I started college a week before I turned 18, graduating from a class of 15 in a school of 69 students. This is not a joke, no matter how much it sounds like one. My town was small and remote—cold inside and out—and my college was four hours away, in the city. It was the first time in my entire life that I was in a big city for more than a day or two. There was a sea of freedom before me, and I floated aimlessly in it, a guppy in the Mariana Trench.
But one of the upsides of that aimless floating was a desire to experience new things, and an actual ability to access them. That fear and that aimlessness spawned and evolved my love for things like film and theater, since I had more opportunity to access both. One of my graduation/birthday gifts for myself was a Netflix subscription, and, during one of my first few weeks at college, I struggled to find something to view. Finally, I noticed a poster of a stick figure on a street corner, haloed by a circle but surrounded by shadow. He looked pensive, small and afraid.
The film was called It’s Such a Beautiful Day. That night, while the world waited ahead of me and people passed by my door with their friends, I sat in pitch darkness and watched it alone.
That was the first time since leaving home that I let myself really cry. Far from the last, but an important first. It felt like a weight had been lifted from me, if only for a moment. It wasn’t the first time I’d thought there might be something wrong with me—since I was a small child, I’d known anxiety like an old friend. I’d scream and panic over a bad haircut because I thought my peers would shun me. But it was one of many things that nudged me towards a greater, darker understanding of my own brain. For that, I’m eternally grateful and only slightly resentful.
It’s Such a Beautiful Day began its life as a series of roughly 20-minute short films: Everything Will Be OK, I Am So Proud of You,and It’s Such a Beautiful Day. It was a triptych over half a decade in the making, spanning from 2006 to 2011. It’s no wonder that the series took so long to complete and connect together, considering that nearly everything you see or hear onscreen was done entirely by Don Hertzfeldt. While there were some points of assistance, namely Sara Cushman voicing a doctor in the final act and Brian Hamblin working as an editor, this is entirely Don’s creation—and done completely by hand.
There are a few projects where you might recognize Hertzfeldt’s style. Fans of The Simpsons may know him from the couch gag he drew for the episode “Clown in the Dumps” in the series’ 26th season. Academy Awards buffs might remember his short film Rejected—a satire of the commercial work Hertzfeldt has rejected all his life—from its nomination for, and loss of, Best Animated Short Film in 2001. His rejection of ad-based work might connect to another reason why people remember him—Pop-Tarts’ ad campaign mirrored his style to the point where there were murmurs of legal action being taken, since the ads kept being mistaken for his work.
I thought I found him through Beautiful Day,but I didn’t remember my actual first time watching him until long after. I was introduced to Hertzfeldt through his 2010 short film Wisdom Teeth. In it, a man pulls out his friend’s wisdom tooth stitch to the point of absurdity, gore, and the friend being mistaken for a baby eater. A visceral description for a film done entirely with slightly more stylized stick figures and a warping of some Scandinavian language.
It isn’t hard to recognize Hertzfeldt’s typical style: sparse colors employed mostly for dramatic effect, surrealist sketching, and minimal details on characters. There’s variation: his recent Academy Award-nominated World of Tomorrow series employs a vivid layer of colors. It’s Such a Beautiful Day slips between both in fascinating ways, the sparse character sketches given life by bright backgrounds and some photorealistic imagery. The film employs just enough of the real world and its mundanity to put you in Bill’s shoes, and enough of the surreal to put you in his head.
It’s more the latter than the former that drew me to this film.
There’s a history of mental illness in my family that goes unspoken. We’re very tight-lipped about these things. I hear whispers about it—tales of troubled youths long gone, traumas leaving behind scars, and the woes of getting old. But nothing’s ever really done with it. Things happen and hurt, time passes, and we live with it. We make jokes. If you can laugh at something, it hurts less.
I was a late baby for both of my parents, the only one for their marriage. My mother’s nearing 70, my father isn’t far behind, and my eldest brother turned 47 years old this year. I felt like an only child most of the time due to the age gap, and my parents spoke to me pretty frequently as an equal. Most of what I understood about therapy growing up came in the form of jokes. Little jabs taken after my parents made some inappropriate joke at each other—“You’re gonna be telling your therapist about this stuff, aren’t you? You’re gonna be there for years just with stories about us, huh?” And they’d laugh, and I’d laugh, and I’d just sort of nod along inside because I knew they were right. Even if I couldn’t put a name to what was happening with me, I knew they were right.
Bill’s meltdowns in the film reminded me of myself, especially in high school. The lashing out in his own head, gripping his own scalp, ripping it apart to reveal pink-tinted brain matter; and then the cut to darkness, silence, and finally his body curled up in the alleyway as he gives in to his despair. The ledge of the cliff before falling.
These things happened to me, too, on a much less visceral level. I’d be overwhelmed by everything around me, consumed by it, and I’d lash out. Mostly at myself, with a blow or two to my skull. Sometimes publicly—in what was comedy to my peers. It’s not uncommon for autistic people—not good, but not uncommon. I didn’t know that at the time, only looking back. I still do it sometimes. As much as I hate myself for it, I do see some reason in it: it’s me trying to punish my brain when it fails.
I still don’t go to therapy, though. I want to, I really do, and I live somewhere closer to mental health resources than I ever did before. But insurance is fickle, healthcare is cruel, and my vision plan from my day job doesn’t even cover an eye exam, so the odds of my work-appointed insurance covering anything involving mental health is unlikely. So I don’t go to therapy. I self-soothe, go on walks with my Walkman, fail at meditation, and succeed in talking to my friends, sometimes talking them off their own ledges.
I help them because it’s free. I help them because I know how it hurts. I help them because I can’t help myself.
But I know I need more. I have ghosts that live in my head and hang on my shoulders, distant things from my teenage years and my fledgling freedom in college. Things that ebb and flow in my brain—some like rough waves, and some like the flow of lava and ash after a volcano. A meltdown.
My grandmother on my mother’s side had Alzheimer’s. So did my grandfather on my father’s side. I didn’t see much of my grandmother’s decline, but I visited my grandfather in his last weeks. He didn’t talk much—although I’m not sure if that’s because the ability had faded away or because he didn’t have much to say. But I saw how he was; how small he seemed in those moments when we sat together, watching the news while my dad helped my grandma with something in her sparse garden. Watching him fade deeper into that endless mist, it was the scariest thing in the world to me. No horror can compare to it.
I know my odds aren’t great for avoiding the same. Genes and time are against me. Every time I forget a word or a memory taps the back of my head but doesn’t show itself, I remember what they went through. I see the fog on the horizon, and its inevitable approach like Stephen King’s The Mist. The fog and what’s within come closer every day, ready to spirit away all I’d ever known. In my most frightened moments, I can see it clear as my face in the mirror.
I see it. Then I turn back to my computer. This is how I survive knowing the inevitable. I keep working on a spreadsheet for my day job or typing some funny message to my friends or working on this very essay. I look into the abyss, let our gazes meet in understanding, then return to my work. Just as Bill does in the first act: he faces death, then has to go back to work with his mind still decaying all around him. Life doesn’t stop when the horrors begin, and the horrors don’t stop as life continues. We see them in our minds all the time, in all their colorful, disgusting glory.
That’s the thing It’s Such A Beautiful Day has over other films that deal with the degeneration of the brain: there are certain terrors involved that cannot be captured in live action. Sometimes the scariest things you can imagine are the things you create with nothing but your mind and some stick figures. It’s the same way that naming a disease doesn’t always make the path clearer; realizing the horror doesn’t make it go away. There isn’t a name given to Bill’s illness. It’s nothing specific—only symptomatic. We see the way his mind degrades, the violent outbursts and intrusive thoughts, the seizures and the gradual loss of self.
We see these things as Bill sees them—in all their putrid, miserable clarity.
At the final stage of the film and Bill’s condition, he lies beneath a tree and the screen cuts to black. The narrator’s voice layers upon itself, pleading for Bill to get up and commanding that he will not and cannot die. So he doesn’t. He lives on, he accomplishes many things, and marries and sires and outlives everyone he ever knew and loved. The final shot of the film is of the stars going out around him. Blessed with immortality, yes, but with no one to remember him as the universe gives way. Life in the film ends, but the horrors linger with you as the credits roll.
Life’s stages end, but the horrors linger on.
My grandpa passed away in 2021, after a long battle with Alzheimer’s complications. It was expected, on some level; we’d been preparing for him to go into hospice. But it still hurt. I spent a lot of time beside my dad in those days, holding his hand, trying to comfort him. How can a daughter help her father mourn? I didn’t know then, and I still don’t know, but I tried.
Months later, after the new year, my parents and I went to the city to spend time with my grandma. She and my dad went off in her old car to take care of trash, leaving my mother and me alone in the house they once shared. We sat in silence, and I looked in her face. I thought about our memories failing us, the good and bad alike. We nearly mirrored how my grandfather and I had sat together almost a year prior. It took all I could stand to not cry, only allowing myself to do it when a piece of our car’s engine broke on the way home and the stress made it seem reasonable.
I wept and wept, and then we tried to push through it with jokes. We managed, just as we always did—and just as we always do. If you can joke about it, it doesn’t hurt as much.
There were signs that something was going to happen before the end, I’m sure. The rot in the engine, the shudder in the car, the lapses in memory and the decline of speech. I didn’t see them, but there weren’t many who did, only admitting it when things were beginning their downward slope. It was the same way when I was diagnosed as autistic; people admitted that there’d been signs but “you were so good at handling it, we didn’t think about it much.” But I think about it. I think about it a lot.
I think about that little girl on the playground so long ago, who read books on the swings and was primarily included in only one particular game. It was called Mama Crow, and the only goal was to run away from her as she ran, cawing and giggling at what she thought was a fun game. No tagging, no play, just running away. Running until you could get away from her and carry on with what you’d been doing. I was always Mama Crow. I only realized how bad it’d been when I was diagnosed. How incomprehensibly lonely I’d been, not understanding why my brain worked the way it did. How scared I’d been.
How no one tried to help me understand. To put a name to what I was going through. I see it in my memories of my grandfather, my grandmother, myself, in Bill. The absence of a ‘why’ for it all. All that’s left is the horror of how it has changed you, and how, one day, it may take you away.
It’s been nearly ten years since I watched It’s Such a Beautiful Day for the first time. I can’t say I’m happier across the board than I was before, but things have changed. I’ve graduated, gotten a place of my own and good work, written and submitted and been rejected. I am well-loved and thought of pretty highly even in absence. I’m understood—if only by myself. My mind still loses itself here and there, and some days I lay in my bed and struggle to find the means to get up and face the world I’ve made for myself, and the one made around me. But, for the most part, I can look at myself in the mirror and make peace with who I see. I’m not who I wished I would be at this age, and I’m far from the girl who wished for those things back in college, or the little girl who dreamt of a better life beyond the Crow game. I’ve outlived them both—and maybe that’s okay.
Even still, I remembered them when I put on the film for the first time in nearly ten years. So I shut off every light in my apartment that I could. I let the darkness consume me, lit only by the glow of the television in front and the streetlights behind, and let myself remember what it was like to be pensive, small, innocent, and afraid in ways I could never truly know and will always know until I’m gone. I mirrored the movements of that younger self as I pressed play and curled the blanket tighter around me, like an embrace.
In that darkness, I listened and wept and watched the stars go out—then repeated it again, just for good measure. Just so I’d remember.
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