This summer, Dee, Angela, Charles, Paul, and I were on a shoot. It was sort of a documentary. We do a lot of brand documentaries, if you can call them such a thing. This particular concept involved little kids. They had to ask some simple and some not-so-simple- questions about life. We recorded their answers verbally and visually.
We had HDVD’d about ten little humans when up on the steps sits a rambler. This kid had tasseled straw hair that had just finished a fight with a comb, passing over a Huck Finn-ish face that contorted everything he saw into a dubious question. His husky voice just polished off the whole Mark-Twainish package as he emoted to the world, “I’m not here to amuse you.”
The little ruffian sat itching on the step as if a spasm of candor wouldn’t let him sit still even if Satan himself had given the instructions. His eye, the color of glacial runoff, was dancing around the room, evaluating every person for usefulness and purpose. His own freckles tried in vain to avoid the areas around his eyes.
I asked him a few questions. He answered thoughtlessly enough. I asked him one question several times in slightly different ways to get a slightly different response each time. He buried his Huckleberry face into his red-freckled hands and gouged at his squinted eyes. Under his husky mumble came the audible reply.
“I just don’t see the point,” he said.
His voice carrying the age of a hundred-year-old man about to breath his last.
“I just don’t see the point in all of this.” And with “this” he waved his hands around the room, indicating everyone involved in the production. His eyes dropped in a weariness that would have given Brando a run for his money in Apocalypse Now.
The room went silent. I smiled. The irony wasn’t lost on me. He breathed deep and let it out. He was spent. His head dropped as if his tiny neck was barely capable of holding it. He had given his performance for the day. He allowed each of us to get a good close look at the honest truth of what we were doing on the set that day.
All is naught. This is an exercise in futility. It is not real. It is fake. You are all pretending to shoot life but this is not life. The real life is outside, untamed, un-filmable.
“I just don’t see the point.”
He was finished shooting his part. I walked outside. I looked at the crew loading up the truck. I saw the actors leave. I listened to my friends talk about what we would shoot next. Trucks were loading, people were carrying boxes and cables. Cells were ringing. Meetings were being planned. Schedules were written in pencil so they could change later. It kept ringing in my head.
“I just don’t see the point.”
We rush and scream and snarl in jammed traffic and push deadlines and hurt other people all in a day’s work. We hate that woman or that girl or that guy. They hate us. We want to get even. No one ever wins.
“I just don’t see the point.”
Yesterday, I was wheeling through a hospital corridor. People looking down at me like a frog in biology class. I had tubes and wires sticking out of me. Heavy pain drugs pumping in my veins. My eyes struggled to see what was coming. The room was clean and stacked with metal equipment. Nurses carved shapes in the hair on my chest and slipped more tubes underneath my skin. Lights were bright and aimed at me. The voices slowly went from a language I knew to one I couldn’t comprehend.
Some people I don’t know were talking intently to me, asking questions. There were procedures I don’t understand. Lights all pointing at me. Then I saw him standing in the middle of my mind. So familiar.
A little boy, straw-wheat hair, freckles and a crooked smile, eyes like mountain runoff blue water. He looks past all of the people wearing white and he mouths the words.
“I just don’t see the point.”
I realized I was mouthing the words myself.
When I came out of the procedure, they asked me what it meant. I responded that I didn’t know what they were talking about.
You kept saying, “I just don’t see the point.”
I smiled.
“I heard that from a little kid,” I said. “He was right.”
