When Charles Jensen was a kid, he remembers going into the TV room to tell his mom he was depressed. As he sat next to her on the couch, trying to explain how sad he’d been feeling, his mom kept one eye on the television, which meant that their conversation was periodically interrupted by bursts of laughter from the studio audience of the sitcom she was watching.
It’s just one of many ways Jensen’s realized that stories told onscreen have helped him understand his life and relationships. And in his new memoir, “Splice of Life,” Jensen weaves together the most harrowing and bizarre experiences of his youth and young adulthood with scenes from films like “Get Him to The Greek,” “Neon Demon,” “Mean Girls” and many others.
As Jensen recently told The Show, the book celebrates the weirdly specific connections we all feel to our favorite movies.
Full conversation
CHARLES JENSEN: I think people are doing the things that I do on “Splice of Life” all the time and, and maybe not consciously or, or purposefully. But I think the movies that we love are all movies that resonate with us because they help us understand ourselves better or they help us understand our experiences better.
SAM DINGMAN: Yeah. Well, can we talk about your chapter on the movie “The Descent”? Tell us about the period of your life that you decided to write about that felt connected to that film.
JENSEN: When I was in my late 20s, the first boyfriend that I was in a long term relationship with had taken his own life. And it was very shocking to me. We had been broken up for several years, but we were still connected in a bunch of different ways and we had just been in contact a couple of months before this happened.
So when I in the, in the chapter, I recount, you know, the, the moment that I got the news that this has happened and working through what was an overwhelming and unexpected kind of grief I had never experienced before and, and felt like I couldn't even find my way out of.
So it felt very natural to me to pair that with this movie, “The Descent,” which is a horror film from the early 2000s about a group of women who go spelunking and get trapped in a cave only to discover that they're not alone. And the other presences in the cave are pursuing them to kill them. The resonance for me is that grief was like being trapped in those caves and it just seemed like no matter what direction I went in, I was still stuck in there.
The main character of that movie herself is recovering from the grief of losing her husband and daughter in a car accident the year before. So I did feel in some ways that the film was trying to say that that grief is impossible to find your way out of.
DINGMAN: Yeah. My favorite line from that chapter as you write, “the mind's relationship to grief is like the tongue's insistence on exploring the place where a tooth's been lost.” I have seen “The Descent” before. It's the most scared I've ever been.
JENSEN: It is a really good horror movie.
DINGMAN: And it had not occurred to me that it could operate so thoroughly and completely on this metaphorical level that, that you've laid out and it made me want to go back and, and watch it again and, and think about it through that lens because all of a sudden it started to feel like a, you know, very graphic and visceral but very lyrical grief poem rather than a story about claustrophobia and maybe zombies, question mark?
JENSEN: Right. But, but isn't that what grief is? And you know, grief is the experience of being haunted in some ways. And also you're, you're not in control of your thoughts, like your mind will really just race through a variety of emotions or memories. There is something horrific about grief, that I think resonates.
DINGMAN: Can I ask you in that vein about the cat scene?
JENSEN: Oh, yeah. The, the chapter about the suicide.
DINGMAN: Yeah, because I got like an actual chill reading that section. Can you, can you describe briefly for us the the cat scene?
JENSEN: Sure, so, my boyfriend Tory had been,, you know, a lover of cats and he even had a cat tattoo. So in the days after he had, maybe weeks after he had died, I started to hear a cat meowing in, in my house and I looked everywhere and I couldn't find it. And it really took me, I think a full day to, to track it down where the noise was coming from.
I don't even know why I did this, but I went out to the carport, I looked all over and then I just opened the hood of my car and a kitten was sitting on the engine. And I just had a recognition in that moment that this was perhaps a way that I was being visited by, you know, Tory’s spirit or his consciousness or something, but just, just a way to like, heal me a little bit in a way that I wasn't able to do on my own. And when I reached to grab the cat, it, you know, jumped down through the, the engine and, and ran off.
DINGMAN: Well, and not to edit your own memory of your story, but the car that the cat was in was the car you and Tory had gotten together.
JENSEN: Right. Yes. Exactly.
DINGMAN: I mean, it, it's just amazing. And one of the reasons it gave me such a chill is because it comes, I don't know if it's right after, I can't remember. But in close relationship to the part at the very end of “The Descent,” when we think the main character has escaped the subterranean caverns and she gets in her car and starts driving away from this trauma and then one of her antagonizers appears in the back seat of the car.
JENSEN: And it's, in the movie, it's deeply uncertain if that's happening or not, right? If that's reality.
DINGMAN: Yes. Which made me think about your sense of disbelief that the cat was there. And then the fact that the cat disappears and prompts you to ask like, was that cat really there? Like did that just happen?
JENSEN: Yeah. And weirdly that happened to me twice when I lived in Phoenix. A cat crawled into my engine. the second time I did rescue the cat and gave it a good home. But that first one did run, run away.
DINGMAN: What are these cats doing? I think it's, it's hotter in there.
JENSEN: I know.
DINGMAN: We meet a lot of interesting characters in the stories from your life. But for me, Tory really is the one who stands out. And, and it struck me that Tory's experiences are often almost like more extreme versions of things that you experience personally. Suicidal ideation, shame about sexuality, status, anxiety.
And it almost felt like Tory's life is kind of like the movie version of your life in this sort of warped way. How much of your desire to write this book was motivated by your relationship to and, and memories of Tory specifically?
JENSEN: Well, that's a very, I'm gonna sit with that for a long time now that you said that.
DINGMAN: Oh no, I’m sorry.
JENSEN: No, it's, it's all good. Tory’s death had such a huge impact on me as a person and how I engaged in romantic relationships after that. How I grieved loss that I, you're right. It is such a core aspect of the, of the book. And so, you know, he was a complicated person. We had a complicated relationship. So there, there are still things that I'm learning from about that experience.
But I think what I discovered in the course of writing a memoir is, is that the book is not about other people. The book is really about me and holding myself accountable for my lived experience, but it also yielded all sorts of empathy for the other people in my life, especially the people that I had complicated relationships with.
For me, you know, that was the real value in, in just feeling a lot more settled about some of these experiences I've lived for what it's worth for me.
DINGMAN: You just described thing that movies can do better than anything else. I mean, that's why we love anti-hero stories so much, you know, I, I mean, I know some people don't but that's why I should say a lot of people love anti-hero stories is because it does, it, it puts you in this surprising position of empathizing with somebody who behaves terribly. But we get a sense of where that comes from and, and what the through line between those behaviors is.
JENSEN: I think it's a reminder too that we are the villain in someone's story, whether we intend to be or not. And it's a reminder that the villains in our story may not intend to be that for us either.
