't heard the update. You see what's coming. We're driving down Fairfax when she says, rather off-handedly, it's in my bones. Stage four. A silence engulfed the car - as if all possibility for conversation had been sucked out the window. I gripped the steering wheel and was suddenly keenly aware of the traffic, the pedestrians, anything but what was being said. She went on talking about her teenaged daughters, and how they're dealing with it, etc. And all the while, I struggled with the elephant in the putative room - how long? Finally, after five minutes, aka an eternity of wrestling with what's polite in this situation, what is caring versus what is prying, what is needed here...I asked. The doctors said two to three years - two years ago. Silence.

What struck me later - no, really, even in the moment, is how terribly difficult death is to talk about when you're really, truly lookin' right at it. It's not an abstract, it's not a bucket list, it's the friend sitting next to you, who looks tired and who's voice is a bit dry these days.

Now, there's absolutely no need for me to enumerate why and how THE BUCKET LIST was a symbolic bucket of chum filled with easy observations, simple conclusions and sitting on top of a pyramid in Egypt - no, that would be easy pickins. Like taking candy from that freaked out baby in POTEMPKIN.

But folks, if you're watching a movie about death - if you don't feel the wind sucked out of your chest while you're watching - if you don't feel the absolute emptiness and difficulty of facing it - then you're watching crap.

Now the question becomes, as writers, how do we talk about death in a meaningful, moving, very real way - if we haven't really been around it? Or maybe we have. But it's a landscape, that closely examined - we pull away from. Sure, death can be funny, we can always laugh at death as a coping mechanism - DEATH BECOMES HER, WEEKEND AT BERNIE'S, etc. ad fun-um.

But if you're writing a movie about death, in all seriousness, this is the time, above all, when the writer's oath must be absolutely hewn to: Above all, endeavor to write of truth. One of my favorite novellas about death - well, my absolute favorite novella about death, actually, is The Death of Ivan Illych by Leo Tolstoy.

And, just off the top of my not-enough-coffee head, here are a few movies that either were centered around the topic or which had scenes dealing with it that were very memorable to me:

ORDINARY PEOPLE
TERMS OF ENDEARMENT
THE HOURS
LOVE STORY
BEFORE NIGHT FALLS
THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY
FINDING NEVERLAND

The list could be much longer but again with the need for more coffee. See, the Wave-inatrix has to get up pretty early in the morning to greet the day for Rouge Wavers before moving on to the brass tacks of the day. Wavers probably have a mighty list of other movies dealing with death in ways great and small that were truthful and memorable. Feel free to list in comments.

Back to the car. With my friend. She's looking at the window, as we drive past The Silent Movie Theater and the flea market, scenes of LA life drifting by the window. I've lost a lot of friends, you know? She looked at me. It's not like in the movies, where everybody gathers around you. People are afraid to talk to me. I turned down the radio and took a deep breath. So - are you scared? And volumes of feelings came out of my friend, so relieved that somebody - anybody was willing to pry a little, to dig a little deeper, and find out more about how it feels to know you're going to die before your kids graduate from high school.

And it was a terribly difficult conversation to be a part of. And yet beautiful as well. Because she spoke of the truth of things. Of how it really, honest-to-god feels to know the clock is ticking such that last Christmas probably was the last one you'll ever see. Our conversation was sad, funny, touching and real. And when we parted ways, she held me and wept. And I went home and felt heavy as Davy Jones at the bottom of the sea. But I knew I had just experienced something really real that day. I had experienced something of the truth.

And that is why being a writer is so very hard on us, guys, because we feel these truths more deeply than other people. I truly believe that we are wired differently. But with that wiring, with that depth of feeling and observation combined with a deftness with words comes a responsibility - above all, endeavor to write of truth.

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