Normal

One of my favorite movies is Normal, which stars Jessica Lange and Tom Wilkinson as Irma and Roy Applewood,  a supposedly average, church-going, middle America family with Hayden Panettiere as their daughter.

Roy decides on a major change for his life, the kind of change that would rip an actually normal family right down the middle, so there is a certain irony in the film’s title, yet Irma chooses to stay in the marriage. No matter the change, Roy still loves her. She still loves Roy. In the midst of it all, their love trumps the rumors, the ridicule, the invasion of Roy’s decision into their lives.

I’ve always wanted to be Jessica Lange from the second I saw her in the 1976 King Kong remake which was, to me, the original King Kong since there was no such person as Fay Wray and no such time as 1933 as far as I knew. I was eight years old. I loved her in “Frances” and in “Sweet Dreams”, the story of Patsy Cline. I was very protective of her character in Normal from the opening scene. I wanted fictional Irma to shine in places where biographical Frances and Patsy were shadowed by their limitations. Would Irma stay? Would she fight for her man even under the most extreme and outrageous conditions?

Yes and yes.

I never got to be Jessica Lange, but I’ve been Irma more than a few times. Well, not the Irma who was needed by her Roy unconditionally even as he was going through personal turmoil. I don’t know if I’ve ever been that Irma. And I’ve never been the Irma who was given the choice to stay. Come to think of it, I guess I’ve always wanted to be Irma, too, and just never got the chance. To be a united public front with my man while being ostracized from our small community. To be the rock among the crashing waves. To defiantly and triumphantly sleep next to my lover and best friend every night for decades to come. Did I never get the chance or did I never take the chance? I am less Irma than I thought. Especially that rock among waves part. I am more like the sea creature that gets thrown by the waves onto the beach and dies from an immediate membrane rupture.

I’ve been comparing my life to the wrong movie.