'Paddleton,' Philosophy, and Pizza

I wouldn’t read about Paddleton before watching it. It’s a film by Mark Duplass and Alex Lehmann being distributed by Netflix. Duplass stars with Ray Romano, and it’s less like a tricky plot that proves amusing than something to experience. The situations and pacing are so close to life, and the acting so natural, that the grieving you will do at the end might not (as in my case) feel much different than the grieving you do for the people in your life.

So I’ll assume any readers already know what Paddleton is. And that Ray Romano’s character (Andy) and Duplass’s character (Michael) are best friends who live together, right on top of each other in fact, in a modest apartment complex. They share meals and detailed accounts of their time apart. This kind of "living together" is what Aristotle used to think was necessary for a true friendship, one where we can see life play out by caring for a friend, paying attention to every consequence and experience they have. It’s like having twice the life, Aristotle explained. It is that much more material with which to watch, learn, and care. (This film kind of works like that, too.)

Romano’s Andy has gifted Michael a sweatshirt custom-printed with a hangman puzzle. Michael has been trying to solve it for over a year. Andy enjoys watching him struggle with it. At the end of the film, Andy confesses that there is no solution to the hangman. Why would he set up a friend like this? Andy explains. Michael always looks just a bit sad when they complete a puzzle. Andy noticed this even if Michael doesn't. To be so known (surely Andy even knew what kind of sweatshirt style Michael would wear), and by someone wanting nothing but the best for you, is what another school of ethical thought, the Epicureans, also emphasized as making up happiness.

And maybe plenty of us acknowledge that friends are great (reviewers keep pointing out how nice it would be to have a friendship like this), but considering the rest of Epicurean advice might help us to recognize what it might take to make such relationships a priority. The film Paddleton is so artful that I would be reluctant to think anything in it was not carefully placed there. It makes me wonder if the filmmakers realized they were reflecting Epicureanism.

There are a few more features of the lives of Andy and Michael that, according to the Epicureans, are necessary to the good life. These are a bit more controversial than “have close friends."

For one, each character lives modestly (you know, relative to U.S. standards) and without big career ambitions. Some reviewers, big fans of the film, have begun by saying the film is about "two losers." I guess they are saying this because of their jobs? Or perhaps because neither is romantically engaged? Or not admired by others? But on an Epicurean view, the two are have been pretty wise and figured out how to be happy. The big mistake we have always made is to think that we can find happiness in being ambitious and competitive with others. This is just sad distraction from who we really are and what might actually make us content, the Epicureans explain. And happy-making activities are out there, if we would only notice them and consider them worthy of our time.

In an interview, Duplass explained that he wanted to explore characters that were content with much less than he would be. Let me quote him, because I thought this was impressively frank. His life has turned out better than he could have imagined, he begins.

"And, still, I wake up in the morning, and I go on Amazon and try to shop for [stuff] to fill in my life and make me happy. And these two guys were so inspiring to me in that they have nothing, their apartments are so not a wish-fulfillment life, and they have puzzles and a made-up game and bad pizza and kung-fu movies and each other. And that is a very full, beautiful life for them. So part of it, for me, was the wish fulfillment of playing that, someone who at least on paper has infinitely less than I do, and is probably a lot more fulfilled and happy than I am."

That terminally ill Michael only wants to continue living as he has, doing puzzles, playing Paddleton, and making pizza, is a kind of proof of how successfully he has been living. Who needs a bucket list if things are already going well? The idea that we would rush to do things differently if we had little time left is a bad sign in terms of what we have been doing. Would a loser want to change nothing? Or is that a winner? The Epicureans explain that we misunderstand the game. To them, Michael is winning.

What ambitious people do not recognize is that nothing in that realm is ever enough, and that there comes a point when you realize this, and then you look back and have to rethink what you were doing in the first place. There is so much testimony of this in our popular culture: Wealthy celebrities are never made happy by their success or beautiful cars. But we have very strong incentives to deny that the paths which others have taken will turn out differently for us. And we get presented with few other options, like an Epicurean one. How many parents actually focus on how harmful ambition can be for their children? Not many.

What Andy and Michael do so well is finding activities they can enjoy, ones Epicureans would consider stable, so reliably fun and easy to access that they cause no anxiety. It’s odd that the Epicureans were slandered with the idea that they were gourmands, because the warning was actually to not get your expectations too high when it comes to even food. Find something simple to eat regularly, so that your day is not full of ups and downs depending on the menu and the complicated assessments we impose on it. Gourmands are constantly being teased and teasing themselves, keeping themselves from feeling satisfaction. But fans of home-cooked pizza do not have much to do to eat the thing they want to be eating. (I am really starting to think the filmmakers took some ancient philosophy in college.)

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A second point of the Epicureans that is surely counter-intuitive today: We are not really the romantic creatures we think we are. Andy and Michael have no luck romantically, and plenty of people compete and compare lives in this way. But the Epicureans (take a look at Lucretius on this) think we buy a lot of propaganda when it comes to romance. We imagine ourselves in certain roles and then ignore the actual hardships and distractions “romance” brings. Attracting who we are wildly attracted to is not the best basis for choosing a regular companion, they suggest. It’s a lot of trouble for little actual pleasure, they point out. Anyway, two guys focused on being friends (rather than parents or husbands) have lost nothing from the Epicurean perspective.

Finally, there is death. The Epicureans might be most notorious for their view here. Our anxiety and fears about death are what motivate us to continually busy ourselves with activities that are not in fact pleasing or capable of making us feel content. We cannot and will not face death without panic, and this might explain why we prefer to die in hospitals, struggling to fix what’s wrong up until the last second. Michael, of course, chooses a course that is much harder.

The character of Michael is not a common one; instead, he may be a bit idealized. Heroic and Christ-like is how my husband put it. I’ve seen reviewers call him “Zen-like” toward his death. I think we lack precise, shared vocabulary to describe his attitudes, because they are so unusual and uncommon. But it seems to me that Michael best represents the Epicurean approach to life. He is not a failure, nor is his friend, for not having poetic, wise, or direct things to say about what it means to die. Dying, the Epicureans explain, is not like that. It is not what gives our lives meaning, it’s just like falling asleep or returning to the condition we were in before we were born — it’s simply how we end and disappear.

There is no perfect half-time motivational speech that fixes death, and the hangman games never get finished in some way that solves the puzzle of our being mortal. The Epicureans ask that we face this. And pretty much just like Michael and Andy do.