About About Schmidt

Last night I spent a small but significant portion of my life watching a late night movie on TV, rather than going to bed at a time when normal people are sleeping deeply. The movie was called About Schmidt, a movie that was pretty big at the time it came out, starring Jack Nicholson as a recently retired insurance guy, whose future seems uncertain and whose life up until that time seems to have little meaning. Good movie.

He does some soul-searching, trying to make some meaning out of his life, which he feels has had little impact on anyone at all. Throughout the movie he writes to his new foster child Ndugu, a little Tanzanian boy that he begins to sponsor through a worldwide children's charity after seeing a commercial. (Incidently, during the actual commercials, they ran a very long Christian Children's Fund ad several times). It is through these letters to Ndugo that Schmidt really lets out his inner thoughts, since he rarely can do so with the people around him, who generally don't understand him. In the end, he finds a glimmer of meaning in his life which makes all the difference.

My self-conscious, however, has apparently deemed the movie imcomplete, and so it has continued the movie in my dreams as I slept. Schmidt goes on to remarry, this time to a woman with a love for life, who Schmidt relates very well to. Schmidt also takes up the electric guitar in my dream. His is the only apartment on the top floor of the building where they live, so this is where he and his new rock band play every day. They're not bad. But the man who lives downstairs, a stuffy young thirty-something guy who represents the Schmidt of yesteryear, can't handle the racket of Schmidt's rocking out. He says whoever is playing that sound is an "abomination." So Schmidt turns himself completely into an abominable sasquatch (not snowman - I don't know why). But he is abominable, and enters the man's apartment in order to scare the piss out of him. He doesn't roar or anything, he just talks to the man, explaining that he is abominable, and that the man ought to be terrified of him. The man was terrified, in a rather subtle sort of way. Good job, Schmidt.

And good job subconscious. Way to make a good story even better. My brain is awesome.