It all comes down to Cinderella

I watched Field of Dreams tonight. My son and I were looking for a good movie and this one didn’t have people killing each other like Star Warz or Lord of the Things.

As I watched this, I was thinking that here’s a nobody guy who has something really amazing happen to him. He’s never farmed in his life and seems to be just stumbling blindly through it. Then starts hearing voices in his cornfield. Then he plows under his crops and builds a baseball diamond. Then ghosts of dead ball players come to play ball there, including his dead father. And as the bank is about to foreclose, thousands of people are already lining up to watch baseball at $20 a pop.

Then I realized that tons of movies are like that. You know, a nobody who discovers or stumbles upon something magical that makes them special:

Cinderella: Miserable nobody escapes evil abusive family through a magical gift
Harry Potter: Orphan living with evil relatives has a special ability and destroys the most evil wizard ever
Lord of the Rings: Most defenseless creature in Middle Earth gets all powerful weapon and saves the world
Star Wars (first series) - Nobody kid living with relatives learns to develop magical powers and destroys the most evil power in the universe (see Harry Potter)
Star Wars (new series) - Child slave escapes from slavery and discovers he has special abilities that later turn him into the (second) most powerful person in the universe
Pretty Woman - Whore meets a millionaire and gets to live the rich life without having sex with more than one person
Goonies (remember Goonies?) - Orphans who are being kicked out of their foster home find a giant treasure hidden under the city
Dune - Son of the Duke whose father is killed and he’s banished to the desert, discovers he the Messiah and takes over a planet (and ultimately the universe)

I know there are others. I just can’t think of them right now.

Maybe that’s what its all about. Maybe we just like that story line. We want to all think that there’s something magical inside us or going to happen to us and then we’ll be better than we really appear to be. I think that’s why we buy lottery tickets, hoping for that magical thing to happen.

It ain’t gonna happen.

Don’t get me wrong, I want it to happen, but let’s be honest with ourselves. There’s not going to be a knight on a white to showing up at the door to take the women away to live in a castle. Nobody on a flying motorcycle is going to tell you that you have magical powers that nobody told you about. And the simple truth is that even if the entire country were reading this right now, only a handful of you are going to win the lottery.

There’s a marvelous quote from the movie “Being There” with Peter Sellers (mentally challenged guy stumbles into the world of the rich and powerful and becomes a nominee for president). At the end of the movie, at the funeral of one of the main characters, they are reading quotes by him. One read “Life is a losing proposition. We enter naked and leave naked, and no accountant can balance it in your favor.” Or something like that.

Kinda dreary. I know.

In the book The Pigman, there’s a riddle/story. It goes like this (paraphrasing):

A man and a woman live by a river with a bridge going over it. The husband tells his wife that he must go on a journey. The wife begs him to take her with him because she knows she will become lonely and will be unfaithful to him with the miller across the river. He tells her she will only in the way and she will have to stay.

A few days after he is gone, the wife can take it no longer and goes across the bridge over the river to the miller’s house. There they do the sort of things that unfaithful people do.

The woman is looking out the window of the miller’s house and smoking a cigarette, when she sees her husband coming home in the distance. She frantically dresses and runs from the miller’s house and heads across the bridge.

But, on the bridge is an assassin who will kill her if she tries to cross.

So she runs down the river a bit and sees a boatman. “Help! Please! You must take me across the river! My husband is coming and an assassin will kill me on the bridge!”

“Ofcourse, says the boatman. That will be $100.”
“A hundred dollars!” she shreaked “I haven’t got that much money!”
“I’m sorry. No money, no crossing in my boat.”

So she ran back to the miller’s house and begged him to give her $100.
“I’m sorry, but that is your problem. I cannot be responsible for your poor financial planning.”

Now she could see her husband is close. So, in a desperate attempt she charges across the bridge in a burst of force and fury, directly at the assassin standing in the middle of the bridge.

And he kills her instantly.

Now the question in the book was: How would you rank how responsible each is for the woman’s death?
The woman who was unfaithful to her husband and went across the river in the first place?
The husband who knew his wife would be unfaithful, yet left her alone anyway?
The assassin who killed her on the bridge?
The miller who refused to pay for her boat ride to save her life from the assassin?
The boatman who refused to take her across without payment?

There’s really no “correct”? answer but the book says that each person in the story represents a different thing in our life and we ranked them according to importance.
The woman - fun
The husband -love
The miller - sex
The boatman - magic
The assassin -money

There really was a point to putting this story in here but over the course of writing it my train of though completely derailed. Anyway, I think I was thinking that we are responsible for ourselves and no magic is going to bail us out of our miserable lives. It won’t happen. You dig in and push where you are and that’s it. If you make it, you make it, if you don’t, you don’t, and a hundred years from now, nobody is going to really give a damn about anything you or I did here. They won’t even know what the heck we were talking about.

So, uh, live it up and try not to screw things up along the way.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 2nd, 2007 at 10:04 pm and is filed under Childish Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.