Good morning. Understanding what’s “for you” or “not for you” is part of refining taste. But what if it’s also closing you off to pleasure and connection?
Your heart’s desireIt’s “Glicked” weekend, if you’re up for it, an invitation to take in a double feature of two of the season’s most anticipated movies, both of which opened yesterday: “Wicked,” Jon M. Chu’s adaptation of the Broadway musical, starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, and “Gladiator II,” Ridley Scott’s return to the Colosseum 24 years after his original epic. If this particular cinematic portmanteau is missing some of the multisyllabic whimsy of 2023’s “Barbenheimer,” the two films on offer this time are as unalike in subject as “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” were, making for another dizzyingly dissonant mash-up, another chance for die-hards to dress up and spend five hours hunkered down in a multiplex. When I first heard that some fans were planning to see “Wicked” and “Gladiator II” back to back, I thought, “Oh, that’s fun, but it’s not for me.” If I’m honest, neither of these films seemed, on its face, to be especially “for me.” I’m inclined to smaller movies over blockbusters. I’m not a huge fan of musicals, nor of action movies. I’m a cultural omnivore, personally and professionally, so I knew I would eventually see these movies. But I would be seeing them as a sociologist, a curious outsider rather than the ideal audience member. I wasn’t going to be mouthing every word to “Defying Gravity” or comparing Lucius’s performance in the arena to that of his father. Understanding what’s “for you” or “not for you” is part of refining taste, of figuring out what you like and don’t so that your time is pleasurably spent. There’s a confidence in that: This is my kind of movie, this is the type of music I listen to, this is the food I like, this is what works for me. It’s the reward for a life discerningly lived — you know who you are. I went to see “Wicked” this week and, if I didn’t feel like it was for me, I did understand after seeing it that it’s for a lot of people who are not me. I was tempted to leave it at that — different strokes for different folks! — but there seemed to be some possibility here. “Wicked” is going to be a huge movie, one that people will be talking about, debating, quoting and referencing, and I was, however tenuously, now connected to these people by dint of having seen it. A few hours in a theater and I could join the conversation. The next day in the office, I ran into my colleague Louis, who’d just written a story about the costumes of “Wicked.” The movie, he confirmed, was definitely for him. He’d seen the stage musical several times, knew the soundtrack by heart. I told Louis that after having seen “Wicked,” I was interested in questioning what I think of as for me, in finding what happens when we deliberately explore something that we’ve consigned to others, assuming our tastes or tendencies are so established that there’s no way in for us. He’d gone to five Mets games that year, Louis told me, becoming in one season a baseball person, the type of fan who might be inclined to seek out a bar when the game was on. Just like that, a new community. It seems like an irrefutable good to know oneself, the ultimate sign of maturity. Enough faffing about figuring out who you are, now you can just be that person. You’ve arrived at your destination. But there’s a finality to that arrival, a rigidity, an end to curiosity. You know who you are, so you know what’s going to happen. What happens if you go see the movie that’s so clearly advertising itself as not for you? Yes, you might sit bored for a couple hours, but there’s a good story (and Milk Duds) even in that experience. Or you could discover something unexpected — an actor you’d never encounter otherwise, a soundtrack that’s actually kind of for you after all. What if you applied the same openness to a problem that’s been plaguing you, or a relationship that’s been challenging? You think you know who you are, how you will react, how things are going to go. What if you don’t know yourself as well as you think you do? What if the you that you think you know, with its taste and preferences and ways of reacting and relating, isn’t totally set in stone? For more
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