TV Documentary Recommendation: Hemingway (2021)

Posted on 04/09/2021 by Pisaries Creator

“I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?”
-Ernest hemingway

I recommend you see this three part documentary film playing on PBS. if you a writer, alcoholic, suicidal, contradictory, or any combination I just listed. Ernest Hemingway is about as influential on writers as is Edgar Allan Poe. They were both alcoholics but one was able to survive as a writer while alive while the other hardly survived at all. Both had trouble with family and both had friends that turned into enemies. I enjoyed watching every bit of this documentary film about Hemingway that begins with his childhood and ends with him taking his life by a gun to his head. There is such a thing about the tortured writer or artist. He was definitely one of them although he allowed many of his personal demons to control him and let his impulses do whatever they felt like doing. He had little sense of delaying gratification, but how frustrating it must be to have a declining physical and mental health getting in the way of what you love to do. I’m pretty confident I won’t go the same route as Hemingway. I don’t drink and I don’t have an inflated ego as he did and yet, I am fascinated and interested in sexual and gender roles as he was. I haven’t read too many of his books, but I plan on reading more. In the short span of time he lived, he wrote quite a bit of novels, novellas, and short stories. On the flip side, Oscar Wilde, Franz Kafka, Zora Neale Hurston, and John Kennedy Toole gained the recognition they deserved after their deaths (wrong on all levels). It goes to show a person should write for the love of it and everything else comes second, third, and on and on.

I rate Hemingway Four Fingers and One Thumb at 100%