On Your Feet!

There’s the Matrix, which elitists like dismissing as pop fluff. Even Cliff and I once dubbed it, “Quality high-budget crap”. It’s so easy to bash those idiots in philosophy class who say, “It’s like um. We could be in the Matrix!” Typically plot devices aren’t the point of the story. The Matrix is no different. You could claim Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was about memory erasure. But it’s far more about contrasting that with memories and relationships we already have. If that makes any sense.

There’s Fight Club, which if you are an idiot, will think is a movie about dudes beating the shit out of each other. I’ve heard analysis about how it’s about the divide between fathers and sons, or about “men” in general. But I see something else. I suppose here understanding the plot device is crucial. Who is Tyler Durden? What part of Jack does he represent? My answer is that Tyler Durden is the manifestation of defense mechanisms that allowed Jack to survive the “Real World”. He thought he was setting himself free, but the farther he tried to be “himself”, the more the walls went up and the more he became dependent on Tyler Durden.

And then there’s Clerks. Unless you’ve read an entry I wrote nearly four years ago, you’re probably saying to yourself, “What the fuck does Clerks have to do with any of this?” Everything. Clerks has no suspension-of-disbelief plot device. (Having sex with a dead guy has no relevancy!) I wrote previously on the role of Randal and how he acted the same as Tyler Durden and Morpheus, but my common thread today is slightly different.

Dante is in a rut. He’s in the same rut a lot of us get into. Too comfortable in our own shit to bother to change. We make excuses why we can’t change, or somehow justify our meager existence. Tyler Durden represents reliance on defense mechanisms to survive. Deciding to “be someone else” other than yourself. Just because that someone else decides to completely reject corporate america doesn’t mean he’s really being himself.

Dante can’t see past his own meager existence. He doesn’t know what else is out there. This is why Cliff dubbed my own shortsightedness, my own little self-contained universe the “TimmyMatrix”. Think of the Matrix simply as a metaphor for the delusions we convince ourselves. In that context, I like to think of Agents as those voices inside us that try to hold us back. Put us down, drag us back to that horrible reality which we built for ourselves. A prison for our minds. We create defense mechanisms to try and protect ourselves, do we not? To inhibit behavior. Ultimately this shoots us in the foot. Dante’s too caught up in his own hellhole to see that there is a better way.

What’s strange to consider is that as much as the consumerism theme of Fight Club is dead-on, this is just a veil to disguise Jack’s inner instability. He may not be his khakis, but he sure did identify himself as the guerilla terrorist, the guy who had it “figured out”, despite the fact that he couldn’t see himself in the mirror. You watch Fight Club the first time and think, “Fuck IKEA!” Watch it a few more times and the Jack/Tyler dichotomy takes center stage. Jack was indeed swept into the TylerMatrix.

Heh, any excuse to use “dichotomy”. You try using that in casual conversation.

This is all just a backdrop. A frame of reference. A visualization, if you will. Some positive rhetoric to rally around.

I see so much pain in so many people. Consistently. Even if it’s just a little bit, I no longer write it off. I know somewhere underneath it all, there’s a fortress of defense mechanisms hiding pains and fears I wouldn’t guess. Or. Maybe it is the obvious, but I couldn’t quite be sure of it before. Take Carolyn, for example. I’ve always known her relationship with her father is the reason she has a lot of her current insecurities, the reason she shys away from physical contact with males. But it wasn’t until after I clawed out of my rut that I realized how deep such a simple concept can be. It’s no different than how everything in my life seems to point to, “Dude, my dad fucked up.”

The tip of the iceburg is typically misleading in what lurks underneath the surface. I used to think, “Okay, I need to be nicer to people.” Or, “Okay, I need to be more social.” Or, “Okay, I need to do better in school.” Or, “Okay, I need to love myself.” But these are empty promises, they treat the surface wound while the inner pain remains. It’s like trying to solve integrals without knowing neither what an integral is nor how to solve for an integral. You end up fudging around some equations without really accomplishing anything. It’s only when you poke around the source of your pain that a cascade effect of perspective occurs.

If there was a single book that gave people the answer, it would already have been written. Everybody’s life story is different. Pain among people seems remarkably similar to me, but the way everybody’s defense mechanism sort out are incredibly different. There is no single perspective that will fix everything. There is no single phrase. There is no weekend retreat. You want to change your life? You have to be ready to change everything.

No, really, I’m not being melodramatic. My resistance to change was fear that I would change things that made me “Me”. I feared I’d turn into something I never wanted to be. The irony is that during the transition, I felt like I was turning into something I never wanted to – BUT!!! Much farther down the road, I’m becoming what I always wanted to be. It’s simply I had so many little hang-ups, so many rules of “I can’t do this” and “I can’t do that” which I associated as detrements to achieving the apex of “me” that there was no way I could have become better without removing those rules first.

I always wanted to be the example. I wanted to prove males weren’t all what women said they are. I wanted to prove that not everybody was depressive. I wanted to find the answer. My rules and regulations prevented me from being a complete person. The simple act of “I can’t” or “I won’t” or “I don’t like that” means there’s an experience that we’ll never have. And wanting to never be depressive? That ended up repressing me. Conflict of desires. It takes a while to really understand that it’s okay to feel whatever we feel. It’s better to feel it, identify why we feel that way, and then fix the problem, rather than shoving it all down into the pit of my stomach and saying “Oh well, I’m just not like that!“

I know my Tyler Durden rather well. I really did become him more and more as the years passed. I hide behind him, terrified to deal with the world. I was convinced I needed him to survive. I was convinced the world was out to get me. The moment I stopped defining myself by my own past actions and starting accepting myself, my life changed.

I used to know my TimmyMatrix rather well. That horrible glass which both fogged the rest of the world, and kept me from experiencing it. Through that glass, I shouted at the world, and was unable to hear a response back. I thought I was alone. I was wrong.

As for Dante, I realized I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life at a shitty job. Oh sure, I enjoyed it. But look at Dante. He got some sick satisfaction out of being the convenience store bitch, observing people and goofing off every chance he got. That’s not what I want for myself. And that, my friends, is why I’m back in school. I try to remind myself of that. In addition, I should finish college anyway. And. College is where my demons were expressed. And it is here I shall slay them.

For a lot of people, we don’t change until we reach that rock bottom and realize we need to change. That’s the moment Agent Critic shoots us in the chest and says, “You don’t deserve to live.” That’s the moment we say, “I don’t need you, Tyler Durden. My life is going on, without you.” That’s the moment we decide to accept ourselves, even if just a little bit at first.

That’s the moment we’ve said No to our inner critic for the first time. That’s when we realize we don’t need our Matrix, we don’t need our Tyler Durden bitching us, and we certainly don’t need this shitty rut we’ve been in. I am no different. I did not make great strides in improvement until I hit my rock bottom. This is why those dramatic climaxes in movies touch us so much. Expressing something we wish we could have, but could never quite put into words. Something we can’t even quite understand it happens. The great tragedy – and then life goes on.

And that’s really the heart of the matter. Life goes on, whether you’re charging into battle or being drug by your feet into the same rut you were in before. The choice is yours. Better to live on your feet than die on your knees.