I threw away a wallet this year. Not on purpose, exactly. I had gotten a new one for my birthday, real leather this time, and before I let the old one go, I did what nobody does with a wallet. I opened it up and went through it. There was a seal inside I had never noticed before, one that said genuine leather. Years of carrying it and I never saw that. I don't even remember where I got it. Maybe an ex. Probably an ex. I'm not sure.
I stood there holding it, zoning out the way I do, running through every place that wallet had been with me, and I realized I was doing the thing. The Walter Mitty thing. Except I wasn't imagining anything. I was just looking at an object and letting it carry me somewhere. The coffees it paid for, the tickets it held, the dead weight of my twenties.
I don't know how many times I've watched The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. I've tried to trace it back, wondered if I could find the exact date in an old podcast episode, and I can't. What I do know is that I never remember the story. Every time I sit down to watch it, the plot is new to me again. I used to think that was a flaw in my memory. Now I think it's a blessing. It means I get to feel it fresh every single time, like the first time.
It's one of the few five star films on my Letterboxd. Not because it's flawless. Because of what it's done to me, repeatedly, on purpose or by accident, whenever I needed it.
I watched it once and it gave me the nerve to change the direction of my career. That was a turning point, a real one, not the kind you dress up in hindsight to sound more meaningful than it was.
I watched it again after one of the hardest breakups I've had, looking for something to hold onto, and I found it.
I watched it during Covid, when the uncertainty of everything was sitting on my chest, and it reminded me that life has always been uncertain. That wasn't new. I had just never had to sit still with it before.
I watched it after I lost a job I loved, people and all, when I was too sad to do much else.
And many times beyond those, for reasons I can't always name, and it always makes sense somehow. I don't know how a film manages that.
Part of it is Walter himself. The daydreaming. The zoning out mid conversation. That's not a character trait I admire from a distance, that's just how my brain works on an average Tuesday.
There's a scene where Walter lands in Greenland and the rental agent asks him to choose between a red car and a blue one. He picks red. I think about that scene more than I probably should. It's the same choice Morpheus gives Neo, blue to stay comfortable and asleep, red to wake up and see how far the thing goes. Walter picking red is the moment he stops daydreaming about a life and starts living inside one. Just him, in a car, in Greenland, going.
I've rewatched that scene enough times to lose count. I could not tell you the last time I picked the red car myself. Most days I know exactly which one I'd choose, and it isn't the one Walter chooses.
There's a line later, Cheryl talking about the mystery writing class she's taking.
"You connect the clues and then scatter them so they seem unrelated. There's like a whole science to it."
I think about that one more than I probably should, mostly because I don't think I've ever scattered my own clues on purpose. Mine just end up scattered.
And there's the moment with the Bowie song, where Hendricks gives some cynical reading of it, and Cheryl shuts that down flatly. She tells him he doesn't know what he's talking about. She says the song is about courage, about going into the unknown. I used to think I watched this film for the daydreaming. I think I actually watch it for that correction. For the reminder that the cynical read is usually just the easy one, and somebody has to say so out loud.
The film ends with that old Life Magazine line.
"To see the world, things dangerous to come to, to see behind walls, draw closer, to find each other, and to feel. That is the purpose of life."
I found the film again today. I wasn't looking for it. I was cleaning out my downloads folder and there it was, sitting in some corner I'd forgotten, and I don't even remember downloading it in the first place. Maybe I meant to keep a copy somewhere permanent. I ended up watching it instead of finishing the cleanup.
I still don't know what it was about that wallet that made me stop and look inside it before throwing it out. Maybe the same thing that makes me watch this film again and again without remembering why, and without ever quite becoming the man in the red car. Some things you only notice the seal on right before you let them go.
