Will sees the brass ring of Arthur's rockstardom right as Arthur sees the brass ring of sainthood.
Unfortunately, Arthur has no interest in being a rockstar and Will has no interest in Arthur's being a saint. Arthur can't even appreciate the huge gravity of Will's selling the family business to Anthony in order to fund the second recording and deal with further lawsuits (the record company refused an advance after the first Brand New Life masters disappeared). Brand New Life starts to unravel as Fr. Bernie is given a new placement and most of the group feels too uncomfortable about dealing with Arthur's mysticism and Will's tyranny toward Arthur.
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| Present-day Will trying really hard |
The ECT has a few unexpected effects.
One is that Arthur is fried so badly that he can't make music for years.Will wanted control over Arthur, and what he got was total control: dependency from a helpless brother. Will dealt with that by institutionalizing Arthur, but after a while, he couldn't afford to anymore, and his girlfriend Linda convinced him to move Arthur to their home in Lansing. Even then, Will just let Linda, a nurse, care for Arthur and spent as little time as he could with him. He just couldn't deal with the anger or the guilt. As Linda spent time healing Arthur, though, she had a mystical experience through him and left Will to become a missionary sister, which meant Will had to take care of Arthur.
He now blames Arthur for driving away Linda.
After years of taking care of Arthur, Will's feelings have mellowed, and some days, Will even wonders about the goals he chased, the damage he did to his brother, and the emptiness of what he thought was the American Dream.
Other days, he convinces himself that he was right.
He's defensive about feeling like a failure, especially as far as his vow to his mother is concerned. He tries to hide his own aging, paradoxically, by dressing like his heroes from the sixties. His main sense of dignity, these days, comes from the fact that he has always taken care of his brother.
Arthur, on the other hand, has healed far more than Will knows, although he will never fully recover. Will never got the mystical side of Arthur. The ECT severed Arthur's ability to discern the difference between mystical reality and reality as most people perceive it, chronological time and Kairos, memory and history, etc. The result was an overwhelming flood of truth and beauty through the Sweet World that Arthur has slowly been sorting out through daily mass, mortification, and obsessive prayer (especially the rosary, which helps him know he's talking to Mary).
He has made very slow progress, but, over the course of thirty years, he has come to remember his calling to make the last album and to deliver it to Joe Lazarus. Over the past year, he has been making music again and Will has come to enjoy it; he even has a little drumset set up by the organ just in case Arthur stumbles on something worthwhile. What Will doesn't know is that Arthur is recording songs to send to Joe Lazarus. Arthur doesn't know Joe is dead, but Joe Jr. will get them in the mail and begin his quest to understand his father, shoot his student film, and resuscitate the career of Arthur White.
And ultimately, we have the story of a felix culpa: Arthur makes the album he was called to make, Joe finds peace and meaning through a return to the Church, and Will repents and finds God.
Plus, the audience is transformed through the story, told through a decade of amazing music, and through their own roles in bringing the story to life.
Plus, the audience is transformed through the story, told through a decade of amazing music, and through their own roles in bringing the story to life.
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