Miscellaneous Musings

October 22, 2022
 
On a Cliché Awfully Hard to Make Convincing
 

It is one of the most romantic moments in a movie. You know the moment when one character spots another for the first time and is immediately transfixed. Time seems to move slower as the character’s jaw dangles slightly and the eyes remain frozen on the figure some distance away. Later, this moment will be described in a number of clichéd ways – The world was standing still, I felt an instant connection, It was like magic, I knew I’d met my soul mate. Sound familiar?
 
Who invented this? Was it the writers of the Bible who first conceived of a world in which the first man laid eyes on the first woman and was instantly enthralled by her? Was it Shakespeare, who – with only two acts to play with – couldn’t afford to spend much time describing a long courtship? Was it those early dime novels that told the kinds of stories that got books and their authors banned? Whoever it was, they did movies a real disservice.
 
At least, Shakespeare could rely on fairies and magic. If two characters needed to suddenly be in love, he could simply have Puck cause a little mischief and - Voila! – instant love. For Romeo and Juliet, it was harder. Without the existence of magic in their tale, the audience had to rely on the skills of the performers playing those parts, yet even here they were aided by a degree of latitude. Romeo and Juliet are, after all, teenagers, and audiences can more easily believe that two teenagers would instantly be swept away by the sudden intensity of their emotions. Perhaps this is why tales of love-at-first-sight are slightly more successful when they appear in teen comedies and dramas. Would it be believable if Romeo were, say, a thirty-five-year-old man who spied a twenty-five-year-old Juliet, or would we immediately assume early mid-lift crisis? Or how about this – a widowed sixty-year-old Juliet and a single sixty-five-year-old Romeo? Would we see this as true love or the result of years of loneliness? One more – a thirty-year-old Romeo and a thirty-year-old Juliet? Would the similarity in their age make us more accepting of their instant love, or would we automatically suspect the real cause of their instant attraction was lust? And yes, there is a difference.
 
Would it make a difference when they met? Are we more accepting of instant love when the story is set in an earlier, “more innocent” time, one when women were given dance cards and gentlemen would politely ask if they could reserve the seventh dance of the evening. or when women were expected to wait for an admired gentleman to come a-courting? Does love at first sight seem more believable under these circumstances? If two travelers meet in Italy or France, are we more willing to believe that true love can blossom in days than we would be if the story took place in Russia or Greenland? And does the origin of the one they meet matter? Is a man with a European accent more easily accepted as a producer of instant love than a character with a southern accent? What about income? I imagine we’re more likely to accept a woman falling in love with a man who can take them around the world than one who is struggling to pay the rent. Just look at the ending of City Lights.
 
I recently sat down to watch Summertime, David Lean’s 1955 movie about an older woman who journeys to Italy and falls in love with an Italian business owner who just happens to be unhappily married. Their courtship happens at lightning speed. Consider this – they meet as customer and salesman, meet again briefly at an outdoor dining area, meet again when he delivers her purchase and has to fend off charges of having mislead her to get a sale, and then just like that, they’re in each other’s arms, proclaiming not interest or physical longing, but true love. Is it believable? Not in the slightest. For despite the romantic setting, the presence of musicians at the most opportune moments, the romantic feelings brought on by a gondola ride along the Grand Canal, and the always impressive blue skies, there is nothing in the script or the performances that suggests that the two of them have been brought together by a power so overwhelming that resistance is both futile and unwise. What seems more likely is that we have two lonely individuals. One has been in few if any relationships, and her experiences have been anything but positive; the other is pleasant and congenial, yet we recognize in him the kind of person who derives pleasure from work because so little else in his life is fully fulfilling. After all, a happily married man does not usually walk along the cafes of Italy alone, looking for an empty table to sit at. She allows herself a measure of happiness for once, and he spies a woman who just might be receptive to his advances. In other words, a relationship of convenience, the kind that – if we’re honest with ourselves – most foreign-soil, short-term relationships are – with the possible exception of Jessie and Celine from the Before trilogy.
 
Love is more believable in films in which the majority of the screen time is devoted to showing that love grow in strength. Films such as When Harry Met Sally, Before Sunrise, and Crazy/Beautiful get this right, and by the end of the film, few people in the audience doubt what has developed in front of their very eyes. Films also excel at presenting us couples that are already in love – married couples such as Al and Millie Stephenson in The Best Years of Our Lives – marriages in which one person has fallen out of love, such as Blue Valentine, Revolutionary Road, and Boyhood, and situations in which former flames meet years after their break-up and are surprised how strongly they still feel for each other, such as Bogart and Bergman in Casablanca and Jack and Ennis in Brokeback Mountain.
 
Contrast those with these relationships, and ask yourself whether you truly believed they were in love.
 
Catherine and Nick in Basic Instinct
Ben and Fiona in The Intern
Thor and Jane in Thor
Catherine and Dr. Cukrowitz in Suddenly, Last Summer
Lelaina and Troy in Reality Bites
 
I never did.
 
I can think of two movies that got it right. In addition to John Huston’s The Misfits, made in 1961, there’s William Wyler 1949 film The Heiress. The protagonist is Catherine Sloper, a plain-looking, socially-awkward young woman who seems destined to be single forever. She’s the kind of person whose dance card remains empty despite numerous men being told that she is present at the party. At one such social engagement, she happens to meet Morris Townsend, a young man whose dance card is equally blank, and the two of them strike up a pleasant, yet awkward conversation. Soon, and I mean soon, he’s proclaiming his affection, and she’s head over heels in love, even declaring her desire to marry him over the wishes of her father. It all sounds so romantic, yet it isn’t. In fact, it is not supposed to. We are meant to see the relationship exactly as Catherine’s father sees it, and to be utterly perplexed by the sheer enthusiasm that Catherine’s aunt, Lavinia, has for their engagement. And this time, our suspicions are proven correct.
 
Love is tricky. As a youth, I thought love was easy to fall in, and I guess I was right. I must have been in love with (and turned down by) someone new every other week. Fortunately, it was also easy to fall out of love that formed so quickly. True love, often the byproduct of an initial attraction not based on inner beauty, took time to develop, and while I never had a moment of realization that led me to run to a New Year’s party because I wanted the rest of my life to begin as soon as possible, I wrote my fair share of midnight notes proclaiming my recently-discovered love to someone I’d known for a while.
 
In movies, relationships often start quickly and then slow down. However, I’ve always found it to be the opposite, that the faster a relationship starts, the more likely it is to flame out just as quickly. Rarely is the reflected in movies, though, and I understand why. In movies, speed is a blessing. We can skip all the messiness of an initial courtship, ignore the months two people would normally spend getting to know each other, and focus on what really matters –you know, stopping the alien invasion.