There are quite a few lines in the incredibly visually rich movie “Nebraska” that resonated with me. Though the characters speak few words, when they do, you listen. It’s funny how most of us don’t think too much about our parents’ inner lives until we are much older and when it’s almost too late as they “can’t remember” when you ask questions. But David “Davey” Grant gets to have a few exchanges with his father, Woody, that move this story along emotionally. One such exchange is when they are looking out on to Nebraska farm land with the round bales of hay lying across the horizon and the pasture dotted with black Angus cows.
David asks his father:
“Did you ever want to farm like your dad?”
Woody replies:
“I don’t remember. It doesn’t matter.”
In the script David asks again if his dad had it to do all over would he have stayed here and farmed. Woody replies that you can’t “do it all over”.
But people try to “do it all over” in many different ways. When I was an actor and director in New York City in the 1980s, I directed plays by a wonderful playwright Jack Heifner. Jack’s play “Vanities” held the record for longest Off Broadway run for quite a few years. It is what made Kathy Bates a star. I directed a one act play of his called “Twister”. It was about a small plain town in Texas that is wiped away by a tornado. It looked a lot like the desolate town of Hawthorn in “Nebraska”. There are only two people left, Betty and Roy. When they find each other after the storm, Roy says he wants to find their stuff like her stuffed animals and a mattress and then bring them to where their house used to be. He wants to rebuild it exactly like it was. Betty doesn’t want any of the “stuff” because it’s just junk. She wants to go away and have a brand new prettier life. She wants to be born again. At the end she leaves and Roy is left alone with the rubble.
Jack returns to this born again theme in several of his plays. There are many times that people want to reinvent themselves and be “born again”. Sometimes it’s as simple as going off to college or moving to another town or state. Sometimes it’s getting a divorce and starting a supposedly new life.
More often than not no one can do a complete do over of themselves unless they are actually making it all up like a grifter or con artist or someone mentally ill like Cate Blanchett’s character in “Blue Jasmine” who announces “People reinvent themselves….I met someone. I’m a new person.” But for most people, you don’t really reinvent yourself, but you can come to terms with who you really are. Carl Jung called this process “individuation”. It’s “getting to know you, getting to know all about you.” It’s accepting the quirks that make you an individual while at the same time seeing what makes you part of the whole of humanity. In the Bible, Paul says that we are “all of one body, with gifts differing.” We each have different gifts but together we make a whole. Good marriages and partnerships work that way.
In “Nebraska” “Davey” Grant finds out a whole lot about gifts and giving on this road trip with his dad. He has inherited his Dad’s kindness and sense of humor and that’s the payoff. Is it better than a million bucks? Doesn’t matter. It’s a great story.