“I don’t want to be a product of my environment; I want my environment to be a product of me.”
-Frank Costello
I wasn’t in the headspace to sleep tonight. I took a shower with the lights off and watched The Departed. Something about Costello’s opening line above struck me when I first heard it. It points to a hang up I’ve been circling the drain on for a few years now — a lacking of agency, knowing now at soon to be twenty-six that I am who I am, and that I’m left feeling disappointed, that whatever it was I thought might or could happen hasn’t happened and isn’t going to happen on its own. It might seem obvious on the face of it, but I have been going through the motions regardless. An analogy. Standing on an edge, far above the water - some of us decide to jump, some eventually decide to climb back down.
There’s no big payoff for the masterfully interwoven threads we’ve been following throughout the story. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the film, the tension was well done and for a while there it felt like it really could go either way — but that end result with everyone dying left me feeling remorseful for having become invested in either of the main characters outcomes in the first place. Of course they were going to die, how else might it have shaken out? It’s literally titled The Departed.
“Ok.”
-Colin Sullivan
I think it’s bullshit. Costello’s opener gets it all wrong. It’s the forces of nature against just you. We can’t ever begin to tip the scales of shaping our environment more than it shapes us. He’s not entirely wrong though, in the very last line of that same monologue he slips in some real sage advice, “no one gives it to you, you have to take it”. I think this is the line that’s really worth taking to heart. That opening line wants to grab you, it wants you to engage with it, but it’s a trap. We see just how well that ends.