As the first film of my 25 / 25 challenge, I watched Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close — a film that I had rented on iTunes and was about to expire, so the timing couldn’t have been better.  I had read this book a while ago and really enjoyed the protagonist’s voice in the novel — a voice that the filmmakers attempted to capture apparently by directing the boy to open his eyes extremely wide.  As usual in a novel-to-film interpretation, a lot was lost in translation, including the whole backstory about his grandmother & grandfather’s relationship, which I found an incredibly moving part of the book.  I also don’t remember the ending of the book very clearly, but I’m pretty sure the filmmakers took some creative license to Hollywood-ify the last few sequences into some sort of happy ending.  In the end, I’m glad that I watched it, but definitely not one of my favorite films.

So I started my 25/25 challenge for the rest of 2012 with The Corrections, but I had a profound realization that I just can’t handle Jonathan Franzen books any longer. In fact, after the torturous but in-the-end rewarding experience with Freedom, I don’t really understand what motivated me to pick up The Corrections instead of trying something new. I find some sort of perverse thrill from reading about families & relationships on the rocks, and reality TV usually provides me with an unhealthy dose of that. But then when I’m curling up in bed at the end of the night, excited to read a good story, the last thing that I want is to deal with family drama — especially drama that isn’t from my own family. There’s something about his writing that hooks me in, and really gets me going, so much that I start really relating to characters that I, in fact, don’t want to relate to. I guess the thing you need to know about me is that my subconscious is extremely prone to fiction — specifically to fully entering the very soul and mind of the fictional characters that I even mildly connect with. It’s some sort of weakness that has always enabled me to do really well on reading comprehension and any sort of literary analysis, but actually threatens to paralyze me in my daily life — or more likely, I’ll just start actually acting like the characters that I may strongly despise in the book.

This happens to me even stronger in films. Cough it up to the fact that I was a film major in college, but when I watch a film, I get fully, entirely, 100% immersed in the characters that I subconsciously start making facial gestures like them and try to copy their accents, speech rhythms, and word choices. I think this might be why I’m really good at learning languages as well. But, what I realized with reading The Corrections, is that I have to be really careful about the 25 books and 25 movies that I choose to read because they could literally shape my subconscious for the rest of the year. I don’t know if this is normal or a common phenomenon, but it always kind of freaks me out that I am so invested in fiction.

So even though I haven’t finished The Corrections, which I feel kind of bad about, I’m moving on to Swamplandia! in the hopes that my subconscious will latch onto characters that are ok to relate to.