"How do we keep the experience?"

I was watching “Six Degrees of Separation” this morning, a movie I’ve seen so many times, I know practically every line by heart. The one scene that still gives me goose bumps is Ouisa’s moment of clarity in the last scene when her and Flanders are relaying the last chapter of their encounter with Paul to a gathering of rich business associates in a dining room at some fancy Park Ave address. Flanders is doing his seductive razzle dazzle segueing into references about art so that he can drum up some business. Oiusa goes into temporary hysterics, exclaiming how worried she is about Paul since he was arrested and they have no way to contact him. Then she says that line expressing her frustration with how everyday human experience is always reduced to an anecdote no matter how profound or life changing. “And we become these human jukeboxes!” That metaphor bowls me over every time! It’s so fucking accurate on so many levels.

As someone who has enjoyed writing for a long time, I struggle constantly with that question myself. The line in any medium of expression between raising and diminishing the human experience can be very fine and in the media, well I don’t think there’s anything I can say to qualify the level to which media has sunk the human experience.

Watching Stockard Channing wake up in that (see link in my fave movies list) scene is revelatory. I mean her performance in the entire film is flawless. But in those last moments as she walks away from Donald Sutherland’s character after presenting him more or less with an ultimatum and struts down the block I get chills because it feels so real. You can sense her liberation soaring as she gains momentum. And I always wonder what happens to her after that. I try to imagine all kinds of alternate conclusions to her life. Whatever happens though, I feel like she’s found herself, and can never go back to her old life again. She’s had an experience that she will not allow to become just a mere story. She will allow it to propel the new course of her life. A scary prospect seeing as she seemed to be living very comfortably, but clearly, it wasn’t enough.