"I wonder where we'll end up?"
"Away from the things of man, my love. Away from the things of man."
Every now and then, when I'm deeply miserable enough, I remember Joe vs the Volcano and pop it into the DVD player. It's about a man who works at a job that is not just bad, but makes him feel sick all the time. Like he's dying. When DeDe asks him what's with his shoe, he says, "I'm losing my sole."
"I know," she says.
The only thing that pops him out of it, after countless tests, is confirmation that, yes, he is in fact dying. Of a brain cloud.
"So I'm not sick except for this terminal disease?"
"Which has no symptoms. That's right."
It's a beautiful fantasy of someone wasting his life away in the deepest, darkest bowels of industrial capitalism finding freedom, epiphany, love and a deep and meaningful sense of how big and beautiful and dangerous and tragic the world can be.
"I don't know what your situation is but I wanted you to know what mine is not just to explain some rude behavior, but because we're on a little boat for a while and ... I'm soul sick. And you're going to see that."
The journey is beautiful and whimsical. The characters engaging and entertaining. It is my favorite Meg Ryan movie. It is my favorite Tom Hanks movie. It is my favorite Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks movie. It has some of the most thoughtful and heartfelt writing I have ever encountered in a film.
It is both secular and sacred. A deeply agnostic celebration of rediscovering that connection to something bigger than ourselves.
"Dear god, whose name I do not know - thank you for my life. I forgot how big... thank you. Thank you for my life."
It is not, however, an imagining of how to reconnect to humanity. Humanity, after all, created the machine Joe is escaping. Good or bad, with every scene moves him further and further away from civilization and the sick people it produces. It's not that he hates them, but he just can't relate to them anymore. And he can't stay in a place that makes him sick. And no one understands when he tries to explain.
"I have no response to that."
There is only joy as he leaves civilization behind. Living well is the only road left to him, given his new perspective. And, lucky unlucky man that he is, he finds another soul sick person to share it with. And it's crazy and it's unbelievable and they decide to go for it, because what else had they been doing? What had the rest of the world ever offered them that surpassed what they'd found in each other? So they jump.
"Joe, nobody knows anything. We'll take this leap, and we'll see. We'll jump and we'll see. That's life."
"I saw the moon when we were out there in the ocean, shining down on everything. I've been miserable so long, years of my life wasted, afraid. Been a long time coming here to meet you - a long time, on a crooked road. Did I ever tell you? The first time I saw you, felt like I'd seen you before."
In they end they sail off together. No reunification with the human race desired or necessary. He was never dying. Convincing him he was was the last desperate attempt by the machine of civilization to kill him.
It's a desperate fantasy of a movie. And it speaks to me in places I forget I had about things I forgot I knew. Every now and then I watch Joe vs the Volcano and it tries to save my life.
Here's to remembering the things I already know. Here's to finding the soul sick and being understood. Here's to finding the path out.
"My father says that almost the whole world is asleep. Everybody you know. Everybody you see. Everybody you talk to. He says that only a few people are awake and they live in a state of constant total amazement."Here's to waking up.
