Marcel

We saw Marcel the Shell today and it reminded me of a person I used to be and the way the world used to feel. When Marcel first emerged, the internet was still young and the idea of a talking shell with shoes felt utterly bursting with marvel and delight. It seems that Marcel's life has also transformed into something a little darker over the last two decades, though there are hints of his previous whimsy.

His short films were big when social media was in its infancy, when the world still felt smaller and the news cycle wasn't as immediate and overbearing. You couldn't join Facebook unless you were a college student and you couldn't friend anyone who you didn't actually know in the flesh.

We were all terribly aggrieved by the re-election of George W Bush (I recall looking out the window of our dorm to a burning American flag on election night). If only we could have looked ahead to the election of 2016 and the divisiveness sewn in the country over the next four years, the vitriol and toxicity of the camps to which we swore allegiance.

The variants of the original coronavirus caused a cold, but didn't shut down the world. Millions of people hadn't died and family ties hadn't been irrevocably fractured by the forced distance, vaccine misinformation, and mental health toll of prolonged loneliness and isolation.

No one in my peer groups had contracted terrible or rare diseases and I hadn't attended any funerals. Cancer was something abstract and obscure, not something anyone I actually know battled.

I had absolutely no money, but I also had absolutely no debt that was due in any kind of immediate way (the college loans would roll in shortly after graduation, but they were never an ACTUAL thing in my mind). I had no mortgage or job or retirement, but that allowed me the freedom to go anywhere, do anything, and have faith that I would be no worse off than when I made the leap. Having nothing, it turns out, is a kind of liberation.

We hadn't begun the cycle of marriages and divorces. Children, miscarriages, and infertility were not yet a consideration. 

My relationship with alcohol in no way resembled dependency like it did at the height of the pandemic. I remember having a beer with friends, it opening doors to intimacy and closeness without that sense that something was very much lacking if the evening didn't end with enough drinks that the terrible edge of the world was at least a little blunted, if I couldn't slide seamlessly into sleep immediately when my head hit the pillow (only to wake in a spiral of anxiety several hours later when the buzz dissipated).

The themes in Marcel were life giving, if not laced with some of the worldly melancholy we have all been feeling. He is worried that things will change and his grandmother reassures him they will. He is frightened of the things to come, but those closest to him push him toward that inevitable future. Death is present, but life goes on, and the reverberation/connectedness of everyone is a final rumination as Marcel sits in front of a window, thinking of Nana.

And before her death, she recites a poem I have never read, and it seems like perhaps the most perfect poem for Marcel and, perhaps, for all of us in this very particular and exact moment.