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Monday, August 29, 2005
Life and Death in Carolina
You can enjoy the movie Junebug without ever setting foot in North Carolina. But if you've done some time there you'll understand it more.
Joanne and I met in college not far from where this story takes place. So, for 90 minutes in that dark theater, we endured chills and flashbacks, oh no's and oh wow's. What a ride we had.
A handsome yuppie drives across country with his hotty new wife, from Chicago to his parents' house in Carolina. That's only for cheap lodging while she negotiates a contract with a reclusive painter, a kind of lurid male Grandma Moses. The young husband hasn't been in touch with his family for years and he's not ready to pick up with them now.
But he has to be civil, at least. That's hard to do when his father hardly speaks and generally hides out in his basement workshop, and his mother dutifully if sullenly goes about her daily chores from dawn to dusk.
Compounding the communication problems is his kid brother (who makes Dad seem like a toastmaster), who obviously resents everybody in the house -- especially his extremely pregnant wife.
And she's a real piece of work. A naive sweet-spirited motormouth, she latches onto her new sister-in-law with an enthusiastic deathgrip.
On first exposure, none of these characters presents a single loveable trait. Not even an interesting one. Wherever this movie is heading, you're not sure you care to travel very far with it.
And yet... And yet, these people grow on you. What you thought you knew about any one of them disintegrates scene by scene.
Never before have I heard that inflection in the cliche, "Jesus loves you just the way you are, but he loves you too much to let you stay that way."
Never have I watched such sustained, amazed curiosity on a listener's face while her urbane husband sings an old gospel song without a trace of irony.
Corners of all their psyches are peeled back to reveal complexities of concern, desire, aspiration of which you'd never guess at first glance. Plot turns feel for the most part as inexplicable and real as the little daily defining events in your life and mine.
We rarely take readings on this choice to speak up or to shut up, on that impulsive reaction or calculated remark, as if the rest of our lives depended on such mundane decisions.
But Junebug's strange slow dance of family dysfunction suggests that is just the case more often than not.
My preacher mind cross-refers here to Moses' last big speech before the Israelites crossed over into the promised land. (See Deuteronomy 30:11-20) His punch line called on them to "choose between life and death." That is, to pledge themselves to go forward in step with God, or to take the line of least resistance and wind up worshiping idols and losing their whole identity in the bargain.
What strikes me right now about that proposition is how sneakily we can make the choice for death. I mean, nobody in their right mind says, "Yeah, of course, I want to die. Bring it on!" That's way too obvious. And dumb.
Instead, we're choosing death every time we refuse to risk our lives in order to really live. Trying above all to keep things safe, retreating from the unpleasant consequences of living right, we slowly freeze to death spiritually. Hypothermia never felt so good.
Ironically, the folks in Junebug are able to feel their way towards lives worth living only when they're willing to die to their habitual ways of making do with a living death.
And they're not the only ones.
posted by Jack Buckley at
2:10 PM
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