life is more than a dress rehearsal

I’m very fond of saying that everything in life is a choice.  And The Adjustment Bureau played out in real dialog for the first time.  My favorite part?  It exposed all the false dilemmas by which we cheat ourselves out of all that we can be.

***spoiler alert***

love the cant---the tension of who we are and who we see ourselves becoming

David Norris loves Elise Sellas.  He wants nothing more than to have her next to him for the rest of his life.  He doesn’t care about his career—although he does a damn good job of furthering it, despite his weaknesses.  He cares a hell of a lot about her career—and it nearly costs them the most important thing: to learn to love and be loved in return.

The Adjustment Bureau has decided that David and Elise shouldn’t be together.  That’s it.  At one point they were supposed to be together.  And now, they’re not.  Sucks for them that there is residual attraction.  The management of this bureau succinctly explains to David that to be all that each of them are capable of being—President of the United States and world-renowned choreographer—they must consent to life without each other.  Life incomplete, full of a void that can never be filled.  A void that the script implies was created precisely because the ravenous hunger it engenders was the only force powerful enough to propel them to their full potential.

But what The Adjustment Bureau does not allow for is the possibility of being happy teaching ballet to six year olds.  The possibility of being happy alone and not in front of a nation.  Like the Jane Austen critics that I pick a bone with, The Adjustment Bureau mistakes silence for voicelessness, privacy for emptiness, and security for imprisonment.  Elizabeth Bennett’s voice did not disappear at the end of Pride and Prejudice because Darcy locked her away in Pemberley  as his wife; her voice disappeared because she finally had an ear that was fully given to her whisper.  And David and Elise did not loose out on the greatest part of their story because they fought for their love; they actually wrote the most glorious story imaginable because they fought for their love.

probably the best reaction ever: surrounded by men who want to kill you? kiss the one you love!

Whatever The Adjustment Bureau may be saying about Yhwh, Deism, Armenianism, or Calvinism doesn’t really interest me as much as what it says about humanism: humanity is worth fighting for.  All the reasoning of the Enlightenment and the mechanics of the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions cannot hold a candle to the ingenuity and fire of the human spirit in love.