the natural
the thing is, it's not just The Natural thing. it's me crying at This little light as well, for the very same reason, or crying at Rosie's superkids who have survived child labor and homelessness to be rewarded with full tuition scholarships so they can fullfill their goals and it's that crying so often comes about from these things, from these very same feelings that gets to me. so. here are the excerpts and maybe they say something or maybe i just liked it. yeah.
november 11, 1999
"read a bit. watched some more real world episodes that i had missed. discovered that the natural, an extremely sentimental early 80's baseball movie with robert redford that i absolutely adore was on. by the time the ending came up, with it's slow motion, and the baseball hitting the arena lights causing electrical explosions while redford home-runs i had both gene and gabriel watch it. i sniffled, gabriel shook his head, and gene rolled his eyes. I CAN'T HELP IT. i love baseball movies. sniff sniff."
Prozac Nation - elizabeth wurtzel
p. 201
(context: author finds herself crying at a figure skater who skates a perfect performance)
"I am still crying long after the broadcast is over, and I realize these are not tears of joy at all. These are, in fact, the same tears I cry when I see Gorbachev on the nightly news and know that this man has changed the world as we know it and that he proves that one man can make a difference.
These are the same tears I cry when I hear the gospel song that goes This little light of mine, I'm gonna make it shine, and I think of the way that ordinary people are able to triumph, in ways small and large, over adversity.
And I remember being in junior high and crying this way for hours after seeing Robert Redford in The Natural, crying over the way determination and conviction can make a simple baseball player do supernatural things. The tears pour down after the movie as I eat dinner with my mother at Sbarro in Times quare on a Friday evening, and she demands to know what I am so upset about. And all I can say, over and over again, is that he's a natural, he's a natural, it's such a gift to be a natural, it is such a responsibility, it is so hard to be a natural.
And then my mother says, because she seems to understand, "You relate to this, Ellie, don't you?"
I nod my head, yes.
"You relate to this because you're a natural too?"
Yes, I want to tell her, and maybe I even do say that, but I am crying because whatever my gifts, the pieces of good buried inside and under so much that I feel is bad, is wrong, is twisted, are less clear than the ability to hit a ball with a bat and break the scoreboard or do a triple pirouette in the air on ice. My gifts are for life itself, for an unfortunately astute understanding of all the cruelty and pain in the world. My gifts are unspecific. I am an artist manque, someone full of crazy ideas and grandiloquent needs and even a little happiness, but with no particular way to express it.
I am a little like the title character in the film Betty Blue, the woman who is so full of... so full of... so full of something or other -- it is unclear what, but a definite energy that can't find it's medium -- who pokes her own eyes out with a scissors and is murdered by her lover in an insane asylum in the end. She is, and I am becoming, a complete waste. So I cry at the end of The Natural.
And here I am, years later, when it is supposed to be clear that I am a writer, that it is through words that I will escape this sense of having no art form, and it is Saturday night, and instead of being out at a party in Adams House or seeing a double feature of Preston Sturges flicks at the Brattle Theatre or just smoking grass with my friends, I am lying in bed in the infirmiry watching TV on a Saturday Night."
images � jennie alibasic (except when not)