Aiming for Distraction

"There are two very different kinds of dissatisfaction or restlessness. One is engendered by disappointment, by not knowing where home is, by thinking you’ve arrived only to later become tired of the place or realize it’s not home in the way you thought it was. In this case the road is the endless exhaustion of continuing to try to locate home, the frantic search for rest. That is the angst of the prodigal still in exile.

But there is another kind of restlessness that can be experienced on the road, a fatigue that stems from knowing where home is but also realizing you’re not there yet—a kind of “directed” impatience. The first is a baseline aimlessness that keeps looking for home; the second is the weariness of being en route, burdened by trials and distracted by a thousand byways and exhausted by temptations along the way that sucker you into forgetting where home is."

— James K.A. Smith, "On the Road with Saint Augustine"

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Dear Kate,

How do you know if a person is restless?  Is it so easy to tell, the sight so self-evident, like fidgeting for a cigarette, fumbling for a lighter, sniffing for a magnificent obsession?

The Oscar is coming up, Hollywood celebrating itself, a popularity contest that I now pay almost no attention to.  Still it can be interesting if the movies it calls attention to are so.

"Once Upon a Time in Hollywood," a movie my son, who's been lately trying to cultivate his cinematic literacy, didn't like upon his first viewing and said right after, "Isn't it quite obvious that this is, like, Tarantino's worst movie?"  Of course it was also obvious to me that it was obvious to him the movie doesn't amount to anything interesting until the final restless movement which--just as obvious to him--is not properly built up to, not well earned, which is to say, inconsequential.  Like the movie itself.  And you can say it again taking away the the.

You've probably heard the term "mise-en-scène," a fancy way to speak about a filmmaker’s control over what appears within the four edges of a movie frame, everything that goes into the composition of a rectangular cinematic universe: camera and character movement, sight and sound design, color, lighting, etc.--"staging in action."  What summons the attention of the viewer is usually a moving, "restless" element, whatever within the frame catches our eyes, like the red coat in "Schindler's List."

Image a viewer looking at a high-octane chase scene and instead of paying attention to the shiny, beautiful cars throwing themselves impossibly across the road he gazes at a palm tree branch far and deep into the background and wonders to himself, Oh geez...what's gonna happen to that shiny, beautiful palm tree now, I worry?  He must be missing the point, right?

Not if he is an arboriculturist.  Not if he can tell the tree is not well.  Not if he can perceive how consequential the tree's unwellness is to the universe however limited and cocooned within its own boundaries.  Not if he cares enough to be unsettled by the slow unveiling of a quiet tragedy.

Yours, Alex