What is the purpose of our life on this planet? What is the plot, the trajectory, the molecular force that links together the discrete atoms, the momentary incidents and emotions, of our existence?
This puzzle, perhaps the most profound that people can pose to themselves, is the real if unarticulated subject of a project unlike anything that has ever been undertaken.
“56 Up,” a movie that recently played at Albuquerque’s Guild Cinema and widely available online, is the latest installment of director Michael Apted’s ambitious lifelong TV project that began in 1963. He chose a diverse cross section of Britons and interviewed them every seven years, beginning when they were 7 years old. In the current installment of the series, they are 56.
Some of the original participants dropped out, one left and returned 28 years later. But the others have continued, for reasons that defy even their own understanding, to allow their lives and psyches to be probed in public every seven years.
Their stories are based not just on face-to-face interviews. They are shown driving a taxi, operating a forklift, walking the moors of northern England, surveying a development in Spain, singing in a club.
Their participation in this series, which has become legendary in England, has made them famous and controversial. One man was excoriated after he criticized the British government of the time. Another man gently laments the fact that he will never be as famous for his scientific achievements as for his participation in the show.
But the real story is not just what this miscellanea of people do but what they are, or rather what they have become and are becoming, for this movie is far from static; it is all about becoming, the actions and motives, the ideas and ideals, that interact with forces beyond our control to shape our lives.
Some of these men and women are among the elite—a lawyer who has reached the top of his profession, a nuclear physicist—while others have almost scraped bottom—a single mother, a sick woman, a homeless man.
The best of many reviews of this film that I have seen was by Mike Lasalle in the San Francisco Chronicle. He wrote:
“We can only begin to perceive the value of the ‘Up’ series, or imagine what social scientists will make of it in the decades and centuries to come. But the films do have the quality, peculiar to important works of art, of making us uneasy, of leaving us with feelings that are big and yet not completely classifiable. We feel good, refreshed and depressed in watching these people get older, also embarrassed in moments and cautioned about the passage of time….There are mysteries of life captured within the frames of this film that are eluding our grasp. We're still too close to it.”
“56 Up” intersperses current interviews with clips of past installments to highlight the development of each subject over the past half-century. At age 7, the people seemed much alike, their personalities not yet formed, their hopes and fears ill defined. At each subsequent interval, they became more and more differentiated as their own abilities and the realities of class, money and, above all else, education shaped their lives. At 49, many of them seemed discontented—this is not what I wanted or planned to be, I am not satisfied with this life, is this all there is?
But by 56, they have grown into their lives and into themselves. There seems to be a quiet acceptance that this, indeed, is all there is, all there will be—and it is not really so bad. Yes, my life could have been better, but, too, it could have been an awful lot worse. Thus the feeling I came away from this movie was not the quiet desperation that seemed to pervade the previous installment, but quiet satisfaction.
In American movie dramas, there is almost always an epiphany and a dramatic climax. Events lead toward a well-rounded conclusion, a finality, a true end.
In French and many other European films, by contrast, the emphasis at the conclusion is often not that something has ended but that life goes on. Just as the Victorian novel often ended with a marriage, as if that was the destination and rationale of life, so American films often conclude with one of the three D’s—death, divorce or disease.
But the French don’t seem to believe in endings. Yes, life changes us. Yes, we endure trauma. But after the trauma changes us, we, our lovers, our families, our communities and our nation endure.
Once when I was living in Africa, an African told me, “You Americans believe life is good or bad. We Africans know it just is.”
In “56 Up” one of the men remarks, a bit ruefully but neither joyfully nor tragically, “Life is for living.”
This four-word message is what I took away from this complex and remarkable montage of lives lived.
Responses to ““56 Up”—Life is for living”