Spiritual Musing: "Still Ahead of Her Time"

Still Ahead of Her Time

“So far I like this lifetime the best.”

—Shirley MacLaine

In Stupidity Is Not a Gift of God I wrote a spiritual musing called “A Cheap Shot at Shirley MacLaine” because I wanted to come to the defense of her belief in reincarnation which was ridiculed by the brilliant writer Ken Wilber whose belief in the Buddhist perspective on reincarnation negated the “kooky” actress/writer’s perspective, which I happened to share (we believe in the autonomous, individual self; Buddhism doesn’t); and upon reading a review of MacLaine’s recent movie The Last Word in last weekend’s National Post  (Saturday, March 11, 2017), which Penny and I went to see this weekend, I was strongly nudged to write another spiritual musing on Shirley MacLaine because of my admiration for her unflagging courage, a feisty independent thinker not afraid to speak her mind just like the role of Harriet Lauler that she plays in the comedy-drama The Last Word.

Harriet/MacLaine (the role was written for Shirley) is a feisty eight-one-year-old retired advertising executive whose failed attempt at suicide led her to re-examine her life, which by happy coincidence was sparked by the obit pages of the newspaper she was using to sop up the wine she had spilled onto her dining room table in her second attempt at suicide as she was about to wash down another handful of Clonazepam before she accidentally tipped over her glass of wine.

In her first attempt at suicide, the ER doctor questions whether taking a handful of Clonazepam with a bottle of red wine was really an accident, and Harriet, true to her brazen, take-no-prisoners personality, snapped back, “Yes, I was sleepy and I was thirsty.” But as she read the obituaries in the newspaper she was using to sop up the wine she had spilled, she got a shocking glimpse into how she might be remembered when she died, which snapped her back into control mode; and taking charge of her life like she was accustomed to, she marched over to The Bristol Gazette office building and demands the publisher to have their obit staff writer work out her obituary by interviewing the 100 people on the list she had drawn up because she wanted to see what they would have to say about her when she died.

Anne, the young obit writer (played by Amanda Seyfried), accepted her assignment with strong reservations (after meeting Harriet, Anne said, “She puts the bitch in obituary”); and she interviewed everyone on the list that she could get hold of and wrote up a draft of Harriet’s obituary, but it proved unsatisfactory.

Harriet didn’t want to be remembered that way, so she embarked upon what proved to be the last adventure of her life—refashioning her image so she would be remembered for who she really was and not the person everyone took her to be, assigning Anne to rewrite her obituary in the process, and the result is an entertaining comedy-drama that called for one or two Kleenex tissues…

I’ve read most of Shirley MacLaine’s books (my favorite is still Sage-ing While Age-ing) and I’ve seen many of her movies, and true to my conviction that a writer does not choose the books they write nor does an actor choose the roles they play, rather they choose the writer and the actor, I can’t help but marvel at Shirley MacLaine’s inordinately successful career as an actor/writer because I believe she chose her current lifetime to expand the paradigm of social consciousness with her “kooky” view of the world that she realized while looking for herself. 

“The truth is that no matter where I went, I was always looking for myself. The journey into myself as I evaluated my beliefs and values, whether living at home or in far-flung corners of the world, has been the most important journey of all. That journey is what led to my search to understand the true meaning of spirituality. I was learning that I was truly creating everything. I was learning to understand the character I had created as myself in the theater of life,” said Shirley MacLaine in her tell-it-as-I-have-lived-it memoir I’m Over All That And Other Confessions.

Driven by the imperative of her essential nature to realize what C. G. Jung called “wholeness and singleness of self,” at the age of eighty-two she may not have realized her goal to her satisfaction, but Shirley MacLaine is still true to her calling to find herself; which was why I had to see The Last Word, because the title of her latest movie (she was one of the executive producers) spoke to what I believe to be her most sagacious view on life and which Harriet/MacLaine passed on to the young staff writer who wrote up Harriet’s new obituary which we get to hear at her funeral because Harriet Lauler does die of congenital heart failure.

The essence of Harriet/MacLaine’s wisdom that she passed on to the young obit writer who kept a notebook of personal essays in her dream of becoming a real writer one day and who by the end of the movie is completely won over by the feisty octogenarian who challenged Anne’s life premise, was for her to be true to herself, something that sounds like an outworn New Age cliché but which holds as much truth today as it did when Polonius uttered those famous words of advice to his son Laertes in Shakespeare’s play Hamlet: “This above all to thine own self be true, /And it must follow, as the night the day, /Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

That sums up Shirley MacLaine, a woman who risked her professional reputation for her New Age belief in reincarnation and UFOs which labelled her “kooky” but which only confirmed that she was and still is decades ahead of her time; and in her role as the uncompromising Harriet Lauler, I think Shirley MacLaine gets the last word, and I honestly think I can hear her laughing.

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