Reflections on Rice

By William Broyles

Without Rice, I wouldn’t be here.
I don’t mean here, speaking, I mean, HERE, on Earth, existing.

My parents went to Rice; they met right down the street, washing dishes at Autry House. I was a Rice baby; I even went to my dad’s graduation. In fact, Autry House brings back other memories. As a freshman, I paraded down Main Street, past Autry House, in my pajamas as the seniors sat in convertibles with freshman girls and shot us with whipped cream, all the while shouting “Slime, slime, slime” at us.

That’s what freshman boys were. Slime. We were slaves to the sophomores. We wore beanies. We had to sit naked on blocks of ice and race up and down the corridors. That was my first introduction to the culture and dignity of academic life. I gather it’s different now.

I grew up down the Houston Ship Channel from Rice in Baytown, a refinery town built around an oil field. I used to stand on the bay and watch the ships go by and want to go down the channel with them, anywhere. Instead, I went up the channel to college at Rice. It was a better choice, for there the whole world opened up to me. Eventually I even stopped being a slime.

Professors like Allen Matusow, Francis Loewenheim, and Walter Isle helped me fall in love with literature, with history, with the rich varieties of experience, with art and music and creativity. From my fellow students, I learned to work together, to have fun, to make something out of nothing. It was with a bunch of my Rice friends that I began Texas Monthly. We’d worked on the Rice student newspaper—how hard could doing a real magazine be?

And Larry McMurtry—I took creative writing from him. He so despaired of our talent that he was reduced most classes to reading from his novel in progress that he would end up calling The Last Picture Show. I listened to it, stunned. I grew up haunting my little library in Baytown, thinking literature was something you read about England or Russia or France or maybe New England. Not Texas. But listening to McMurtry’s books, I knew the characters. I knew that place. It might as well have been Baytown. It was a shock, a realization that changed my life. You could write about this? About Texas?

From Rice I learned so much. It is, as is the Texas Medical Center, one of the great institutions of Texas, and you deserve much gratitude for supporting it. It taught me the value of education, of culture and critical thinking. It taught me to ask questions.

Which naturally brings me to the image of Tom Hanks running around in a mo-cap suit with his fake head suspended above him on a pole. That was all to show him as a child in a movie I just finished filming called Polar Express, based on the children’s book about the loss of the childhood belief in magic and wonder. All to make the unreal seem real. The same sense of unreality surrounded Apollo 13. We worked so hard to make Mission Control seem real that the real astronauts who advised us kept bumping into the wall on their way to where they remembered the bathroom to be. And Cast Away, where we had to sweep the evidence of hundreds of crew members off the beach before every take so the viewer would believe Tom Hanks was there all by himself.
Making movies is about making the unreal seem real. That was what struck me about September 11. It seemed like a movie. I was so used to thinking everything I saw on my TV was fake that I couldn’t believe it was true.

Or like war itself. It seems so clean and neat on TV, as if it is under control, guided, directed, like a movie—not chaotic and messy and bloody and horrible, the way wars always are. It seems almost fake, but it is all too real. The extras don’t get up and wipe off the fake blood and go have a smoothie. The dead stay dead. But because it comes to us the same way movies do, it somehow seems distanced. We become numb. We must be careful not to take it for granted.

Because we are very good at making illusions—at making bits of celluloid, captured moments of light, pixels, and binary codes pass for real. With the technology we are using on Polar Express, you could, if you wanted, now make movies with Tom Hanks forever. You could take Paul Newman as a young man and play him opposite Paul Newman as an old man or give Tom Hanks Paul Newman’s eyes. Or forget actors entirely, every director’s dream. What we can do is now so different from what we should do. Whatever we can imagine, we can put in front of you. It is not to be taken lightly.

At the core is something again I learned at Rice, which is the uses of language, the art of telling stories. That’s what we do with film, and we’ve gotten very good at it.

Taken together, American television and film are one of our three biggest exports, right behind weapons. Smart bombs, dumb movies, that’s America’s export strategy. English is the world, now—the global language.

Storytelling is what humans do. It’s what I guess I do, with words and pictures. From the time the first humans gathered around the campfire to pass down oral legends like the Iliad, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Tale of Khieu, the heroes and heroines that inspire us—right down to those of Spiderman and the Lord of the Rings and, yes, Apollo 13 and Cast Away—we know through stories.

Our religions are based on stories, of Jesus, of Mohammed, of Moses and Buddha. Jesus taught best through parables, which are stories. Politics, advertising, business, all work through stories. “We’ve got a great story to tell”—that’s what you hear, whether the story is about a senator or soap. Journalism thrives on stories. Stories underlie our own national identity and those of other nations and peoples as well.

The Palestinian–Israeli conflict is the clash of two different national narratives. Hitler sold the German people a story about humiliation, redemption, and destiny. Osama bin Laden has sold a similar story of humiliation and revenge to Al Qaeda. In each, there is a scapegoat, an enemy, that is less than human, that has to be exterminated.

And we, of course, are living out our own story. Of an innocent nation brutally attacked which now has to go do battle against evil—in the name of freedom, democracy, and all things good.

The great value of education, of what Rice does, is to teach us to think critically about stories, to understand the stories of others and not just our own. It reminds us how universal are our feelings and dreams. How we don’t have a monopoly on suffering, virtue, or wisdom. How we sometimes can be wrong. It restores our common humanity.

And that is much in need of restoration. The most powerful weapons, after all, are not guns and bombs and germs. The most powerful weapon is the mind that lets us pull the trigger, push the button, or seal the deadly letter and mail it. It is the story in our heads that lets us see others as less than ourselves.

In War and Peace, Tolstoy shows us Nikolai Rostov, a young cavalry officer obsessed with dreams of his own heroism. In his first battle, he suddenly realizes that those hard-faced men coming toward him are the enemy and they want to kill . . . oh my god, they want to kill me! “Why would they want to kill me,” he wonders, “I whom everyone loves so much?”

At that moment, he realizes that he is an extra in someone else’s movie, he’s an “enemy”—something to be stabbed or shot or blown away. Something less than human.

Rostov was doing what we all do. He was living the story of his own life, unconnected from anyone else. I, too, have my own personal movies, screening 24/7, not at the local multiplex but inside my own head. Some are realistic, some are fantasies, but they always have one star: me. I was always ready for Mr. DeMille to shoot my close-up. And I suspect I am not alone, that this is simply what we do.

For us as individuals and for us as a nation, it’s not easy to realize that in real life we are sadly not always the star. Others may not enjoy being extras in the movie of our life. The same is true of how the rest of the world sees us. Our story is one of freedom and opportunity. In that story we mean well and wish others to succeed and enjoy what we have.

But look around the world. Surprise. Some people see us as self-centered, arrogant, and downright dangerous. In that story, we play the rich prep school kid everyone loves to hate. The one who talks too loud, has too much, notices nothing. Who wants everyone to speak his language.

That is why I am so honored to be here with James Baker. When he represented this country at the highest levels, he spoke quietly and with respect for the rest of the world, but he still managed to represent our interests, to show that it was possible to be decent and respectful and tough and American all at once.

What we learn from a place like Rice can restore our humility. It can reconnect us to nature, to other people, to ourselves. One way it does that is by being rigorous. By helping its people fail as well as succeed.
I went to Rice to study math and engineering. At a less rigorous school, I might have done okay, but at Rice I was like a good high school basketball player suddenly thrust into the NBA. My inadequacies were smoked out. I was blitzed, bombed, obliterated. On my first math test I made a six. Out of a hundred.

I failed. An F.

And that failure was the best thing that ever happened to me.
Right after I graduated from Rice and Oxford I found myself slogging through the jungles of Vietnam with a bunch of teenaged high school dropouts. Inoculated against all known diseases, armed to the teeth, plugged into rock and roll, we were lost in a world we neither recognized nor understood. We might as well have been on the Moon.

I thought of my friends who had graduated from Rice with me. They were going to law school, getting jobs, starting families. And I, I was nowhere, fighting a war I didn’t even believe in, terrified of my own death. The hopes I had and the ambitions I nourished as I sat at my graduation had all been lost. Sort of like Chuck on his island in Cast Away. None of my dreams had come true. I felt like such a failure.
Again.

As I lay awash in self-pity and fear out near the Ho Chi Minh Trail, I saw something wonderful—the streaking light of a spaceship in the infinity of space, the fleeting passage of Apollo 13 on its way to the real Moon.

For years, I was determined to get to the top: of my career, of the world, whatever. I even went to the point of climbing the highest mountain in the Western Hemisphere, some 23,000 feet high—more than four miles above where we are at this moment.

All I thought about as I climbed was exactly the word that had driven my ambition: up, up, up.

I didn’t know what I expected to find. Maybe I expected to reach out and touch something: God, meaning, the universe, something.

I got to the top, and I looked around—higher at that moment than any human being standing on two feet on this side of the planet—and all I could think was, down, down, down.

Why? Because when you get to the top, you realize there is no place else to go. And you are all . . . alone. So who wants to stay there? Better to climb back down, or, as usually happens to me, fall off, pick yourself up, and go find another mountain.

It’s that going down, that falling off, that failure that stays with you, sticks in your gut, and keeps you going.

Success feels good, but it makes you soft, saps your courage, makes you satisfied. Failure hurts—and it can really, really hurt—but it forces you to use your wits, to gather your energies, to try again.

Which brings me back to lying in that rice paddy. That “failure” years later gave me my start in film. It became the basis for my TV series China Beach, which explored how women and men behave as heroes in impossible circumstances. How they turn national failure into personal victory.

As for Apollo 13, the lunar mission I saw streaking across the sky from my rice paddy, it blew up and never made it to the Moon. NASA considered the flight a failure and wrote it off. Its astronauts were shuttled off to obscurity and never flew in space again.

But precisely because it was a failure, Apollo 13 was the best Moon flight to make a movie about.

Why?

Because it showed how men and women rise to great challenges.
The astronauts could not have made it home unless every single one of the people on the ground did their job exactly right under excruciating pressure. Not just the stars, but everyone had to do their jobs, to be part of something larger than themselves.

By today’s standards, the spaceships then were tin cans; the computers could not even run a Nintendo. In the movie, Tom Hanks, as Jim Lovell, proudly boasts to some congressmen that they have a computer that “sends out millions of instructions and fits in a single room!”

Okay, laugh on. Who knows what our children will find so amusing about what we today find so amazing.

What NASA back then believed was so state-of-the-art now seems quaint, like a slide rule or a black-and-white TV. But could we send a man to the Moon today? Every single veteran of NASA I talked to said no, we couldn’t. We’ve gotten too big, too divided, too careful. Too afraid of failure.

But there was a time when human beings dared to leave this planet and venture into space, when people like us got up one morning to go to the Moon.

Going to the Moon. What a harebrained dream. Almost like the Greeks spending 10 years besieging Troy because of some woman. But those are the dreams that move us forward—the dreams of Columbus, of Lindbergh, of Jonas Salk and Madame Curie. Of William Marsh Rice and the men and women who teach and do research at the university that bears his name. Nobel Prize winners.

Those “What if . . . Why not?” dreams that are risky, that may not succeed, that most likely will fail—that will be seen as mistakes.
Fail like Apollo 13. But what a failure and, in the end, when we rescued our brothers from the blackness of space, what a victory. And what a reminder of how great we once dreamed and how small we dream today.

Apollo 13 also is a reminder of the ultimate failure hard-wired into us. We don’t live forever. We are made to self-destruct. Life, as they say, is the one disease for which there is no cure. Although if one is found, it will likely be right here, in the union of these two great institutions on either side of Main Street.

But that is the great, brilliant failure from which everything flows. It is what makes life—for all its bruises, batterings, false starts, and dead ends, its blind alleys and sudden reversals—so rich and so worth clinging to. We have life so briefly. A blink of an eye, a whisper in infinity, a streaking line of light crossing the night sky above a lonely rice paddy far, far away.

But for a brief moment, we live, we love, and we make the failures that save us—the failures that make us human.

We saw on-screen today President Kennedy’s speech at Rice announcing we were going to the Moon. I was there, in the audience.
Wearing my beanie. A slime.

And I was at Rice a year later when President Kennedy was murdered. We were stunned, heartbroken, grief-stricken. All our professors canceled their classes for the next day. All except Alan Grob, my English professor.

We were surprised. Dr. Grob was an admirer of the president and a Democrat himself. We went to his class sullen and sad and resentful. Who was he to drag us into an English lesson on a day when real life was so overpowering?

But then Dr. Grob entered, he opened a book, and he read “Lycidas,” by John Milton. The assigned text for the day, and a poem about grieving for a man of great promise dying too young.
It was a transcendent example of how literature can give structure to unruly human emotions, how art can channel grief. How it can comfort and connect us.

It struck me like a bolt of lightning. I knew, then, that somehow, in my own way, I would try to do that.

Dr. Grob changed my life that day.

Rice is being honored as a city builder. But Rice also helped build me. And thousands like me. The first word of Cast Away is “time,” that relentless process that runs our lives. The last words are “thank you,” the gratitude we should feel for what we have been given. Rice has given me so much. And for that, I say, with all my heart . . .

Thank you.