PicoBlog

Last night friends came to our house for dinner. I cooked lamb shanks because one of our guests had cooked lamb shanks and posted a picture of them. Each person had a giant bone on their plate. Richard said, “It’s looking a little too paleo in here for me.” I baked a little raspberry galette. I really like these people. I should dig up the dahlia tubers. I prefer writing to you.

The ZOOM on starting and sustaining a Substack publication is on November 25 at 3 EST. To attend, please RSVP: lauriestone@substack.com.

The next ZOOM Clinic on creative writing is on December 16 at 3pm EST. There is a limit of 25 people. To RSVP: lauriestone@substack.com

The ZOOMs are for paid subscribers. If you can upgrade to paid, you would be insuring the stack can continue. We’re in year two, where there is churn and people who have subscribed have fed the tip jar. To take a turn at the tip jar, please click here.

There are three buttons at the bottom of every page: “like,” “share,” and “comment.” I love hearing from you!

If ever there was a MacGuffin in a movie, it’s Diane Nyad herself in Nyad (Netflix). A MacGuffin, for anyone who doesn’t know, is what Hitchcock called the thing of no consequence in itself that sets in motion the action of the characters. In the Maltese Falcon, for example, the MacGuffin is the damn statue of a bird. We don’t care about the bird. We care about how the movie plays with the genre of film noir, and we start to think about how life is a film noir on the the good days—I mean Humphrey Bogart sets up Mary Astor to take the fall instead of winding up her schlemiel—life is a film noir when it isn’t a horror movie, where the girl is attacked, or a war movie.

I loved Nyad. Maybe you will. How can I know? I woke up today, and I thought I should watch this movie so I’d have something to write about that isn’t a horror movie or a war movie. I’m like five minutes into it, and I start to cry. I cry through the entire two hours. It’s not a sad movie. It’s not uplifting. It’s not any of the things Diana herself would like you to think about her life and her successful feat, in 2013, of swimming from Havana to Key West after four failed attempts. At age 60, she decided to get back in the pool after retiring from marathon swimming at age 30. She reached Key West on her fifth attempt at age 64, becoming the first person to swim from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage, swimming a distance of 110 miles, through water filled with jellyfish and sharks, in approximately 53 hours. Nyad wants to stand as a symbol of Never surrender your dreams, and Age isn’t an obstacle to whatever.

I couldn’t care less about this advice. No one wants advice. No one follows it. Nothing is more depressing than inspiration or people who set themselves up as role models. They aren’t models for anyone but themselves, and if only they would stop hammering other people about their courage and grit. Diana doesn’t know why she does what she does, and she doesn’t need to. Starting at 14, she was raped by her swimming coach, Jack Nelson, as were her team-mates, and this experience is always in her head, as the film, directed by Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, brilliantly shows, splicing in fragments of Diana’s memories as she methodically strokes along and sings to herself to keep going.

Nyad is an asshole from beginning to end, a shark, an engine of self burning away. Imagine playing a person who is an asshole from beginning to end and learns nothing about herself or other people. It’s the acting equivalent of swimming from Havana to Key West, and Annette Bening pulls it off so well we never come to care about Nyad, not really. It’s the great feat of misdirection the film pulls off. The reason I cried for two hours is because of everyone else in the movie who are not assholes and show you how to be a person. They are gorgeously wonderful, starting with Bonnie Stoll, Diana’s close friend, played with the perfect amount of underplaying by Jodie Foster, who agrees to coach Diana through the swims.

Coach is a word with almost no meaning in the context of this relationship. She keeps Diana alive through every moment she’s in the water, feeding her, guiding her through hallucinations, capturing all the players she will need to build a team, including shark wranglers, who’ve devised an electronic shield that turns the fish away. Years ago the women were an item, and now they are friends and more than friends, or maybe all friendship that finds a way to last is a glowing form of love with no special name.

This is what I want to talk about. Jodie is thrillingly alive, convincing herself to take the ride and convincing the team’s boat captain John Bartlett (Rhys Ifans) to overturn his life to join their adventure. Nyad is so in her own world, she can’t see the way she functions as the MacGuffin for others. She thinks they are sacrificing themselves for her and that she deserves their devotion. The others are looking for a plane that is leaving the airport, so they can have somewhere to fly. So they can find each other and create a thing of beauty only a group can create.

I love the way the movie reminded me of the many ways there are to love aliveness and the beauty of other people. Do we need a Nyad to call us to the airport? Do we need a Nyad to keep us flying? Between the fourth and fifth attempts at the swim, Bonnie pulls out. She’s broke. She’s mortgaged her house to help with expenses. Nyad remains an idiot of need. When Bonnie returns to help her with her fifth swim, she says, “You’re my person. We’ve been each other’s person for more than 30 years. If you die, I want my face to be the last thing you see.” Quickly, she adds, “I hope you don’t die.”

As I write this, I wonder if Richard and I are each other’s Bonnie. He is mine. I hope I am his.   

ncG1vNJzZmikkaq%2FqrHSraannV6owqO%2F05qapGaTpLpwvI6nsJqc