So, in the spirit of redeeming my mistake, and in the even bigger spirit of passing along my 11th graders' GREATNESS, here's a quick summary of this particular assignment:
After learning about Modernism & reading The Great Gatsby, I asked my students to come up with an overarching question that was inspired from the novel. The question needed to be one that involved critical thinking, and then they needed to write an idea for a movie based off of that question. The question could be anything. It could be inspired by something that really irritated them about Fitzgerald's characters, it could be about the mindset of those in the 1920s in general, it could be a character expose, whatever. Honestly, the sky was the limit. The movie ideas could either explore the question proposed, or specifically answer it. They had freedom to create their own characters, infuse the characters from Gatsby, etc.
That being said, please enjoy this piece written by one of my precious students, Hannah Smith.
Hannah Smith
April 2014
Question to be explored: Is the pursuit of happiness the most direct path to depression?
Question to be explored: Is the pursuit of happiness the most direct path to depression?
“The Best Days of Their Lives”
The city is unspecified, caught in an eternal sigh with slouched
shoulders that once upon a time looked like skyscrapers but since have fallen
from glory. Its streets lay covered with anonymous grime from hundreds of
thousands of millions of anonymous soles of anonymous shoes of people who have
names that nobody can
remember.
In one un-particularly shady back alley, our story begins. A deal
is made, and the camera doesn’t show much more than shuffling legs and an
exchange of hands, garbled voices in the background. There is exactly enough
present for any attentive onlooker to get the idea, but in a city of such
lonely crowds, nobody is going to call out against it. Two men and one woman
are handed little bags, and one person walks
away.
The three who remain progress further down the alley, talking
ad-lib about groceries. Here one may deduce that the individuals are
roommates.
After the end of the alley and a left-right-left-left, the trio
buzzes into a brown door between a 7-11 and an old Mexican place that more than
likely isn’t a restaurant so much as a front. The eyes of its patrons are
always watching, always lit up with a certain paranoid gleam. They seem not to
have noticed that nobody pays them any
mind.
Following the group leads to a dark apartment, with only a lamp in
the far corner that still works. Even its bulb, however, is running dull. On
the floor there are two mattresses and against the wall with the window there
is a couch. Across each there are blankets and some pillows, different shades
of tan and
gray.
The one with the red hair- his name is Raith- opens and shuts the
refrigerator door, without glancing to see what’s inside. The camera will go
close enough to show that nothing is, and the sense of habit from the action
suggests that this is usually the case. Talk of groceries in the alley, it is
now understood, is an empty habit just the same.
Raith doesn’t stop walking until he reaches the stereo. Unlike all
else in the building, it works as well as it did the first day out of the box.
Theme music, he calls it, and Eleanor smiles at him, an inside joke; he smiles
back. Aaron fails to notice. Had he noticed, perhaps other events of affection
would have come together here, like the final degree in boiling water that a
few degrees ago wouldn’t have meant anything. However, it is important to
remember that he does not notice, and so Eleanor must love him
still.
Along these same sorts of oblivious lines, Aaron is the last to
remember to unhide the bag in his back pocket. Eleanor and Raith stare at him,
waiting, each reminding him of it being his idea in the first place. Holding
himself to the most confident, slyest grin he can manage, Aaron bites his
tongue to keep from reminding himself that he’d been
joking.
It’s pink, and ‘Be Mine’ is etched out on the front, like those
candy hearts from class Valentine’s parties. Eleanor shows hers off, blue with
a butterfly. Cute, she calls it. Raith presses
play.
An hour goes by and the first thing in which Aaron can see
a difference is Eleanor’s hair. Reaching her waist, the color of cinnamon dust
and the texture of the ocean, her hair has always been known to dance, but
today he watches strands of ballet slippers tiptoe across it to the erratic
beat of electronica and bass. The rest of his forever could have gone by like
that, and he vowed that as much of it would as he could control. Eleanor and
Raith talked, they danced, they sang and laughed, but Aaron only watched. Later
he would be made fun of but for now he breathed in time to the dancers and
waited for the sunrise to make them come alive for real.
Whether it was that darkness stayed too long or sunrise came too
late, Aaron never would really know. But he never sees the ballet slippers
under the spectacular golds and reds and pinks he’d waited so patiently for;
just the dimming lamp and what’s left of the moonlight through the crowded
buildings and the open window. The dance dies down. Raith forgets to turn the
music
off.
Three days later, Raith, Aaron, and Eleanor take the pieces of
good times out again: this time, Raith says, for real. There’s a guy he works
with- do they remember Anthony?- who knows a place to go. The best place to go,
somewhere the cops don’t
know.
Night comes, and together the three lock the door behind them and
check to make sure their pockets don’t feel empty and don’t look full. Paranoia
comes as a friend to the
risk-takers.
This time, Aaron finds a yellow circle in his hand, decorated with
a dove. Like the one on the soap bars. It melts a little bit on his tongue and
takes less time to make a difference. By the time it does, Eleanor’s dancing
hair is lost in the background. Nobody else’s moves in just the same
way.
Aaron’s search for that opiate distracts him from reality, and
that reality no longer looks the same. The lights, all thousand of them, all
the hundreds of colors and flashes, are thick and blended so much that they
would probably taste and feel the same as
pudding.
The people around him change, grow younger at the same time as
they grow older, and the time isn’t Aaron’s. Maybe it’s ninety years before
his. The dresses touch the floor, and people swing when they dance and
everybody’s hair is cut nicely, on purpose. The music is, too. It lacks the
accidental haphazard Aaron knows from Raith’s stereo. High heels and shined
shoes and suits and nothing goes wrong. Hair doesn’t dance but nothing goes
wrong.
Eleanor stays missing, but Aaron finds Violet with hair black like
his, and her life together not like his. Braided and held up with pins, it
doesn’t dance but her eyes swim. Bright green forest eyes and, in them, the
trees swim. He doesn't love Violet but he loves her eyes. But, Aaron
comes down before the moon does once again, and Violet's eyes aren't so
brilliant when the light falls naturally.
At seven in the morning Aaron trips his key through the
eeky-creaky dead knob door. Eleanor and Raith don't move to wake up, sleeping
on their mattresses but Eleanor is wearing Raith's shirt. Separate
mattresses, separately asleep, but once together, once awake? Or maybe the
shirt belongs to Aaron, the initial confusion no more than a hysterical product
of a mind tumbling down from euphoria.
_________
From seven in the morning onward, Aaron can only ever see Eleanor
in Raith’s shirt, no matter what she really wears. But Violet never wears
Raith’s shirt, she wears that dress with the mystery color that touches the
floor for as long as the moon touches the sky, every other Friday night. Then
every Friday night. Then more than that. The nights are full of Violet and
Aaron hates the sun.
Months go by and Aaron stops noticing. Faces fade and collapse on each other
like the lights, and flashes of little circles, Be Mine’s, Butterflies, and
Doves, pinks, blues, yellows, Raith’s damned stereo sometimes but Sinatra
serenades most times as Aaron shifts his reality to 1924. He never travels back
in time anymore, only forward, when the sun rises. He belongs in the world
where the moon sets at night. Eleanor and Raith belong with sunrises.
_________
On the last day before Aaron moves out, he remembers how Eleanor’s hair used to
dance, the way it would call him like the ocean and ripple when she smiled, and
how it was made of bronze- no, cinnamon. Once upon a time, her hair was made of
cinnamon. He flashes back to the first time he saw it dance like that, and how
he loved her then. It had had magic all on its own.
Aaron waits for her to come through the door, watching the empty apartment with
a clear mind for the first time in what feels like years. The dust covers the
floor more than he remembers. Raith’s stereo doesn’t even work anymore, does
it?
Finally Eleanor’s footsteps fall through the doorway. Her hair falls only to
her shoulders and the waves don’t fall at all, the cinnamon dust blown away.
Aaron asks Eleanor why she cut her hair. Eleanor stares, and stares, and
stares, and says nothing. He asks her why she cut her hair. She asks him how he
got into the apartment when she and Raith took his keys away three Septembers
ago.
Now Aaron realizes how far he’s gone. Eleanor keeps staring. He loved her once.
Part of him wants to love her again. But he loves Violet and she loves
Raith. She’s wearing his shirt. Before he walks out the door, that old,
eeky-creaky door, Aaron chooses to act on this goodbye which he recognizes as
forever. He tells her how he loved her. He tells her that he misses the way she
smiled, but that she should smile like that for Raith forever because she loves
him now. When Aaron says Raith’s name, Eleanor throws the last working
lamp at him and it shatters.
_________
Aaron finds himself soon with Violet, back in the color and life and craze of
1924, with the forest ocean in her eyes. He tells her that he loves her, and
she laughs because she’s not real. She’s never said a word to him, she’s only
ever laughed, but thanks to clever montaging and mixing of the 1920’s
sequences, that only now becomes clear.
Thus, in the same day, Aaron has lost both his loves and both his oceans, and
he starts to fall out of place of any reality- his or otherwise. Violet’s
charms don’t work quite so well now, and eventually her eyes turn gray, her
laugh into indistinguishable city noise and Frank Sinatra suddenly sounds a lot
like an electronic keyboard exploded, screeching pulsing semi-regularly in a
million different hues of something that used to be pleasant.
Aaron wanders around, and tries to forget. Mostly, he does, but sometimes, vague
memories of a girl who’s name might be Allie slip in, and did he ever know a
guy with red hair? Was the city always so monotonous like this? But he never
forgets how beautiful an ocean looks when it’s made out of cinnamon dust, and
every morning when he wakes up he can almost see it, the way a dream is when
it’s on the tip of memory.
Aaron stumbles, one day, upon a young man holding a tiny blue dove in his hand,
and manages to remember just enough to know what it is. He needs it. Now. And
he gets it, though his hands will never be the color of his skin again.
_________
One last time, Aaron meets Violet.
She laughs and disappears and Aaron can’t help but notice all the noise, and
what is it about?
The people around him are screaming
and crying and nothing has a color besides black or white or gray, and where
did all the brightness go? Surely, there still had been some when he left?
Nineteen twenty-four doesn’t look like this.
A stranger beside him grabs Aaron’s
shoulder and shakes it, sobbing to himself, and Aaron can’t tell what he’s
supposed to do. The man looks familiar, and maybe his name started with an R,
but not familiar enough for other letters. At a loss, Aaron follows the
direction of the gaze of the crowd, and realizes it points to nowhere.
Newspapers are flying everywhere,
and he picks one up. The date at the top reads October 29th, 1929.
The headline announces a stock market crash.
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