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The Great Escape

How do you escape?  Do you do so through relationships, cliff jumping, unwinding after work in a bar, or talking for hours to a friend?  And what is escaping really?  Why do we do it?  Why do we need it?  Is it helpful? Is it second nature?  For me, at least, I know what my great escape is and that is art in its many forms.

Since it’s my escape, I often wonder what art is.  Is it simply to bring beautiful things into the world? Is it to help us learn things about ourselves and each other that we didn’t know before? Or, perhaps, it’s the combination that’s important.  Learning within, either about ourselves or each other, is bringing beauty into the world.  We escape into ourselves and from there we learn or we pause or we heal.

To me writing has always been my great escape, from reading books to watching movies.  For awhile I’m elsewhere.  For awhile I get what I need, and often I learn something new about myself or about life in general.  That’s what today’s blog post is about—where I escape to and why. And if anyone wants to share their escapes and maybe even why they need to escape, feel free to comment below or on my Facebook page.

I do not pretend to be a critic or to understand how a movie was intended to be.  I only know, as a viewer, how it resonates with me.  And if you are unfamiliar with any titles I am about to talk about be warned.  Spoiler Alert is in affect.  

Sometimes I dream of finding love—the kind that should only exist in fiction, even though I know this to be far-fetched.  It’s an impractical idea from a girl who has spent far too much time in her own head.  It’s even more outrageous for a girl who doesn’t have the energy to keep up with a boyfriend.  And I don’t have to.  That’s where story-telling comes in.  One of my favorite things to do of late is watch re-runs of Dawson’s Creek before I go to bed.  Pacey Witter is the boy I would banter with if fantasy were real.  He’s a wise smart-ass, which is the best kind.  He’s sexy and romantic, but he’d punch a bully in the face for you and still name his boat True Love.  I remind myself he doesn’t truly exist.  He’s a character played by an actor spouting lines a writer or team of writers wrote.  Still, he keeps me company.  And if life had been different, Pacey Witter is the type of boy  I would have looked for to marry.  In a drama series I learned that I’d want a man who could pull a quip as fast as I could, call me out on my bullshit, always make me laugh, and be romantic without thinking it made him less of a man. Even though I’m not out in the world making my own romantic mistakes, I’m still learning.  I understand what it means to me.

Another character I have spent time with is Jace Wayland from the Shadow Hunter series by Cassandra Clare. I was first captured by the MOVIE version.  I was so enthralled with him (which is weird because he’s blonde, and I normally go for the tall dark and handsome type) that I bought the books and have read the series at least three times and will probably re-read them again after I finish re-reading Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, which is one of my favorites too.  

Jace is the warrior type.  He fights demons after all!  Yet, he’s a bad-ass that can play piano, be vulnerable, and fight for love while doing it so carelessly cool.  He plays in my head when I need to feel tough.  I imagine a female character as tough as him with him. They’re entwined in love and always have a weapon or two up their sleeves.  I like the contrast of that.  I like the mystique of him.  He has an untouchable quality in any enduring sense, yet he finds a soul mate anyways.  I like that.  To me that’s sexy, and since fantasy is my favorite thing to write it’s right up my alley. I can get lost in the Shadow Hunter world any time.  I’m still upset to this day that they dumped the sequels to the movie, but I will always be grateful for Jamie Campbell Bower who played him so well.  Making that movie so well from all fronts for a female who loves fantasy was art.  I’m their target audience, and I loved it!

I’ve been suspended in the struggle and impropriety of Penny Dreadful.  They took something daring, messy, and bloody and made it evocative.  This series ended too soon, but I loved every minute of it.  Vanessa Ives struggled with evil, real true evil. She felt turned away from God, but her friends never turned away from her.  Ethan Chandler had his own crosses to bear, seemed simple but was complicated, and would have died for her. Sir Malcom knew her from childhood and loved her as a daughter, then hated her, then grew to love her again, because he saw in her the same things that were in himself—which weren’t endearing qualities, but qualities they needed to survive in their lives.  This show twisted the works of Oscar Wilde with his character, Dorian Gray.  I loved this book, and I love the spin they gave to him for the show.  There were other familiar villains given a new twist such as Dracula and Frankenstein and his monster—or in the show’s case, monsters. There were familiar faces like Billie Piper and Josh Hartnett (who played Ethan Chandler) that played characters with tragic pasts and bloody futures.  The entire cast did an amazing job.  The writing was phenomenal, and they touched on diversity, rank, and status that still exists to this day.  This was a show you watch to see how many boundaries can be pushed and how far actors can reach. And all the actors in this series showed impeccable reach.

I even fell for the Twilight movies, and I’m not embarrassed to admit it since I didn’t fall as hard as some. But who wouldn’t want to be Bella stuck between Edward and Jacob?  I’m a Jacob girl all the way.  He was described as the warm best-friend.  Who wouldn’t want to end up with that?

I love how certain movies could have gotten it wrong but got it right.  Like how Warm Bodies was in a way making fun of the zombie craze yet it did it in a way that was funny, original, and just good.  Ironically or on purpose they ended up creating ANOTHER good zombie movie.

Vampire Academy is my guilty pleasure.  I’ve watched it at least half a dozen times, because I think it did what it was mean to.  Parts of it showed overacting as teen dramas tend to do, yet it had a story line that wasn’t too deep or to shallow.  And the actress Zoey Deutch portrayed her character well in scenes and with lines that weren’t easy to pull off. She made the movie for me.  I think it was supposed to be a “bad, non-serious, non-accolade” type of movie, but as far as “bad” goes it’s top of the list for me.  This shows that everything has a place and not everything is meant to be the same.  Follow certain rules.  Break others.  Create something.  Some people will get it, and some people wont. Not every line needs to be a soundbite.  Not every story needs to be deep.  Sometimes you just need to laugh, figure out how the script of a show works or didn’t, see how actors can make or break good and bad writing.  Realize how much effort and people it takes to make a good movie or a good book.  For me, just knowing these people, characters, writers, directors, set designers etc are out there makes me feel like part of the world, because when I like a movie or a book, they’re all speaking to me, and my fandom speaks to them.

And today I watched A Walk to Remember.  Jamie dies of cancer in the end.  Her tragic teen love story changed her love interest, Landon, who otherwise would have ventured down a different path with likely hard, unfulfilling consequences.  I don’t like sad endings. Life is hard enough, why take the time to watch something that will make you cry?  Today, with this movie, I made an exception, because at least her death has a point.  She changed him.  Where there was sadness at least there was a silver lining.  I find that in life, if you look hard enough, good usually can come from the bad times too.  I don’t believe we are meant to suffer like these characters did, but until we fix the world’s tragedies, at least we can grow from suffering instead of taking it in and letting our pain add to the collective.

The Farthest Away Mountain by Lynn Reid Banks is what dropped me into the world of words.  This book intrigued me so much that from fourth grade on, I never have stopped reading.  As children we used our imagination to play with dolls or to pretend to be superheros, but until I read this book I didn’t know imagination could go deeper than that or last longer.  It awoke something in me.  My teacher, Mrs. Brock, used this as a class read.  She used this book as an example of how to write creative sentences. And every time she put a plain one up on the whiteboard my hand was first in the air to jazz it up.  With her encouragement, I found that words were inside me too, and I enjoyed playing with them and urging them to come out.  Back then I never realized how much writing would mean to me and not just my own.  Stories have kept me company. Stories have made me laugh and imagine and wonder and hope and feel joy when I need those sensations most.

In Mansfield Park by Jane Austen (which is my favorite Jane Austen book) I sympathized with Fanny Price while wondering if it was weird, in modern times, to root for her ending up with her cousin.

I’ve learned love and forgiveness with A Course In Miracles.  

I can’t wait to get my hands on anything by Marianne Williamson.

Then there are books like Harry Potter.  I wished to be in his world, from being at Hogwarts to the Burrow, to giant friends and Diagon Alley, and from Lord Voldermort to believing in something so much you’d die for it.

My point with these erratic examples is that art in any form takes us away for awhile.  I don’t have to be lonely.  I can imagine there are Pacey Witters in the world.  I don’t have to be bored. I can go on an adventure with Jace Wayland.  I can find boundaries in my mind being pushed with shows like Penny Dreadful.  And I can be inspired by them all.  While I sit silently while people talk about their normal lives, I’m laughing in my own head with characters I’ve read or watched and characters of my own I hope to share with others to make them laugh some day.

I’ve escaped real life when I needed a break and learned something along the way with all of these characters and countless more.

Something true that will always stay with me is this:  ART IS THE GREAT ESCAPE

What is yours?