in hot pursuit

I’ve watched other movies since, but last week A. and I saw The Pursuit of Happyness, which I’d initially skipped because of my skepticism about what seemed like creepy Reaganomics apologist mindset but she put on our Netflix queue because of confidence about little Jaden Smith’s cuteness. That makes it one of those situations where we can both be right, I think. But yeah, cute and creepy pretty much sums it up.

I know especially the night before 11 September I’m supposed to be thinking about bigger and loftier issues, except for me it’s a different anniversary that resonates more strongly. This year is 10 years since I was first raped as a college freshman, and that’s something that affected and changed me a lot more than I wish it had. Last September my cat Saffron was loose in the woods and being in the dog park with Addiston this weekend really made me uncomfortable because it was so like and unlike the time I spent with my tears and a book behind my apartment building last fall until I was able to find my little cat and coax her back into my arms. I spent all the nights she was missing in hysterical guilt, crying and waiting and worrying. Losing Saffron more recently when I moved here is as close as I’ve gotten to a custody dispute, and while I had moments of deep sadness I know she’s well and I get to see photos at least from her new phone.

So what I’m saying at least at the end of that paragraph is that I have no idea what it must feel like to give up a child, even if to keep Solomon from slicing him to bits. And yet the most sympathetic character in The Pursuit of Happyness was protagonist Chris’s wife, Linda, who got sick of his constant promises that he’d find some way to make the necessary money to pay the rent and cover childcare. So she did the rational thing and moved herself and her child away from him to what seemed like a more secure situation, only to accede to his wishes to let their son Chris live with his father when she moved to New York in search of a new life. From the previews, I got the impression we were supposed to consider her heartless, but I pitied her and empathized. Sure, it was a failure of imagination not to go along with Chris’s plan to go from selling useless, unwanted medical equipment to taking an unpaid internship that would give him a 5% chance of becoming a stockbroker, but I’m not sure how we’re really supposed to blame her.

Except I’m being a bad person in talking about what we’re supposed to do because that’s not how art works and what always gets me in trouble, and yet this is ceaselessly didactic art. And I’m not sure about the messages, either. It was really painful not only to watch Linda have to suffer through indignities and disappointments and double shifts so Chris can spend more time badgering HR execs, but to then see the good-vs.-evil setup that permeates everything. Because Chris is good and trying to do right by his son and better himself, it’s fine when he rips off a cab driver and funny when he runs away. But when a mentally ill and presumably homeless man or a hippie musician steal Chris’s medical equipment because he’s being irresponsible with it, he’s able to hunt them down and recover his property. It really gave me chills to watch little Chris alone in a men’s homeless shelter at night while his dad studied and did machine maintenance because I couldn’t get over the foreboding sense that certainly little Chris (statistically speaking, at least) should be molested or something rather than just get to sleep angelically and be cute and endearing. And what kind of person does that make me?

I think I’m just a critical, fed up person. Because I said I’m not talking about national politics and yet I can’t avoid them. Yes, it’s great that Chris was able to essentially con his way into riches, especially since he proved his worth once he got there. It’s certainly admirable he was able to get his son off the streets unscathed, if that’s actually what happened. But the whole system that leaves people poor and broken is the problem. I spend so much of my spare time reading foster/adoption blogs and I’m deeply, deeply, constantly concerned about the nature of poverty in this nation. I know we have a horrible system set up that hampers the people who need help most and refuses to help plenty who are doing good work. And what am I doing now except being critical? It’s something I worry about a lot, the same way I worry about a fictionalized story of a poor black man who molds his life around inspiration from Thomas Jefferson without ever acknowledging that it might be possible to, say, pursue happiness more easily (if not with a free conscience, although perhaps that wasn’t even an issue) when you’ve got slaves taking care of your day-to-day concerns. So I’m bothered by this exceptionalism even as I admire exceptionalism in life, especially because I worry I don’t have enough sympathy or support for the people who are stuck in the system and not able or willing to do enough to escape. Because, really, who of us can escape when we’re what the system is made of? Maybe happiness is, as the movie says, something we can chase but never hold, but I think we have a moral duty to make sure that while they exist poverty and suffering have a hold on us.