The Purple Rose of Cairo

One of my favorite Woody Allen films due to it's surrealistic experience the main character Cecilia has at the movie house in New Jersey during the great depression. She loves the movies and escapes from the depressing real world life into the fantasy film world almost every afternoon. After her husband abuses her and her boss fires her from her job, she returns to the movie house to watch The Purple Rose of Cairo all afternoon.....until finally one of the characters begins to speak directly to Cecilia out in the audience. He leaves the films, walks up to Cecilia and encourages her to run away leaving the rest of the film characters stuck in limbo until he returns.

A complete fantasy that really hits home with me.  You see I love movies, I really enjoy relaxing after a long day and just unwinding in front of the television. It can be Sci-Fi, Action, Drama, Superhero (my favorite), even a good scary movie sometimes is fun.  The thing is that I enjoy the escape. I enjoy running way (in my head anyway) from all the surrounding realities in my world.  Just like Cecilia, it was her way of getting some peace from the life she struggled through.  She had it tough. The work environment of waitressing.....not promising during the depression. Not many tips but she could be thankful for it while so many didn't have work. Her husband, out of work and a bum. He would take her hard earned money and gamble it away on cards or pitching pennies. If he didn't loose it that way, he would drink it away.  Cecilia's last straw was when she came home and found another woman in the house. She was ready to run away with the fictional character from the film.

Trouble was, the character Tom Baxter didn't know anything about the real world and wouldn't be able to survive.  His money was fake, he only had one set of clothes, he only existed as what his character was created as. He was pure and wholesome....just not real.  The actor that played Tom Baxter was Gil Shepherd and needed the film counterpart to get back in the film to save his career.  After all, he couldn't have his clone running about town loose.

I guess the whole movie has an inspiring reaction from me with the fantasy of something fictional coming to life. A lot like my superhero blog recently. What a wild imagination.....especially in times that are really pressing. Like these days. Maybe not as much as it was a few years ago but still the world seems less than friendly. The surrounding environment is not a pleasurable one but rather a hostel one.  One that demands so much of us that we cannot exist within its boundaries. We require escape.

There are days that I wish I could run away.....if only my entire belongings would fit inside a single suitcase. That would be sad, but liberating. If there were the moral responsibilities of honoring those responsibilities. The struggle with being a perfectionist is that everything feels like a responsibility, feels like my responsibility, my need to complete to the best of my ability all the tasks that lie in front of me. But really what is so bad? What is so bad that you have to run away? Blessings abound it just isn't always easy to see them. We have been given so much to be thankful for. Sometimes we need to look at all the good things we have in comparison to bad. I am sure it will be very one sided......for the good.

In the end, Cecilia didn't get the fictional character and disappear into the film, she didn't get the actor....he was more concerned with his career.....she was stuck....at the movies. We should think about the real world and be satisfied with what we have....it isn't always that bad! We could be stuck in a film!