Counterfeit Comfort

I used to love going to the movies. From occasional family trips to the budget cinema in a rundown mall 20 miles south of my childhood home, to the standalone multiplexes with bigger screens and better sound of my high school years, to the smaller independent art-film-showing niche theaters of undergrad and the rest of my early 20s. There was something magical about cramming into close, unreservable quarters in a public place to enjoy a shared experience with strangers. The generally uncomfortable, squeaky seats with 25-year-old gum stuck to the bottom. If you went with a big group of friends to a popular movie and you weren’t there early, you’d often have to sit apart from one another.

I know there are still some theaters like that, but most of the easily accessible ones have shifted to seat-assigned-ahead-of-time, cushiony recliners spaced pretty far apart. If you’re there with one other person, or maybe two, there’s the possibility of it feeling somewhat like a shared experience, but the only real intent behind the change seems to be “upgraded” comfort for the individual moviegoer. Despite this, I can’t recall a single experience in any of these supposedly upgraded spaces that even comes close to being as memorable as my earlier ones in relatively ramshackle spaces.

You could argue that I’m being hipster snobby or just getting (somewhat prematurely) crotchety (likely both are somewhat fair assessments), and/or that the art you experience when you’re younger just has a more substantial effect on you (I’m sure that’s also part of it). But I think there’s more to it. Because the most recent legitimately affecting movie-related experience I had was watching Alexander Payne’s Nebraska on the little screen built into the back of an airplane seat, listening to it through Delta-provided, tinny-sounding earbuds. Like the movie theaters of my youth, airplane movie viewing is not especially comfortable, and I was crammed into close quarters with strangers; however, none of these strangers were watching the same movie, so my theory about “shared experience” doesn’t quite track. And yet, something about it still felt special.

I think one major reason was the unexpectedness of it. My attitude regarding flying had reached a sort of nadir after a delay on my initial flight made me miss a lunch with friends. Then when I got onto this plane to return home, an elderly woman was already sitting in the middle seat of my row (I had the window) and she told me I was going to have to crawl over her. I threw my carry-on in the overhead compartment and did my best to not step on her and keep my butt as far from her face as possible. And of course, right as I was about to sit, I noticed that in the minutes before I boarded, this same woman had somehow spilled her soda on my seat. I tried to wipe it off, half-successfully, but gave up and plopped down in the sticky residue. At this point, my seatmate started coughing and sneezing and making all sorts of other illness-related sounds that made me pretty sure I was going to leave this flight having caught something that would lead to my untimely death. So, with my sour mood now fully activated, I started looking through the available movies and settled on Nebraska.

Though the movie is twelve years old, I hadn’t seen it. Mostly because it came out the same year my daughter was born, and lack of sleep plus all the other worries and busyness of being a new dad essentially took me out of the pop culture loop for a few years. But I had vague memories of hearing it was good, and I loved Payne’s more recent The Holdovers and liked a few of his earlier movies, so thought I’d give it a chance.

It’s contemporaneously set, but it’s filmed in black and white to play up the austere nature of Bob Nelson’s script and the stark beauty of the landscapes of rural and small-town middle America in which much of the film is set. In the movie, Woody Grant (Bruce Dern), a cantankerous alcoholic in his mid-70s with some cognitive decline receives a piece of mail that says he’s entitled to one million dollars, but he needs to mail it in or go to Lincoln, Nebraska, to cash in. So, not trusting the postal service and without a driver’s license, he sets off on multiple failed attempts to walk from Billings, Montana, to Lincoln, before his son David (Will Forte) agrees to drive him, despite his knowing that it’s only a Publishers Clearing House-type scam.

To get to Lincoln, David and Woody have to drive through Hawthorne, the small Nebraska town where Woody grew up and where much of his (humorously portrayed) family still resides. They stop for a few days, and much to David’s chagrin, Woody lets it slip that he’s “won” a million dollars. The whole town finds out and hijinks ensue.

In the earlier parts of the movie, it seems as though Woody is not a good father, not a good husband, and not a particularly good guy. And no one is quite sure what he thinks he’s going to do with the million dollars if he gets it, aside from “buy a new truck” that he can’t drive and get a new air compressor to replace the one his former business partner, Ed, (a delightfully menacing Stacy Keach) “borrowed” from him almost 40 years prior. But David (and by proxy, the audience) comes to find out more of Woody’s story and his intentions for the money as the movie progresses.

In one of the most affecting scenes, David goes into the town newspaper’s office (The Hawthorne Republican) to tell them not to run the story they were planning about his dad winning the money because it isn’t true. When he gets there, he’s greeted by Peg, a kind-faced, grandmotherly woman, who, it turns out, had been Woody’s high school girlfriend, and who, along with her late husband, had run the town’s newspaper in the intervening years. Peg tells David that Woody’s drinking only really got bad after he returned from Korea because he had a hard time dealing with the memory of his plane being shot down — a story David had never heard. And she tells him that though he’d never been a big talker, after he returned, he wouldn’t say a word, but he was always kind and never turned down a favor, and because of that people took advantage of him. She tells David that she’s sorry that she can’t print the story about the million dollars, but promises not to publish a story saying it isn’t true either, as to let people believe what they want/come to their own conclusions.

Some critics (mostly ones who never spent any real time in the kind of places the movie’s set) said it seemed like Payne must have felt contempt for the people he portrayed, but as someone who grew up in a pretty similar milieu, I didn’t see it that way. I’m very particular about artistic representations of small towns/rural areas, and this one was entirely recognizable (if a little broad, for effect) to me. People seem to let it slide if you show rural areas as being entirely depressing, and all the people ignorant, cruel, or put-upon; or on the other side, if they’re portrayed in a pie-in-the-sky, wouldn’t it be better if we were all more like these simple country folk? kind of way. But the reality is that they’re both AND neither. Which maybe sounds nonsensical or impossible, but I think that’s what makes it true.

It seems to me that when people and places are portrayed realistically, people get upset, defensive, or dismissive. When a cast of characters shows that some people are clever, some people are cruel, some people are both, some people are neither, some people blend in, some stick out like Flannery O’Connor-type grotesques, and the one thing that really ties us together is our shared brokenness, people get up in arms. One review of the film said:

Writer Bob Nelson clearly understands the psyche of a small town as well as Payne knows how to shoot one. But Nebraska isn’t a defense or a condemnation of that fading way of life. Neither is it an indictment or pardon of alcoholic fathers and shrewish mothers. It just takes a black and white snapshot, a cinematic selfie, and leaves it there.

The reviewer meant this as a slight, but I think that’s why the movie works, and it’s kind of the whole point. Why do we think that everything has to be an indictment or pardon, a defense or condemnation? What can that possibly lead to, except more judgment?

Eventually, after a number of mishaps, including multiple people attempting to get what they feel they are “owed” from the “newly rich” Woody, David tries once again to change his father’s mind about going all the way into Lincoln to save some of his dignity, but Woody insists. David asks him about his motives one more time, and he says he just always wanted to own a new truck. David asks, “Well, what about the rest of the money? You don’t need a million dollars for a new pickup truck.” Woody, looking away from David, sighs and says, “It’s for you boys (David and his brother). I just wanted to leave you something.”

At this point, I’m trying to covertly wipe the tears from my face, and hoping that the flight attendants don’t bring the beverage and Biscoff cart around anytime soon …

When David and Woody finally arrive at the Lincoln address on the mailing, they arrive at a nondescript building in an office park. They go in, and there’s one woman in a zip-up hoodie sitting at a desk covered in disheveled stacks of paper and surrounded by opened cardboard boxes. They explain to her why they’re there, and she takes the letter, types something into her computer, and says she’s sorry, his number wasn’t the winning number, but she can offer him a free gift of a hat or a seat cushion. Woody takes the hat, a foam trucker hat that says “PRIZE ★ WINNER” on it, and goes back out to the car. David stays behind and asks if this happens a lot. The woman says only occasionally, usually with older people, then asks David if Woody has Alzheimer’s. David responds, “He just believes stuff that people tell him.”

As they’re about to head back to Billings, David tells Woody that they “might make a couple quick stops first.” I sort of knew what was going to happen, but it plays out so beautifully. The first stop is at a used car dealership, where we see David moving his and his dad’s bags from his Subaru into a shiny truck. Woody says, “I don’t understand what’s happening to your car.” David explains that he got a “good offer” on the car, and this “practically brand new” truck is a step up, then adds, “Oh, and I hope you don’t mind, I put your name on the title.”

The second stop is at a hardware store, where David goes in and buys a new air compressor and puts it in the bed of the truck. And the third and final stop is back in Hawthorne, where David stops the truck right before Locust Street (the main drag/historic downtown), and tells Woody that now it’s his turn to drive.

Now I’m quietly sobbing amidst the sea of strangers on the plane with me and can barely be bothered to pretend otherwise.

I’m also coming to realize that as much as the attempted justifications for my crabbiness towards the woman sitting next to me could sound legitimate, they were actually analogous in a way to the same sort of predetermined sense of what is “owed to/deserved by” us and others based on what’s “fair” that Nebraska and Jesus warn us against.

Was I considering how much of a hassle it probably was for that woman to get to the airport? To board the plane? Was I considering how equally annoyed she probably was at me for having to jump over her? And how maybe she was embarrassed by the spilling of the cola and her cough? No. I was just thinking of my own comfort.

Which brings me back to my problem with the “comfort” of new movie theater amenities. It feels more like an attempt to reduce friction than to actually facilitate a better experience. And I think a lot of this has to do with a poor understanding of what comfort really is. In many less-contemporary English translations of the Bible, both Jesus and Paul use the phrase “be of good comfort.” But “comfort” here means something very different than what we mean by it. It’s meant to be understood as something much closer to consolation: joining with others in their sorrows/times of need. This is where we find real comfort, and it’s a far cry from a plush recliner and a fifteen-dollar bucket of popcorn. We could continue to attempt to maximize this counterfeit comfort, but at what expense and why? Have we forgotten our omnipresent creator whose intent for his creation has always been connection? We can’t escape encounter, and encounter implies friction.

In his book Culture Care, Makoto Fujimura writes that “an encounter with the arts can lead to generative thinking as generosity supplants our quid pro quo expectations.” God frequently encounters us through means, including unexpected ones like in-flight entertainment and seemingly inconvenient interactions with people we’d never choose on our own. When we close ourselves off from these means, whether that’s art, our families, friends, and neighbors, or the coughing stranger seated beside us on a plane, we close ourselves off to the possibility of encountering God through them. Though we seek out comforts of isolation and frictionless convenience, God is always working to draw us back in and reorient us out, by reminding us of the grace we’ve already been given. This reminder compels us to forgo our self-importance and helps us realize that creature comforts can’t supplant connection. It shows us that grace in practice looks a lot like openhearted generosity, and that encounters with God are frequently the result of some kind of friction and always unexpected.