The other day I saw ‘Misery’; it was one of those classic films that by some reason you miss when in theaters, and which always feel like finding one more french fry in the box when you thought there wasn’t any left.
There is a scene round the beginning, in which the mollusk-like sheriff is in his van, searching for the writer’s disappeared vehicle. By his side, his wife, from the driver seat, suddenly stretches out her hand out and caresses the sheriff’s knee, in what unequivocally looks like a sexual attempt. The sheriff, in a very serious manner, tells her: “Jenny, when we’re here in this car you are not my wife, you’re my deputy”.
That simple scene, in my case, was closing a loop opened many many years ago, and which I did not even know that existed. For many years, I had listened to Bob Marley’s ‘I shot the sheriff’ (to tell the truth, I first heard Eric Clapton’s version), without the least suspiction of a false friend. I had always thought that “deputy” was referring to a politician; there was something sweet and simple in the fact of a politician being killed in a reggae song. Besides, there are no sheriffs in my country, so how could I guess that ‘deputy’ was also some kind of assistant… Ah! Oh!
Then I had an idea; not as a theory, just poetic speculation. Who knows, maybe life is just that: solving that kind of tiny, unspoken misconceptions we weave and got stuck with in the first part of our lives. We toil and make plans, and suffer with our anticipations, and try to hoard the good moments and minimize the bad ones, but in the end, the real meaning of the whole picture, the underlying plot, is simply solving those little nuisances. Once we have them all corrected, even if we are not aware of it, it is when we are ready to go.
Ain’t that ironic?
Related posts:
There’s nothing wrong with being a freak
Brain tracks… not too deep, please!
Nacho and the primal forces
Mindfulness: a case study from Stephen King
The hypnosis of details
