Lives of constant sorrow
True Life hits harder than anything else on MTV
Michael Murray, The Ottawa Citizen
Shortly after I started high school, I went to the Towne Cinema on Beechwood Avenue in New Edinburgh and saw a midnight screening of Quadrophenia. It’s a rock opera composed by The Who, and pits the mouth-breathing Rockers against the dapper Mods, who all look like they own espresso machines. The movie made an immediate stylistic impression on me and I wanted very much to be a Mod, even though I had never met one.
Although I didn’t have a super cool Vespa scooter, like the ones in the movie, I did have the CCM 10-speed bike, and I thought that would be close enough as long as I put the appropriate stickers on it. Wearing my best Mod clothes, which included a Harris Tweed jacket, a narrow(ish) Murray of Atholl tie and a pair of grey flannel slacks, I pedalled to school, where I was mercilessly teased for my attire.
Apparently, I looked more like a mama’s boy from a Marks & Spencer catalogue than a rebel hipster. I only survived the day by convincing some influential, if gullible, students that I was dressed that way because I had to attend the funeral for a boy from my tennis club who had perished from a nasty case of cholera.
Growing up is tough, and whatever marks us as different can make us vulnerable to the bombardments of a mainstream that feels threatened by the alien. This, of course, can irrevocably damage lives, with people limping into middle age still licking the poorly healed wounds of their youth.
I was thinking of this while watching the celebrated MTV documentary series True Life. Typically, this program follows the lives of three young people, each belonging to a unique sub-culture that separates them from the herd. We get a peek into the lives of kids with gay parents, those getting breast implants, or those battling an addiction to crystal meth.
Unlike a lot of programming on MTV, True Life is hardly frivolous, having more in common with a show like the unflinching Intervention than the frothy My Super Sweet Sixteen.
A recent episode focused on the impact that stuttering had on the lives of three people.
Tim, 23, is a likeable guy with a profound stutter, one that forces him to sometimes choke on the first syllable of a word for 10 seconds or more. It was painful to watch as he struggled to be understood, and disheartening to see the impatient and dismissive responses of the people he was trying to communicate with.
In one scene, a pizza shop hung up on him. A simple task that we all take for granted is an occasion for dread for Tim, a predictably humiliating nightmare.
The most recent episode of True Life focused on people who have been dealing with schizophrenia. One subject is 23-year-old Josh, who has a shock of curly hair that’s reminiscent of Sideshow Bob.
Sensitive, articulate and utterly lost, he refuses all medication or therapy.
His hallucinations are manifold, and he believes that animals and birds are communicating with him. We see a shot of Josh, taken from below, and above him sits a row of birds on a telephone wire.
He tells us, sincerely, that he’s always listening to what the birds are saying to him, as he’s trying to figure out what’s going on. The moment is almost poetic, until we see the torment and confusion it causes both him and his family.
While sitting in the back seat of a car, beside his younger sister, Josh tells his thin and worn mother that the sun just spoke to him.
She wants to know what it said, but Josh flinches, as if freaked out. He wants to know if anybody else just heard the voice that he did. His mother bites her lip and inhales deeply. It was terrible, sad and scary.
Later, after having to move apartments once again, Josh tells us that he smokes weed — which his mother tells us makes him more paranoid — in order to alleviate the biting solitude he endures.
The dope animates his memory, bringing voices from his past to life, and so he continues to smoke to keep friends, even if they’re not real, around him.
The last image we have of Josh is of him sitting, like a zombie, in front of a stack of empty boxes, talking about getting his life back together.
Another tragic story belongs to 23-year-old Ben, who takes 15 pills a day in an effort to control his schizophrenia. Heavy and sleepy-eyed, Ben has multiple tattoos and several piercings. He looks like the drummer in a metal band, and if not for his illness that’s probably what he would be.
But at 18, a voice that goes by the name of Marcus started telling Ben that he should kill himself.
Ben, speaking deliberately, reasons through his condition. He tells himself that it’s a hallucination, and not God, telling him that he’s responsible for the cancer that killed his grandfather and has now afflicted his father. Ben can do little more than survive, staying at home with his family and watching television while hoping to keep the demons at bay.
It’s awful to see the sorrow that consumes this family, and that has reduced Ben, who is sweet by nature, to rubble. He is devoured by his obsessive fear of when, and how, his illness will possess him again. As the family sits at the table, holding hands in prayer before a meal, we can only hope that some light shines into their lives.
True Life shows us the incredible variety of circumstance and experience that each person faces. It’s an illuminating program that challenges our imagination.
It asks us to empathize so that we might see the frustrating and potentially crippling narrative that is the life of the person we are watching, to see that the stutter or the demons scares them more than it scares us.