So, a couple years back I had to write a creative response to American Beauty. If you've seen the movie you might recall the video clip that show's a plastic bag being blown about by the wind. Oddly enough, that was the scene I was required to write about.
I found that essay today, tucked back into files from 2007/2008 school work, and thought I'd share it with you. I surprised myself with what I'd written and the way I went about it.
Note: It's to be read from Ricky's point of view.
Creative Response to Text
By Marissa Holmberg
A plastic bag blows in the wind, its fate sealed by the wind as it floats down the street past on coming traffic and people in the distance. The cold day makes people scurry across streets and hide in buildings and cars. They are amusing to watch, but my camera isn’t focused on the people; it isn’t focused on the traffic or the weather. It’s focused on the plastic bag, fluttering in the wind, blown about with no regard and no control.
It reminds me of my life. Forced from one house to the other, to follow the rules without argument and to live the way my dear and loving father tells me too. Am I any different then the bag? I pause to consider why I am filming something as simple as a plastic bag in the wind. I think about why it matters to me, what draws me into this scene instead of another.
The air feels stiff with static, and you can almost hear it, the little sparks of electricity in atmosphere. It’s beautiful. So simple and so complicated, like the bag is a person, a child maybe, and the wind is all the circumstances we are compelled to fight.
But why do we fight? Why don’t we give ourselves up to these circumstances and just let ourselves be blown about by the winds of fate? After all, it works so well for the plastic bag. It has given up and stopped fighting. Maybe, so have I. After all, when was the last time I told my father I wouldn’t do something just because he told me to?
The drugs. I still deal them, still do them, despite the fact that he’s threatened to ship me off to the reserves if he catches me. I guess it just means I have to make sure not to get caught. Is that fighting the circumstance? Or just being rebelliously ignorant?
Beauty. Can we give up on beauty? People don’t see beauty in anything anymore. They walk by me, and I know they think I’m crazy, standing here with my camera focused on a plastic bag. They don’t see the bag as beautiful, and I worry that if I don’t catch it now, I too will lose the belief that there is beauty in everything. There is some force in the world telling me that this is beautiful, that I need to film this and that I never need to be afraid again.
This bag represents the beauty of life. Of a little kid that wants to play in the fresh falling snow, catching snow flakes on his tongue. I can see it, as it jumps upwards and falls back to the ground, catching the wind. Am I crazy for seeing it; for seeing in it the beauty of two lovers dancing on a crowded street with no regard for the people watching them. They hear the music in their heads and the laugh and dance and sing. They don’t care that nobody else can hear the music, that everyone thinks they’re crazy. The bag is dancing with me, like the woman unaware of everyone else’s eyes. She doesn’t care that nobody else sees the beauty of her movements, they are just for me.
We are compelled to fight. This bag is compelled to try and escape the wind and I am compelled to respond to the violence shown to me by seeing the beauty in the world around me. I try and look at the bag as having a mind, because then we can connect on a different level. Personification. I stop thinking that the bag is a victim of the wind’s power, that it has no choice but to be blown about. I think that maybe it isn’t just being pushed around, but that it’s fighting to get out. And it’s telling me, as the voice of the same force that told me not to be afraid, that I can fight too.
In fifteen minutes my life changes. The bag floats up too high and gets caught in a tree. I want to climb up and get it, release it from the tree’s grasp, but that would be imposing my will on something else. This is the end of the dance, the part in the music where the girl realizes that she is being watched and carefully returns to her seat, not because she is ashamed but because she is done dancing.
I turn off my camera and zip up my coat. It feels like it should be snowing and as I look up to the sky and see if I can see the snowflakes that the bag was trying to catch I am caught myself.
Circumstances. The moment in time when we realize or don’t realize that we need to fight for something. My life seems to be a slow downward cycle of hell until I reach the very bottom and am sucked into the whirlpool or the black hole that appears when we refuse to fight. But what am I fighting? Death? I am not afraid of death, at some points I would gladly welcome it to take me away from this world. My father? Who is brave enough to fight my father? Perhaps that is who I’m fighting then. Fighting to be my own person, and not let him push me around. Fighting to recognize the despair that threatens to overcome me and drag me to the eye of the storm that is my own hatred and fear.
Fear. I am fighting fear. That is my circumstance and I fight it with beauty. If I can remember that I am not alone. Even though I feel alone I’m not. I walk back towards my house, and I am that much wiser. If you know who you’re fighting then you can fight back. I laugh, realizing that is something my father would say. Know who you’re fighting and you are more likely to win. Fear has glittering eyes, hypnotic and forceful, how else would it be able to draw you in. You cannot see it until it is too late and you are trapped by your own fear, and you don’t know how to escape.
I fight back with beauty; beauty I film in the strange places people would not think to look for it. I think of the woman, frozen to death on the sidewalk, as people walked past her. I didn’t. There was death there, and people fled from it. Not knowingly, but they did. I didn’t. I filmed it, because it was beautiful. Where others would see only the horror of loss I saw beauty. I saw God, looking at me through her dead eyes, and I looked right back, because He wanted me to. He wanted me to see the beauty; he wanted me to know that I was not alone and that I didn’t have to be afraid anymore.
When the day comes, and I know it will come, when my father realizes that he has not ‘cured’ me I will need to fight there too. Circumstances will arise and I will face them, because through everything I’ve seen in my life, I will be prepared to tell him what ever I have to, to escape. I will remember the plastic bag, and that which it represented. The child unafraid to play in the snow, who will tell me that I need to be free and see the world as he does; as a beautiful whole. I will tell my father what he wants to hear, so he will let me go, and I will be free.
I will see the bag as the lady dancing, calling me to dance with her. Maybe there will be a real woman who I can go to when that happens. But the dancer will tell me that it doesn’t matter what people think of me. She will tell me that I need to fight, because I need to escape. She will help me understand that sometimes the circumstances do call for a lie, that I can dance around the truth with her if it means I can be free with her. Circumstances will arise one day and I will need to raise up to face them, take them and analyse them so that I can fight back.
How did I learn all this from a plastic bag floating in the wind? I lock the door of my room, knowing my father will be angry, but not caring. I learned all this from the bag in the wind, because I was not afraid to look, not afraid to think. People are compelled to respond to everything, the simple, the complex, the important and the mundane. There is no one kind of problem that warrants us fighting back; it is every problem, every moment, every day.
A plastic bag taught me the most important thing I ever learned, that we may appear to be blown away by the wind, lifeless and careless, but there is a life behind everything. A benevolent force took the time to tell me not to be afraid, so that I would know that I can fight fear with beauty, and pain with wonder.
I watch the video on my TV, watching the events unfold again. A plastic bag blows in the wind, its fate sealed by the wind as it floats down the street past on coming traffic and people in the distance. But now I see that its fate isn’t sealed, it is still fighting for its freedom, just like I am. And I watch the fifteen minutes again, until the bag again becomes entangled in the branches of the tree. And I know that when I escape it will be hard, and that every day I am fighting to get there, but it will eventually happen for me too.
I will be caught in the branches of some tree, seen as trapped, limited by some people, but I will be free. No longer will I be misunderstood, scrutinized and suspected. I will not be pushed around. For now I will let the wind control my life, silently fighting back by being myself, but when the chance presents its self, when circumstances require me to fight back, I will fight. I will win. I will be free.
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