Magnolia (1999)

directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

Eric Thompson

I watched Magnolia in the mostly finished basement of the Iowa house I grew up in. This was the place where there was always a 24-pack of Pepsi on the stairwell and where my best friends and I would gather, first to mess with my model trains or make strange movies on a giant camcorder, then later to play pool and listen to Eve 6, or half-accidentally beat the shit out of each other wrestling over a golf club. And, finally, to play Goldeneye and make outrageously uninformed statements (that were really questions) about girls. Later still, it was the place Melanie and I watched American Idol and late-night network TV reality dating shows, and hundreds of VHS tapes rented from Borderline Video. It was where we rolled around on the couch, and hid from my best friends when we DID NOT WANT to go camping. These were the circumstances under which I built my lifelong relationship to movies, and my relationship to relationships.

Borderline was just eclectic enough to carry the odd cult classic or independent masterpiece. My parents found Vernon, Florida there and Melanie and her ex discovered Night on Earth, having no idea who Jim Jarmusch was. We watched anything and everything: Psycho, Porgy and Bess, A Room With a View, Independence Day. If it was good, we’d sit totally transfixed. If it was bad, we’d make out until something interesting happened.

Magnolia was one of the few movies that had my attention the entire time, that made me ignore my girlfriend intently. It was also the movie that made me want to become a filmmaker. Never mind that I did not become a filmmaker. Put yourself back when high school is ending and imagination is nearly synonymous with manifestation. When a sudden flare of desire can become a painful obsession or a crippling lack that makes you cry every day you don’t get what you now believe you need. When a dumbass and dangerous whim can seem as attainable and inevitable as a glass of water. When the rest of your life is nothing and everything at the exact same time, and who’s to say you are not about to do whatever you think you might? Can you remember this time?

Magnolia was the movie that made me want to be a filmmaker, and I was going to be one, too. Because now I knew what was possible, and it was so much more than I’d realized. Apparently, you could do anything in a movie. As far as what it was about, the box promised this: “On one random day in the San Fernando Valley, a dying father, a young wife, a male caretaker, a famous lost son, a police officer in love, a boy genius, an ex-boy genius, a game show host, and an estranged daughter will each become part of a dazzling multiplicity of plots, but one story.” It was a sprawling, divisive miracle, and when I read about it later, I would not care at all that a good many people thought this magical movie kinda sucked.

In fact, it was my first experience knowing, without a doubt, that a movie was good and that I liked it, that it had power over me, while also knowing that I could not explain all its mysteries to anyone else. I could not be offended or surprised if they hated it, nor could I really disagree when they told me it was too long, or too depressing, or it didn’t make sense. I could not tell them why the frogs started raining but I could tell them that the scene was right, the moment perfect, and that there had been no mistake made. And this was a fucking beautiful certainty in a time when I wasn’t even certain about where I’d be in three months, or who to act like when forced to convince a whole new collection of people to like me all over again, from scratch, which I’d pulled off once before, against all odds, and so seemed like a long shot to achieve for a second time.

The frogs. I hate to spoil things, but we do have to talk about the frogs. Near the end of the movie a storm of frogs pummels the San Fernando valley (or maybe the whole world?). First there are one or two, then a handful, then an amphibious hail storm’s worth, causing ambulances to flip on their sides, and pool water to churn and roil. We see each character as their night is interrupted by this completely unexplained phenomenon. People seem generally alarmed, but nobody ever discusses it.

I once wrote an admissions essay about it, for film school, though it’s gone now. What would I have said about that scene, that inexplicable chaos in a movie of such sadness and beauty? It has taken me 18 years to understand the rain of frogs. I started to try to unpack it right away, in that essay. I know I offered up a bold assertion about what it meant. It can’t have been right, though, can it? My instinct was to joke about the impossibility of a high school kid being able to understand the pain and loss and confusion of this movie. I was momentarily under the assumption that, though it affected me viscerally, I could only really relate to the movie later, as an adult.

But then I thought about high school some more. High school: when I threw a remote control at my dad’s head, when I was in love and tears of different varieties, weekly. When I was constantly being hurt and hurting others, out of arrogance and ignorance. Attending a funeral for the girls from my cross country team whose car slid into ours one night on the ice outside Mason City. Receiving suicidal emails from buddies and pounding on locked bathroom doors to try to get girls to please stop cutting their arms. Embarrassed by everything my parents did or didn’t do, buying Abercrombie shirts and mortifying myself to great effect just by trying to appear cool.

Actually, it is ludicrous to think that my current self can process Magnolia’s pathos—those people’s bared, electric pain—any better now because of the extra years I’ve been alive.

I have thought many times, without irony, that I had a fairly happy, stable, uneventful adolescence. And I think, even after writing these things down, that I still believe that’s true. But around the time I watched the film I was being kept apart from girls unfairly by snowstorms and summer camps that just didn’t give a shit, and by adults who didn’t understand. Blacklisted by gangs of friends because of rumors, true and untrue. I was being offered counseling over the school’s loudspeaker because I’d broken up with a girl and then she’d called my new flip phone so I could hear her drive her car into a telephone pole.

Adult movies are made for children, too.

*

I own Magnolia on DVD, have watched every special feature, but I haven’t seen it in years now. I don’t really need to. Its power is in the fragments that coalesce, particles that attract particles, tiny moments that never leave you. Its power is in whatever I can remember and feel all these years later. A police officer so ashamed by the loss of his gun that he’s compelled to confess it to his date, and the way they rattle all the silverware on the table when they jump up to kiss. A little boy quietly entering his father’s bedroom in the middle of the night and telling him that he needs to start being nicer.

Watching the movie in high school, I learned that plot didn’t matter. Later I’d have to unlearn that, internalize just how essential plot is. Both lessons are one hundred percent true. I’d already started to realize that I could be carried along for pages at a time by lyrical writing, poignant observations. But in movies I still wanted bank heists and aliens and Tarantino’s gore. In Magnolia I encountered a movie over three hours long with so many small stories that wandered all over the damn place. And, in an overarching sense, not much was happening at all. The suspense would have to come from how some of the characters might connect, and how they might angle their head just above the rising tide of swamp water and get a breath, stay afloat as their own life tried to sink them again. I realized halfway through that I just did not care what “happened.” It was enough that each raised eyebrow, or stuttered confession, or perfect brushstroke of background song was arresting, and was tuned directly into a truth, even if a confusing one.

I did not like the frogs at first. But I kept watching. And at the end of the scene, the youngest character, quiz kid Stanley Spector, sits awe-struck amid the deluge and whispers, “This happens. This is a thing that happens.” And then he says it again.

Here’s what I might write now, were I starting my whole life and trying to convince someone to let me go to film school: When something we can’t make sense of comes along and ruins us, it stuns us right out of ourselves and our selfishness and throws us into action, if we’re lucky; we’re forced to wise up and be active in the weirdness of the world, to grapple with what just happened, whether we believe it possible or not.

*

But before the frogs, something else that changes everything: Aimee Mann’s incredible song, “Wise Up,” plays as a drug addict calls herself stupid and snorts another line. But then she lifts her head up and performs the song. We see each of the nine characters, lonely and running out of ideas, sing a section of the lyrics to themselves, a hopeless or hopeful act depending on your interpretation.

I understand why the sing-along made some people walk out or turn off the television. But I will never forget those characters sitting in isolation and singing those words in their wavery voices. The slow realization that not only was the bedside nurse singing the song, but behind him, on his death-bed, so was the old man. The camera’s slow zoom to shift the scene’s focus to him, flat on his back. The forced breath of his ravaged voice, the way it should have been an awful mistake in tone, laugh-out-loud ridiculous, but was, instead, exactly the strange thing needed to move me. It was also what set me up to trust implicitly, and to believe every moment that came after. Those scenes and lines were what happened. Like I was watching life: here were some people and what they did, and how they felt, and what they could never get past, and how hard they tried to get past it. The characters’ decisions, same as the director’s particular choices: no point in talking about why, or why not, or whether they should have.

Those nine people were all a part of the same haunting world, and I was sneaking into it, too. And when the pain gets to be too much, we sit on the edge of the bed, or hunched at the kitchen table, and sing, and we wonder if others are stumbling through the same song simultaneously. That scene, the simple and literally illustrated yearning for connection at our lowest and most alone, may have gotten me through the rest of high school, and college, and life. Melodramatic, sure. And real as shit. An empty pop can for the echo and a drive to Pilot Knob alone in the middle of the night, and I could sing at the same time I cried. And when the frogs rain down it does not matter whose bed we’ve been kept from, or that we are out of pain pills, or whether or not the rumor about us is true or only based on a kind of truth. When the frogs fall out of the sky they fall down on us all.

Eric Thompson is a writer. He has also worked for a cruise line, delivered refrigerators, and been a middle school teacher. Right now he is walking a lot of dogs all the time, making homemade ice cream, and trying to figure out how to write a novel-in-stories.