The Virtue of Patience

“Patience is a virtue!” So chants Evy in the 1999 film The Mummy after her brother Jonathan exhorts her to hurry along her search for the golden Book of the Living to stop the regenerating mummy who is after them. And I wonder, “What kind of answer is that? Hurry up, woman!”

I’ll be the first to admit that Patience and I are not friends. We’re barely acquainted. The one major thing I know about Patience is that I’m sorely lacking in it. Up to now, I have managed to gain a minuscule amount of it. I know I need it; I can identify exactly when Patience has and would do me good, but it is difficult to engage it at the right moment. I know too when Patience has been and would be useless to me; like if I were being chased by a living mummy and its mob of minions. I would not, in that crucial moment, sing jauntily: “Patience is a virtue!”

What is a virtue anyway? I turned to the ever-reliable Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11^th Edition) for the answer.

vir·tue \’vǝr-(͵)chü\ n [E vertu, virtu, fr. AF, fr. L virtut-, virtus

strength, manliness, virtue, fr. vir man – more at VIRILE] (13c)

1a : conformity to a standard of right: morality

b : a particular moral excellence

2 : pl an order of angels – see celestial hierarchy

3 : a beneficial quality or power of a thing

4 : manly strength or courage : valor

5 : a commendable quality or trait : merit

6 : a capacity to act : potency

7 : chastity esp. in a woman

Now, let us not get distracted by the sexist manly strength and womanly chastity. In the death-defying race against a creature bent on regenerating his mummified flesh, returning to life his centuries-dead beloved, and—oh yeah!—destroying the world, Patience is a virtue. Really! It’s “a particular moral excellence” that forces its bearer to help fight evil. And that “manly strength or courage” business? Yup, Patience is that, too. It’s even “a commendable quality or trait”! And most important in a mummy-chase situation, Patience is “a capacity to act.” When is it more important to do what’s needed than when saving your hide and all of humanity from a vengeful, not-quite-dead, very powerful mummy?

I’m with Jonathan on this one. When a mummy and his minions are closing in on you, speed is of the essence. Whether or not (cue Evy’s sing-song tone) “Patience is a virtue,” that is the time for a little haste not deliberation. Using Patience earlier would have been better, like when deciding whether to flee Egypt or defend it; or later, like when choosing to sacrifice oneself to save others.

So when is the right time to engage good ole patience in your life? Maybe the time is when you’re in line at a cashier behind a person who has apparently never written a check before. Or better yet, the time for Patience is when you grudgingly follow a car moving at 10mph below the speed limit until it approaches a yellow light and races through the intersection, leaving you smoldering at the red. You get the idea.

Patience may not always be emotionally satisfying, but I say remember how handy it is and use it... judiciously.

No Movie for Normal People?

My Seattle friends, a good number of them, went to see No Country for Old Men in the theater, when it came out. One by one, they came back shaking their heads and wondering if violence in America had really come to this. They guessed it had, then went on with their lives.


Me, I went once with a friend (who saw nothing but the blood and never wants to see Javier Bardem in anything at all, ever)—and then I bought another four tickets to see the show by myself. I watched it three times in the U. District, and twice at the cheap theater in North Seattle. When it came out on DVD, I rented it another six or eight times. I downloaded (a version of) the screenplay. I bought the book—after the fact—and underlined passage after passage, and made notes in the margin like this:



"!!"

and this:

"WHERE is this, in the film?"

and this:

"This is war."

"He hasn't got long to live."

"Texasism."

"How does he get the briefcase, in the movie?"



I even found the place, on page 211 (which I marked, of course, with a "!!" and a pithy comment), where McCarthy connects his story to the Yeats poem, as if flicking a fountain pen at the careful reader.

But I digress.

The more times I watched the movie—I own it, now, of course—the less I found myself insisting that the Coen brothers “hadn't really done anything!!" The more I watched, the more respect I gained for the choices they’d made, through the lens, and the more times I hit 'pause' and sprinted for the bedroom to check one detail or another against McCarthy's authoritative written word, the more I trusted the men who brought this story to the screen: If you can stand the dark parts, or find a way to tune them out (I recommend whistling), No Country, The Film, turns out to be a great lesson in knowledge of craft and in respect for a great tale—over and above the numerous lessons that are in McCarthy’s book, to begin with.

I simply never get tired of No Country for Old Men. I do, I confess, skip over the violence as often as not, these days, just as I thumb through the much-loved book. I have cranked up the DVD player probably a hundred times in the past three months, to study this film, and only once or twice have I watched it through; I no longer need to. It plays in my head all the time, and informs my life. There are only five or six movies I can say this about, and I intend to discuss them all here, one after the other.

I’m not a movie buff. I just feel as though I stepped in a hole called ‘Ethan and Joel Coen’ and got stuck there, for awhile.



Five posts:

1. No Movie for Normal People?

2. Moral Violence?

3. Tommy Lee Jones’s Texas

4. Rurality

5. Dread Simple

FirstPost

We are a couple of girls who met in a writing group. Not a film club; a writing group. One day, we fell to talking about movies. We discovered that we each had one or two that had stuck with us, that we'd finally had to buy, in order to watch them again and again. Not like critics. More like zombies. We are the audience those movies were designed for: we apply them to our lives because we can't stop. We decided to share our fixations, and here's the result.

What We Are Up To

We are two chicks who've managed to find lessons for life in a handful of movies we'd like to tell you about. We aren't movie critics; we're not even movie buffs, and yet we discovered in conversation that we'd become glued to a couple of movies, The Mummy and No Country For Old Men.


And it turned out that it wasn't just those two movies; we each had a backlog! (You might have one, too.) We decided to take turns writing about them. At first we thought we'd change movies at the same time, after a designated number of posts. Well, that didn't work. Sometimes we had a semester's worth of lessons learned from one of our faves; other times, we took away just a couple of notions.

We liked the idea of taking turns posting, however. We kept that.

Why watch a movie more than once or twice, if you're someone like us? Well, sometimes the movie just grabs you and won't let go.

But more about that, on the blog.