The Words
Words. I place a ridiculous amount of importance on words. People mostly don’t care about words nowadays, they care about stuff. Things. Therefore, they are careless with words. And by careless I don’t mean, for example, cursing you - cursing is welcome in my space. Cursing is about the only truthful thing some people let out of their mouths. I support a good curse.
What I meant is, people are careless with using words; either by not using the good ones, or by using really good ones for no reason at all. Don’t you sometimes wish you lived in, I don’t know, 18th-century England, where you’d send and receive letters and handwritten notes, and every single word meant something? When one word could make or break your whole world, or your words could break someone else’s?
Words are power. Too bad the society today doesn’t feel that way. Or even gets it. Instead, they dip into their pools of platitudes daily, thinking they’re letting out some proverbs of utter importance.
The conversations are unbearable. I watch so many films & TV shows, read countless books, reports, historical events in a desperate quest to find smart made-up dialogues. I’ll take made-up, rather than uninspiring reality.
Sometimes movies go under the radar for me, I skip them in my mind or don’t hear about them for some reason. They then appear on my radar exactly when I’m ready or need to take something out of them. It's still unclear how the movie called The Words could go under the radar for me for so long.
It finally got under my fingers yesterday. I read the title, I read the summary, and that was it; I knew it would stay with me. A writer who wants to be much better than he is, he’s good, but good is not enough. He has to be great. Monumental. Or at least scandalous.
He’s neither.
He has nothing.
Even though he’s empathetic (Bradley Cooper), the movie is so smart about depicting a phenomenon of today; the existence of social networks where everyone pretends they’re the star of their own movie. Everyone wants to be great, known, accomplished, sought after, famous. And the scariest part of all, everyone thinks they deserve it. There exists a legion of mediocrity in this world, believing they can replace great talent with a level of ambition that is ultimately just a delusion.
Being unrealistic usually goes in hand with a dose of arrogance, often mistaken for an ambitious drive, convinced it will surely get you there. Drive on its own, talent excluded, is nothing but a futile ambition.
In the movie, our mediocre writer Bradley Cooper finds a manuscript of a memoir written and accidentally lost by a talented man who wrote a story about his post-war life in Paris. Bradley finds it in some Parisian antique store, by accident, reads it, and realizes the greatness he won’t ever achieve. Distressed, he decides to rewrite the whole manuscript on his computer, word by word - “...just to see how it feels to type the words so great, just to slide it through my fingers....”. And later on, steals the manuscript pretending it’s a novel he wrote.
Naturally; publishing, fame, and accolades followed. Praise followed. Public, peers, parents, wife, and loved ones. That’s always important to those who strive for greatness but have no talent to back it up - praise.
The old man, naturally appears, having recognized his work, crushing Bradley’s dream bubble back where it should be. Crushing it not by reporting him or outing him; but by making him snap out of his delusion, and reminding him who he is. A mediocre writer.
A mediocre writer? Seems like an oxymoron. Is a mediocre writer really a writer? Or just someone who types words? I can’t decide.
Whenever we fake it in writing, it always shows. And if we fake it well, and pretend even better, we always know. And can we live with that?
Watch The Words. Very sententious little piece. Jeremy Irons as the old man, now that’s a greatness if there ever was one.
