#sheepqueues | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

wordpress-blaze-73734803 · 5 hours ago

Text

Living Outside Boxes

A Memoir in the Shape of a Movie Reel

byChrisWhite - 2015

The first movie I ever saw—truly saw—wasn’t projected on a screen. It flickered across my mother’s face.

I must’ve been ten, maybe twelve. She was sitting two rows ahead of us in the Harding Mall theater, her profile painted in blue light from the screen as the spaceship on the screen pulsed and hummed its way through some grainy galactic adventure. I wasn’t watching the actors. I was watching her. The way she leaned forward when the music rose. The way her lips parted slightly, as though she could breathe in the drama and the wonder. That was when I knew I loved movies. Not for the special effects or the plots—not yet. I loved them because she did.

With four young kids in the house, we didn’t have money for much. But we had enough for matinees. Those old theaters were cathedrals to my mother. My siblings and I were acolytes, and the screen was stained glass, refracting every emotion we couldn’t yet put a name to.

And oh, the things she took us to.

The classics of our time; Pink Panther, the first Star Wars, The Godfather, Jaws, Dr. Strangelove and The Graduate, American Graffiti and the Towering Inferno. We not only experienced those classic stories in those fantastic old theaters, we were given a front-row seat to the evolution of special effects. But once, just once, there was one not so special effect that had our Mama marching us out of the Harding Mall theater like we’d stolen something.

And in a way, maybe we had—some small piece of childhood, peeled away by the vulgarity of a talking phallus on a movie screen. It was 1978, the lights dim, the carpet, a confusing blended aroma of buttered popcorn and mildew, and my brother, sisters, and I had just started to giggle when Mama snatched our collars with the practiced grip of a woman with experience in wrangling four children and one mountain of a husband.

Barbarella and The Groove Tube, in one double-feature disaster she never quite lived down. Barbarella was weird, yes, but she hustled us out fifteen minutes into the second movie, yanking our arms like a Baptist preacher exorcising sin. I remember looking up at her during that scene—the one with the talking genitalia—and thinking, this must be adulthood. Forbidden. Vaguely hilarious. And dangerous in ways I couldn’t yet articulate.

She didn’t explain it on the way home. Just watched daddy—with rolled up car windows—light a cigarette, then muttered something about Chevy Chase and never mentioned it again. I mention it plenty.

Some people inherit land. Others, heirlooms.

I inherited dialogue.

My mother gave me a love for stories not in paragraphs but in scenes. Tight, controlled bursts of human failure and redemption that unfold over ninety minutes and leave you either changed or amused or wrecked. Sometimes all three.

My wife teases me about it. Says I even love bad movies. And I do. Because even the worst ones have their moment; a single line, or a sweeping score, or a camera angle that makes you feel less alone, or more. And because bad movies, like bad days, still count toward the narrative arc.

It doesn’t take an Oscar winner to show you how to live. In fact, great actors teach us more when they just keep their mouths shut it seems.

Lately, I’ve been shedding a few tears during chick flicks.

I’m fifty now, and testosterone has packed its bags and moved out. It left behind a house haunted by sentiment. Romantic comedies make me weep. Plotless indie films about two people learning to bake bread in Tuscany make me ache for my own childhood kitchen. I find myself watching a coming-of-age montage set to Fleetwood Mac and thinking about grandparents. My father. My former self.

But there’s a scene in Men in Black I never get tired of. Will Smith’s character, Agent J, sits in a room full of the elite—the best the government can offer. Everyone in the room is locked into the test like soldiers, hunched in their egg-shaped chairs, strictly conforming to silence and awkward angles.

But not Agent J.

He looks around. Breaks his pencil. Drags a metal table screeching across the floor with the kind of disregard that only the truly confident possess. He doesn’t do it to make a point. He does it because he can’t think straight in a crooked chair.

And that’s what I love. That deliberate noise. That sacred refusal to conform.

Later, he shoots a cardboard cutout of a little girl while everyone else is picking off aliens. Rip Torn’s character, Zed, asks him why. And Agent J, deadpan and honest, says, “She’s in the ghetto at night with quantum physics books. She about to start some shit.”

That scene never leaves me.

Because it’s not about testing. It’s about vision. The kind that cuts through pageantry and protocol and finds the truth sitting on the floor in pigtails, holding a science book.

I don’t like the cliché phrase thinking outside the box. It sounds like something a junior associate says in a conference room right before showing you a pie chart. But I live outside that box.

Maybe it started in the back row of that movie theater, learning that forbidden images and maternal silence could live in the same memory. Maybe it happened the first time I wore a badge and realized that law doesn’t always look like justice. Maybe it happened when I turned fifty and realized the strongest thing a man can do is cry at The Notebook and not explain why.

But I do think it happened gradually.

The box was never mine. It was given to me by good people. Teachers. Coaches. Parents and pastors. Each one adding a plank to the frame. Study hard. Speak respectfully. Open doors for ladies. Take the job. Marry the girl. Raise the kids. Keep your head down. Work till you’re tired, then work more. Don’t cry. Don’t fail. Don’t question what the others agree upon.

Decorate your box, sure. Put your diplomas on the wall. Hang a deer rack by the door. Make it smell like Willett bourbon and Kentucky tobacco and powdered drywall. But stay in it. Live in it. Die in it.

And I would have. Except something in me—something borrowed from my mother’s provocative streak and my own failings—refused.

My wife has heard me sing in the car. God help her. I belt 80s rock with the delusion of a man who thinks being off-key is a form of Taylor-Swift-Esque authenticity. But I never sing in public. I can hold a Glock with perfect form in front of a room full of cadets but ask me to hold a G-sharp note and I suddenly fall to pieces.

That’s a box, too. One I built myself.

We all have them. Boxes of fear. Of shame. Of expectation. Some are wrapped in velvet and handed down like your grandmother’s wedding china. Others we hammer together out of scraps: one part trauma, two parts pride.

I know people who live in gilded boxes—beautiful to look at, lethal to breathe in. They post curated lives and quote Jordan Peterson and believe that God wants order more than He wants honesty.

I’ll take honesty. Even if it screeches.

Living outside the box isn’t rebellion. It’s revelation. It’s figuring out that your life won’t echo or feedback into an amplifier if it only repeats what others told you.

You don’t have to light it all on fire. But you should at least crack open a window and give it oxygen.

Last year I did just that. Career-wise, I was suffocating. Chained to the decorum of my title and responsibilities. Gasping under the weight of political correctness, my wife’s family drama, and procedural pageantry. So, I said something. Did something. And to be fair, it was pretty bold. I Walked out of my box with the audacity of a man dragging a metal desk across the tile. Straight to that oracle of modernity, Facebook. And I put a man in his place. Every week, once a week, for ten weeks.

People frowned. Whispered. Rolled their eyes. Said I was making people uncomfortable.

Damn right I was.

Comfort is a poor substitute for purpose. And sometimes, when a person crosses a certain line, he might deserve more than a dirty look.

Look, I know that sometimes we have to follow steps. Surgeons can’t improvise. Pilots can’t freelance. But life isn’t always a cockpit or an operating room.

Sometimes it’s a movie theater in South Nashville where a man smokes in silence while his kids pretend not to laugh at inappropriate puppetry. Sometimes it’s a metal desk screeching toward the center of the room. Sometimes it’s a man at fifty, deciding that what he feels matters more than what people expect.

And sometimes, it’s just knowing that there’s more to see than what fits in the frame.

So here I am. Still singing in the car. Still quoting movies. Still watching people try to make sense of me. And writing this—this too is outside the box. It’s a risk. It’s me saying I am not finished. I’m still becoming something else; yet again.

I may never shoot aliens or ace an exam in an egg-chair, but I’ll keep dragging tables. I’ll keep loving movies and reading fiction. Even the bad ones. Especially the bad ones.

Because like all of us, they are trying.

Trying to say something that matters.

Trying to live.

Trying, against the grain and against the odds, to a breath in a boxless world.

When was the last time you stepped outside yours?

Source: Living Outside Boxes

0 notes