David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

David McElroy

When I’ve done something great, nothing seems impossible to me

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Do you know what it feels like to be certain that nothing can stop you?

It’s a moment of winning. Time slows down. It’s the sudden feeling that all is right with your world. It’s the certainty that you could do anything in that instant. That nothing could stop you. That you are in such a state of perfect harmony with something in the universe that God is pleased with you.

I live for those moments. I crave those experiences just as much as a junkie needs a hit of his drug. In those rare moments of seeming perfection, I feel as though I am good enough — and that I can do anything.

I felt that way one Saturday morning 15 years ago. I was at a film festival and my short film was about to be shown to an audience for the very first time. It was a large crowd, maybe 500 or so, I suppose. I was nervous. The audience had seemed bored during the films before it. Maybe this was a tough crowd.

And then my film started.

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Briefly: Dumbed-down public discourse means reason is dead

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The decline of modern culture can be seen clearly by looking at what passes for public discourse. There was a time when people who wanted their ideas accepted made rational arguments. It was assumed that most people were bright enough and rational enough to evaluate those arguments — and a surprising number of them really were. Today, the arguments are made in the form of irrational and simplistic graphics called “memes.” Because these graphics can’t convey complex or nuanced information, they present dumbed-down presentations of positions which are stunningly juvenile and seem designed to offend rather than to convince. We have regressed from books and dense pamphlets to a level more like that of angry kindergartners making crayon-scrawled hate notes to send to other children. Reason no longer plays a role in public discourse, and this signals the coming fall of this society.

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I can’t tell truth about my father unless I dig for truth about me

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I was trying to tell a friend about my film idea when I stumbled upon the right title. I casually said something about attempting to tell “the truth about my father” when it struck both of us that I had just spoken the right title.

“The Truth About My Father”

That would be the name of the non-fiction book I would write and then it would be the name of a very fictionalized comedy version that I would make afterward. Why did such a strange tale need to be told as a comedy? I didn’t know then and I still don’t know, but I know it’s a dark comedy.

That was years ago. Ever since then, I’ve struggled to figure out how to make the story work as a film script. Redrawing my father as an exaggerated form of his eccentric self was easy, but the story centered around a son learning the hidden truth about his father. And I figured something out this week.

The story is boring — and it doesn’t work — unless I dig into my own flaws and trace where the worst part of me came from. To tell the truth about my father, I have to dig into — and expose — the worst parts of myself.

And that’s scary.

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