Garden State

When I first heard about this movie, I was a bit skeptical. After all, Zach Braff is funny enough on Scrubs, but can he write, direct, and star in a film that's worth the two hours it takes to watch? My past experiences with writer/director combos have been mixed at best (I still don't see what's so great about Donnie Darko), and it seemed especially unlikely that a comedy actor, whose body of work is mostly in TV, would be able to produce a film with any kind of dramatic or thoughtful interest. It turns out, my fears were pretty much unfounded, and the film posits some interesting ideas about the nature of happiness, which I will now attempt to discuss.

In my opinion, the film's main focus is on a sort of tension between happiness and pain, and how different people deal with that tension. Braff plays Andrew Largeman: a twenty-something who has been seriously medicated since he put his mother in a wheelchair when he was a kid. He has a strained relationship with his father, and seems generally as though he does not fit in any particular circumstance he ends up in. He's seen lying in a perfectly-white bed in a perfectly-white room, staring vacantly into space instead of answering his phone. This shot is repeated a bit later when he is seen looking into a mirror, wearing a shirt that matches the wall behind him almost perfectly. In both instances, he is both static and different from his surroundings; in the first shot his skin and hair are the only sources of color in the entire room, and in the second they're the only parts of the frame that aren't textured. The end effect is that Andrew is somehow categorically different from both the extreme clarity and purity of the white room, and the busy-ness and exuberance of the textured wall. Taking these two instances as emotional metaphors, perhaps for happiness and "good" emotions versus sadness and other "bad" emotions, Andrew is non-interactive with both, and thus exists in some kind of limbo between the two.

I don't personally know much about the actual drugs he's supposedly on, but the effects of those drugs are obvious from the way the character is portrayed. Through the first half of the movie, Braff's character spends pretty much all of the time with a blank expression on his face, often staring straight into the camera, or at himself in a mirror. The scene where he's at the party with his supposed friends, and everything shifts into fast-forward around him, while he sits quietly, unresponsive to the glut of movement around him. He seems to be completely sterile, as if he's just a spectator in his own life.

The audience does eventually find out why Andrew has been so heavily medicated for so long: he cost his mother the use of her legs, during a violent outburst when he was a kid. His father, a shrink, then stepped in and, in an attempt to fix the problem, prescribed the drugs for Andrew that seem to have caused much, if not all of Andrew's platitude. When Andrew finally confronts his father about this move, his father explains that he just wanted everybody to be happy again. The obvious truth is that no one has been happy at all since the incident between Andrew and his mother, and while the drugs may have taken away Andrew's pain, or perhaps his "bad" emotions, they've taken away all his "good" emotions as well. The film thus seems to make the point that having no feeling is not really any better than having bad feelings, and by extension, that happiness is more than simply the absence of pain.

I think this sentiment is one that modern American culture would say it believes on paper, but contradicts heavily by its actions. We seem to be a culture of quick-fixes, fad-dieting, and antidepressants, and we try so hard to be "not-sad," that we completely miss the boat on being happy. If someone is unhappy, we give him prozac and send him to an impersonal head-doctor, rather than sit down with him and really listen to his story. If someone's stressed out over work, he just crams more "liesure activities" into his free time, hoping that if he just plays harder, he won't regret working so hard in the first place. Instead of trying to find out how to live well, we try to find out how not to live poorly, and thus we never really solve the problems, we just try to fix the symptoms. I would liken it to a patient who deals with a sinus infection by using ten boxes of tissues per day, instead of taking some antibiotics.

I think the root of this is an inability to give up the things that, as humans, we have decided we can't live without. I've known several guys my age who repeatedly get themselves into destructive relationships, of varying degrees, because they "can't" deal with the idea of solitude. I find most areas of my life which experience recurring sin patterns are difficult to solve because I don't want to actually lose the sin, I'd rather just fix the problem. If people can't give up their own ideas about happiness and embrace God's plan for them (and here I'm speaking to Christians alone, since I don't think this is possible for anyone else), even if it means they never get that thing that seems so all-encompassing right now, they'll never be happy. Speaking as a single man, I need to realize that, while it may mean that I'll never find that "special someone" (whatever the hell that means), I will be happier in the long run if I follow God's plan in solitude, than if I take the matter into my own hands.

So in Garden State, the final solution is to give up this dream of eliminating pain, and replace it with an honest struggle for happiness. As humans, we need to either take both the good and the bad, or neither, but we'll never be able to take just the good. That's not how life works.

The happiest man will be the one who also experiences the worst pains, and in the end this leads to the richest life of all.