I haven't written in here in a while because I didn't have anything I wanted to write about with any strength. The other night at the office, inspiration struck again.
At the production office, my boss Dave and I do the night shift and end up watching movies to fill the time. After plowing through the Harry Potter saga in a week, our selections have become less focused, more random-- but recently we've been watching chick flicks masquerading as guy-friendly comedies.
On a side note, it's funny the way Dave and I rationalize our movie choices:
ON 'THE SWITCH':
Me: Man, I love Jason Bateman. He's so funny.
Dave: Yeah dude. Well, I've seen 'Dinner for Schmucks,' so... (the other possible redbox choice)
ON 'LOVE AND OTHER DRUGS':
Me: Anne Hathaway's so hot. I heard she's naked a lot in this movie.
Dave: Really?
(decision made)
But anyway, I've had a conflicted relationship as an aspiring filmmaker with the Rube Goldberg machine-esque story grind in Hollywood, and all the formulaic movies that come out as a result of it. One of the genres most susceptible to this kind of hackneyed, ham-fisted corruption is the romantic comedy. More broadly, it's any love story-- but usually, for box-office reasons, romance comes served with a side of humor.
Maybe it's just the wavelength I'm vibrating on right now that makes me write all this, but I feel I have to become a defender of the romantic comedy, executed correctly (more or less). Side note-- the ending of 'Love and Other Drugs' was really forced. I like where your guys' heads were at, but come on. Close but no cigar.
It makes sense that these stories exist. They have existed, and will continue to do so as long as human hearts still beat, people still crave intimacy and affirmation, and our imagination has the range to imagine and dream about a perfect romance. To take this discussion to the next level and show how serious I am here, Hollywood romance-- at it's BEST, not always-- is a warm helping of Platonic Idealism.
And I like Plato-- his philosophy was metaphysical, mostly applied to describe the physical world. Or at least, most people that pick up Plato and read him will assume that his 'ideals' were kind of an abstract way of describing physical objects. But I think a better interpretation is to truly stick to metaphysics.
You can't locate love on Earth. It's not something that can be bottled up and pocketed, but it exists. It exists as a place in the mind-- and so does everything else, really. It's a field of possibility, and to each person or pairing of persons, some permutation of this field emerges and can be observed by others.
And to put it as simply as it can possibly be stated, love is important.
I had a kind of mini-epiphany the other night when I was watching (POSSIBLE SPOILER) Jake Gyllenhall flying up the freeway in his Porsche, chasing a tour bus with a Parkinsons-disease-riddled Anne Hathaway on it before she leaves for Canada. Side note-- oh, Hollywood.
But as I was watching, I went through several mental gear-shifts.
The first was cynicism. Every romantic movie ends like this. After all the trials and tribulations, the man (less commonly, the woman) has to chase the woman (less commonly, the man) before she gets away. A dramatic, heart-rending expression of passion is displayed, the two are reunited.
The second was acceptance. You know, you have to give it to Hathaway in this scene. She's really crying... well, Jake is leaning into his lines a little hard, but alright. Man, he knows what he's doing though. Or the writer does at least, that's literally exactly what she would've wanted to hear.
The third was identification. I know these tears.
As a man, it's hard to admit some of the pull these stories have over me. Not because I'm afraid people might call me a pussy or something-- I mean I love tons of quote-unquote gay shit. I have a burning love for pop music of all shapes and sizes, I enjoy reading poetry occasionally, I own a pink striped shirt. I honestly couldn't give a fuck what people think about me.
The real reason is because these movies teach things. Movies like these get in your head with a mix of well-intentioned idealism tempered with conditioned social values that you swallow without noticing-- and this clashes with the natural instinct that actually helps men get what they want.
All straight men think about women constantly, and about sex-- but the percentage of men actually getting the amount of sex they want is probably ridiculously low. I'll go further and say that I don't think most women are getting as much sex as they want either, but for different reasons. Socially, men have learned how not to get sex and women have learned to avoid it. But I digress.
You have to square this as a man. One way is to cultivate a hate for women. Not a hate that spits and scowls, but one that slowly seeps in deeper with time. Every man has felt this at some stage, but not every man has had the presence of mind to quell it. This kind of mindset is a sneaky world poisoner-- it will twist and warp every perception you have of everyone around you in subtle ways you'll never re-examine. It's like a burglar breaking into your house at night and moving all the books on your shelves a quarter inch forward, or pivoting all your picture frames two degrees to the left.
Despite a natural frustration that comes with learning how to actually deal with women, I’ve learned to love women. I think that the road to viewing women as prizes only is a short one to drive down as a man, and often it somehow pulls women in despite better instincts—but emotionally it’s a dead end.
It's been said that romantic comedies teach men to let women get away with murder. For a romantic, these movies sting. There's always scenes where the male romantic lead is a Man. The onscreen couple has been through the fights, they've gotten into their petty arguments which escalated, they've had the blow-out fight where the secret motive from Act I has been revealed and the girl storms out angrily.
And the Man comes back, maybe with flowers or chocolates or some other sentimental gift. He looks the girl dead in the eyes, completely hang-dog in appearance-- on the VERGE of tears but not actually crying (usually). He steps up and stops being stubborn. He accepts responsibility for his mistakes, but now He has this feeling. He knows now that his life will never be the same without this girl. He will go to the ends of the Earth and the depths of Hell for her. And the girl will try to push him away, saying she's too much work, it'll be too hard, too much has happened between them-- and the Man will dispel all of these petty thoughts with one fucking powerhouse line that encapsulates an ocean of emotion.
The girl will smile and cry, jump into his arms. They'll kiss.
Everyone romantic man dies a little inside remembering at least one time they tried to be Noah from the Notebook. The guy who never gave up, and suffered beating after beating and either pushed the girl away or watched her turn cold to him. The truth is, these tactics really don't always work. Lots of women love a guy that will fawn over them-- for a little while.
But again, all of this is avoiding the deeper truth that everything starts and ends with the mind. Life is really just a giant blank and you get to scrawl in your answer. And the truth is it’s not impossible to be Noah—it’s just fucking hard.
In these movies, you get a lot of what being a man means to me-- you just have to be smart enough to put the messages in perspective, just like anything else.
To me, being a man means being stoic. It means being passionate and caring, being loyal, being positive and unafraid of challenge. It means having the confidence to show yourself all the time without fearing the perceptions of others. It means you impose your own reality.
You can get all this from good Hollywood movies, from so-called "trash," digestible genre flicks. But we have genre to remind us of the most primal things in life.
I think that as a man, you respond to love by feeling it fully or pushing it away. The kind of risks you take when you let yourself feel are a lot scarier than the safety you feel by being weak and pushing people away. We all know that there's a special kind of pain that only those that we love the most can inflict, sometimes intentional and sometimes not, but standing up to it is really the only possible option. And this goes beyond romance.
This even goes beyond being a man-- it's about being a good human being. My philosophy is that you love harder than anyone else in the room, you die a thousand deaths for the people you care about, and
you don't stop pushing against the world until it's rearranged itself to your liking.
As I was watching the end of that movie, I considered that the ending was bullshit-- but then I reconsidered. The ending was my bullshit.
I'm a fucking romantic. Peace,
Ryan
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