Moxie, besides being a soft drink, is a slang term which is defined as "the ability to face difficulty with spirit and courage," "aggressive energy, initiative," or "courage, daring, or spirit." However, the way Amelia uses it in conversation, especially with Larry, the meaning is perhaps more closely related to "muchness". Muchness is defined by Websters' as "the quality or state of being great in quantity, extent, or degree," but the term has a different meaning when used by the Mad Hatter in the 2010 Alice in Wonderland: personal essence, positivity and inspiration, the general sense that all is right with the world. Alice has lost it and thus finds trouble coping with a world where she must conform to all sorts of rules which she views as nonsensical. Larry has lost it likewise, only he lives in a world which values outward signs of success and upward mobility rather than the deeply personal sense that you're right where you're supposed to be.
There seems to be a trend here. It looks like moxie/muchness is tied to a blend of having to conform to the world and not really wanting to. Larry, for instance, becomes so absorbed in his work that he does it every night, practically, evidenced by Nick's displeasure in his statement, "So you're working tonight." "Kids are full of Muchness." Nick is included in that statement. He looks at his father's life and the life he's living with his father and, even though materially everything is good, he views Larry's having meetings over Chinese takeout at eight PM as "work" but staying up all night keeping tabs on exhibits which come to life by means of magic and making sure they all stay inside as "the coolest job in the world." Nicky, being about twelve, can still see the magic and wonder in the world and values it more highly than how cool he looks to his friends with Guitar God VI "or whatever."
Amelia is also able to take one glance at Larry and see that he's lost something vital to how he views the world. As her own way of saying that Larry doth protest too much when he states that he actually likes his new line of work, she states, "I know what you said, Mr. Daley, but what I see in front of me is a man who's lost his moxie." She sees Larry, even though he's a success, as someone who's losing himself in his work to escape what he feels for leaving the museum. Therefore, he lost something about himself when he left the museum to become an entrepreneur and start showing the signs that our society at large attributes to success. He lost his muchness, and Amelia isn't shy about letting him know it.
So how did he lose it in the first place? Why did he lose it? is the better question to ask, since it was of his own volition that he left the Museum of Natural History in the first place. At the beginning of the first Night at the Museum, it's made clear that he has a huge series of ideas in his head that he wants to bring into reality, but pursuing them is destroying his relationship with his son and forcing him to move around constantly, which is why he becomes a night guard in the first place. He finds by the end of the movie that he's cut out for it exactly, but he still leaves. Why? Because he still doesn't see how well being a night guard fits him, and he's still hanging onto that dream that his inventions will make him a lot of money and he can finally settle down with Nicky and be happy that way. And because he was inspired by real events in his life, specifically those pertaining to the museum, by the start of Battle of the Smithsonian, he's achieved this.
But what has Larry achieved? He works around the clock, his son is upset with him for giving up the museum, he has a high stress life, he's always doing two things at once trying to manage everything he has to manage, and he's always on the go. When we see Larry in Battle of the Smithsonian and he's shown being a success, he's always walking around, not really making eye contact with anyone, he's on his phone half the time, and even when he talks, it sounds like it's ninety miles an hour. He moves from one person to another at the drop of a hat (something Ahkmenrah is sure to have noticed and maybe been angry about). Even while he's in disguise as a night guard, he behaves in this fashion. He's not even above outright lying just to cover his own butt. It isn't until Larry is conversing with the captive Jedediah while Kahmunrah is opening the gate to the underworld that he finally slows down and actually engages. For two thirds of the movie, he's focusing on what he's going to say and do and deal with next, not what's actually happening around him.
Is Larry beyond hope? No. Jedediah attests to that. Despite the fact that on the last night, he's angry with Larry for not being around at the museum, and even though when he made his distress call he and the other exhibits were under direct attack, he looks at Larry and he sees "a hangin' suit, all gussied up but dead inside." Jed was in more than "a bit of a pickle", but he knew that if Larry had any of who he used to be left, he would come to the rescue. If Larry wasn't too far gone, he would turn up and do everything in his power to contain the situation before things got out of hand. Larry's first thought was to relocate the tablet, which is actually quite wise on his part and shows there's still a little bit of night guard left underneath all that businessman.
During Larry and Jed's intimate conversation while Jed is stuck in an hourglass and Larry is in a room full of people who don't like him, Jedediah expresses that Larry is the one who needed the exhibits, and in this, he's one hundred percent correct. Only after Larry has spent time working at the museum does he gain the inspiration needed to make his various inventions take off, and all of them (at least all of them that were named) draw on various exhibits and other museum-related things for their properties: the Unlosable Keyring, the Super Big Dog Bone, the Glow-in-the-Dark Flashlight. One can almost imagine him discussing these with other exhibits before he quit, like looking at his flashlight and thinking aloud, "Wouldn't it be cool if this glowed in the dark?"
He does still visit the museum, though Dr. McPhee hints that these visits are becoming more and more infrequent as time passes ("Haven't seen you for a few months"). He doesn't seem to be the only one who's picked up on this, either. All of the exhibits are upset with him, save possibly Teddy (Sacagawea's reaction is never seen, and if it is, she's blank faced practically all the time) and Ahkmenrah (who probably is angered when Larry passes up a chance to converse with him for more than two seconds in favor of talking to some other exhibit). Dexter and Attila are most notably bothered outside of Jedediah. In fact, if one ponders it a bit, one picks up on the prevailing attitude of, Why does he bother? Why does he keep showing up if all he's going to do is use the exhibits for inspiration to keep being a success? Why doesn't he just leave them behind entirely and make their lives easier? But for whatever it's worth, he does come back from time to time.
Jedediah is not the only one to pick up on the fact that Larry can still be saved. In the midst of escaping from a bunch of assorted bad guys on the Wright Flyer and Amelia needs to perform repairs literally on the fly, she is forced to turn the "wheel" (really a stick) over to Larry, saying, "I know you've got moxie in you yet." Essentially, she just said, "You can handle this and you know it," with a hint of, "This is what you need to help you feel alive again." By this point, Larry is still protesting. He plans, when this is over, to go back to his life as a success and take care of business. He probably has a few more inventions buzzing around in his head to get started on after the pitch meeting with Wal-Mart and whatever else he has lined out. In fact, up to Kahmunrah's seizing control of the tablet and the combination needed to open it, and consequently his army of birdmen, this seems to be Larry's view of his life. He's going to step out of this weird waking dream and get on with his life as he knows it.
He doesn't come into his own and realize that everyone around him is right until all-out war has broken out between good guys and bad guys and he's thrown in the midst of it. As per the first Night at the Museum, he plays Dr. Phil to one of the exhibits, in this case Custer, and then makes his way through the fray as he tries to figure out exactly what he's going to do about chief baddie Kahmunrah. He brings Amelia in on it because he knows she wants something to do with her life and because she remembers the combination where he doesn't. (Numbers don't seem to be Larry's "thing", but that's neither here nor there.) He proceeds to get the bad guys to fight amongst themselves, distracting them from battling the good guys, and then he moves on to engaging with Kahmunrah in what is quite possibly the most epic scene of the movie: the sword-flashlight battle. At the end of it, when asked what he is by an amazed Kahmunrah, he says, with care and precision, "I'm the night guard." Larry has come home, and he did it in the heat of battle.
Now there's a very good chance that not a lot of us will find ourselves locked in heated combat with museum exhibits who have been magically resurrected, but you can still find your moxie, too, if you've lost it. This may require being faced with death, or it may require considerable time spent soul searching (though for your safety, I strongly recommend the soul searching), but it can be done. How, you may ask? There are a few things I'd like you to consider if you've lost your moxie (or muchness, whichever you prefer, as I use them interchangably throughout):
1. Are you struggling to conform to the dictates of society? Conformity isn't a bad thing, not at all. What I mean to say by this is, is being what society asks you coming in conflict with something inside you? This could be your moral compass, or a definition of success that you've believed in for years but didn't mach what your society defines as success. Or, this could be that you're having trouble with what's "proper" as Alice in Alice in Wonderland had ("Who's to say what's proper? What if it was agreed that proper was wearing a codfish on your head? Would you do it?"). Perhaps societal rules are deeply nonsensical to you in some way, shape or form. If this is the case (and since you really can't change the society in which you live), perhaps it's time you stepped back and re-evaluated your life.
2. Do you feel like something is missing? This is admittedly very obvious and well within the bounds of common sense regarding this topic. However, I personally often find that common sense is severely lacking in the vast majority of the population, so the question needs to be asked, anyway. The idea behind this one is simple: if you feel like your life is lacking in some way, then you've probably lost your moxie somewhere along the line. (However, if what you've lost is common sense, then you have a different issue entirely and probably shouldn't be reading this article.)
3. Are you having fun? This is a tricky fish right here. Someone on the Far-Flung Net expressed concern at teaching kids that all they should do with their lives is have fun, in the traditional sense. However, what Amelia means when she expresses this sentiment to Larry is not "spend all your time goofing off". It's "enjoy what you're doing with your life." You don't have to be a multi-millionaire to lead a life that's worth living. All you have to do is love what you do. This could be swabbing decks, this could be teaching kids, this could, in point of fact, be making millions of dollars on the stock trade. Just so long as whatever it is, you wake up every morning and want to go to work and start your day. There's a famous saying which goes, "If you love what you do, you will never work a day in your life", and those are words to live by. (There's debate, especially at Forbes, about whether this is actually good advice, but it's a better starting point than most, believe it or not.)
4. What matters? Get your priorities in order. People say that if you live to make a million bucks, you lose sight of "what really matters": family, friends, the goldfish, you name it. There are people who have huge bank accounts, who you would think have everything they could possibly want, but their lives are under microscopes, their every problem on display for the world in some cases. Sometimes they suffer separation from their spouses and families because they have to work constantly to maintain their level of success. Maybe they've just had a messy divorce or someone had an affair because of this. These people exemplify where Larry would be if Dexter had never stolen the tablet, or if he had never truly realized his calling at any point during the movie.
Larry learned that he lives for the exhibits at the Museum of Natural History, and if you've lost your moxie, you need to step back and figure out what you value most. This isn't what you should value. It's what you actually value. If you realize you want to spend more time with your kids, do it. If you realize you want to spice up your sex life and you're married, sit down with your spouse and reconnect, however you choose to do that. Decide what makes your life truly worth living, and reconnect with whatever that something is.
These are essay questions. These are questions you spend hours, sometimes weeks, planning out the answers to for scholarship applications. These are questions you ask yourself in all seriousness when you try to find your center. And once you answer them correctly (there is a right answer, it's just different for everyone) and adjust your life accordingly, you'll wake up one morning and realize that you've got your moxie back.
To learn more about moxie/muchness:
How to Reclaim Your Muchness
Finding My Muchness (this website includes pages on what muchness is as well as a blog and a page where the site mistress hawks various things)
Next on "For the Love of Night at the Museum": I ponder why it seems like the only characters for whom backstory seems to be explored is the Brothers Egypt (this will by nature bar discussion of actual historical figures such as Amelia Earhart, Teddy Roosevelt, and Attila the Hun).
Countdown: 329 Days to NATM 3.
No comments:
Post a Comment