Day 3: What to Watch When You're Under Quarantine
This is America: There's plenty of wheat bread at the grocery store, but good luck finding hotdog buns...
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There’s a Latin word, farrago, which literally means animal feed or the contents of a feedbag for a horse. Idiomatically, it means something closer to a mixed bag—the good and the bad all jumbled together—which must be consumed all at once. (Nearby in my Oxford Latin Dictionary is another wonderful word, fartum, which means a “sausage” or “the stuffing.”) This word—farrago—is rather wonderful. If you’re the horse in this idiom, you don’t get to choose the tasty bits out of the bag. It’s strapped to your face and you just have to get on with it.
In a way, we are all served a farrago every day. Yes, the headlines are awful, empty grocery store shelves are grim, and social distancing is really cramping nightlife in a lot of cities. Yet there are good things every day as well. Mary Florence (my better half) has a new cousin who is joining the world today. The trees are budding and the flowers are blooming in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. Every parent I’ve spoken to in the last two days—in between praising the hard work of teachers—has mentioned that they’re enjoying getting to play outside with their children. And as you can see here, Guapo the Dog is taking this opportunity to take a break from the rat race.
It can be incredibly easy to focus on our problems. Apocalyptic thinking is a fly trap. You know it’s bad for your mental health, but you can’t seem to stay away from the latest headline. I get it. The first thing I do in the morning is look at the latest news, and it never seems like it’s good. But I’ll let you in on a secret:
If it bleeds it leads.
This is an old tabloid technique. You always put the car crash or the quadruple homicide on the front page to get people to read. People can’t help but read about disaster. Yes, coronavirus is a tough situation. But we’ll get through it. And there are other things happening in the world. We can also exercise control over how we respond to life’s slings and arrows. But sometimes, it can be helpful to have someone out there tell us to chill-the-fuck-out.
So here it goes—
I’m giving you a prescription to take a vacation from your problems.
TODAY’S RECOMMENDATION: “WHAT ABOUT BOB?” (1991)
In director Frank Oz’s “What About Bob?,” Bill Murray plays Bob Wiley, a New Yorker suffering from an endless number of crippling neuroses, including a virtually paralyzing case of agoraphobia. At the start of the film, Bob is forced to find a new therapist, and winds up in the office of celebrity analyst Dr. Leo Marvin, played by Richard Dreyfuss. Everything seems to be going swimmingly until Dr. Marvin goes on vacation to Maine with his family. Bob, accompanied by his goldfish Gil, invites himself along for the summer. Beyond being sharply written and directed, the pairing of Murray and Dreyfuss lends the film extra frisson. Both are fantastic in their own right, but Dreyfuss legendarily loathed working with Murray, and their personal animosity is palpable.
The brilliance of the film is that it’s simultaneously a straight comedy about a Freudian analyst and a meta-comedy about Freudian analysis. If this seems redundant, watch the film and you’ll see what I mean. Bob, in the pursuit of his therapist, is forced to overcome the very neuroses that sent him to the therapist to begin with. And as Dr. Marvin confronts Bob’s intrusions into his life, his own psyche begins to crack. It’s a deeply funny, genuinely heartwarming, an incredibly smart comedy, and it’s packed with some of the best one-liners ever. Is this corn hand shucked?
The fartum of the film (see what I did there?) is the inherent tension between sanity and insanity, doctor and patient, conscious and subconscious. We like to think these dualities have clear, crisp lines delineating them, but as Bob and Dr. Leo Marvin learn, these boundaries are actually pretty fluid. At the end of the day, what matters in “What About Bob?” is less who is crazy and who is sane, but how we treat our fellow human beings. Are we helping them feel better? Or are we tying them to a chair and lighting a stick of dynamite?
“What About Bob?” is streaming on HBO. Special thanks to reader Bridget McGinley for reminding me about this film.
READING LIST
At the risk of promoting my competition, you should definitely take a look at New Yorker critic Richard Brody’s recommendations on what to stream during these times. He suggests Classics for Comfort.
On a more serious note, I suggest Highly Transmissible reader and Templeton World Charity Foundation President Andrew Serazin’s recent piece about the “pandemic virtues.” He essentially argues that human beings are blessed with a set of virtues which will help us get through the coronavirus.
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