Review of Anvil: What I thought of Anvil

After participating in forensics and debate for ten years, Anvil had a unique connection with me. For many coaches, Debate and Forensics is a job, but it’s also a labor of love. There’s a certain disconnect from reality that comes with it. We (coaches) give up our weekends to travel long distances to instruct high school students in an abstract competition. Many of our friends don’t understand it. Many of parents didn’t understand why we were involved. And many of our spouses/significant others don’t understand it either. And in some way, we are always pursuing an unobtainable goal – qualifying for state, winning state, qualifying for nationals, winning nationals, making the college team, qualifying for college nationals… and so on.

Playing Metal music into your 50’s is a strikingly similar. These guys love to play, but the shows are not their real jobs. They have to travel to the shows and there’s a set of unique individuals who are religious to metal concerts. The quest to “make it” in the music business (whatever that success may be), is relatively undefined and hard to obtain. There is a greater goal in entertaining, as there is in educating students in debate and forensics, but sometimes it’s hard to see the big picture.

Lips and Reiner face similar challenges. To persevere for thirty years, and see the toll that it extracts on one’s family was quite revealing. I do hope they “make it” in the end, what ever that may mean. The alternative is that they become a modern day Sisyphus, always trying to roll the ball up the hill. And I’d fear for the destruction that ball would wreak on their families.

On the same note, I felt the first question asked to the UW-Madion alum editor who was at the show, was quite apt: how do you react to people laughing at sad moments? I was quite frustrated that people would laugh at the sad realization that one may not live up to their dreams. After all, these were real people puring their hearts out, and you think it’s funny? Yes, I know, their choice of words may not be poetic. They are, nonetheless, their words and they are real. Perhaps these individuals didn’t get the film. It was  only clear to me until after doing further research that this was not a Christopher Guest film and that this was not a mockumentary. Maybe they were just mislead. I hope so, because I wouldn’t want to live in a society without empathy.