In the Realms of the Darger Movie

In the Realms of the Unreal, was pretty good, actually. It was kind of more – er – ethereal than I personally would have liked. A lot of it was sort of animated versions of his work, which was cool, but I kept wondering what he’d think about it. I guess I’ll have to go read a book about him. If anyone isn’t familiar with his art, check him out. He was this prolific, gifted, outsider as they say, an orphan, with very few people in his life, possibly with some sort of mental illness but functioning in the world, albeit in a very limited way – home, work, art. He kept his work completely secret from even the few people he did know. He knew he couldn’t really draw, so he sort of traced images and pieced them together to tell this – beyond elaborate, 15,000 page story of the Vivian girls, and his sense of color, proportion, imagery, story is just so incredible. More than anything though, what I was left with after seeing this movie was that this man who went through life largely unseen, has left something like this behind, and it makes me think about how all of us have something to contribute, a reason for being here, that we all matter, and that in Darger’s case we were just lucky to have access to knowing the reason. I’m pretty sure a lot of lives go by where we don’t. But someone does. Every life touches another life in some way. Okay, I’m getting into Chicken Soup territory. Sorry.