Tear Jerkers

Tear Jerkers

I just watched two movies while flying cross-country. The first was on the flight from Norfolk to Atlanta and the second I just finished as we are heading into San Diego. The first one was called Hard Miles with Matthew Modine. It tells the story of a teacher and his four juvenile delinquent students who are taking a therapeutic bicycle trip to the Grand Canyon. The pathos runs thick between the struggles of the small rehabilitation school for teens to stay alive against state funding cuts, Modine’s parental angst with his dying father who is in a hospice near the Canyon, and then the four individual stories of the young men who are struggling to position themselves to make something of their lives. It was a true story. The second one was the story of a young girl who needs a liver transplant to survive and how a random and somewhat personally wounded hairdresser decides to take on their cause and both raise all the money for their medical bills, but also enable the transplant by organizing a plane and a helicopter to get her to the hospital in time. Its called Ordinary Angels and stars Hilary Swank as the hairdresser. It too is a true story. Both had happy endings of a sort. The only casualty seems to have been the school, which eventually did close due to insufficient funding.

I have always been a sucker for a good tear jerker movie and am always more impressed when it comes from a true story. I guess that’s a combination of the storyteller in me and the soft-touch liberal that I am. I have been trying to think about silver linings to all of what we are witnessing on the political front these days. Between the outcome of the debate, news of the fundraising shifts to the right and now the pronouncements from SCOTUS today, I would say that there are a lot of Democrats and otherwise liberal-leaning people like myself that are feeling like we are watching a very bad and scary movie rather than the processes of our constitutional democracy. I can think of few things more dramatic and emotion-packed than the issues we are seeing unfold before out eyes every day across the country and the world. The women’s reproductive health stories alone are tear jerkers of the ultimate order. The erstwhile immigrant family stories are too numerous to recite. And now the stories of average citizens wondering whether there will be a place in this country if the MAGA crowd takes over, are just getting started. The perspectives on events could not be more diametrically opposed, and that is the makings of great pathos.

One of the shows I have not followed for the two prior seasons it has run and which others including my own children tell me is as good as any they have seen is the FX series The Bear. Whatever the opposite of a foodie is would best describe me and my relationship to fine cuisine. That is probably why I have not watched more than an episode or two of the show up until now. Before leaving Norfolk this morning I downloaded all of Seasons 2 and the new Season 3 episodes, intending to watch and catch up to see what all the fuss is about. But I got looped into those two tear jerker movies I mentioned and the downloads are sitting where they lie in my Hulu box on my iPad. But tonight, as Kim and I are thinking about what to watch other than Jen Psaki and Rachel Maddow talk more and more and more about the SCOTUS immunity decision, we both agreed that we needed a break from real life now that we are home again, so I thought of The Bear. Kim has faithfully watched both of the first two seasons, but has not started the third. I agreed that I would jump right into Season 3 because I understand the fundamental backstory of a Chicago cooking family that loses one of its faithful to the New York world of Haut Cuisine, only to have him come back upon the death of his brother to reboot the family common-man eatery and turn it into the restaurant of his dreams. I have been watching the opening Season 3 episode for 20 minutes now and it is less about dialogue and story and more about restaurant imagery and culture. In fact, the episode ends with hardly a bit of dialogue and only the story that could be gleaned from the imagery. That cinematic risk-taking alone is reason for me to continue watching this series.

I have asked both Kim and my son what the guiding theme of The Bear is and have yet to get an answer. What I am noting in the extraordinarily long introduction to this third season is that the main protagonist, Carmen, is writing down the lessons he is learning while chopping, peeling and scrubbing his way through the restaurant world. You might never guess that he is talking about the restaurant business with the generalities he is extracting from his labors. They are what Carmen calls the “non-negotiables”.They are the same lessons that one might extract from one’s time in kindergarten if one were paying enough attention. In other words, they are universal truths of life.

This contrast of the seeming high importance of what is happening constitutionally in our country, the life and death drama of everyday people as told in these tear jerker movies and what my son Thomas eventually tells me is “the beautifully grueling reality and humanity of the service business” as portrayed in a perfectly aligned series of peas on a plate in one Chicago restaurant seeking its first Michelin star, is an interesting blend of thoughts to me. I find myself crying for different reasons about all three. I cry for the future of our country, the country I have loved fervently since my early days as an expatriate child desperately wanting to return home to the American way of life. I cry for all the people in the country who struggle to make a life for themselves, whether they are children of immigrants torn between the slippery slope of life on the streets or the struggling working man who cannot afford the health care his family desperately needs no matter how bulging his muscles might be. I also cry for the youth of America that are torn between menial service jobs and getting an education with all the incumbent student debt attached only to find that the best they can do is a slightly different menial service job. In many ways The Bear seems to me to be about today’s diverse youth and the effort by them to find beauty and satisfaction in the art of feeding the privileged few who have found a place in capitalism to garner far more than they probably deserve. There is bad out in the dining room and bad inside the kitchen and I think what it should remind us all is that that is how it has always been and will always be (allowing for times of slight improvement or regression). The secret may be to retain our humanity and appreciation for beauty in its many forms. Every situation, every circumstance, every age and every place holds its share of good and evil and beauty and ugliness. All we can each do is seek out the good and beautiful wherever it lies and shed tears for the effects of evil and ugliness when it presents itself. The bottom line is that life is a tear jerker. There is great sadness and great joy in overcoming it, but neither happens if we don’t keep on truckin’.