Everyone loves
a good story. Especially one that reflects, for the...well, who’s even counting
anymore?…time the apocalyptic battle between good and evil, between the weak
and the strong, between truth and lie.
During
Greek times, there were the myths that people believed explained the twists and
turns of their lives, the unfurling of their destinies, their sorrows and their
joys.
Children
clung to fairy tales, to happy endings, to living happily ever after in a
dreamland modeled on their wishes and desires.
As for
modern-day people, we still need something to believe in and cling to from time
to time in order to get us through the day, the hardships of life, the
inequities of fate.
So we’ve
concocted our own myths and fairytales we hopelessly invest with great powers
of alleviation: the urban stories (or myths, if one might prefer it), the sole
crumble of irrationality we have left in a hyper-rationalized and hyper-rationalizing
world.
Nowadays,
the wrath of the Gods has been replaced with the wrath of the boss, while the
gift from the entities above is for the modern man a one-week leave of absence.
The Sphinx asking
philosophical questions has long disappeared, leaving room for its 21st
century opposite-number, the multinational corporation asking mere mortals to
meet the deadlines or else…
Nevertheless,
we choose to continue to believe in urban stories.
And there
are always people eager to provide them for us. People like Marc Abraham, the “Flash
of Genius” director. Abraham's debut movie revolves around a patent infringement for which
main character Robert Kearns has sued Ford Motor Company. Kearns,
portrayed by actor Greg Kinnear, is a college engineering professor in Detroit
who has invented the intermittent windshield wiper, an invention that Ford claims
to be theirs, after the professor takes it to the company. The legal battle
that follows, between Robert Kearns and Ford Motors, takes a tremendous toll on
the former’s life, coming to destroy both his health and his marriage with wife
Phyllis (played by Lauren Graham).
If the grueling struggle between one man and a multinational
corporation has at its core a symbol, the intermittent windscreen wipers being
a constant reminder that we live in a world that’s come to be utterly infected
with the idea of time, the fact that twenty years of Kearns’ life are consumed
in the flash-fire of one lie actually manages to outline the truth about the
modern-day man: He cannot win. The Gods have left him for good, the fairy tales
no longer have happy endings and the cubicle is not exactly a fantasy land.
The only thing he can still hold on to are the crumbles, the urban stories.
And the movies like „Flash of Genius” that raise an important question: is the
truth worth bartering your soul for?
