Click

Sometimes my days just fly-by and I don’t even realize how many days of the week I have skipped; for instance last night I thought it was Wednesday but when I checked the calendar on my computer I discovered, to my great surprise that it was Thursday. I had no idea where the Wednesday had gone. This happens quite often — I skip one or two days without realizing and it is often on the Fridays that I realize that it is not Wednesday. Life has become so fast that I cannot keep track of individual days.

Yesterday we saw a really nice movie called “Click” featuring Adam Sandler and Christopher Walken. Adam Sandler is a busy architect in the movie and he has no time for his family. He is always preoccupied with completing his various projects and getting promoted to a partnership. He’s always absentminded and in a perpetual state of hurry. There is another thing that nags him constantly: his inability to figure out what remote controls what gadget. One night he gets so fed up that he goes to the market to purchase a universal remote (I have been planning to get one of those but right now they’re really expensive). In one of the stores he meets Christopher Walken — a strange looking scientist who gives him this universal remote control (for free and with no-return policy) that controls the universe. His joy and troubles begin from this point onwards.

He discovers, initially to his great happiness, that he can control every aspect of his life. He can mute people he doesn’t want to listen to, he can switch languages, he can change the color contrasts, he can jump to different parts of his life, and he can fast forward events that he finds irritable. He can also fast forward when he is too impatient to wait for things to turn up. For instance when he doesn’t want to make love to his wife he fast forwards the moment and gets done with the thing quickly. Similarly when he doesn’t want to take a bath he fast forwards himself to a time when he has already taken a bath. The problem is that the remote control has its own intelligence and stores his preferences in its memory, that is, his life fast forwards whenever he tries to make love to his wife or whenever he goes to take a bath, or does whatever he had fast forwarded in the past. Things look pretty good until he decides to use the remote to alter his destiny and afterwards everything goes topsy-turvy.

One day he discovers that his promotion is going to take a few more months. He wants to fast forward himself to that period of his life. Christopher Walken, who appears like a ghost every time Adam Sandler needs support for the remote control, advises him against taking such a drastic step hinting that he may not find what is looking for at that point. But of course he cannot resist and in a moment of passion fast forwards himself to his day of promotion. The promotion happens after a year. So he skips everything that happened during that year which means he also skips the moments that led him and his wife to seek the help of a marriage counselor. His dog too dies during that period. He is so upset with the turn of events that he wants to give the remote back but as is the policy he cannot return the remote. As much as he tries to get rid of the remote, the device keeps coming back to him.

While he is trying to cope with things that happened to him but he didn’t witness them his boss talks about another promotion. Now, since the remote control has programmed itself to fast forward whenever a promotion is on the anvil, the life fast forwards even when he doesn’t want it to. The remote fast forwards 10 years of his life. This way he keeps fast forwarding his life and before he can get the hang of things his life is over. During his last days, to his great dismay, he realizes how he neglected his parents, his wife, and even his children. In just a few fast forwards, he is quite old, his wife has left him and married another man, his children are fully grown, his father is dead, and he himself is going to die. In the hospital, almost on his deathbed, he sees his grown-up son, a very successful architect who is ready to skip even his honeymoon to attend to an urgent business call, and sees the history repeating itself. Totally terrified, he runs behind his son to tell him that when it comes to business and family, the family should always come first. He tells this to his son while taking his last breath.

The universal remote control is a great metaphor in this movie and I think at one point or another we are all using this psychological remote control to skip days and even months in order to pursue careers. In this pursuit we forget that we have families and other passions. I know the money is important, and in fact it is very important for the happiness and financial security of our loved ones but sometimes even when we have crossed the threshold we don’t realize when to stop and this is then we start losing the life trying to get it.

Moments spent with your family and friends are priceless and in fact they are the most important aspects of your life; but of course this philosophy cannot be applied universally. It depends on what matters to you — there have been great writers, painters, politicians, social workers and scientists who couldn’t have achieved what they have had they opted to spend more time with their families and less time doing what they wanted to do. The plot of life is quite complicated and there are no simple solutions or black and white deductions. One should just do the right thing.