Follow your dreams and follow me on this journey:
I am about to say a very Millennial sentence, but stick with me here: The iconic season 1 finale of the HBO series Girls in which Jessa (Jemima Kirke) suddenly gets married to a guy who is her total opposite (a delightfully rare pure asshole role for Chris O’Dowd) has a line that 7/10 people who were in their 20s in the 2010s thinks about constantly. At the wedding, in which her friends are absolutely gobsmacked to witness their weirdest friend do the weirdest thing she could possibly do, Jessa thanks the crowd by declaring: “your dreams are not what you thought they’d be!”
(I have searched for a meme or GIF or video of this and am shocked not to find it considering how ubiquitous this moment seemed at the time. This proves once again that the internet is also not what we thought it’d be and time casually erodes all Moments.)
What did it mean? In the context of the show and the episode it meant that Jessa settling down with a finance bro was never part of her fantasy. For a generation who was entering the workforce during the recession and navigating being the poorest young adults in recent history, it felt like someone was reaching into our souls and telling us that we were going to have to make A LOT of concessions. Or “pivots” :)
Adults took just about every chance they could to tell people in my age group to follow our dreams when we were growing up. I doubt it was just us. I’m from an immigrant family, so I was always told about the sacrifices made fleeing an oppressive regime so that I had the freedom to follow my dreams. Disney movies told me that I NEEDED to follow my dreams. Big or small, it didn’t matter. Your dreams are YOURS. You own them in your mind palace! Take them by the balls and drag your dreams onto YOUR journey! Make them follow YOU! YOU DESERVE TO HAVE YOUR DREAMS COME TRUE!!!
And…we bought it. Or I guess I did? I’ve only ever wanted to be a writer - everything else has always been an effort to aide that pursuit (the pivots, if you will) - so in my 30s I doubled-down on that dream and went to film school to finally write the movies in my head. Now I follow my dreams to Hollywood….in the middle of an industry recession. Geez. Can a girl catch a break?
Well, hell. It wasn’t the time in 2010. It isn’t the time now. It’s simply never the time. So what’s time doing getting in my way? Fuck time. Time doesn’t exist. I’ve sharpened my sword and I’m ready to go to battle for my dreams!
This is all to say that I watched Problemista the other day and it spoke to me.
Problemista is comedy writer and overall good artist Julio Torres’ first film. He wrote, directed, and starred in the movie where he plays an aspiring toymaker named Alejandro from El Salvador who comes to The United States to follow his dreams. He wants to work at Hasbro where they can give him a work permit that will allow him to stay in the United States, but they aren’t hiring at the moment. He waits for the opportunity to open up, but the time on his visa is running out. That’s when he meets one of the weirdest and most realistic characters I’ve ever seen on film, an artist’s wife (widow?) who snipes at everyone and everything all because she is desperate to secure her husband’s legacy. Tilda Swinton plays her. She has an Irish accent and an awful dark red dye job. I love everything about it.
Her character reminded me a lot of Emma Thompson’s reclusive writer character in Stranger Than Fiction. These are despicable, misunderstood, difficult women who are mean to most people because they’ve never known kindness. There is devilish joy in watching these goblin characters onscreen! Problemista takes a very sympathetic look at this wounded hydra of a character. When Elizabeth’s new intern tries to bond with Alejandro by complaining that she’s a “nightmare”, Alejandro very ernestly says, “I don’t think she’s a nightmare.”
My heart! He is sympathetic to her not just because he needs her potential sponsorship to stay in the country, but because he seems the same hunger in her that he has. It is a hunger to be understood through your art. It is a hunger to survive by being who you are.
The film is about immigration and the struggles to survive in this specific way because this man has a dream. From having to learn an outdated file organization system because one eccentric boss wants it to resorting to Craigslist jobs - Craig from Craigslist is personafied by Larry Owens like the internet’s answer to Ursula from The Little Mermaid - Alejandro’s surreal survival is wildly relatable to anyone who has ever had their checking account overdrawn for being overdrawn.
It is pointed out that he likes things to be “difficult”. If he didn’t, then he wouldn’t have chosen this difficult life for his toymaking dreams. That struck me. Do we like things to be difficult or do we like our dreams SO much that we will accept the difficulty as the steep fare needed to ride the train to fulfillment?
The quality of the dream isn’t questioned. It doesn’t matter if his toy ideas are good or bad. It just matters that it’s what he wants. He wouldn’t be happy with himself if he didn’t try.
Little Miss Sunshine had a moment like that. That film was also about pursuits of all kinds and how failing those pursuits was part of it. It is one of the most celebratory films about failure to ever be made. When Granpda tells our little leading lady, “a real loser is someone who’s so afraid of not winning that he doesn’t even try” we all felt that. Fear keeps dreams from becoming reality.
Similarly, Ed Wood takes on this idea. Tim Burton’s Ed Wood told the story of the true story of the B-movie horror director who loved making movies SO much that he never let lack of funds, distribution, reviews, or credibility stop him. He was prolific…and he was terrible. But he didn’t let that stop him because the dream wasn’t about being good or bad. The dream was about doing it. And he was doing it! He was being a director!
Little Miss Sunshine and Ed Wood were more optimistic looks at failing at your dreams, but they are likely more realistic. Most of us fail. We fail and fail and fail until we get it “right”. But by then does “right” matter? By then it’s about everything else. It was about the journey and the little enlightenments that showed up along the way.
If you’ve read my previous work, then you know that I am a sucker for a film where the dreams don’t work out. Or the talent isn’t enough. Inside Llewyn Davis is the Citizen Kane of that kind of film and should be required viewing for anyone with a dream. It isn’t just about talent. It isn’t just about dreaming. So I found it refreshing to watch a film that wasn’t about the thing and how good or bad he is at it, but about the existentialism surrounding the pursuit.
At one point Elizabeth tells Alejandro not to wait for the Hasbro opportunity. “You won’t get anything in life if you’re waiting for answers from an entity,” she says. It’s what he needed to hear. It’s what most of us need to hear. It’s what Ed Wood already knew. Are people telling you ‘no’ when it comes to your dreams? Too bad. You’re not a director if you’re not directing. You’re not a toymaker if you’re not making toys. And you’re not a writer if you’re not writing.
So let’s do it. Recession be damned. Let’s all be toymakers.
Sorry, this took so long! I graduated and am moving across the country! I’ll likely have a few emotional essays soon as I reflect on those things and prepare to Follow My Dreams (tm).