Make, America. Make, Again.
The Soul of America lives in the Ache to Make.
I just finished a heartwrenching documentary.
MAKE is a feature-length documentary for the modern creative, produced by the team at Musicbed. This film is a question. A conversation starter. It’s an examination of the reasons we create and the things that drive us to make something new — passion or success. The film looks to examine the myth of creative success and what it means to live a healthy life as an artist.
It’s hard to express why I feel this way.
It wasn’t depressing. It wasn’t uplifting. It wasn’t that I was drawn into a story because there was none.
No, it was something else, something deeper. As one musician explains in the documentary:
Whether you’re a pop artist or a jazz artist or R&B, country, good music all has ache…
…To me it’s just this intangible quality of acknowledging humanity’s deep capacity for suffering but also its deep capacity for joy and somehow holding onto the center of that and allowing people on either side of that spectrum whatever they’re walking through to be able to cross back and forth.
This film has ache.
Despite the success of some of its subjects, this film is the antithesis of fame and fortune.
It strips the wealth and notoriety from its subjects in favor of their words, their humanity.
Yes, it is a documentary on art.
But i feel it’s so much more than that. It is the most succinct visual discourse I have come across so far on the urge to create. The ache to make.
It is told with sincerity through the eyes of film makers, graphic designers, musicians, photographers, letterers.
These men and women collectively reflect on their own creative lives.
There is no “ah ha” moment.
It is no panacea.
And yet.
And yet.
And yet.
I just feel so deeply that this is something America needs to watch.
Especially now.
Why?
Because we are in the midst of an identity crisis of global proportions.
What do we stand for? Where has the American Dream gone? Listening to the ambient noise around us and they would have us believe that it is dead. Smothered by machines.
But the dream lives.
It lives in the delicate folds between suffering and joy.
It pulses as we confront our ego and our empathy.
It breathes deeply when our collective intent stretches towards greater, more wholly expressive creations.
Yes, this is a documentary about art.
But what is art but that which we exist to make?
What then do we, as Americans, exist to make when the artifices fall away?
I think we may have forgotten for a period, lulled into a simmering antipathy.
So this film is a heartwrenching plea to all of us partaking in the joyous struggle.
How do we indeed Make America Great Again?
We Make.
