Testament

My post on the 1983 film Testament continues to attract new readers to Mental multivitamin.

Recently, L.C. sent the following note:

This evening I decided to search for information on the movie Testament. I saw this movie, only one time, years and years ago. I was in my early thirties, I think, before either of my children were born. One weekend afternoon I idly flipped on the television, something I rarely did during those years. The plan was to unwind for a few minutes and then turn off the TV and go about my usual non-TV business. Well, at that particular random moment, on that particular random channel, the movie Testament was beginning. Needless to say, I watched the entire thing. It’s like karma, as if I were somehow meant to see it and that’s why I turned on the TV at that moment.

This movie left an indelible mark on me. I have thought of it often as 20+ years have passed, and to this day, when it comes to mind, I am cautious. I feel compelled to think about the story and yet also afraid to think about it, lest I think about it too much and stir up more emotion than I want to handle at the moment. Remembering certain scenes can make me cry on the spot, especially now that I have children of my own.

Interestingly, I didn’t remember the title of the movie until I happened to discuss it with my 17-year-old son a month or so ago. I think I have deliberately avoided remembering the title all these years as a way of avoiding watching the movie again. After all, if I didn’t know the title of the movie, or any cast member names, I couldn’t deliberately go out and find it. So, for weeks now the title has been popping up in my head, but I didn’t actually get over my resistance and Google Testament until tonight.

Well, to make a long story short, I found your blog entry about the movie, and one of the sentences you wrote captured, for me, an important idea. You said:

I remember it now as my first genuine glimpse into the lives of adults, of families. (And this is, of course, the gift of good books, films, artworks, music, etc. -- that they help us understand what is real and true in ways in which what is real and true has not yet done, perhaps cannot do.)

Yes, yes! Good books, films, etc. are GIFTS, in exactly the way you describe: They allow us to vicariously experience essential stories outside of what our own lives can /will / have provide(d). We call a book / film / etc. “good” when we recognize that it tells a story that has impacted our understanding of “what is real and true.”

By the way, in my opinion, your “perhaps cannot do” part is very important. The story It’s a Wonderful Life could never happen in real life, but it helps us understand a lot about real life, nonetheless.

So, thank you for what you wrote. I will remember it.

As it happened, Testament was on my mind this weekend because I finally watched The Road. I concluded that the former is far and away the more emotionally wrenching film, perhaps because quiet horror is more insidious and thought-provoking than graphic depictions of man's inhumanity to man, because the beginning of the end of all things is infinitely sadder and more painful than the near-end of all things. *

Naturally, receiving L.C.'s message and seeing The Road prompted me to reread my post on Testament, and as I did I was reminded of the parallels I had drawn between the film and Thorton Wilder's Our Town:

The film, which was brilliantly cast with gifted actors (Jane Alexander, Devane, the young Luke Haas) who actually look like a typical nuclear family in a California hamlet, opens twenty-four hours before a nuclear attack. In Thornton Wilder's Our Town, Emily cries out in Act III, "I can't. I can't go on. It goes too fast. We don't have time to look at one another. I didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed." This is, of course, the essence of Testament's extended first act: that the father challenges the son to make the hill but pedals ahead, that the youngest would prefer to be a rat in the school production of The Pied Piper of Hamelin (a wish denied that serves as heartbreaking foreshadow), that the mother fails to awaken in time to exercise, that the husband and wife make love rather than continue a painful discussion, and so on. Piano practice. Breakfast. Clutter. School. Work. Answering machines. Unfinished projects. Unspoken fears. Unmet expectations. Pain and beauty, the extraordinary and the commonplace. Life. And no one really notices. The rhythms and grace notes that underscore everyday life grow too subtle, pass unmarked, end uncelebrated.

Ah! I realized That ol' synchronicity / serendipity/ synthesis is at work again: "It takes life to love Life."


* That said, I appreciate and highly recommend Cormac McCarthy's novel.