With the evolution of ubiquitous media, we also experience role models remote from the flesh. We become inspired by actors and athletes and preachers and politicians. We can also become misled by them, just as we were as kids.
Remember, way back then, coming out of the movie theater and walking like the guy you just saw up on the screen, experiencing the world like the guy. Sitting in the theater, you’d absorbed him a bit. You were James Dean or Kirk Douglas. You were the character the actor was playing. You were yourself. This absorption was artificial but so what. You grew from it.
Your growth might have been warped. It’s a risk that growth entails. Both these actors projected intensity. James Dean, in his brief career, played young men teetering on the edge, young men who were wild at heart and took risks. He lived the same way. He killed himself by driving like a madman. He was 24. He never became a geezer. From Dean we learned self-destructiveness as well as passion.
Kirk Douglas, on the other hand, lived to be 103. There now was a geezer and a half. When he was young he made three movies a year. He played characters who were driven and fiercely active, a model of virility for us young men. Sometimes, generally when he had his shirt off, he’d go over the top. He’d give you a bit of ridiculousness to spice up the stew. In with all the passion there was laughter. Most of his characters had some son of a bitch in them. From Douglas and from the characters he played we learned toughness. We also learned transgression.
Maybe we even learned not to fear being a buffoon. Maybe we learned to enjoy being laughable. We were, after all, men, in the prime of youth. We were tough, like Spartacus, like Ulysses.
When he grew older and the roles came more slowly, Kirk took up writing. He was not content being inactive. He wrote an autobiography. When that went well, he wrote a novel then another then another yet. By this time he’s pushing 80. He still has a half dozen or so books left in him.
Two of them were memoirs based on adversities. A few years back he’d been in a helicopter crash. He was injured. Two others were killed. This got him asking the question we all sooner or later come to ask: What the Hell is it all about?
Kirk had grown up Jewish. As a kid he’d had religious feelings. They faded. Now their offspring were hatching. He was letting it happen. He was an artist. Everything was material. Here came another book, a geezer exploring who that geezer might be, tucked away in his fading body.
Then one more challenge, a stroke that left him unable to speak coherently. You can imagine the frustration to a geezer whose work and life involved expressing his characters, expressing himself. He became depressed and suicidal, but he pressed on. His goal was to act again. He spent three years in rehab. He made another movie. He wrote another book.
Kirk Douglas was one of a kind. Will any of us have a geezerhood as full or as rich as his? He set the bar high. You can look at his story and see that, yes, what he did was humanly possible, if not possible for you or me. He had some formidable gifts, and he started applying them at an early age, But you can be inspired by his tale. You can reach out a little farther than you are. There’s always farther.
A Geezer and a Half
Transmission problems. Did Geezer and a Half make it thru to you?