This essay has been sitting in some sort of draft form since 2019. I’ve always wanted to share it, and never quite felt ready to. Today’s the day — it will never be quite polished enough, and most of it was written by a younger me — one who had just started to heal. Now, older-ass and much more healed me is very thankful she let the right ones in — and that one of them was Keanu Reeves.
Keanu by Kitty Curran
This is a story about how thankful I am for Keanu Reeves, and how he helped save my life. He didn’t physically, actually save it. But be like Keanu and stick with me.
I first loved him when I was a kid and saw him in Speed (in theaters!) with my family. I named every boy in every story I wrote “Jack”, and you could be damn sure they chewed gum and sassed bad guys. In seventh grade, a friend and I spent a sleepover taking extreme advantage of our New Release 2-Day Rental of The Devil’s Advocate. The Matrix came out when I was a freshman in high school. I was obsessed.
Not just with the computer tan beauty of our leading man, but with the all-access pass to ideas about philosophy his performance granted me —and the desire to make movies of my own. I went to film school. Constantine came out while I was there—a movie I loved deeply and immediately. I yapped about it whenever I had the chance, to people who agreed with me, challenged me, or whined that he should have been English and had blond hair.
All to say I spent most of my life fully engaged in my day and my dreams, and brought big energy to both in a desire to be wildly successful. Of course, in the years after film school, I did not become wildly successful. I didn’t even become mildly successful. Still, I never stopped writing, trying, dreaming. Until...I ended up spending some time in a bad relationship. It didn’t start bad, far from it. But I soon discovered the shape-changing, corrosive effects depression and gaslighting can have on a partnership.
Emotional abuse can be hard to recognize, especially when you’re the one being abused. Especially when things started good, and the abuse grows out of someone’s depression rather than the mustache-twirling control most often demonstrated in movies. It can be even harder to believe that the bad times are something you can’t “fix”—especially if you blame yourself for causing them. You might think, as I did, that if you could just change your behavior enough, hide your emotions enough, be pretty or gentle enough, or simply hollow out your core enough, your Love would touch you again! Or at the very least stop breaking household objects in anger!
My tongue is stabbing a hole through my cheek now, but at the time I believed this was the way back to good. I lost my interests. I lost myself. Loved ones tried to throw me life preservers but I didn’t—or wouldn’t—hold on to them. I spent a good (bad) year and a half turning off all my own lights in an effort to give more energy to My Love. Of course, My Love didn’t notice, as we only spent time together silently watching TV.
Enter...the Baba Yaga.
One day, months after its theatrical release, I walked in on the bad boyfriend watching John Wick. I sat down, and became consumed by it, and totally struck by surprise. I think people sometimes see what they want to see in a movie. Sometimes they see what they need to see. Keanu, who I had more or less put out of my mind, suddenly flooded back into it. What had he been doing all this time? How could he do all of that with his body? Was that actually him? Had he spent time training, dancing? Was that his personal dog and what did the dog look like now?
When you’re in the trance of a toxic relationship, it’s hard for real life to make contact with you. Even if friends and loved ones are trying like hell to get through to you, you can turn away and lose yourself in the mist of extended metaphors for dependence and grief. Keanu’s John Wick performance started scrambling the trance’s signal a bit. The metaphorical mists cleared, if only for a moment- I wasn’t someone trapped in a bad life choice anymore. I was interested in something other than my relationship, and remembering a person I had forgotten. Two people, really. Keanu Reeves. And me.
This moment wedged a window open. A year later, the cumulative powers of Keanu’s John Wick performance and my support system helped me finally leave the bad relationship. I moved out, and in with a friend-of-a-friend who, whether she expected to or not, became The Continental to my broken assassin. She provided safe harbor, and a proper re-introduction to Keanu Reeves, one of her favorite actors.
My new roommate’s genuine love of him and plainspoken appreciation of his finer points cocked my head in a way I had not cocked it in some time. My interest was piqued. I would watch many things with my roommate, and I began to reevaluate Keanu. And yap about him at the social gatherings I was now attending again, after a few years of being a distracted guest. I found myself yapping about Point Break, action, and desire, how Keanu WAS good, and asking people if they’d seen The Replacements lately?
The writing skill I had downplayed in my relationship suddenly had new room to breathe and grow. As I stabilized, I regained creative expression. My writing partner and I even got a chance to write a book about Keanu because of admiring him online. I raced off the bus and up into the apartment, whipped out my computer and banged out an idea, fueled by hope and desire. It was not something I would have thought I was capable of just a year or so before.
Sometimes I think about recovery from abuse like learning to eat solid food again, or any occupational therapy. It is frustrating on some level because you SHOULD know this, you DID know this, but due to circumstances you have to learn it all again. how to act, how to think, how to complete basic tasks. But having been in the abuse for so long, you forget you A) know how to B) could learn again. Recovery can be protracted because of the humiliation built into the journey. Even when you regain some footing, there is always the quicksand of shame to pull you off course/into a pit of despair. Recovery takes care: for yourself, and from others. It takes time. And it takes work.
Spending time reading about Keanu’s processes, watching his movies, had me realizing: this guy works. He busts his ass for what he has, and even though NOW he is appreciated for his skill set and he’s always been appreciated for his looks, he now isn’t simply reduced to them.
Before the bad relationship, I had prided myself on my sense of self and control. After the relationship, I had not much sense of either. But talking about movies again—no, not talking, LISTENING to someone talk about movies again, and story, and redemption—worked on me. Like being caught off guard by John Wick, I was now caught off-guard by the idea of Keanu Reeves being Good, and of his Replacements character needing to earn his place back on the field by being on the field. And by sing-dancing in the locker room.
This opened me up, more and more, to the idea that I was Good as well - and that I would be able to play the game of life again.
Not everyone gets to live to fight another day. For those of us who can, who are, who are here—we owe it to ourselves to be like Keanu this way. We may never know much about this guy beyond the movies and our own myths of him, but we know this for true: Keanu works. Keanu doesn’t give up. Not on his career, and not on himself.
I don’t have to, either.