From the Flash Stash VI: Baines

The well-dressed man in the film says, “It’s a great life if you don’t weaken.”

Maybe then, it’s a good life if you don’t weaken much and an okay life if you don’t weaken a lot, and a shitty life if all you do is weaken.

That’s the thing about film heroes, though, they get the line off and it’s on to the next scene. Proving the words through a series of practical applications is not important to our man. Not even in the next chapter of the story when he is tested and fails to keep a stiff upper lip. He’ll get more chances. This you know because we’re only in act one.

And he has delivered the line with such finesse. It lingers, hangs in billboard-sized text, the words are quicksilver. You don’t forget them because you like the man and the moment. You like the real world feel of the language and the sentiment. He says it from a lofty place, a verandah looking down on an early morning London street.

His perch is many stories above the everyday goings on below:  the milk wagon, the people walking to work, the neighbor’s cat looking for a handout. He says it to the boy, who is his charge, and for that moment, you are the boy. That’s right, you are the boy, and you are looking up to him to show you how not to weaken.

And to learn that lesson, you will follow him anywhere.

by Wayne Cresser

(This piece was originally published in Open: Journal of Arts and Letters, December 19, 2019)