Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about bravery. Bravery and cowardice. More specifically, a weird habit, or tic, or routine I've formed, where I analyze everything I do over the course of the day through that lens. Is it a brave action, or a cowardly one? I don’t think this is a healthy way to think of one’s own life.

I think this habit has formed as a result of two large churning forces in my life right now1. The first of these forces has been that of writing fiction/screenplay: my efforts to do it more, to think about it more, to have it consume my life as wholly as it can. I feel that it has a Tetris effect on my experience of the world, the way a really stylized movie2 will affect the way you see and move and think for the rest of the day after you’ve finished it. All of the instruction I’ve received about creating narrative from books on craft and theater classes and shitty YouTube video essays, about character motivations and arcs and beat sheets and needs and wants, it all starts to get projected onto my own life and actions. It’s like that feeling that I’m not sure has a name: of life imitating art imitating life3.

I rewatched Interstellar a couple of weeks ago at AMC Lincoln Square on the big IMAX film projector. These next two sentences spoil part of the plot of Interstellar, so I've redacted them. Highlight them with your mouse to read if you've seen Interstellar or if you don't care about spoilers. That morning, on the train into the city, I saw a tweet proclaiming Matt Damon’s character in the movie as “possibly the greatest coward ever committed to film.” I thought of that Tweet as I was watching that climactic stretch of the movie, of a man putting his own fear of death over the fate of all of civilization. Was this the pinnacle of cowardice, as far as we could stretch its parameters?

It made me think of Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life, which tries to stretch the parameters of bravery, in the opposite direction, to its extremes. It depicts an act of bravery that brings only a life of suffering for its do-er, benefits no one, is wholly private in that it will be remembered and/or celebrated by no one, and is done solely because it is the right thing to do.

But do these two really represent the poles of this bravery-cowardice spectrum? I consider the combination of the two, an act of cowardice that is completely private, will only ever be known as such by its do-er. How many of these have we all committed? How many have I committed today alone?

This brings me to the second slushee drum churning into my life right now. I’ve been living a very private, isolated, structureless life since graduating, living under my parent’s roof, unemployed4, trying to imagine how to carve out a life for myself as a writer/artist/filmmaker, a life in which the only thing keeping me accountable is myself5, a life that presents its liver with boundless opportunity for private failures, acts of cowardice, but also private victories, acts of bravery.

Do you live a life defined by bravery, or cowardice? Let me know in the comments! Thanks for reading Alantown :)

1. As I write this, I am picturing the ICEE machine at the movie theater, with its dual clear churning barrels of slushed drink, one red and one blue. And I always ask the person if they can mix the two colors for me. And if they feel like being my friend, they flit back and forth between the two streams of slushee and make an intricately mixed drink for me, and if they don’t they just fill the bottom half of the cup with one color and the top half with the other. Anyways…

2. This was a really seminal youtube film video essay to me when almost all of my film education came from YouTube film video essays. Sometimes it feels like that was the purest time of my love for the movies, when I would search out all the various white dudesa who would make videos like this and soak up everything they had to say without discernment. It was sad to get a little older and realize so many of the people making videos like these were so stupidb. Nerdwriter was totally right with this video, though. I watched Girl With a Dragon Tattoo for the first time last month and totally felt my reality Fincher-fied for hours after. Most recently, I’ve been Tetris-effect-ed by Disco Elysium, which has a very idiosyncratic text-based dialogue system that looks like this. I bought Disco Elysium impulsively during the Steam Holiday Sale and got the stomach flu last week and played it for too many hours a day in Megan’s bed while they were at work. Now sometimes when I talk it feels like I am picking my own dialogue options.

a. all white dudes except for Every Frame a Painting, who is Asian and also coincidentally the best of them.
b. karsten runquist

3. Like when me and Meg, in the midst of a fight, got a flat tire on Eda’s car outside the pancake diner, and an old old man, obviously a regular who spent many afternoons sitting at his booth looking out the window onto the freeway, noticed our flat and came out to the parking lot and taught me out how to use a scissor jack and change the flat, and then went to go sit in his car to watch and make sure we drove away safely. And as we drove home on the spare feeling so calmed and recentered I thought, “this feels like a movie.” But then whatever movie I was thinking of was made to feel like real-life moments like this. Or when you look at a beautiful view and think it looks like a painting: a painting painted to look like a beautiful view.

4. I am very, very fortunate to be able to do this.

5. That, and also my weekly writing accountability meeting with Jabez.