The River of Life

Robert Altman’s philosophy on navigating life

Movie Life Lesson here from one of the greatest filmmakers ever:

In his oral autobiography, Robert Altman the great film director said he saw life as a river. Robert Altman's idea was that your life is shaped by the point at which you enter the river. That happens when you’re born. You can't control that. If you’d been born ten years earlier or ten years later, you’d be entering the river at a different point and your life might be totally different.  

I like this metaphor.  

Water plays a big role in many of the major stories that have shaped the world and how we all see our place in it. For starters, almost every creation myth talks of the flood story. The Babylonian epic Gilgamesh relates tales of a flood that cover the world. The first words of the Old Testament of the Bible involving water moving over the face of the earth. From the Garden of Eden flowed four rivers. When you cross over, the Boatman ferries you across the River Styx to get to the Underworld. You’re baptized in water.

Historically speaking, the Nile and the Tigris and Euphrates rivers were called the cradle of life because they allowed the earliest civilizations to grow and prosper along its banks. The earliest efforts of colonization around the globe often focused on the settlement of areas with deep harbors that could use the rivers which flowed from the source as trade routes. Caesar crossed the Rubicon as he led his forces to invade Rome in a Civil War in 49BC; today the expression “Crossing The Rubicon” means to make and final and fateful decision; to commit irrevocably to a course of action.

Naturally speaking, the earth is covered in two-thirds water. Seventy percent of our body is water. If you believe in any kind of intelligent design, that strikes me as too obvious as to be merely coincidental.

In terms of story, some of my favorite films have featured water as a symbol, and signal, of transformation within a character. 

In “THE GRADUATE” director Mike Nichols and cinematographer Robert Surtees used water to symbolize a key moment that was about to happen in Benjamin’s (Dustin Hoffman) life. Something transformative, as Benjamin moves into the adult world, as he sheds his innocence in the ways of the real world.

 In the movie, “AMERICAN GANGSTER” Denzel Washington travels up a river in Vietnam to get the heroin he sells from the source, and in the process remakes himself from a low-level gangster to a king of the underworld.

“APOCALYPSE NOW,” Coppola’s Vietnam-era interpretation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is about a soldier (Martin Sheen) sailing up the river to find the renegade, Colonel Kurtz. The river is the journey of transformation from a true believer to a disillusioned man, uncertain of his place in the world, or its morality.

When Tom Hanks finds himself stranded on a desert island in the movie “CAST AWAY” is literally imprisoned by the ocean that surrounds him. And one of the first things he needs to figure out is how to get fresh water so he can live. Rain helps with that.

In the movie “THE EDGE”, Anthony Hopkins explains how one can use ice (water) to make fire; it’s elemental.

This is why water in stories tends to be symbolic of transformation. That is one of the underlying ideas of the flood myths; that the world has been irrevocably changed. This motif is repeated constantly in stories.

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book "Outliers,” discusses a similar idea about the difference between fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, who embody many of the same attributes of success, yet the progeny of one generation may end up many times more successful than their parents or grandparents. Ultimately Gladwell concludes that at least part of the reason for that disparity between the success (in business or a career) of one generation and the next has to do at least in part in the era in which they were born.

Or as Robert Altman would put it, they entered the river at different times and that made the difference.

 It's easy to think yourself what's the point? If everything is determined by when I'm born/when I enter into the river, why bother trying to figure out where I'm going at all?

Because the point is not when or how we enter the river of life; that’s left up to fate or chance, depending on your mode of thinking. 

In Robert Altman's metaphor, you have no control over when you enter the river. Any more than you can do anything to stop it. Or out swim the river; the river is flowing much faster than you. Like life, the river is always flowing. It only stops when you die. Even then, the river will continue flowing after each one of us is gone. What’s important to keep in mind then is that…

OUR LIVES ARE MOST DETERMINED NOT BY WHEN WE ENTER THE RIVER, BUT BY HOW WE CHOOSE TO NAVIGATE IT.

As Altman says, you can choose to swim upstream or you can go downstream but you might decide to go rushing down the middle where the current flows strongest; you can cover the most distance that way, but maybe the current pulls you under or sweeps you over the falls.

You might choose to make your way slowly along the banks of the river, going slow, near straying too far from your side of the river. Chances are you won’t get swept away, but you may not go very far.  

It's all up to you. 

The important thing in determining how you navigate the river — your journey — is to know your destination. Where are you trying to get to, and how do you intend to get there? Where do you intend to camp for the night? What about detours down tributaries off the main river? What about those unexpected times when the current picks up and sweeps you along, and you find yourself in rough waters, navigating churning rapids, trying to avoid going over the falls. At other times in our lives, the river is placid and calm, and everything moves more slowly.

Unless you intend to leave it all up to currents of life, then navigating the river of life involves knowing where you want to go. You can’t steer your way if you can't say where it is you are trying to get to.

To use another water metaphor, a Captain of a ship shouldn’t expect to reach his destination, if he doesn’t chart a course.

This is why what I take away from Robert Altman’s metaphor is that we should not be comparing ourselves to others — because there are too many variables between when each of us enters the river of life to make for a fair comparison to anyone else. By the time the next person enters the river the currents may be flowing in a different direction, or at different speeds. Therefore, the comparison is only to yourself, where you are now compared to where you were at an early point in your journey. Then you can determine how successful you’ve been at navigating the river of your life.

https://www.amazon.com/Robert-Altman-Mitchell-Zuckoff-audiobook/dp/B002TNABXC/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=robert+altman&qid=1619690921&s=books&sr=1-4