Picture me rollin’. Slowly. Through mid-day traffic on a Wednesday. Along U Street in NW Washington, DC. The sun is shining. The windows of my Grand Prix are cracked generously to welcome both the fresh Spring air and the sounds of the city. From somewhere behind me, I hear the approaching bassline of a song I think I recognize. I make the NPR go away for a moment.
“Is that…Seal?”
Before the question mark fully forms in my thought bubble, a cherry red Grand Caravan eases up next to me. It is pristine. Fresh from the car wash where it obviously got the deluxe treatment. That’s the one where they run a toothbrush through every inch of the rims as thoroughly as if you washed the whip in your own driveway. The shiny Caravan has only one passenger: its driver.
The first thing I see is his chocolate brown forearm. The driver’s window has been rolled down and his left arm dangles out of it. His forearm has the type of girth that probably made several running backs shiver several years prior when the driver played division three football at a liberal arts school somewhere in Ohio. A masculine, gold bracelet — the kind you’d expect a proper pimp to wear — bounces as his arm keeps time to the song.
It is Seal. Then it is Seal again. First “Crazy.” Then “Kiss from a Rose.”
As the first song blends to the second, the chocolate brown man with the large forearm and the gold bracelet turns the volume up. The Seal-ier Seal gets, the harder the driver rocks.
As I process this scene, I’m thinking about one of my favorite lines from Micheal Clayton. Somewhere in act two of the film, the crazy genius lawyer played by Tom Wilkinson turns up dead causing his colleagues to gather at a bar to drink and console and drink some more. Michael Clayton, played by George Clooney, takes a seat at the bar next to the head of the firm who is played by the late Sydney Pollack. Clooney’s character is more befuddled than he is grief-stricken. He asks a series of questions about the mysterious demise of his friend, eventually declaring that none of it makes sense. His thoughts tangle into a single word, “Why?”
Pollack’s character raises his eyes from his scotch and shakes his head as if he can’t believe his younger friend doesn’t know what is so obviously obvious. With disdain and sadness in his voice, he answers Clooney’s character matter-of-factly, “Why? Because people are fuckin’ incomprehensible … Why …”
Stereotypes can be contemptible devices. They can also be useful sorting tools that give order to the presumed randomness of the world. In every case, stereotypes are reductive, and they live and breathe on aggressive simplicity. Stereotypes don’t typically provide the kind of space for people to act out all the complexities of their own humanity. And that’s why stereotypes invariably fail us. People, as the screenplay for Michael Clayton told us, are incomprehensible.
Pulling apart the elements of the scene on U Street, a couple of stereotypes could emerge. Perhaps the driver would be better cast behind the wheel of a Cadillac bumping Chuck Brown. We might expect the Caravan to have been piloted by a sleep-deprived woman chauferring half a soccer-team who were being distracted by a Pixar DVD. And the person most likely to do a car-aoke version of a Seal song would be … well … that’s just it … there really isn’t one. Seal, himself, is a destroyer of conventions. And his music is a fitting soundtrack to a scene that reveals so explicitly the limits of stereotypes.
When Tony Gilroy was dreaming up that character that enabled Tom Wilkinson to give a master class in acting, he knew something about people and the space they inhabit. People can be understood … to a point. But after that point, it’s a fool’s errand to cage them with your own expectations. As Seal might tell us, we’re all just a little bit crazy. And crazy, the last time I checked, is the enemy of forced simplicity.
At the very least, crazy has the kind of forearms to create as much space as it wants. And it will listen to whatever music it pleases.
