In the classic Billy Wilder film Sunset Boulevard, Gloria Swanson plays a washed-up silent film star. At the end of the film, after shooting her younger lover, she goes mad and surrounded by news cameras, imagines that she is back on a Hollywood set. She announces, “All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up.” In this one moment her life of vanity, glamour, and despair is captured. Are there single moments in your life, positive or negative, that capture who you are and what you are all about?
Professor Todd Schultz of Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon thinks so. For the last 10 years, he has written a number of fascinating articles and chapters about what he calls the “prototypical scene,” a powerful and compelling episode in an individual’s life that expresses the most critical themes or conflicts in his or her life. These prototypical scenes are a very special case of the more general self-defining memories that I study in my research (see my book Memories that Matter for more on the role that these memories play in our lives). Prof. Schultz draws on writers and artists for his examples and has illustrated his ideas by analyzing the memoirs, letters, and biographies of such luminaries as Kafka, Kerouac, Capote and Plath. For example, Kafka returned over and over to a scene in which he begged for water as a child with no response from his parents. Finally, his father took him from his room and carried him outside the house and set him down alone and shut the door, still without giving him water. Is it any wonder that one of Kafka’s greatest books is The Trial, in which a man wakes up to being arrested and is eventually carried away without ever receiving an explanation for what he has done wrong?
