The State of Grace

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Jules, I am absolutely delighted you stopped by the blog to share your thoughts on State of Grace; I hope this won’t be your last visit. Most of my posts are about either filmmaking/storytelling or my New York upbringing — my most recent essay, “The Lost Boys of the Bronx: A Tribute to Joel Schumacher,” is about both— and as a fellow New Yorker/filmmaker, I think you’d bring a lot to the conversations around here! It’s admittedly not as good as sharing war stories over a Guinness at the Landmark, but you’re nonetheless welcome to pull up a chair and join me here any time! In this thoroughly absorbing story of first love, friendship and family tension, Asperger's syndrome neither defines nor stereotypes. Grace is a protagonist to which any young reader will relate. Yet, along the way, we learn so much about one individual's experience. We share the exhaustion, understand her anxiety about social interactions, see how overwhelming some situations are and totally 'get it' when she has no choice but to switch off. Before reading The State of Grace by Rachael Lucas, I had yet to read a book featuring a protagonist on the autism spectrum before. There are a few out, but not a huge amount, and only one other that I know of that is #OwnVoices, so I was really excited for The State of Grace, as it sounded like a really awesome story, and Grace has Asperger's syndrome. Unfortunately, I don't think this story really was for me. As I read the last chapter I was excited to finally get some answers for at least one person and I was left with no answers and even more questions. Perfect way to get me hooked and ready for the next book.

The summer Joanou shot State of Grace on location in New York City, I was a thirteen-year-old boy living in the Bronx. For me — in addition to its many other pleasures — Grace is like a photo album of what the city looked and felt like at that very special time in my life (something I wrote about here). To echo Jules’ comment directly above, New York doesn’t look like that or fully feel like that anymore, and I’m grateful to Joanou for preserving that ephemeral moment on film. So many of the movies set in New York during that era presented a gloriously romantic vision of the city — The Secret of My Success (1987), When Harry Met Sally… (1989) — but Grace, along with Do the Right Thing (1989), wasn’t afraid to shoot New York in all of its “imperfect,” blue-collar beauty. So, if someone like yourself, nearly two decades my junior, were to ask me what New York was like at that time, I’d refer them to State of Grace.There's a circle of lovely people around Grace like a warm blanket of reassurance to accompany her through life's ups and downs and I felt reassured by this, she's a character I really cared about.

I can certainly appreciate the frustrations you experienced on the production. I worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood for over a decade — I was never produced, though I developed projects for actor/producer Ice Cube and Lights Out producer Lawrence Grey, among others — but ultimately grew battle-weary from all the capricious egos that so often stood in the way of anything getting done in that town. (All the “rules” changed after the 2008 WGA strike, and selling specs and setting up features, as I’m sure you’re aware, became infinitely more challenging.) I don’t mind creative collaboration and compromise — I welcome it— but not at the expense of eventually getting something produced. So, I’ve transitioned from screenwriter to author/blogger, and I am enjoying the creative freedom and fulfillment that’s afforded me. Her sister, mother, and friends readily forgive her, and no one talks with her about what she could do differently to prevent the same things from happening again. She feels terrible about each incident, but it felt like she was being let off unusually easily, or that they didn’t think she’d be able to do better, and I wished they’d been portrayed as having more respect for her ability to change. People] tell me what they think I feel because they’ve read it in books, or they say incredible things like ‘autistic people have no sense or humor or imagination or empathy’ when I’m standing right there beside them (and one day I’m going to point out that that is more than a little bit rude, not to mention Not Even True) or they—even worse—talk to me like I’m about five, and can’t understand.” (134-135) Por defecto, los comentarios se ordenan por fecha del comentario y según otros criterios para mostrar los más relevantes, incluidos a título enunciativo el idioma, los que incluyen texto y los que no son anónimos. Puede haber otros criterios para ordenarlos (por tipo de viajero, por puntuación, etc.).

Spar tid og penge!

PS. You’d be surprised how many people & families who were connected to the real Westies are STILL living in Hell’s Kitchen. I’m not sure if the natives did the smart thing and bought their buildings sometime in the 90’s but there a surprising amount of older people & offspring still living in the area (and drinking at local bars) who have very familiar surnames to someone who knows their local history. I need to be quiet, somewhere, and just let myself settle, like a snow globe. But it’s hard to make people understand that.” (76) I wasn’t a fan of Bullet’s meeting with the other soul bond, Wild. Bullet has been saving all of his firsts for Grace, and though he feels guilty for kissing Wild and flees, I felt it was unnecessary to add at all. If there has to be MM, i always prefer any attraction to be after everyone is established with the fmc. I also felt sad that for a lot of the book, Grace isn’t all in with Bullet and he feels jealous of her connection with Riot despite their connection every night when he dream walks (which she never remembers). lenguaje ofensivo, sexual, discriminatorio, amenazante, que incite al odio o de contenido violento;

How wrong I was — about all those assumptions. One of the great (continued) surprises of this post is how, much like State of Grace itself, folks have continued to discover it, and how they’ve taken the opportunity to express their own affection for Phil Joanou’s underrated masterpiece here in the comments. (God, how I would love to interview Joanou or uncredited screenwriter David Rabe about the film!)​ And still reeling from all that, I found myself displaced from the familiar comfort of the halls of public school, where I’d enjoyed tremendous freedom with minimal oversight or accountability, and thrust into the regimented, buttoned-down structure of Jesuit prep school. Overnight, nothing in my life was the same as it had so reliably been. Only a year earlier, I’d had a very clear vision of where everything was headed—an idiotic John Hughes–inspired fantasy of infinite free-range teenage adventures with me and my little gang on the streets of the Bronx, just as life had always been. Swear words, sexual references, hate speech, discriminatory remarks, threats, or references to violenceYou might know your neighbors name if you live here, or your wife may have friends in the community garden but there is very little left of any roots, ethnic tradition, or the “Cheers” factor at local businesses, when maybe 20 or so years ago a corner bar or store still felt like an extention of home. What happened to him over Christmas vacation of ’89/’90 is a complicated story that I myself didn’t fully understand until just a few years ago, and that I obviously didn’t recount here in any contextual detail for myriad reasons. Funny enough, I was chatting with him on the phone last week, and he recalled a time my father gave him a comforting piece of advice after he and I got in some pretty serious trouble: We’d played a birthday prank on his younger brother that wound up really hurting the kid’s feelings. It wasn’t done malignantly — it was simply a case of two twelve-year-olds talking themselves into an ill-conceived idea — but nonetheless the damage was done. And when I was relaying the content of that phone conversation to my wife over dinner that night, she said (in her wisdom) that we all did stupid and regrettable things at that age simply because we didn’t know any better, and that’s how we learned. We need to understand, she added, what was done is in no way a reflection of the person we are now, and that we ultimately have to forgive our then-selves for it. I mention that because it goes to exactly what you said about having empathy for who you were, in all of his in-progress imperfection. It may just be that general audiences have had enough of these never-ending IPs. I suspect — I hope— there’s a renewed hunger for stories with strong artistic points of view, relatable themes, and cathartic resolution. But I also think that kind of old-school storytelling needs to be consciously reintroduced to a generation raised exclusively on “storyless” fiction (meaning corporate mega-franchises), which is why it falls to the elder generations to share their appreciation for movies like State of Grace with their kids. Because the great thing about a “forgotten” movie is that it’s like an archeological treasure just waiting to be rediscovered.

I thought it was interesting, though, how you said because Grace has Autism, the book isn't intended for you? That seems sad! I feel like books are for everyone, no matter the topic. One of my favourite books is about prosopagnosia and I don't have that. *shrugs* I'd just not heard of books not being intended for anyone who wants them. God knows I did. When, in eighth grade, the ground beneath me dropped out overnight, and there I was a (floundering) fish out of water at parochial school with kids who grew up in that culture and were very comfortable in it, I determined I had a binary choice to make: to try to fit in… or to proudly and stubbornly rebel against the whole thing. I calculated (probably accurately) I had no shot at the former, so I opted for the latter. If I couldn’t fit in, then I would simply revel in being the unwanted outsider.Cooper: You’re the man! Thanks for being such a steadfast support of that great movie and this humble tribute to it. Please welcome your friend into our club! As it happens, a week or two after posting the treatise, I received an object lesson in its very proposition. The experience was an acutely emotional one for me, though not at all unpleasant or unwelcome, and a reminder of what storytelling at its best can do: A story can comment on its times while reflecting timeless truths. It can depict a very specific world that is nonetheless universally relatable. It has the power to preserve a moment or an episode in all its emotional complexity, serving as a time capsule that can continue to yield new insight with age. A good story changes the course of history, in some unquantifiable measure, influencing subsequent real-world events and artistic works in ways that, I think, go mostly unconsidered. Grace’s descriptions are given in ways that autistic readers will connect with, and with enough detail (as far as I can tell) for neurotypical readers to understand what it can be like to be autistic while having to deal with the demands of ordinary life—a careful and impressive balance. Wanneer je meerdere beoordelingen ziet, staat de meest recente beoordeling bovenaan, afhankelijk van een paar andere factoren (in welke taal de beoordeling is geschreven, of het alleen een score is of dat er ook opmerkingen in staan, etc.). Als je wilt, kun je ze sorteren en/of filteren (op tijd van het jaar, beoordelingsscore, etc.). State of Grace is, after all, a story about a way of life, a mode of existence, that was coming to an end, and the tragic inability of some — in this case, the Westies — to accept or adapt to those changes. It might be a movie the execs in Hollywood should make the time to watch; there’s a lesson in it for them.