Me and Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

Originally written February 1, 2015

This essay won the Best Film Essay Telos award in 2015.

Sitting in the waiting room of the ICU seems like a pretty appropriate place to write an essay about a film like Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. I am surrounded by people who are contemplating mortality. Their own, but especially that of whoever they love who’s had enough injuries to end up in the Neuro Shock Trauma ward of the hospital. Everyone’s asking themselves questions. What does it mean to really know someone? How do you deal with the question of the survival of your loved one? 

On Thursday morning at school, I got a text from my mom telling me that my grandmother had been hit by a car while crossing the street, and was in the hospital. At first I just thought that she might have a couple of broken bones or something, but as they day progressed, and I continued getting updates, I realized that her condition was actually very serious. She had some pretty severe brain injuries. I have spent most of the past four days in the hospital with my family as we wait to see what the outcome of this situation will be. 

As I sat in the waiting room for hours with my favorite cousin, who also enjoys really good films, our conversation eventually turned to the last great movies we had seen. I had gone to the Sundance Film Festival screenings for high school students with my school earlier that week, so naturally I had a couple films to talk about. As I told him about the best film I had seen there- Me and Earl and the Dying Girl- I realized just how relevant the film was to my life just then, and probably to everyone’s life  at some point. 

The film, based on the novel by Jesse Andrews (who also wrote the screenplay), stars Thomas Mann as Greg, a hyper-modest high school filmmaker who is forced by his mother to reconnect with an old friend, Rachel, who was just diagnosed with cancer. The film really explores the ways that Greg deals with the uncertainty of disease, and the possibility of loss. One of the main themes of the film is that people’s stories can continue to unfold even if they are gone.

The whole idea is that, even if someone isn’t with you anymore, you still learn about who they are. In Dying Girl, Greg has a teacher who tells him that when his father passed away people kept telling him stories about his father’s past and he was astounded. He’d had this idea of who his dad was, but he realized that there was a lot more to him than just what he presented to his son. People have pasts, and interactions with people that we don’t know about. 

As I was in the hospital thinking about this, I was struck with regret, or melancholiness, or something. My grandma wrote a book. It’s legit, you can buy it at some bookstores, and on Amazon, and everything. It’s a memoir about her childhood. She grew up the daughter of Jewish circus owners in post-WWII Germany. I’ve never read it. Hundreds of people who have never met her know more about my grandmother’s early life than I do, and I have known her as long as I’ve been alive. I recognize now that she has played a very specific role in my life, and that outside of that capacity, she has had an entire life. Even though her future is really uncertain right now, I know that no matter what, her influence in my life isn’t going to just end any time soon. 

Even though the situation that I am dealing with right now is very different from the one explored in the movie, I think that one of the purposes of film is to draw connections between the things that people feel, even if the specific circumstances surrounding them are different. I really felt like Me and Earl and the Dying Girl accomplished that. I learned things from this film; memory is so important, but progression is equally important. Even if someone dies, it’s almost like your relationship can continue to grow. I am better able to understand and deal with the events in my life right now because I watched this film, and I think that is one thing that really makes a movie great.