What do we as a society do with misfits? More importantly what do misfits do with themselves in a society hell bent on conformity and the norm? In Furr , Jimmy Finn’s mother sends him to a psychiatrist and eventually to the mental health ward of the local hospital so he can be cured. Society tries to cure our misfits with drugs and therapy but for Jimmy Finn, none of those work. He’s a misfit with urges and rages. They come and they go and he can live a somewhat normal life with a job and an apartment. He drinks to cope, consuming a burning liquid to incinerate what he can’t control.
Until he starts drinking on the job, and he wakes up in a park with the police chasing him. He runs from the city into the hills, where, through a series of unexpected discoveries, he finds himself because he finds others like him and finds his past.
Who hasn’t felt out of place at some point – at the office, with friends, surrounded by family? My current out of place environment is the office. I ride this cusp having been so long in one job I’m considered experienced and senior yet realizing that younger, less experienced people are passing me by. I stick out like a sore thumb.
Our need to belong is strong, hard wired into us to maximize our survival, and Jimmy wages a constant battle with that need to belong when he is so out of place in modern society. He desperately wants acceptance but can’t have it, squirming against the order that society tries to impose upon him time and again, fleeing the skyscrapers and cement and roads for open skies, woods and small towns.
Oh, how I would love to do the same when that out of place feeling strikes, waiting to pounce on me from behind every cubicle wall.
In the mountains, Jimmy finds an unexpected place where everyone knows him and what’s going on, leaving him to wonder why he doesn’t know what’s going on. What he does find is a place where he belongs, one way or another and he will carve that place out for himself or die trying.
Good on you, Jimmy Finn.
Ava Holland 