Mitty

In the Los Angeles Times, there was an interview with Ben Stiller about his “Walter Mitty” movie - unless it’s a background piece about the movie that happens to include observations from the director, Mr. Stiller. In any case, it notes that it is an updated version of the story, what today might really be called a “reboot.” I remember reading it in high school and understanding the ideas and themes behind it, so it’s not like there was all that much about it that was really deep or complex: This guy has a life that is excessively normal and not always in a good way, and he escapes from it in elaborate daydreams that make him think he is more than the workaday guy he is. 

Post-S&H, of course, there are additional inferences to make even from what little I remember in detail about it. Some of the details, though, are mixed up thematically and chronologically, which makes a proper generational analysis fraught with pitfalls. If I remember the (1950s) Danny Kaye movie, I’m going to get a different feel for it than from the (1930s?) original stories. I might expect that it is more of a High (Artist-focused, boring present post-war) narrative than a Crisis (crazy present, Civic/Hero-focused) one. And what I remember makes it more of the former, which makes me distrust my expectations from this update.

Nonetheless, the Times’ article refers to it as “a bit like what Falling Down might look like if Michael Douglas had gone to a more redemptive place.” That movie - set in the Unraveling, and as appropriate a metaphor for the entire 20 year period as anything -  is  of a Boomer trying to navigate a world as it changes from one where he is an important cog in the machine to one where he may as well not exist. It’s a tragedy, and I need to examine my Four Stories to determine how to turn them around to work in that context (except for the Artists, of course, for whom I have to figure how comedies work, instead. Two words: Harold and Maude.) I’ll toss out that if moral superiority isn’t enough for the hero to succeed, it’s a tragedy. And that is to some extent just the deal with that movie: D-Fens has some very particular ideas about how the world works, should work, is supposed to work, and he tries to convince those around him of how correct he is, with gunfire where appropriate.  That’s even one of the appealing things about the movie, that he does make such sense and you want the world to work the way he says. 

As for Mitty, of course it needs to be Redemptive: It’s a Reactive doing a Reactive Story.  The original was not: I’d guess that a re-reading will show me someone doing what he can to survive in a Crisis period, while the Danny Kaye one will, in fact, be the Artist story in the High. The same article alludes to the sort of things that you would need to make those stories Redemptive: an earlier sense of hope, a thought of chances missed and potential squandered, the possibility of earning it all back. And it requires that things can change.