“What movie about Vietnam was made by Oliver Stone? Platoon. What movie about Vietnam was directed by Stanley Kubrick? No. Wrong. Full Metal Jacket.” This from an undersized boy in an over-sized pink tee-shirt, fourteen years old and yelling across the racket of Swingers at 10:00 on a Thursday night to a rapt audience made up of his parents and two best friends that look like the kind you only ever get to have once, but remember for the rest of your life. He is confident and brash in a way only kids born and raised in Los Angeles by artistic parents ever are, and I can’t help quietly falling in love with him from two tables away. Maybe it’s envy or nostalgia or projection or some such thing- I don’t know how to describe it. Tim O'Brien probably would. The reason I started listening to the kid in the first place, besides the fact that he pretty much made it impossible not to, was because I am in the middle of reading The Things They Carried for the first time and suddenly it seems like everybody, everywhere is talking about war. I picked it up for a lot of reasons: I saw the Hurt Locker and realized how much time I’ve wasted actively not knowing anything about actual Americans in combat; somebody sent me a list; I found it on a shelf at my office which meant I got to read it for free; it is one of those books that everybody else has read that I somehow never got around to. Besides being incredibly relevant even 19 years after it was written, it’s a near-perfect meditation on truth and fiction and the strength of language, on what it means to write a story and why anybody would ever do so. Go reread it or read it for the first time right now, I'm serious. Go.
No comments:
Post a Comment