“I’m not here to tell you who you are. … I don’t know who you are. I don’t want to know. It’s taken me all my life to find out who I am and I am tired now, you hear what I’m saying?” – Marshall
My favorite movie is Joe Vs. The Volcano. People who know me know this well, because I bring it up often, and references to it show up throughout my life. The first thing I ever wrote that wasn’t assigned by a teacher was a DVD review of the film for my friend’s zine. My dog Marshall is named after the wise old chauffeur who imbues Joe with confidence at a time when he needs it most. And at our wedding, Danielle and I asked (forced?) our best man and maid of honor to perform the movie’s climactic scene, the one that ends with Joe and Patricia—whose meet-cute involves a capsized yacht and several days lost at sea afloat on Joe’s luggage—jumping into a volcano. This happens right after Patricia says, “No one knows anything. We’ll jump and we’ll see. We’ll take this leap, and we’ll see. That’s life.” I still think that’s pretty good wedding ceremony material.
Joe was panned by critics when it was released in 1990, with the Times’ Vincent Camby comparing it to Howard the Duck. Damn. But it’s not hard to see why it went over everyone’s head. Its stars, Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, were coming off widely lauded, career-defining roles in Big and When Harry Met Sally, then showed up in this bonkers Dadaist fairytale, with its ridiculous plot, surreal production design, and lunatic performances from the likes of Lloyd Bridges, Amanda Plummer, and Abe Vigoda. Ryan outshines them all, playing three different characters and gamely delivering lines like this: “All I know about Waponi Woo is that the name means ‘little Island with the big volcano,’ and that its people, the Waponis, like orange soda.”
The movie’s mere existence is one of those Hollywood miracles. Playwright John Patrick Shanley had recently won an Oscar for his screenplay for Moonstruck and sent his script for Joe to Steven Spielberg, who loved it. Spielberg signed on as the film’s executive producer and suggested Shanley try his hand at directing. But the studio freaked when dailies started coming in and they realized they’d greenlit an experimental romp from a first-time director, someone who’d told his cinematographer, “Treat the camera like it weighs 5,000 pounds,” a creative decision that gives certain scenes the feel of very-high-budget community theater, and I somehow mean that as a compliment. (Shanley’s direction is especially hilarious when you consider Joe came out six months before Goodfellas, with its legendary Steadicam shots.) Thankfully, Spielberg and Hanks both ran interference, keeping the suits off Shanley’s back as he realized his Seussian vision. No one knew how to market the results, and so the studio pitched it as a quirky rom-com. No doubt thanks to Hanks and Ryan’s star power, the movie broke even at the box office, but it’d be 18 years before anyone let Shanley direct something again.
I discovered Joe in college, and it helped me to define and appreciate the kind of tonal subversiveness I gravitated toward, both as an aspiring creative person and actual person-person. If we dated, I probably would have made us watch it sometime around the sixth date, and if you were turned off by the movie’s mix of sincerity and foolishness—by its big-swing existential exchanges followed immediately by the appearance of a giant rubber shark—then our sensibilities were misaligned, and the relationship was doomed. Joe hit on something that was hard for me to articulate then and still is today, but it’s approximately this: Life is very silly, a tale told by an idiot. Amid the silliness, there are opportunities for real heroism and big romantic gestures, but even or especially when the stakes are at their highest—i.e. in the face of death—there’s a kind of winking absurdity to things, a surrealist comedic undercurrent that is evidence of something grander and more magnificent, provided you keep an eye out for it, which you should.
Weirdly, for a movie that’s so near and dear to my heart, it only just occurred to me during a recent morning dog walk how relevant this all is to my current situation. Plotwise, Joe is about the changes that take place in a person when they find out they’re going to die. In Joe’s case, he’s diagnosed with a “brain cloud” and given six months to live. (“You’d think they could come up with something better than a brain cloud,” Patricia will later say.) With nothing left to lose, he accepts an eccentric tycoon’s offer to pay him to jump into a volcano, thereby appeasing “The Great Wu,” the deity worshipped by the Waponis, who will hand the tycoon their mineral rights in return. For Joe, jumping into the volcano on behalf of the Waponis serves as a final act of heroism, one that will give his life meaning and purpose. With his days numbered, Joe’s outlook blossoms into a kaleidoscope of color and wonder. “All this, like, life seems unbelievable to me,” he tells Patricia aboard the yacht, beneath a canopy of stars.
However, after he goes through with this plan and is eventually spit out by the volcano along with Patricia, Joe learns that his diagnosis was a sham, a con cooked up by the tycoon to trick Joe into doing his bidding. As soon as he realizes he’s no longer terminally ill, Joe immediately reverts to his old self: “My whole life, I’ve been a pawn, a dupe,” he says, and seemingly we’re right back where we started.
As I emerge from my own personal brain cloud, I’ve noticed something similar happening. What felt like clarity of purpose is giving way to the standard assortment of quotidian fears and insecurities: What’s next for my career? What do I need to accomplish? Could I stand to lose 15 pounds? These were distant concerns throughout the past six months when I was battling cancer, but as life reconstitutes itself, I find them returning. Back in June, the act of seeing live music again—even while seated in a wheelchair—brought me to tears. But in the last few weeks, we’ve been to the Hollywood Bowl twice, and I’ve mostly just complained about the crowd size, or how expensive the parking is.
I wish I had the secret for maintaining that connection to something larger than oneself, that feeling of being attuned to the hidden language of things. It’s a silver lining of serious illness that it tends to come bundled with such perspective. If you’re lucky you get better, but as you do, that feeling you had becomes more of a memory. I’m reasonably sure the tradeoff is worth it. Reasonably.
“Your whole life is ahead of you!” Patricia reminds Joe, responding to his return to pessimism and hypochondria. For a moment, his faith is restored, but then he remembers their predicament: They’re stuck on a raft, in the middle of the ocean. They just survived being blown out of a volcano, but now that adventure is behind them, and what lies ahead is uncertain.
Patricia is unperturbed: “It’s always gonna be something with you, isn’t it, Joe?”
This is the Healings Newsletter. It’s sent out on Thursdays.
It’s written by Garrett Kamps and edited by Tommy Craggs. Today’s installment is illustrated by Ayana H. Muwwakkil.
It’s about illness and recovery, and comes with jokes.
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“Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” — Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor
Loved this one
Don't feel guilty about forgetting the pain and agony you went through. Just call it HEALING mentally and physically,
Beth