verbal overshadowing

Banausos

There is something about sports, that simple pleasure of mapping intention to physical outcomes. Modern lifestyles teach many of us to think about movement in a very left-brained way. Reductionistic, forced: flexing muscles in the only ways we know how from the brief period of our time where we were free to learn movement -- childhood. Constrained: by trauma, injuries and shame accumulated as like plaque through adulthood. In this way movement is a very emotional kind of thing. It can be exhilarating or painful. A movement as simple as running is so polarizing -- I know friends who love it but equally many who find it excruciating.

There's also something about art, that simple pleasure of mapping feeling to media. I'd always been very tense when I played the guitar -- it was always about technique, getting the notes right, playing cool songs, feeling good about it all. But recently I discovered the pleasure of being awful at it. Truly awful -- even getting one note to sound the way I really want it to. Lately I am trying to play by ear rather than shapes and notes and found it incredibly difficult. I had to take back all the crap I gave artists: the process of creating I realized was beyond nontrivial -- it's a part of my brain I've hardly explored. 

But it's a bastardization, isn't it? Expressing the inside through clumsy hands upon the restrictive frets of the outside world... even those who have spent their lives mastering technique still pay the expressibility tax. This work is banausic, but in a way also beautiful. Left and right brains work in conjunction to bring forth beauty into reality in whatever imperfect, approximate way we can. All the better, if we can preserve some sense of beauty independent of technique throughout this process. 

We're all trying here (a review??)

I think the English translation of this show's title doesn't do it justice. But maybe that's the paradox of it. It's certainly full of that. The two leads could not be any more different... But they're so much alike in contrast to the other characters in the show. Everything in it makes me want to really live, want to shout myself into the world as the protagonist (Hwang Dong-man) does, literally, in several scenes. At the same time it so well characterizes that heretofore unrecognized fear of being heard. Desperately wanting to succeed -- in what? For what purpose? -- ...but what then? What novel flavors of failure and shame await us? 

Every character teaches us something about existence. A character we might have scorned, who in all rights is an antagonist... but here, while we may not necessarily like them, we empathize with and even love them, root for their growth. Dong-man on the other hand is immediately lovable, yet pathetic to the end in the best possible way. It is tempting and would have been forgiveable to indulge him (and the audience) in some easy wins, but he fucks up at every turn. But it is those exact fuckups that draw people to him, inspire genuine-ness in others when he is genuine (often, overly and stupidly so) with them, and hurtle him towards his goals.

Deep inside, we all want to be this person. I don't think that's a strong claim.

One of my favorite figures of speech in Korean is "사람 냄새난다" -- I.e. "it smells human". This show absolutely reeks of it, and it makes you want to commit to the bit, breathe it all in. In short: it has heart, in spades. Despite having 0 screenplay experience, I'd go as far to say I wish I'd written something like this. Or at least.. could I become the kind of person who could?

A nuance I might add here. In a way as much as this show is about emotion, it is also about language, inevitably so, being a self-referential show about writing itself. The characters here are so beautifully articulate, the dialogue so paced and weighty, that I wonder if my difficulty in expression is due to the lack of words, or whether the lack of words is due to my difficulty in expression. It brings to mind an analogy from episode 10: when Dong-man  says that it's only the art which matters, not the brush, Gyeong-se counters: the best artists are actually the pickiest about their equipment. 

The female lead often says she sees us all as "masses of emotion". Maybe there were no paradoxes in the first place. There are only protagonists and antagonists if we decide there are. Otherwise we are more akin to emotional children left to our own devices, crying out into the world to be recognized by our existence. 

So to me the literal translation is more fitting: "Everyone is fighting their own sense of worthlessness". A title that could read cynical but is in fact entirely hopeful. It's not a tragedy but a comedy, and we might aspire to be as happy with that as Dong-man is. We're All Trying Here leaves us with a few such quotable aspirations. My personal favorite: to "open the thousand doors inside", as not many open even one.