may 28, 2010 01:58pm – in Korea
If you're one of my friends, you've seen my erratic tweets, and maybe received a panicked instant message from me. Yes, I'm going crazy. It's not your imagination.
What brought it on is my slowly but surely draining bank account, a useless degree, and noticing that my late twenties were well on their way but having nothing to show for it all but two music videos and a bunch of unfinished projects.
It's not as easy as it once was to calm me down with endless refrains of "there's still time" and "you can't be a failure at 25." These used to help, but I'm waking up to a bigger and darker realization: If I follow my noble ambitions and fail, as I always promised to do, it's not the fault of others for not recognizing me as a writer. It's nobody's fault. It just happened.
Maybe it was my dad's pep talk yesterday. "When I look back, I was just a blip in the history of the city of Ontario," he said during one of his tangents. He also kept reminding me that "plenty of people have jobs they don't like." The implication being that I'm not any different from anyone else. I used to be different; I was too stubborn to do that.
I've been applying for jobs I don't really want. As video work and writing work have begun not paying the bills, I've started trying to gitta jawb. It almost worked. Maybe if I wear a tie or smile more, the next one's in the bag, but no luck so far. My scattered, baffling job history tells the story of someone who had dreams and ambitions, but not a career path. Some people, you could probably guess their personality pretty accurately from their resume. You could probably look at mine for instance and say "this seems like a guy who can never find his cell phone."
I could (and I'd forgive you for feeling like I SHOULD) just get in line and march in lock-step to the drum beat of the corporate masters like, well, pretty much everyone in the world. This is a move many before me have made, and refer to in retrospect as "growing up." I can't say for certain where I earned a get-out-of-dead-end-job-free pass. If I, for some reason, woke up and decided that it was time for me to get a job in marketing at Tyrannicorp, I'm sure you'd agree it'd be a stretch given my qualifications.
So to recap: 1) I want to make movies and get paid for it. 2) Realizing this is tough to do, I've been looking for humbler jobs 3) The humbler jobs aren't forthcoming and 4) I'm pretty much out of money, which brings me to that realization I was talking about: I'm tumbling down the mountain of my ambitions, toward my career as a barista.
I say "career as a barista" sincerely. I would (and perhaps will soon be) be padding my resume and pounding pavement for weeks to get that barista job. Even those don't come easy right now. That's a big plate of the proverbial pie and I am, at long last humble enough to eat it.
So I'm not above shitty work to weather the storm, that's neither here nor there. My dad's pep talk went in a much more surprising direction than that: He said I shouldn't get a shitty job. He wanted to pursuade me that If I pour every ounce of my blood sweat and tears into it, I could get a business going making web videos for people, or at the very least "videotaping bar mitzvahs."
Four years ago I finished my first feature screenplay; an epic historical sci-fi action comedy. At 21 I was sure to the point of smugness that wealth and fame were close at hand. It wasn't a question of whether my script would sell, it was a question of how much I'd get. No one pounded down my door trying to get that script, so I co-directed a music video that was on MTV2, but famed movie producer Joe Longcigar never called us. Some hiccups followed that, but suffice it to say I've had some mountaintop moments of high ambition, and some deep, existential valleys to go with them. I say all that in order to make a point: scrounging and struggling for the opportunity to videotape bar mitzvahs was never where I saw my life going.
But, let me re-emphasize, I'm prepared to go to these lengths to scrape by. Plenty of people have it much worse.
Still, "plenty of people have it much worse" is no mantra to live one's life by. It is a consideration, however when I look back on my decision to go into moviemaking to begin with. When I was 17, and I decided that, in fact, filmmaking was for me, I was heavily under the influence of Traffic and Fight Club. Hollywood was taking chances on some real tough, anti-establishment material. I also discovered foreign films like City of God around that time. Making movies seemed noble and important. I was going to make gritty movies about social problems (The kind of movies I was planning to make were later encapsulated perfectly by Children of Men.)
I live in Hollywood now, where there's not much mention of movies as important social statements. The idea of moviemaking as primarily a business venture was once, to me, and I'm being sincere here, something only hardcore cynics would talk about. I'm not saying I got blindsided by hollywood superficiality after I moved here; I became jaded a long time ago. What I am saying is that what I really wanted to do at one point was "make a difference" through movies. STOP LAUGHING, DAMN IT.
Of course you can make a difference through movies. You can steer the course of people's lives, especially impressionable teenagers. You can accidentally persuade them to try and make movies too, like what happened to me. But I don't blame the movies. I also blame the "be whatever you want to be" rhetoric my generation was raised on (To be fair, Fight Club warned me about that, but I didn't listen).
The path toward being a filmmaker had a vague and glowing endpoint. Respect and fame were there at that finish line, but not any sort of job title. Upon graduating, conscious of my mistake, I used to say I felt like I'd just majored in winning the lottery. I was studying the techniques of great writers and directors. I certainly wasn't studying the techniques of people who have jobs in Hollywood. My greatness would carry me past all that nonsense.
I've done a lot of writing, but the prospects were always impossibly grave when it came to entering them in competitions or mailing them to agents. I didn't work my way into the Hollywood system in order to curry favor. I never had any internships (in fact I resent the very idea of them, but that's another tirade entirely), and I never got myself a job as the assistant to the personal assistant of the secretary of the guy who cleans up Michael Bay's pubic hair clippings. I could make excuses where working in this town are concerned, and say I tried and was defeated. The fact is I don't have the stomach for it.
It's not weakness I'm admitting here, but call it that if you want to. I simply don't have the stomach for the climb-the-latter approach to "making it" among any city's snarling corporate monsters. It doesn't matter if they're the giant, cannibalistic insects at a Dallas oil company, or the the fanged mutant octopi on Wall Street. Me and those guys, we just don't mesh. And I didn't realize it when I got into this with my precious good intentions, but that was going to prevent me from paying my dues in the 9-5 world here.
Honestly, I thought for 25 years that I was uniquely talented among my peers. It's taken up until today for every last burning ember of that delusion to burn out, and for me to see myself as "just some guy." It didn't hurt realizing that now well into adulthood, I'll never be considered a "whiz kid" (which is to say it hurt quite a bit). The fact that I was anything but "just some guy" was what assured me that I never needed to consider the course of my career. "That'll all sort itself out when I get famous." I've paid lip service to this concept over the years, but I've never internalized it before right. this. second.
Forgive me if this is taking on the tenor of a suicide note. I'm not in a state of despair right now. Far from it. And I still want to make movies. I'm just starting to suspect that I need a real career. Not a job, mind you, although I need one of those too. Filmmaking is an interest, or even a passion. But come on. A career? Is it really a career? Really?
My mind is awash with heavy thoughts right now. The light of morning might not shine well on the words I'm writing. But right now I'm back to where I was when I was 18: I feel like I can make a difference in the world. I just have to figure out how.