The Mirror Part 1: We Can Try
We accept the love we think we deserve.
A good line is instantly recognizable. A great line has a way of lingering — it sits with you long after the film has ended — it becomes a part of you. It became part of Bill Anderson.
Charlie witnessed something disturbing — his sister being hit by her boyfriend. Then at a party, he sees the girl he likes, Sam, with a boyfriend who is obviously wrong for her. The next day, just before English class, he sees his sister and Derek kissing like nothing had happened. He had built a level of trust with his English teacher, Bill Anderson, so, puzzled, he asks him why nice people choose the wrong people to date. At a very young age, Charlie sees something that has perplexed me my entire life. He loves his sister and cannot comprehend her choices. Why would she choose to stay with someone who hits her? Then he sees the woman he loves, Sam, choosing someone who is wrong for her when someone amazing, like Charlie, would treat her the way she deserves to be treated. Why do nice people choose partners who are terrible for them — to the point of abuse — and never see the person standing right in front of them that will love them more than they could even comprehend?
Mr. Anderson, not preaching, but coming from a history of personal experience and pain, gives him the answer.
We accept the love we think we deserve.
Mr. Anderson has sat with this truth for a long time. Through personal experience and pain, this wisdom has given Bill something unexpected — legibility of himself. Being a true teacher — a mentor — he now gives Charlie the same framework of discovery. Charlie, not understanding that the statement is really a mirror, deflects it outward onto the women in his life. He asks, “Can we make them know they deserve more?” Bill answers simply, “We can try.”
In his own way, Charlie spends the rest of the film trying to show everyone around him this truth. As Charlie truly sees Sam, the line finds its way to her, who then turns the mirror back on Charlie — and he finally sees himself.
The film is The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Stephen Chbosky’s adaptation of his own novel, released in 2012. Everyone who has seen The Perks of Being a Wallflower knows it is a film about being seen. What I want to do here is show what being seen actually is.
In many ways this film saw me before I saw it, in the way precise art speaks to the reader before the reader is ready to recognize themselves. The first such scene was an invitation received, and Charlie’s first party. Recognizing Charlie, Patrick toasts him saying, “You see things. And you understand. You’re a wallflower.” Thus far, the film has been about Charlie’s determination to turn it around this year, and, in spite of his intentions, cemented his position as an outsider. This is the genesis of Face Against the Glass — the view from the outside looking in. A lifetime of looking through the glass gives plenty of time for the astute to observe people. I see things and understand.
The architecture I live inside — the one that keeps me at the glass looking in — is the continuous, involuntary cognitive process running beneath every social interaction — the mechanism that converts the raw data of human exchange into something navigable. I call it the translation program. The bidirectional attunement, emotional mirroring, nonverbal reading, tonal calibration, the thousand micro-adjustments that constitute natural connection are observed and catalogued in a library of human interaction that is built over a lifetime. In every encounter my counterpart must be observed, a pattern matched against the library, interpreted, and then a response must be generated, evaluated for social acceptability, timed correctly, and delivered. All of this happens in the window between stimulus and response that most people never notice because they don’t have to occupy it. The costly translation program creates a degree of social performance.
Being trauma-based, Charlie does not have the same architecture as me, but this party scene is about what happens when the social performance is removed. Getting high may have removed the social performance of Charlie’s architecture, or it may have been an in vino veritas moment — either way, what we are left with is a Charlie without the social performance filter, in a moment of pure truth. Until this moment Charlie had just been an awkward teenager at a party. He didn’t have anyone to talk to and inadvertently offended them when he asked why one of the popular kids was at the party. It speaks to human nature that when the filter was removed, everyone circled around Charlie and were drawn to him the way humans are drawn to anything exceedingly rare. He observes the people around him and describes what he sees with unguarded precision. It was the first time any of them truly saw Charlie, and he was added as a member of the Island of Misfit Toys as a result.
This scene also gives Charlie and Sam time alone, as she makes him a milkshake. Absent from the previous scene, the woman who will eventually return Charlie’s diagnosis as a mirror, is beginning to see who he is underneath the performance. Her connection with him allows her to see something the others missed. Charlie’s best friend killed himself and he was alone — friendless. The people at the party, and now Sam, have seen what it is when the architecture, or the social performance overhead stops. Not broken. Brilliant.
As if self-fulfilling prophecy, many of the things Charlie has been writing all along — to someone he chose because they listen and understand — are starting to happen. But the first person to read what Charlie wrote — and to see the writer in the writing — was his English teacher. Bill Anderson is the most quietly important character in the film.
His story has been written — the writer becoming legible through the writing and his personal experiences and pain. He has been called to teach, and by so, he is using what the writing produced to bring the possibility of legibility to students who have not yet done the work themselves. Bill sees Charlie on the very first day — sees a mirror — and recognizes him from his own story. They used to tease Bill. They called him Spaz.
Bill has spent his own time standing at the window looking in.
Seeing Charlie standing at the same window, he puts him on the same path of clarity that produced the wisdom of we accept the love we think we deserve. Charlie — after asking if we can make them see they deserve more — immediately sets forth to make those around him see that elusive truth. What Charlie doesn’t see, is that when Bill says, “We can try,” he is talking about Charlie. Everything Mr. Anderson does is so that Charlie might realize he deserves more than the reality he has accepted.
Long before the mirror of his own question is reflected back on Charlie, Mr. Anderson has been handing Charlie mirror after mirror, in the form of hand picked novels, and then asking Charlie to write about what he sees in the mirror with each essay he turns in. The film barely lingers on the books. Most of them appear only as spines accumulating on Charlie’s shelf. But line them up, and a pattern surfaces that the film never names aloud. Each novel fits one of three themes. Bill is assigning Charlie a curriculum on himself. The first is seeing clearly when the world would rather you didn’t. To Kill a Mockingbird is the entry point. Charlie recognizes himself in Scout before he knows he’s being shown himself. Next is the cost of the architecture — the cost of being a wallflower. Bill points at the danger in Hamlet. A mind that sees too clearly, surrounded by performances it cannot enter, paralyzed by what it knows. And in books like The Fountainhead — the answer. The self, intact against every pressure to compromise it.
So that we may see Bill’s heart, he steps outside of this curriculum and gives Charlie one last book. For Christmas, Bill gave Charlie his own copy of The Catcher in the Rye — his favorite novel from when he was Charlie’s age. His personal copy. In doing so we see something much deeper — much more profound — than a teacher trying to help a student. Bill tells Charlie you are standing in my footprints at the window. This is the book that helped me when I had no one.
I was you, Charlie.