Don’t You Understand? When You Give Up Your Dream You Die
There have been many memorable lines in films and television over the years. Clark Gable’s “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn” to Vivien Leigh in Gone With the Wind, Strother Martin’s “What we have here is a failure to communicate” in Cool Hand Luke and Jack Nicholson’s “You can’t handle the truth” in A Few Good Men are memorable. As is “Captain my captain” spoken by each student as they climbed on their desks at the end of Dead Poet’s Society. Or on the humorous side, Cristopher Lloyd’s (as Reverend Jim) absurdity in Taxi, “Pardon me, I didn’t know I was here.”
The above are just examples of some of the more memorable and/or classic lines. But, in my view, the philosophically most powerful line ever spoken on screen, large or small, was in the film Flashdance.
The film is about a young woman, Alex (Jennifer Beals), who works as a welder for a construction company in Pittsburgh during the day. At night, she works as a dancer at a local bar. Her dream, however, is to become a professional dancer although she has no training nor the background typical of the type of dance she wishes to pursue. She wants desperately to attend the Pittsburgh Conservatory of Dance and Repertory but is scared to apply as she feels she may be refused even a try out due to her lower-class background and lack of dance experience (other than the bar). Yet, she burns with the fire of this dream.
Nick Hurley (Michael Nouri), the owner of the construction company where Alex works, sees her dance one night at the bar and becomes infatuated. He tries repeatedly to get her to go out with him but Alex refuses initially. Finally, she gives in and they begin an intense relationship.
Nick learns of Alex’s dream of professional dancing and encourages her to apply to the conservatory and she finally works up the courage to do so. When she is accepted for an audition, she is at once ecstatic and scared out of her wits. Out for a celebration of her audition acceptance, Nick makes a casual remark that alludes to when he learned of her acceptance. It dawns on Alex that Nick knew about this before she told him and that he had used his clout to pull strings to get her accepted for an audition.
To put it mildly, Alex goes ballistic over Nick’s interference in this process. She refuses to see him, won’t go to work and lays around her apartment sulking. What Nick realizes is that Alex is using his assistance as a way to creatively avoid going for the audition as she is scared that she will fail miserably. He confronts her and hits her between the eyes with the truth: She is scared shitless. It is at the end of this exchange that he says the two sentences that comprise the greatest and most powerful line in cinematic history, “Don’t you understand? When you give up your dream you die.”
These two lines provided the wakeup call that Alex needed. And, when she goes to the bar to gather up her clothes, she observes first-hand the lifelessness of what giving up a dream looks like as she listens to the story of one of the other bar dancers. She dumps her creative avoidance ploys, goes to and succeeds at the audition which sets her on the road toward her dream.
While few pursue their own dreams and are thus fully alive, the failure to do so is antithetical to human existence. We are not made to compromise nor to extinguish the unique fire that burns within. It is not genuinely in human nature to run at the first sign of stress or pressure. Circumstances were never meant to send individuals into a reality distorting view of their own agency — victimhood is not a virtue. We are not meant to blindly follow some version of life scripted by status seeking parents or a myopic educational system. Nor are we meant to sacrifice individuality for inclusion in an “identity group.” And most importantly, we are not fragile. But, whether early in life or by degrees over time, many cast off their dreams for safety, predictability, status ad nauseum. They betray themselves, their full potential and the human spirit.
The fundamental philosophy and thus the fundamental understanding of what it means to be human that underpins the rightness of the pursuit of a dream is rarely articulated and sparingly understood. The Friedrich Nietzsche quote below, from Beyond Good and Evil, offers a glimpse:
“It is not the works, but the belief which is here decisive and determines the order of rank — to employ here an old religious formula with a new and deeper meaning — it is some fundamental certainty which a noble soul has about itself, something which is not to be sought, is not to be found and perhaps, also, is not to be lost. The noble soul has reverence for itself.”
What Nietzsche offers is a view of what it means to be human and that the belief in the potential of the individual — in a general sense — is foundational or first in the “order of rank.” Said differently, it is a view of life grasped by few but available to most: We are antifragile — we grow stronger when pushed, stronger when stressed and stronger when focused on a dream that brings meaning. Life is about the full development of one’s potential and this is reflected in the concept of the innate (not to be sought or found) “noble soul.”
In Flashdance, in spite of circumstances, Alex had the fire though she came close to extinguishing it. She epitomizes, in a way unique to her as an individual, the aliveness from a dream rather than the death from its denial.
With the extreme attention being paid to “work-life” balance today and other aliveness killing concepts, a common statement is something to the effect of “When you are old and thinking back over your life, you are not going to be thinking “I wish I had spent more time at the office.” Instead, the popular refrain is that if there are regrets, it will be because not enough time was spent with family. While this may be the view of the herd, for far too many this will not be the deeper truth. The paramount and soul shattering regret will be that somewhere along the line decisions were, imperceptively or overtly, made to stay “safe” and a dream was allowed to die.
