Artistic Voyeurism | Better Than Therapy

These aren't fun movies but demonstrate the honesty set apart from your own behavior

Mom and I love going to movies. Together, apart, in theaters or at home, we love movies. Last week we decided to catch the latest Jason Statham vehicle. The BeeKeeper. As expected, it wasn’t a masterclass in great scriptwriting, direction, or acting but it was fun. Really goofy, violent fun.

“I love him. I see him in a movie and I want to be him.” My 74-year old mother wants to be Jason Statham and I freaking love that.

This reaction is at the core of great storytelling and a central tenet missed by so many storytellers out presenting their stories: if the audience can’t identify with at least one character, either want to be that character or can see themselves on screen, you lose them. Saltburn left me dry as a Mormon sister wife’s sandy cooch because I found no finger hold on any single character onscreen. I like to refer to this phenomenon as universal commonality and without some sense of its importance, the story falls flat except as an intellectual exercise.

John Wick (all four ridiculously entertaining movies) starts as an exercise in universal commonality. Wick has lost his wife and she has given him a puppy to help him grieve with grace. The puppy is killed by bad guys because who other than bad guys kill a puppy? We feel connected to a master assassin with mad skills in killing because few of us can stomach the idea of someone killing our pet. Few of us can identify with the ability to kill a man with a pencil but the dog thing? We get that. We feel that. And we’re willing to go along with the increasingly complex world building in that series because of that simple, universal connection.

The most fun stories give us that entry. Less fun but far more therapeutic are the stories we can see ourselves in. We love those inspirational tales of Will Smith, on his ass but determined to feed his kids, miraculously beating the odds to become a hugely successful Wall Street trader. Not because we want to be a Wall Street viper but due to the simple fact that every one of us has been on our ass and see his choices as ones we could make as well.

Harder still are the stories where we can see a character make choices we have made and suffer for them in exactly the same way we have. For myself the two films that resonate deeply are The Fisher King (a movie I watch regularly whenever life is kicking my ass) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (primarily because I identify so strongly with the Joel character).

I’m not a huge proponent of therapy. Like religion, if it helps you, groovy. You be you and more power to you. Try not to push it on me. I get my therapy from the voyeurism of watching art.

This past weekend I decided on a whim to watch two movies sitting in my queue for ages that I knew were good movies based on recommendations but was reticent to sit through. It makes sense that I avoided them. If I lost a child, the last movie I’d want to sit through is Kieslowski’s 1993 film Three Colors: Blue or Van Groeningen’s 2012 The Broken Circle Breakdown. Watching Derek Cianfrance’s 2010 Blue Valentine or Noah Baumbach’s 2019 Marriage Story is not super fun when living through an awful divorce but a year and half down the line, I went into the tunnel.

First up was Blue Valentine. Starring Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams (who both were producers on the film as well) the story splits its time between the obvious and gut wrenching end of a marriage and the early halcyon days of love that brought them into it.

Dean:
I feel like men are more romantic than women. When we get married, we marry, like, one girl, 'cause we're resistant the whole way until we meet one girl and we think, "I'd be an idiot if I didn't marry this girl. She's so great". But it seems like girls get to a place where they just kinda pick the best option... 'Oh he's got a good job.' I mean they spend their whole life looking for Prince Charming and then they marry the guy who's got a good job and is gonna stick around.

Dean sees Cindy and immediately feels connection. He gives her his work number and obsesses over his belief in love at first sight until he sees her on a bus. Cindy has been trying to break away from an abusive relationship from a high school jock and she and Dean reluctantly have a magical night of he playing songs on his ukulele and she dancing to the music. Soon after, Cindy realizes she is pregnant but doesn’t know who the father is (likely the jock she dumped) and Dean, being informed that it is not his child, proposes marriage on the spot. Cindy needs escape; Dean has fallen head over heels. This foundation is revealed as we see how dysfunctional they have become years after their daughter is born.

Dean:
[Having dinner in the Future room] You're not gonna eat that?

Cindy:
Why don't you do something?

Dean:
What do you mean?

Cindy:
I don't know.

Dean:
What does that mean, "why don't I do something?"

Cindy:
Isn't there something you wanted to do? Isn't there something you wanna do?

Dean:
Like what?

Cindy:
I don't know. You're good at so many things. You could do anything you wanted to do, you're good at everything that you do. Isn't there something else you wanna to do?

Dean:
Than what? To be your husband, to being Frankie's dad? What do you want me to do? What-what-what... in your, like, dream scenario of me, like, doing what I'm good at, what would that be?

Cindy:
I don't know. I just... you're so good at so many things. You can do so many things. You have such capacity.

Dean:
For what?

Cindy:
I don't... you can sing, you can draw, you can... [chuckles] dance.

Dean:
[Exhales] Listen, I didn't wanna be somebody's husband, okay? And I didn't wanna be somebody's dad. That wasn't my... goal in life. For some guys it is - wasn't mine. But somehow I've... it was what I wanted. I didn't know that. And it's all I wanna do. I don't want to do anything else. That's what I want to do. I work so I can do that.

Cindy:
I'd like to see you have a job where you don't have to start drinking at 8 o'clock, in the morning, to go to it.

Dean:
No, I have a job that I *can* drink at 8 o'clock in the morning. What a luxury... you know? I get up for work, I have a beer, I go to work, I paint somebody's house - they're excited about it. I come home, I get to be with you. What's... Like, this is the dream.

Cindy:
Doesn't it ever disappoint you?

Dean:
Why? Why would it disappoint me? I could still do whatever I could do.

Cindy:
[Over Dean] Because you have all this potential.

Dean:
So what? Why do you have to f***ing make money off your potential?

Cindy:
Look, I'm not even saying you have to make money off it. Do you miss it?

Dean:
[Over Cindy] What does potential mean? What does even potential mean? What does that mean "potential"? Potential for what? To turn it into what?

Cindy:
We rarely sit down and have an adult conversation because every time we do... you take what I say and turn it around into something that I didn't mean. You just... twist it. Start blabbing. Blah-blah-blah-blah-blah.

Dean:
If you're not interested in what I have to say, then maybe I just shouldn't say anything.

Cindy:
[laughs]

In watching Blue Valentine, I see so many choices I’ve made in the past across most of my romantic relationships, so much of Dean that I see in myself. Two of my marriages came about as my falling for someone in need of escape from her choices of wrong partners and my desire to be the hero of those stories, to be the good guy who shows up. The trouble is that those looking for escape choose the safe choice without thinking past the person like someone drowning cares less about anything more than not drowning. The self imposed ‘hero’ becomes a welcome mat, doing anything and everything to please someone who would rather be in a more toxic relationship because the drama of it all keeps things humming.

One takeaway would be to no longer be a nice guy (not to say that I’m always a nice guy but I’d give myself a 60/40 on the nice vs asshole scale). A better takeaway is to comprehend the difference between being the good guy and falling in love with she who needs saving. The most important finding in a film like this is that no matter how beautiful the beginning, the ending is always pretty ugly and it’s usually no one’s fault. Neither character, despite their flaws, are painted as a villain and that’s really the intersection between emotional devastation and cold, hard truth.

It’s a brutal movie but brilliant nonetheless.

Marriage Story. Equally brilliant. A little more difficult to relate to as both Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson portray people on the more monied side of things yet are still every bit as flawed and human as the rest of the bunch.

Johansson is Nicole, Driver is Charlie. She is an actor—famous for a teen movie and since a celebrated New York stage actor. He is a director—recipient of a MacArthur Genius grant and the up and coming impresario of a theater ensemble headed straight for Broadway. While the money involved in the story was alienating for me, the connection to the stage sucked me right in. I know these people. I’ve been these people. In a certain angle, this is the story of my second divorce (sans the kid in the middle and the lengthy, brutal divorce procedure).

The film begins with a couples therapy exercise and each provide a voiceover of what the appreciate in their soon to be ex-spouse. It’s obvious from these that the two love each other but have come to a place where that simply isn’t enough. She decides she does not want to read it in front of him and the game is afoot. Theirs is a marriage of unequals. She is an actor (with all the ‘see me’ pathology involved in that profession) perpetually in her husband’s shadow. He is unwavering in his pursuit of his own artistry, is given most of the credit for their onstage collaborations, and tends to give her credit between the two of them but take it for himself in public.

Nicole:
You know, I just watched that documentary on George Harrison, and I thought, “Own it. Just own it. Be like George Harrison’s wife. Being a wife and a mother, that’s enough.” Yeah, then I realized I couldn’t remember her name.

Charlie is caught off guard by this. He hasn’t been paying attention and she has slipped away, looking for “her piece of earth” that is hers apart from the marriage. He believes they can simply deal with it between themselves until she gets a lawyer (Laura Dern). If Marriage Story is about anything specific it is how the system in place legally is designed to make the act of divorce adversarial. Both start it out as sad but kind and eventually become angrier at one another as each legal hurdle increases in acrimony.

Charlie:
You want to present yourself as a victim because it's a good legal strategy. Fine, but you and I both know you chose this life! You wanted it until you didn't. You used me so you could get out of LA.

Nicole:
I didn't use you.

Charlie:
You did, and then you blamed me for it! You always made me aware of what I was doing wrong, how I was falling short!

Charlie and Nicole are simply two married people who have grown to want two different lives, he content with the status quo, her seeking a kind of personal validation apart from him that can only be done solo. Unlike Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale, there are no villains. Even the divorce attorneys are doing the job without animus.

If I found something that knocked me in the nuts a bit, it was Charlie’s response to Nicole when she brings up his sexual tryst with his stage manager. He insists it was only one time, she doesn’t care, and he responds:

Charlie:
You shouldn’t be upset I fucked her. You should be upset that I had a laugh with her.

This brought home a weird moment that I hadn’t fully processed until I heard him speak the line which made me stop, pause the film, and sit quietly for a moment. My third ex-wife had a lover for nearly three years, unknown to me but obvious in hindsight (like Charlie, I just didn’t see it). Before I knew she’d been selling sex but after we’d decided we were getting divorced, I asked her to leave the apartment so I could call my family and let them know the split was happening.

When she came back she confessed that she had gone over to his place and they had watched a Will Ferrell movie together. “It was really pretty funny,” she commented.

I would’ve preferred she’d gone over and been raw dogged than sit on a couch and laugh at a movie she would never had agreed to watch with me while I wept on FaceTime. I was more upset she had a laugh with him.

In the end, while sad to see, the film closes with a sweeter and more hopeful conclusion that Blue Valentine as Nicole, now divorced, performs a simple, lovely act that indicates that there is still love but not marriage.

Similarly to the moment last year when I decided to rewatch Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, my experiences in divorce are reflected by the stories put out in films about the subject. As a ‘fly on the wall’ I get to spy on these fractured relationships and clue in to behaviors that I have found in my own choices and, with the remove provided by artistic distance, learn from the stories lessons for my own.

At some point, grief becomes an intellectual exercise and I’ve had enough time and soulful family caretaking in the past year and a half to feel that transition. Sure, there are moments of ennui and angst over the losses cumulated from the most recent split up but, overall, the therapy of artistic voyeurism is both cheaper than a freaking therapist and more entertaining.