How many people have ever read a book, seen a movie, seen some art and thought “Wow, this speaks directly to me. I identify so much with this character/what this author has to say” ?
What were these forces and how did they impact you where a similar work didn’t?
(I don’t want to just limit it to books, movies, or art; I’m talking about all forms. Comic books, video games, whatever it is that made you feel like you can identify.)
Tori Amos, Crucify
Don’t remember the exact situation, but it involved a girl and (that I liked, but wasn’t more then friends with) I always listened to that song and wondered why I put myself through so much crap for her.
Also, when my girlfriend at the time (different time then above) broke up with me…Bob Dylan: Positively 4th Street
Eric Foreman from “That’s 70s Show.”
Just the fact that no matter what, he’ll make things worse.
Oh, and he’s a totaly idiot.
The first time I heard Side One of “Nighthawks At The Diner” by Tom Waits, I was floored. I remember having to listen to it over and over because everything about it was just perfect. As it turns out, the rest of the sides are fine, but they don’t get any better at any point than anything on Side 1, and some don’t reach that pinnacle. But this is when Waits still had something to prove, and he had honed his gin-joint, hipster-storyteller persona into a powerful weapon. I think he was recorded on the right night, with the right people and the right setting and he played his best stuff first, to wow the crowd. And wow is right!
I think works of art do that for me in retrospect more often than they do it ‘at the time.’ If I hear or read something I really love, sometimes I’ll look back at it a couple of years later and see how clearly it spoke to (or shaped) what was happening then. But American Beauty and Lost in Translation, along with Radiohead’s OK Computer, did grab me that way on first viewing or listening. I’m not sure if I can explain why those hit me as they did. I think I just heard them at transitional moments in my life- for example, seeing LiT at a point where I was wondering about how people can manage to really connect with each other through the noise around them.
When I saw Sideways a couple of years ago, I did say “I identify so much with this character,” and that’s why I didn’t like the movie. I felt Miles was basically what I would be if enough things went wrong with my life, and that’s not a pleasant thing to look at.
Mine was more of a “Hey, this is just like you!” moment - listening to Train’s “Meet Virginia” my ex-husband looked at me (messy haired, wearing sweatpants and heels - I had just dashed outside for the mail and put on the first shoes I found) and said… “This song is about you!” Except my mother doesn’t work on carbureutors, and my brother is definitely not a fine negotiator for the president or otherwise. My dad, however, has probably wrestled an alligator somewhere in his checkered past 
That sounds pretty interesting actually, at least about Lost in Translation . That was such a well done movie and so correctly portrayed the differences of cultural divide. It never said that one culture is better, it just said that they’re different. If you want to delve deeper into it, I think it could end up being a rather interesting discussion.
As clichè as this may be. . .I REALLY identified with Holden Caulfield in High School. I think I read Catcher in the Rye about three times in a row when I was 16.
I’m not prepared to defend that anymore though.
What changed so much?
Well, I heard this songabout me once…
Miguel Delibes, El Camino (The Way).
No idea if it got translated into English. Delibes is one of the most important 20th century novelists and essayists in Spanish. His first novel, “5 hours with Mario”, won a big literary prize so it’s compulsory reading for 10th graders, which is pretty dumb since it’s a widow talking to her deceased about their extremely complex relationship before the burial - not something a 15yr old can identify with.
But El Camino is about a 10yr old boy who had many points in common with myself at that age; Delibes often writes in the 1st person and he did so in this book, so while it’s got a wider vocabulary than most 10yr olds would get it’s nothing I had trouble with.
I read it the summer I was 9; when we got back to school our first essay assignment was “a book I read this summer” and the teacher wanted to flunk me for lying. She’d only ever read “5 hours with Mario” :rolleyes: so asked her to let me lend her “the Way” so she could look it over, and if what I’d talked about in the essay was wrong, then she could flunk me. She accepted.
9yr-old-Nava: “Teachers are WEIRD.”
I never really “got” the song “Jackie Blue” by the Ozark Mountain Daredevils until having a recent realization that I’m just like the title character. Egad!
Moving thread from IMHO to Cafe Society.
Yes. I’m actually a lot like the fascinating, frustrating and intriguing girls that many artists describe such as Maroon 5 in She Will Be Loved and the girl in Garden State.
Sorry I can’t think of better examples, but I think you get the idea. Aloof, mysterious, and appreciated by a select few.
By the way, by no means am I bragging. Most of the time it sucks to be me because I get judged so much by other females, but when a guy comes along that sees that special something in me, that really makes me feel good about myself.
Oh, another one I thought of-- the stripper with AIDS in Rent. She was gorgeous but totally weird.
Two immediately spring to mind: the movie “Lucinda’s Spell” and a certain episode of Sex and the City.
Background: I was very promiscuous throughout my teens and early twenties. I really enjoyed seduction and sex, and did not see myself a slut at all, more like a woman who could really connect with men. Kind of a sex-therapist, if you will. In fact, I’d say a more than average number of the guys that I slept with (be it one night stand or longer-term) went on to find their life-partner immediately after me. This never upset or exasperated me in any way, I was glad for them.
“Lucinda’s Spell” is about a witch who does magic with sex. She is a prostitute. She gives her clients what they need to feel good about themselves. I really identified with this very strongly. The other witches call her a whore and don’t take her seriously, but it turns out that she is more powerful than they imagined. Now I’m not deluded about having magic powers, but I really liked the message of the movie: Sex is magic. 'Cause it really can be magical. I loved the positive message.
Of course, later in life, I settled down, got into a long-term monogamous relationship that ended quite badly. I returned to California with mental, emotional and physical bruises. I had something of an identity crisis, where I didn’t really know who I was or what I wanted anymore. After a couple of years, I more or less put myself back together, new relationship, better job, etc. I used to really wonder how I went from who I was then to being this person I probably wouldn’t have even hung out with before.
Then I saw the episode of Sex and the City where their friend from college is having a baby shower. She was the resident bad girl and slept around, and now she is married to a banker and lives in a Martha Stewart-esque house. She comes over uninvited to a party, and proceeds to try and act like her old self, except that everyone won’t give her any alcohol since she’s pregnant, and her bad girl act is way more embarrasing. At the end of the show she says “Someday you’ll look in the mirror, and you won’t know who you are.” It hit me like a ton of bricks. I cried that night.
Yikes, long post. Well, you asked.
P.S. I’m doing much better nowadays.
This will not be as deep as some of the others, in the movie Raising Helen Kate Hudson’s character is named the guardian of her sister’s kids. She doesn’t understand why her, and not her more responsible sister was given this honor.
I won’t spoil it for those of you that haven’t seen it and may want to…
It fully encapsulated for me why I named my friend Mandi the guardian of my daughter.
Lucky for you I like weird girls…and weird people in general.
I did ask. It’s always good to take a trip down and pick out the media that shapes you and then identify it. Sometimes, after you point it out, you realize it might have been good or bad, like if you had said you were heavily influenced by “My Little Pony”, I’d expect that you’d think about it afterwards.
So, now that I asked the original question, I’ll ask another. How did those two things shape who you are today?
When I was in my teens, I saw a lot of myself in Esther Greenwood, the protagonist of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.
A couple of years ago I tried to reread the book, and I was horrified to think that I’d identified so strongly with this deeply disturbed young woman. Every time I find myself wishing I were young again, I can remind myself that being young wasn’t so great, not for me (or for Sylvia Plath).