2005-03-25 || 12:31 p.m.

|| lyman ward needs a hug. ||

there is a scene in brother's keeper where brother lyman is standing in an unbuttoned plaid shirt and dirt-caked jeans, tobacco staining his wiley beard and moustache, talking about how he's nervous all the time, how he was born to be nervous. the filmmaker keeps prodding him about it and he starts to shake and wander into the street, and you can see how dirty his jeans are and how frail his body is. the uncontrollable shaking and aging that has set in. the camera follows him and lyman walks to an old barn with a large plank of wood where a door would be and pushes it aside, desperate to get away from the camera, and slips through a crack like a scared cat. he can barely squeeze through and the tail of his shirt gets caught in the crack, and there are several seconds where you can see him trying very hard to free himself and hide out in the dark.
it was one of the most heartbreaking things i've seen on film, real-life anxiety, and i thought of how many movies have tried to replicate that level of social awkwardness, the visual manifestation of fight or flight. there is something about lost old men and the way their lives are displayed in how they button their shirts and let their beards grow all craggy, shaving only on special occasions and missing patches of whiskers about their jawlines and adam's apples.

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