(This is the second of a series of posts. Here are the links to part one and part three.
If you're like most men, this is the image from the movie that will haunt you. (Click on the images to see them larger.)
The still doesn't even begin to do it justice. It's the graceful power that matters. He's laying sixty, seventy feet of line out here.
But there are a couple of problems here. In fact, the vast majority of trout caught on the fly are caught on casts of less than forty feet. This sort of thing is beautiful to watch but not terribly practical. But the really big problem is that he is casting straight downstream, an utterly pointless thing to do. Fly fishing in rivers and streams is done across the current. Depending on the circumstances, you might go up and across, straight across or down and across. But straight downstream makes it impossible to give any sort of natural motion to the fly. The bugs and small fish that live in fast water never just hold in one place against the current and they do not swim straight up current.
And that brings me to something I promised to come back to in the last post but forgot: that animalistic way that Norman conceives of Paul. Because every guy is haunted by the memory of that childhood companion who just seemed to have grace and power. He always pushed the limits and always seemed to get away with it. And even if, Icarus like, he flies too close to the sun, we remember that guy who just had effortless grace and not the charred mess after the crash.
Truth be told, he was never what we imagined. He was a projection. He was the guy whe chided ourselves for not being. Later, when we'd grown up and realized we'd never gone fishing as often as we wanted, he would haunt us.
You've seen that in real life. Many, many times you've been driving over a bridge and you looked to the side and you saw the river and it was beautiful just like that. And you wished you had the courage to park your car, and go down and fish that river. And you didn't for a lot of reasons.
Only one of the reasons was that you couldn't picture yourself casting gracefully enough or catching enough fish to escape the fear of seeming ridiculous of the next guy to come along. You know perfectly well that it would take practice to get good but you want to be past that. You want to be the guy laying out long, powerful, graceful casts that set the fly gently on the water and get the fish to rise.
And don't you imagine making love to women in similar terms?
Ah, the Craftsman style. As the aesthetics of American manliness go, this is as good as it gets. And this is the study, which is to say, the ultimate manly room. The only thing better than being a boy who gets invited into his father's study would be to be a father with a study like that.
Ultimate manly room in a house that is. This movie also has great bars in it. There are bars that just say manly success (I think they would have actually called them saloons at the time). To be at home here, would be to have arrived.
And then there are the bars you could get hurt going into and you don't really want or like the idea of being in them but you wish you had been in them once upon a time just to have had that experience under your belt.
Oh yeah, there is also the woman you wouldn't want to be with but you wish you had been in them once upon a time just to have had that experience under your belt.
All of these things, Norman projects onto Paul. Paul was comfortable doing these things, Norman felt awkward as we all do. He compensates with Paul but, in the process, he makes Paul into a beautiful graceful animal more like a trout than a trout fisherman.
If you're like most men, this is the image from the movie that will haunt you. (Click on the images to see them larger.)
The still doesn't even begin to do it justice. It's the graceful power that matters. He's laying sixty, seventy feet of line out here.
But there are a couple of problems here. In fact, the vast majority of trout caught on the fly are caught on casts of less than forty feet. This sort of thing is beautiful to watch but not terribly practical. But the really big problem is that he is casting straight downstream, an utterly pointless thing to do. Fly fishing in rivers and streams is done across the current. Depending on the circumstances, you might go up and across, straight across or down and across. But straight downstream makes it impossible to give any sort of natural motion to the fly. The bugs and small fish that live in fast water never just hold in one place against the current and they do not swim straight up current.
And that brings me to something I promised to come back to in the last post but forgot: that animalistic way that Norman conceives of Paul. Because every guy is haunted by the memory of that childhood companion who just seemed to have grace and power. He always pushed the limits and always seemed to get away with it. And even if, Icarus like, he flies too close to the sun, we remember that guy who just had effortless grace and not the charred mess after the crash.
Truth be told, he was never what we imagined. He was a projection. He was the guy whe chided ourselves for not being. Later, when we'd grown up and realized we'd never gone fishing as often as we wanted, he would haunt us.
You've seen that in real life. Many, many times you've been driving over a bridge and you looked to the side and you saw the river and it was beautiful just like that. And you wished you had the courage to park your car, and go down and fish that river. And you didn't for a lot of reasons.
Only one of the reasons was that you couldn't picture yourself casting gracefully enough or catching enough fish to escape the fear of seeming ridiculous of the next guy to come along. You know perfectly well that it would take practice to get good but you want to be past that. You want to be the guy laying out long, powerful, graceful casts that set the fly gently on the water and get the fish to rise.
And don't you imagine making love to women in similar terms?
Ah, the Craftsman style. As the aesthetics of American manliness go, this is as good as it gets. And this is the study, which is to say, the ultimate manly room. The only thing better than being a boy who gets invited into his father's study would be to be a father with a study like that.
Ultimate manly room in a house that is. This movie also has great bars in it. There are bars that just say manly success (I think they would have actually called them saloons at the time). To be at home here, would be to have arrived.
And then there are the bars you could get hurt going into and you don't really want or like the idea of being in them but you wish you had been in them once upon a time just to have had that experience under your belt.
Oh yeah, there is also the woman you wouldn't want to be with but you wish you had been in them once upon a time just to have had that experience under your belt.
All of these things, Norman projects onto Paul. Paul was comfortable doing these things, Norman felt awkward as we all do. He compensates with Paul but, in the process, he makes Paul into a beautiful graceful animal more like a trout than a trout fisherman.
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