We aren't death-defying squirrels
We are sometimes communal, sometimes solitary, but we need each other. This is especially true in filmmaking.
Two events happened to me last week that cemented themselves in my brain. And they happened on a single afternoon while I was walking my two dogs, Cider and Miso.
Miso has this habit of owning the sidewalk. She enjoys meeting people, but because she and Cider have trouble sharing, whenever we see people walking toward us, we usually pull over and wait.
In this instance, the woman approaching stepped off the sidewalk into the street, to go around us. I had already pulled over to the side and told her, “You can come on through. They’re friendly!” She balked a bit, but came back on the sidewalk and walked past. She told me she usually doesn’t walk past dogs because she never knows what they’ll do, and she seemed apprehensive about passing too close to us.
As someone who has seen many irresponsible pet owners and their animal charges doing stupid, annoying, or dangerous things, I sympathize. One never knows if the person you’re approaching has leash control, or if their dog is fearful or aggressive. It’s often easier to avoid the uncertainty.
Still, I felt a little sad about this woman, who wanted to avoid walking near me and my dogs, likely because of some bad experience she had. I felt semi-responsible on behalf of all dog owners, but recognized the moment was not one in which to linger. I wished her well, and we continued on our way.
About a hundred yards down the road, I heard a noise above us. I looked up and across the street saw a squirrel cavorting in a tree. I didn’t pay it much mind, but out of the corner of my eye I saw the squirrel take a flying leap from one branch to another, only to miss and plummet twenty feet to the hard concrete driveway below it.
The SMACK as it hit the ground still haunts me. I saw it falling, felt the air shift, and my heart fluttered in fear for this squirrel, and as it landed I thought to myself, There’s no way it survives that.
The squirrel seemed shaken, but it scampered away, jumped up a fence post and then sat, resting, on the fence separating the driveway from its neighbor. I thought I could see it favoring one paw, but was too far away to tell for sure.
As I turned the corner, I considered what chances that squirrel had for survival. Assuming no internal injuries, but a possible broken bone or several, after the adrenaline wore off, that squirrel would most likely succumb. Even if it survived excruciating pain and debilitation, could it still run and climb and jump properly to find food and seek shelter from predators and the elements? Unlikely.
This is where animals in the wild face the unrelenting force of nature’s inevitability. Even city squirrels risk easy death. The fate of an animal can be tested by one mistake. Afterward, they are alone, at least in most cases; they do not have society to care for them. Animals die alone, often in agony, and that is simply… nature.
The great anthropologist Margaret Mead was once asked what she considered to be the first evidence of civilization. She answered: a human thigh bone with a healed fracture found in a 15,000-year old archaeological site. Mead suggested that the care of another human being, over the time needed to repair the injury, indicates a level of civilization beyond that of the simple hunter-gatherer group. For a person to survive a serious broken limb—especially a vital bone like a femur—they would have had to have been cared for long enough for that bone to heal. Other humans would have had to provide shelter, protection, food and drink, and possibly medicinal care over an extended period of time for this kind of healing to be possible.
We live on the knife’s edge. We are a society of humans living together, and we’ve made collective agreements with each other. We care for each other, we build structures and services to help us survive and thrive. We pay taxes, we build hospitals and train doctors and EMTs and firefighters, we fund safe places for kids to play. We take all this for granted.
Filmmaking is one of these collective actions, virtually impossible to achieve without at least one other person, more often requiring a small army to achieve whatever it is the film is about. It requires organization, sure, but more importantly, it needs a shared vision and a collective agreement to come together to create one unified thing. Without each other, we are death-defying squirrels. We were not meant to live in nature or create art alone. Yes, some art is solitary, but in the end, it takes a world to appreciate it, if not to create it.
Something beautiful about that. But also something disquieting. If we don’t foster relationships, if we forget that we all owe each other kindness and a willingness to come together, then filmmaking, and any other creative practice, will become small, insulated, suspicious. We will rather cross the street instead. And that would be a loss.
I know I’ve grown a bit more philosophical as Lucid’s progress has slowed. It’s to be expected. I hope to have more substantial updates for you in the next week or so, on multiple fronts.
Worth a_
📺 The 2019 horror documentary In Search of Darkness is a bloody, nostalgic tour de force. It’s a monumental oral history of the 1980’s horror movie scene, featuring a bevy of talking heads whose love of ‘80’s horror films is only surpassed by the sheer volume of content covered.
The amazing thing is, at just over four hours long, it never feels long, with no wasted moments. It’s efficiently edited and yet you’re never left feeling like you needed more. And with interviews with 70 horror experts and icons, filmmakers, writers, producers, journalists, and even musicians and other assorted fans tangentially connected to the horror movie scene providing critical takes, insider tales, and unheard anecdotes, it is varied enough that each minute feels fresh and fun, allowing the viewer to revel in their own memories or to discover new movies they’ve never seen.
Initially it began as a single documentary funded through Kickstarter, but was so successful writer/director David Weiner went on to make In Search of Darkness Part II and Part III, giving devoted fans a total of 12+ hours of absolutely riveting horror history.
All three parts are currently available on Shudder. With the upheaval at AMC, Shudder’s future is somewhat shaky, so go watch this while you can. If you’re a connoisseur of horror, especially from the 1980’s, this is a documentary series you should not miss out on.