American Experience Amelia Earhart

I watched this yesterday as I was finishing up work. I felt a little odd about the rush of biographical data jammed together to make the story, on the other hand there has to be a compelling narrative to pull the viewer in. There were irritating threads, the idea that she was simply lucky and not a very good pilot is one. I know that many have made this argument but the woman did some amazing and daring things and walked away alive at a time when many did not. She must have been pretty good at flying a plane. I think what moved me most were other themes/ threads; there was much made of her fame, some interesting interviews with Gore Vidal who obviously kept the best for later, (his insistence that she had an affair with his father), but still talks with assurance about what fame meant to her, and what the cost of it was. The other thread that worked for me was the idea of loneliness and separation. Certainly being that famous meant you had to experience a remove.

Of course, everything is always skewed to fit with the overarching idea that a writer or producer has in mind. I noted a small flaw, they said that she had trouble in boarding school because she tried daring stunts. . . then showed a photo of her atop Columbia's library. In fact, she had issues in boarding school because of her strong moral beliefs, not because of stunts she pulled.

I guess what made me sad was the cost of everything, physically and emotionally and how it ended. I have no idea what happened to Amelia, although I don't buy into the wildest notions of her being a spy and captured and shot, I think it likely that she crashed at sea, or crash landed on an atoll and died there later . . . what this show does is set up a sense of fatalism. I'm not sure she felt it, but it worked on a basic, emotionally charged level. However, I would argue that it isn't the mystery of Amelia's ending that matters as much as the rest. She believed that women should try everything and anything, that they could do whatever a man could do. I had my mother for an example, but being my mother she was all too flawed, Amelia's example gave me courage to try to do what I love most. And recreating her, living with her every day continues to help me believe I can do this, I can finally write the book I've always wanted to write, and be the best writer I can be. So thank you Amelia.