These People Could Stand to Sit Down

Hollywood keeps moving. The world keeps not caring.

Movie people. I have watched them cycle through since before most of their agents were born, and I will tell you what I told Marylou Hennessy the morning she tried to explain her son's cryptocurrency situation to me over weak coffee: wanting something louder does not make it better.

The Harry Potter children are grown now, hopping from one project to the next like they are being chased by something they cannot name. Maybe they are. I have known people chased by things they could not name, and the smart ones stopped eventually, turned around, and had a conversation. The others just kept running and ended up wherever the thing wanted them to go in the first place. You can keep busy until you drop, but eventually you have got to reckon with what has been following you since the second film.

Mrs. Tallentree down the lane has been making that fruitcake since before the war. Same recipe, same pan, same unhurried Tuesday afternoon in November. It has been circulating through Harrow Corners longer than I care to track, and it comes back to me every Christmas without fail, same as my own. Nobody eats it. Nobody throws it away. It persists. That fruitcake understands something about dignity that twelve sequels cannot teach a person.

Sean Bean playing the Sheriff of Nottingham like he has something left to prove. Viggo Mortensen grinding himself down to the nub for a statuette. I do not begrudge a person their ambition. Ambition is fine. Ambition is a tractor: useful when pointed at something real, dangerous when you have forgotten why you started the engine. At some point a body has to stop chasing the horizon and ask what it was doing in the town it left.

Megan Fox has built something and seems embarrassed to stand next to it. That is a different problem from the others but it is not a lesser one. What you built is built. Pretending otherwise does not make it smaller; it just makes you smaller standing beside it.

Liv Tyler, Marion Cotillard, running. Always running. I am not saying where they should go. I am saying that where they are going and where they are trying to get to seem to be two separate addresses, and nobody has stopped long enough to check the envelope.

Then there is Mischa Barton, back in theatre, which is a fine thing, a genuinely fine thing, and I have no quarrel with that. My quarrel is with dragging your personal business into the aisle and presenting it to strangers like a dish nobody ordered. Keep what is yours on your own shelf. The audience paid for the performance, not the inventory of everything that went wrong before you walked onstage.

The county fair ran nine days longer than scheduled one year, and nobody could leave. Folks hollered and fretted and tried to negotiate with the ticket booth. Mrs. Pell set up a cot by the funnel cake stand and read three library books. By the time it ended she was the only one who looked rested. I think about her when I watch people perform their own exhaustion for a camera.

None of them need to come to Harrow Corners. We have enough strange here already, and frankly I do not have enough covered-dish casserole for the whole of Hollywood. But there is a thing you learn when you have lived long enough and buried enough husbands and watched enough of your neighbors do things that cannot entirely be explained: speed is not the same as progress, and noise is not the same as work. Some of the most determined people I ever watched were determined in entirely the wrong direction, and they arrived at the wrong place with tremendous efficiency.

Sit still. Let the thing in front of you tell you what it is. If you have made something worth having, stand next to it without flinching. The past does not need outrunning. It is already where you are.

That is the whole lesson. It was available for free. Nobody had to sprint for it.

Tend your own work and do not perform your running. , Aunt Dot
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