A few years ago, I would not have believed you if you had told me I would be committing to spend six years of my life in Kansas. It just wouldn't have made sense. I knew that people lived here, of course, but I had never taken the time to picture the life of a Kansan, never accorded the lives lived here with my own as equally real. And when I was living in Portland, with too much to do and plenty of people to do things with, it just wouldn't have seemed like the way my life was supposed to go. I had a category for myself, and, by virtue of distance, the category of Kansans was different.
At the end of the movie, when Moze starts to consider turning back to get Addie, and sees Addie running away from her aunt's, there was a part of me that objected. Yes, this life seems to make them happy, but Addie is a kid, she's supposed to go to school, make friends her own age, grow up without the danger of bootleggers and cops looming over her. I had this image of what her life should be. But the magic of Paper Moon is to remind us of a world that was different from ours. To remind us why we made those classic movies, what we were trying to tell each other. Bogdanovich reminds us what we were trying to remember. People scraping by through the Depression, in the deprivations of prohibition, stealing from each other because there's not enough to go around. The category in my mind of what Addie's life is supposed to look like didn't exist in Kansas in 1936. There was no perfect childhood, no perfect coming of age, no perfect life. The categories were different. Addie knows that better than I. And so she picks what will make her happy.
There's still no perfect life. It's pretty easy for me to pick out things about my life that were better in Portland or back home in California than they are now. But it's getting easier and easier to go the other way. My categories are shifting. And I think I'm getting old enough to spend less time imagining a perfect life and work on building a good one. It's going pretty well. Maybe soon I'll be as wise as Addie.
