Wilford Brimley vs. Humphrey Bogart

They’re at war within me waging a battle for my soul (or maybe who my soul would like to have lunch with). Both of them are intense. Both of them are intensely moral. Both of them have patently goofy names, but they are so intense you don’t even notice how silly the names are.

It’s when you ask these two to step out of the car and walk a straight line that their differences become evident. For Wilford Brimley it’s no problem. He knows what’s what and doesn’t hesitate to share it with others. He’s certain about everything; Bogart is certain about nothing. Bogart is sloppy, nihilistic, sarcastic, funny, self-indulgent, at times self-pitying. He will do right, but only after showing every indication of doing wrong.

My inner Brimley has had the upper hand for years. To maintain a comfortable living and my inner equilibrium I have given Brimley carte blanche to direct the way my mind works. His sense of order directs the way I organize my workday. His moral earnestness reproves my sense of fun in a way that keeps me second-guessing my every outburst of wackiness.

He even appears in my dreams. I am in a van riding to an assignment, a meeting I am covering somewhere on an upper floor of an office building. Brimley is in the van, driving me to the meeting. We go through towering mountains past deep canyon-like pits scoured out of the landscape. (At one point, as we drive through one of the pits, Brimley spots a van like our own teetering on the edge of a cliff above us. He stops our van, climbs out, and, Titan-like, reaches up, lifts the van as if it were a toy, and puts it down on the top of the cliff with all four wheels safely on solid ground.)

When I get to the office building I can’t remember where my meeting is. I climb up stairs from floor to floor until I come to a landing filled with people waiting in line outside a meeting room door, and I join the line, knowing I’m in the right spot—everyone in the line, women and men, is a Wilford Brimley.

Why is this a nightmare? What’s my problem with Brimley? How has he ever steered me wrong? What’s wrong with unflinching moral certainty?

I think the problem is that moral certainty strikes me as bogus, inauthentic, and unearned without the flinches of doubt. When Bogart does the right thing and resumes resistance to the forces of evil at the end of Casablanca, I’ve watched him struggle to seize that moral ground, and I feel like he’s earned it.

When I watch Brimley lay his moral pronouncements on some struggling whippersnapper, it’s like I’m supposed to believe he knows what he’s talking about just because he’s got a deep voice and an authentic Dr. Phil drawl. He acts like he’s got a license to tell other people what to do just on the basis of his blank stare, 19th-century moustache, and folksy accent. I feel like I’ve spent my life following this guy’s advice; now I want to review his resume before I make one more moral choice based on his sense of certainty and order.

In the June issue of the Atlantic there was a fascinating article by Joshua Wolf Shenk about the Grant Study, a lifelong documentation of the lives of a cohort of Harvard graduates from the 1940s to the present day, including examples of the lives of “happy” and “unhappy” lives, with a notion of determining what really constitutes happiness, or a life well lived.

The story included anonymous profiles of some the study’s participants, the most interesting of which was the account of what Shenk calls “the study’s antihero, its jester, its subversive philosopher.” This guy skipped World War II as a conscientious objector and, in filling out a questionnaire for the study right after the war, wrote, “I’ve answered a great many questions. Now I’d like to ask you people a couple of questions. By what standards of reason are you calling people ‘adjusted’ these days? ‘Happy’? ‘Contented’? ‘Hopeful’? If people have adjusted to a society that seems hell-bent on destroying itself in the next couple of decades, just what does that prove about people?”

This guy worked in public relations, married young, had three kids, started drinking, divorced, remarried, came out of the closet. Eventually he became involved in the movement for gay rights. In an interview for the study in the 1970s, he revealed that he loved The Sorrow and the Pity, Marcel Ophuls’ famous documentary of the German occupation of France. He said the sort of people the Grant Study described as well-adjusted, happy, and successful ended up collaborating with the Nazis, “whereas the kooks and the homosexuals were all in the resistance.”

The study’s leader, Dr. George Vaillant, doesn’t quite know what to make of this guy, describing him as paradoxically depressed, yet full of joy and vitality. “He could have been a resistance leader,” Vaillant reported. “He really did seem free about himself.”

I’m not prepared to draw judgments about this character, any more than I can reach conclusions about the real Wilford Brimley or Humphrey Bogart, separate from their personas in popular culture. People who lead messy lives often hurt the people around them. People can do great good publicly and behave miserably in their private lives, and vice versa.

Adoph Hitler doesn’t look to me like he was having fun; Ronald Reagan seemed to never have a bad day; George W. Bush appeared never to have had a doubt; Lincoln was wracked by depression. I don’t know how it all sorts out. I have come to believe, though, that whatever doubts, fears, sadness, and second-guessing I’ve subjected myself to in life need not end up as pointless suffering. I believe that real good, even a kind of happiness, can be drawn from getting through the torments of life, and resolving to keep trying.