Wider Screenings column #1 May/June 2008
Inter-Personal Communication and Impossible Ideals
One of the most rewarding attributes of humanism is the joy possible in inter-personal bonding. Society has its lone wolves to be sure, but it is no surprise that the telling sentiment once behind Barbra Streisand’s hit song “people who need people are the luckiest of people” should still strike a note of recognition with so many. From Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus to the latest tome on how to improve your relationship, the thrill of communication and the ideals of intimacy between lovers has been an inspirational subject for much popular culture. And of course, cinema has embraced the study of inter-personal intimacy, from high drama to so-called women’s “weepies”.
Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal in When Harry Met Sally
The one constancy through films that explore the inter-dynamics of human relations is the emphasis on the nature of inter-personal bonding. In contemporary times, it is perhaps that timeless question posed by Nora Ephron in When Harry Met Sally that endures: the sly wondering as to whether men and women can be friends or if the prospect of sex will always get in the way. Intimacy. It’s an intriguing theme and an enthralling ideal to aspire towards. Indeed, in film the theme has its own legacy and examinations of human intimacy can result in works that seem to define the held moral priorities of their time. Now, with the wondrous advantage that DVD offers by putting the wealth of film history at the disposal of the home viewer, it is possible to either look back and reflect over this legacy or discover it afresh.
Take what one might consider an inter-personal dilemma as presented in the 1940s classic Brief Encounter. The film concerns a married woman (Celia Johnson) who by chance meets a man (Trevor Howard) at a train station. Each time they meet, as they wait for their trains, they chat, increasingly fond of each other to the point where they fall in love. Naturally, in the invigorating mix of passion and yearning that is found in the prospect of surrendering to a lover’s embrace, the two of them make arrangements for an intimate encounter. However, rather than go through with it, Johnson puts aside her passion and returns to a presumably chaste and staid marriage. When the film was released in the 1940s, this self-sacrifice in the name of marital duty was seen as a positive virtue, but today’s films can’t help but wonder if setting aside passion for the ideal of monogamous traditional marriage is indeed as virtuous and fulfilling as people make it out to be.
Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard
in Brief Encounter
The contemporary riposte to Brief Encounter can be found cumulatively in the films of British director Adrian Lyne, whose tantalizing looks at marital relationships and the prospect of the fulfillment of infidelity in Fatal Attraction, Indecent Proposal and Unfaithful make his works modern morality tales, exploring contemporary notions of inter-personal needs and the turmoil inherent in fulfilling need in the face of moral convention. In these popular films there still remains a deferment to the ideal of marriage as a kind of moral standard, but unlike the honourable self-sacrifice of Johnson in Brief Encounter, Lyne (and modernity) cannot help but ponder the dangerous invigoration of the alternative – the inter-personal fulfillment of a lover’s communication as emotional, sexual and intellectual self-actualization. The legacy of Brief Encounter is that it sets up what many subsequent films measure such inter-personal bonding against – the ideal of intimate love.
Glenn Close and Michael Douglas in Fatal Attraction
So, whilst a classic like Brief Encounter can find solace in an ideal, it is the nature of the ideal as illusory and self-deceptive that consumes subsequent examinations of the theme. By contrast thus there is, for instance, the seldom seen Maria’s Lovers. Here, John Savage has idolized Nastassja Kinski from afar for a long time, put her so high on a pedestal that having her is to him all that sustains him as a man. However, now married to her, he finds that sexually consummating his relationship with an “ideal” ironically diminishes that ideal. He paradoxically needs the sense of unattainability in order to sustain his “ideal” of love and the perfect partner. In the fallout of Savage’s resulting psychological impotence, Kinski is drawn to seek other men for the sexual and inter-personal contact she requires: the “ideal” destroys the inter-personal.
What is one to make therefore of cinema’s continued investigation into the inner workings of humanity’s need to relate and bond with another? Is there a direction away from tradition? What are they searching for if not an ideal? Certainly films can create tales of romantic intensity, indulging in fantasies of the perfect, ideal love but they can also call into question the moral expectations underlying such ideals. But, to re-state the earlier point, what remains constant is a search for the intimacy of communication – verbal, sexual, emotional – as an innate human need and an important factor in achieving personal fulfillment.
MUSIC TO BROWSE THIS COLUMN: with DJ Drifter
(courtesy of YouTube embedded video)
"Dare to dream, be what you can be. The rhetoric of the self-help, self-improvement movement is one of overwhelming positivism. It's nice to have the strength of mind, the passion to achieve what one is capable of achieving... Deepak Chopra said in No Limits magazine (Aug/Sept. 2008) that "when you discover your essential nature and know who you really are, in that knowing itself is the ability to fulfill any dream you have". It's an admirable notion. But me, I like music: knowing myself, sometimes I just like to sail away in an Orinoko Flow (Enya)."
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