I love this quote by Michael Shannon, it really spoke to me. Anyone else feel the same? If anyone responds I'd love to discuss what I think he means.
"The hopeless emptiness? Now, you've said it. Plenty of people are on to the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness."
To see the hopeless emptiness in life mean to me that you've had the courage to actually look into the reality of life and seen it for what it is. Most people never do that. Most people use blinders or rose-tinted glasses or just ignore reality all together and live life in a delusional fantasy world. That's why movies are so important. Books are important.. they help us "get lost". Alcohol, money to run, buying things, drugs, sex, anything to keep from focusing on this thing we all have to live through to get to the other side of nothing. Hopeless emptiness mean to me that there is no light and there's never gonna be any but we still have to go on even tho it doesn't mean a damn thing. I think about it sometimes... Like, what's this rotten affliction we've all be dealt called "Life" for? Nobody asked us if we wanted to come here. Nobody asks us how we'd like to leave, or where we want to go to after we leave here.. What's the deal? We get evicted from the only decent home we ever have. Some woman begins pushing on us and a bunch of doctor grab us with a metal thing and yank us out. What's the deal on that one? We come into this world screaming and crying externally and continue screaming and crying internally till the day they put those pennies on our eyes, and who knows what happens after that. More and more hideous screaming and crying is what I suspect. As soon as we get old enough we begin swallowing back pain and covering unhappiness with a smile. We lie our entire living existence through because it's just too painful to look at things outright. By the time we're about four years old we've already been destroyed. We spend our entire lives, day after day, and year after year, trying to stay alive... and for what? For This? Nobody can ever change anything on a large scale. Year after year the load gets heavier and we get weaker until we finally begin breaking down physically to go along with being broken down mentally and emotionally.. and then.. we finally die? As far as I can figure we were all born dead to begin with.
Anybody who thinks that living on this earth is NOT a dead end and a big bottomless hopeless empty painful hole is living in a delusion. If life was a good thing we wouldn't have to rely on the millions of ways humanity has come up with escape this nightmare!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BjhJLhSbYg&feature=fvwrel
Accept Loss ~ Jack Kerouac
Let me start out by saying that I agree with everything you just said. I espeically enjoyed the metaphors pertaining to getting evicted from our mothers' bodies.
I think the problem we have is that people do not want to admit that the hopelessness is there. They do not want to admit that life generally sucks. Maybe they are too afraid of driving people away because of a negative outlook on life. But life is negative, there is so much suffering out there and so much unhappiness.
I bet people call you a pessimist, but you're not, you're a realist. Thank you for being real Greta.
I should start out by saying that this is what I believe that line in the film was about. I personally don't have that bleak of a outlook... not any more. I am a surviver... I am grateful. I have been to the "other side", the side the character Michael Shannon played in the film. I have been picked at and prodded at by so-called doctors of the mind, misdiagnosed with mental conditions they seemingly just pulled out of a hat! I been treated like a non-human being in mental facilities. I learned from those places that no matter how detached and cool you think you are, the "hole" strips you bare of your humanity and leaves clinging bare bones barely holding together.. It's a good thing they allow the patients to mingle, or it would really be bad... the solitude and loneliness of thinking you're the only one is dreadful. (you get enough of that out of the hospitals) If it weren't for those self professed miracle-workers I wouldn't have wanted to come back out. I never felt as much at home as I felt in the loony bin. Being among my own. The misfit, the outcast, the beaten down.. they're my people..
I will never forget this one guy.. he was brought in one morning after apparently going mad and trying to harm his mother or someone, and then when the police came he fought them so they threw him in the nuthouse for observation. I recall standing at my door watching him casually, flippantly, walking up the hall with what remained of his "street coolness" He had a white plastic spoon concealed in his hand. He wasn't as mean as he let on. On his way back down the hall past me I spoke to him. I mentioned that I would imagine it was really difficult to walk the halls of a madhouse with anything resembling street smarts and cool detachment and he looked at me and we met each other at that very moment.. met each other in the bottom of the well. We never spoke with anything but our eyes. He was only there a couple of days. I don't know what happened to him.
Yes, I am a realist and I don't bring people down by talking too much. I had a raw life. I enjoy having a good conversation tho... thanks..
Accept Loss ~ Jack Kerouac
I read the book (and watched the movie a while ago) and I'm going to fly a little against the current and say that I felt that the "hopeless emptiness" comment was, while not intended that way by Frank, more true of the lives of Frank and April than anything else. Even as he said it, he was speaking as he often did to impress an audience with his cleverness (the book talks about how he thinks about how he is speaking and posing for maximum impact and how much he enjoys when people praise his intellect after his speeches). Both he and April and many of the other characters are living lives that are very contrary to who they really are but they don't know how to escape them and be true to themselves. They live lives of hopeless emptiness.
When Frank said it, he was suggesting that life in America was hopeless emptiness but I think it was just a reflection of his outlook and experiences with his own life.
Loomis Orange - your two comments on this thread are just about the most well written, insightful & interesting passages I've ever read on any message board. You, Sir, are a brilliant soul.
shareThanks Bubbles.. I need all the praise I can get. Most everybody just thinks I'm a nutball. I'm a chick.
shareHey, remind me 2 call u when I need cheerin up, k? Dis is like feel-good post of da century.
Werd 2 ur mudda, bruddafckka
>We get evicted from the only decent home we ever have.
Don't forget the apple pie and baseball. But seriously, the womb was not all that great for many of us. All the drug addicted babies. Or the few, like me, who had to live through abdominal surgery to save my mother's life. And the many who had to uptake nicotine cos mom smoked constantly like April does in this film.
You went through all of that only to grow up an *beep*
shareI loved that quote too and I agree with it 100%. I agree with the other poster about the entertainment the books we all fill the emptiness and we all try to fill it. "but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness" because if you see the hopelessness you will do something entirely different you will do something real you will do something that matters you will stop trying to just "fill" the emptiness with more empty things. A very profound statement and revelation if you can achieve it indeed!
shareI do. This is one of my favorite movies because of how empty it was. I could feel the entrapment and disatisifaction of your life especially for that time. It's truely a tragic film because I think April was just beyond saving towards the end.
shareHopeless means there is no better tomorrow. Hopeless means, nothing different will ever happen, from here we can see till the end of our lifes. We can easily see hopelessness in other peoples lifes, but we want to believe better things for ourselves.
shareLife's a bitch, and then you die. There's no getting away from it. I guess that's the hopelessness.
shareThank you for starting this thread.
Yes, that was indeed a profound line in this moving film. Probably the focal point of the story. The scene made me reflect on my life and the life I could have had.
A fine presentation of existentialism. All people die but only some people live. Having hope is not necessarily a deciding factor.
For the record, I rated the film 9/10.
The quote is even more profound by Revolutionary Road's end due to the self - denial the acquaintances place themselves in. Refusing to see beyond the confines of their so - called American dream.
"I'd rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not".
I love this thread!
shareSpoilers. It is one thing to have an empty life. A life where you go to a job you don't like day in and day out. Or you stay at home with the kids when you really don't feel very maternal/paternal and wish you could be doing something else with your time.
To be hopeless means you don't feel there is any way you can change your circumstances and you have resolved to not make any effort to make things different or you have resigned yourself to the fact that nothing is going to take the unhappiness feeling away. You are stuck and are just going to have to put up with it.
You can feel emptiness but have hope that things will change. It is hope that gets many people through the day, through rough times. Once you lose hope...well that is what caused John's breakdown. That is what caused April to get rid of her baby.
Hope is tricky, though. When one person gets hope, it can affect someone else's hope. When Frank gained hope that his life in the US could be better (the work promotion, raise, making his dad proud), it took away April's hope. There are lots of themes of that in the movie...one person's hopes getting raised, someone else's hopes would get crushed.
The house itself on Revolutionary Road is a metaphor for hope. The realtor wanted the house to go to a nice couple. She though at first that the Wheelers were the perfect fit, probably so that she could use the couple as makeshift friends for her son or to use the couple as replacement children that she wishes she had instead of her own son. Once those hopes got dashed with the Wheelers being normal people with normal problems, the next couple that moves in are "the perfect fit", unlike the Wheelers who, according to her, were not that perfect after all. So, not only do we have our own hopes to worry about, we have the external pressure of what others hope for us. The realtor, the neighbors, the coworkers/boss, represented the external pressure. April and Frank and John represented the internal pressure.
I agree with this insight, it was very telling when April stated "I hope we can be happy." Hope is a strange thing in that happiness is usually buoyed by a person's hopes but when a person's primary hope is for happiness they struggle to stay afloat and ultimately take the plunge into depression.
share