The Graduation Project

Learning a lesson about bravery and forgiveness

“Everything Will Be Fine” - photo credit: Jonathan Foster

1.

There were ten chairs crammed into a small side room, the curtain, although useless, was nonetheless pulled tight so we could see the flat-screen, an eyelash away from we sardines. Some of the chairs were occupied by parents, with students perched on the remainder and everyone else standing along the walls or sitting on the floor. It was the hottest the day of the year and I’d long since finished my plastic beaker of complimentary instant coffee and UHT milk at this years Communication And Media Exhibition - Graduation Project.

We’d already been impressed by the 1000 meticulously folded origami swans entitled Media Uniformity, we’d been shamed by being asked to choose which of the beautifully made clay-mation models was most likely to be the 1 in 10 men that payed for sex, and we’d nodded along knowingly to the pastiche magazine ROGUE, that satirised the construction of female body-image within capitalism.

And now we were crammed into a tiny room watching four short films, before the exhibition was officially over, and the students, those shiny bundles of beautiful energy, were released into the world, two weeks later.

As the first film appeared on the screen the wifi dropped out, but snappy student fingers connected the laptop to a iPhone with a marvellous expertise and we were back on track before the media teacher can find a place to pop his coffee down.

And then it starts and I am no longer thirsty. I am no longer in the room. I am lost.

2.

When my brother and I shared a room I was glad his bed was closer to the door because if a murderous intruder ever came in they’d likely kill him first and I’d have time to jump out the window. They’d have to catch him by surprise though, because if he could, he’d offer me up for sure, take him, take him he’d have screeched.

I didn’t not like my brother. But I didn’t exactly like him either. This had long been settled. Our family dynamic encouraged this brotherly rift to evolve from a vague discomfort to being carved in stone. Rather than being assisted to find each other my brother and I were partitioned into separate camps.

Even though he was a gangling, alienated and difficult boy that struggled making friends, we rarely found each other. I assumed he knew what he was doing being that he was the older one. But I was wrong, and I stubbornly stuck to being wrong. Until it was too late.

People thought he was odd. He was odd. At a young age he’d adopted an affected poise and imagined himself a classical stage actor, following in the footsteps of already long forgotten thespians. Disoriented as he was in his own time, he affected the style of a bygone era and found sanctity in a pretense of himself, content to don the robes of any roll but is own. My brother’s temperament was encouraged by the adults around him and I assumed they knew what they were doing, being that they were the older ones. But I was wrong. I didn’t realise everyone was just as foolish as I.

Back then he was cast as a melancholic eccentric, a boy with an artistic bent, too clever for his own good. Today he’d have been diagnosed and maybe, just maybe, he’d have found help. Back then, he was encouraged toward isolation and drama school.

3.

The first film in the Communication And Media Exhibition - Graduation Project dealt with being an outcast. The chirpy piano soundtrack and three tone animation gently disclosed the tragedy of being a displaced personality. It played like a genuine 1970’s children TV program, a disconcerting cocktail of being both resigned to the truth that society’s dissolving kinship was permanently baked in, whilst simultaneously encouraging hope for change. A perplexing tone for 1970’s kids thats was being gently mocked by this graduating generation.

Then came a perfectly paced black comedy tightly packed into 6 minutes. A lonely man goes upstairs to complain about the noise, only to be seduced by the festivities of the youthful party in full flow. He drinks, he dances and finally, realising the partygoers have embraced a hedonism that clashes with the values he’s spent a lifetime locked into, he falls victim to his own exclusionary tendencies and begins to despise everybody for exactly what attracted him in the first place. The film was a tiny masterpiece of inter-generational alienation wrapped into a Molotov cocktail of black humour. The room rippled with pathos from parents and students alike as the whole thing blew up in our faces.

The heat in the room kept rising, but somehow no-one shuffled about or made for the door. We all sat utterly transfixed, just watching the these sharp barbs, reminders of just how far we’d let all this come. There’s was something brewing on the room. Something no one wanted to acknowledge. Something utterly bewildering.

The third film knitted together a life through a collage of social media images. Another middle-aged male, laughing and drinking and playing board games and embracing his family and friends and eating out in crowded restaurants and pulling funny faces and looking to all the world like just another of the millions of us living out our lives on this bland canvas of infantilised everydayness. Until suddenly we see his smiling face in a frame, perched upon a coffin, as the statistics of male suicide rolled past in the form of credits.

I see tears silently rolling down my wife’s cheeks as I sit in frozen estrangement.

4.

Twice a year I’m dragged through my raw flimsy facade when I ring my brother for the Birthday Call. With each digit pressed I regress further and further toward those old patterns formed decades ago, even the timbre of my voice delivered a half pitch higher as the past takes control of my vocal cords. He struggles to converse through the cocktail of pharmaceuticals he’s prescribed, supposedly to alleviate his depression, and I struggle to converse through the shame of my having abandoned him to his fate. I sound like a half demented cartoon character intent on proving everything is just fine and dandy, even as I’m plainly a few steps over the cliff edge. He sounds like a man who’s seen this cartoon far too many times before.

I have a million escape hatches and I’ve taken them all. There’s one unopened hatch with his name embossed on the front and I never reach for the handle. Twice a year I speak through the intercom. But I never press the buzzer and enter his life because I’m not the person I think I am. If cognitive and moral dissonance were a church I’d be the High Priest.

5.

The fourth film is an unnerving experience where we, crammed into the room, suddenly feel part of the exhibition as we watch a rabbit hole of YouTube Reactors watching Hi Ren, a masterful back and forth performance piece between musician Ren and his alter ego as he’s enacts an internal battle for control over his own identity, and as we watch the reactors watching the performance and we watch the performance and we watch each other watching, we are dragged helplessly through the multiple layers of identity and spectacle of symbolic imagery into which we are all entrapped and shredded every minute of every day.

As the room seems to shrink and we all get hotter and hotter, Ren ends his song with a monologue:

As I got older, I realised that there were no real winners

And there were no real losers in physiological warfare

But there were victims and there were students

It wasn't David versus Goliath, it was a pendulum

Eternally swaying from the dark to the light

And the more intensely that the light shone, the darker the shadow it cast

It was never really a battle for me to win, it was an eternal dance

And like a dance, the more rigid I became, the harder it got

The more I cursed my clumsy footsteps, the more I struggled

So I got older and I learned to relax

And I learned to soften and that dance got easier

It is this eternal dance that separates human beings

From angels, from demons, from gods

And I must not forget, we must not forget

That we are human beings.

(Lyrics to Hi Ren - 2022)

And then there was silence, and again nobody moved or shuffled and the applause failed to smatter until my youngest daughter started slowly clapping. And then we followed suite together clapping and clapping thunder and lighting into the world.

6.

One winter’s day, a few years back, mountains of rubbish accumulated on the main tourist street close to my home. Dark grey bags of trash rose toward the heavens like a tiny snow-covered Himalayan landscape. I was thrilled and overjoyed by the chaos. It seemed like everything was on the verge of collapse. It seemed like a new world could be born. As I walked to work I had never felt more content, I felt like a modern Marco Polo entering an unknown land and an unknown future.

The films and artwork at the Communication And Media Exhibition - Graduation Project gave me the exact same sense of hope and joy. Even though the student’s were expressing appalling and painful truths of the world, and even though they were revealing their anxiety and fear at being pushed into a society that resembles that cartoon character running beyond the cliff edge, and even through they recognise the stupendous challenges they face, they still refuse to accept the idiocy and instead they reject the old patterns and dare to forge ahead with new and brave ideas.

I was humbled by their generosity and their loving kindness. They clearly saw the faults and weaknesses of their older generations, and instead of blindly following this blueprint for disaster, they chose instead to embrace each other, and forgive each other, and bravely slam their collective foot on the brakes and pull over for a moment, to be themselves, and try something new, whatever that might turn out to be.

So, humbled by their courage, I went home and brewed up a coffee and picked up the phone and when my brother wearily answered, I took a deep breath and in a calm voice, I said hello, and maybe for the first time, I asked him how he was.