The Lessons of Laurel Canyon.

(originally posted Sunday, February 10, 2008)
[NOTE: If you have not seen the movie “Laurel Canyon,” this contains major spoilers]

I saw “Laurel Canyon” when it was first released in 2002. The Canyon is a famous drive in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles that has been home to many of the most famous names in the entertainment industry.
In the movie, Christian Bale brings his brilliant fiancee, Kate Beckinsale, to his mother’s home in Laurel Canyon. His rock-legend-turned producer mother, played by Frances McDormand, is supposed to be gone. But when they arrive she, and a motley rock band are still all about the place, as they try to put the finishing touches on a new album.
Beckinsale’s character, the daughter of an old-monied New England family, is a brilliant and accomplished scholar finishing her Ph.D. dissertation in some incredibly complex branch of genetics. She starts the film as a squeaky clean little-miss-perfect. She has always excelled at everything, always been every upper-crust parents’ dream of the perfect daughter. But as Bale, working as a resident in a psychiatric hospital, becomes more and more unavailable, Beckinsale succumbs more and more to the hedonic lifestyle of McDormand and the band.
At the climax of the movie, Bale finds Beckinsale necking with the band’s lead singer at a stoned-and-drunk party hosted by his mother. During their confrontation, Bale asks how she could have done this. “I didn’t know how,” Beckinsale’s character screams. “Know how to what?” Bale demands. “I didn’t know how to fuck up!” she cries.
I absolutely loved this line. I loved it so much that I embarrassed my wife by hissing “YES!”in the movie theatre.
That is such an important idea. We need to learn how to fuck up. Because if we don’t learn, then the first time we do so, it’s going to be a whopper.
Another way of putting this is that we need to learn how to make mistakes. We need to learn how to blow it, mess up, ruin a good thing, act stupidly, make a fool of ourselves, make bad judgements, let people down, let ourselves down. But I really wonder how many people get a chance to do this, and even more, how many people give their kids a chance to do this
I have written earlier about the growing problem, seen among counsellors at colleges and universities, of young people who cannot take the stress of living away from home. They have been protected from an early age by their parents, not only from physical harm, but from “doing the wrong thing,” from making mistakes. Without mom and dad around, they run the risk of screwing up every time they make a decision. And that is just too scary.
I occasionally see parents who are worried sick because their teen is starting to break free, and they don’t trust the kid’s judgement. Rightly so, in my opinion. Teens’ judgment is not yet completely developed, and needs to be monitored. “But then,” they ask, “how can I keep them from making mistakes, from getting into problems?”
“Don’t,” is my advice.
Now look, I am definitely not advocating allowing teens to run hog-wild and get into legal trouble or physical danger. But they NEED to fall down. They NEED to fuck up! Otherwise they will not know how to do it. And then they will be in real trouble.
The flip side of the students who can’t take being on their own are the students who, once free of mommy and daddy’s watchful eye, go totally berserk, with sex and booze and drugs and partying until they get sick, flunk out, or wind up in court.
And I see the parents who never figured out how to fuck up themselves. They see their kid do it, and instead of treating it as a teachable moment, take it as a total disaster, the ruination of their kid’s life, and proof of their utter failure as parents. I remember one couple, successful professionals, who were aghast at their teen’s behaviour, which was actually well-within the norms (no sex, no booze or drugs, no law-breaking). When I described it as fairly typical teenaged rebellion they looked at each other, then at me, and lamented, “Neither of US ever rebelled.”
And I believe them.
Most troubling of all, to me, are the young clients who come to me in various stages of depression. They have had a setback, or done something stupid, or made a serious error in judgement. They have fucked up. And now their life is ruined, over. They have no idea what to do next. And so they have to pay someone to sit and listen to them, and help them learn what they should have learned as a part of their normal development.
We are people, not paragons. As parents, our children’s lives are not our achievements, they belong to those unique human beings who are living them, for better or for worse. We must let our children get it wrong, and help them learn what to do afterward.
And when we get it wrong, we must try to accept it as an unpleasant but necessary part of life, allow ourselves to grow from the experience, and learn to forgive ourselves.
For, and this is my whole point in writing this, only by learning how to fuck up, do we learn how NOT to.