Beyond The Script: Reinvention Within Movies
By Diana Campos
There’s always a post-clarity moment right after the holidays end, inducing moments of trying to redefine your life as the new year approaches. We seek change, we seek redefinitions, and most of all, we seek inspiration to guide us into a “new” life. Films tend to offer us a “leap of faith” moment, allowing us to borrow and gather inspiration to retake hold of our lives. They give us glimmers of hope that we, too, can take control and firmly grasp what it takes to find fresh starts that are fit for us. And with that, various films utilize the New Year’s holiday as one of many narrative devices to drive themes of rebirth, new beginnings, and bringing resolutions to the screen, reminding us that it’s never too late to start over in our lives.
When we sit down to watch a movie to create motivation within ourselves, we look to characters that are a reflection of who we are, or who we wish to reinvent ourselves into. We see character arcs of starting off in moments of stagnation and escaping the ordinary to moments of hope and fulfillment. Films like The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013) and Into the Wild (2007) display how ordinary daydreamers escape from society and immerse themselves in new adventures. They have moments of romantic idealism for escape, and both protagonists in their respective movies embark on ugly and harsh quests for finding meaning. These films bring about transformation, both utterly messy and utterly human. The viewer can throw themselves into each protagonist’s shoes, igniting a feeling that I, too, can escape the ordinary and mundane and thrive in a life I want to build into my own adventure. We see our characters’ arc of building themselves out of real experiences, showing that their transformations are earned and attainable in even our own real lives, too.
In life, we travel through moments of completely losing our footing in life or feeling like we’re stuck with no way out. We have Wild (2014) showing us that being at rock bottom isn’t permanent to our development or our lives. The protagonist (Cheryl) in this film encounters heartbreak and loss, throwing her into a journey of hiking long distances so she can reclaim her own pain and start anew. Her pain transforms into brutal self-reflection; her healing journey is never pretty or appetizing, but every step is oh so worth it. In another film, Julie & Julia (2009), we have one of our protagonists, Julie, stuck in a soul-sucking job, feeling like she’s never able to dig herself out of this rut. She has a burning need to change her life, to make it feel like she’s alive again. She throws herself into an adventure of cooking through Julia Child’s cookbook, blogging her way through every recipe. Julie simply shows us that a passion project can be the simplest thing we have to reinvigorate our lives again. Each protagonist, respectively, shows us that transformation can be ugly, boring, or even trivial. But the reward of changing your life, step by step, or by creating, is worthwhile, truly displaying that the simplest things can change our lives completely and unexpectedly.
Sometimes, movies show us what it would be like to completely start over, clean slate and all. Really getting down to the nitty-gritty of reinventing your life. In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), the movie delivers the question: if you could erase the memory of your lost lover and start over, would you? Our couple in the movie erases each other from their memories, leading them to find new perspectives in their lives. But, in the end, the movie screams that everything is worth trying, and everything is worth the risk, regardless of loss and pain. It reminds us, the viewer, to really take a look at our identities and our realities. It shows us that painful experiences are essential for our further development and growth in life, that we should love the messy and let it shape us into better people for it. It yells in our faces that life is worth reinventing again and again in spite of the pain our lives can throw at us. All our experiences and memories, wonderful or awful, mold us into the people we will become. No more false escapes, we invent ourselves into deeper and more grown people.
Each of these films highlights that new beginnings are our liberation. They spread the idea of resolution, something so commonly attributed to the New Year. That every “messy” aspect we encounter is truly essential for our growth and pledges to change. They show us that a simple pivotal decision can alter the trajectory of our lives. These films invoke a shift within ourselves, giving us a newfound perspective to return passion and inspiration to our lives, once again or for the first time. The movies are magic, giving us a portal, a magic mirror, or whatever you wanna call it, to see ourselves transform from movie scene to reality. We are now the directors of our own movie, grabbing hold of the clapboard and ready for our next pivotal scene.
