Thinker. Dreamer. Lover

I’m not one to openly celebrate mass produced holidays so you can imagine my take on Valentine’s Day. It’s the holiday par excellence for consumerism, commercialism and capitalism and I believe it is one of the reasons people  incorrectly equate true love with an exchange of some sort of commercial enterprise; i.e. fancy dinner outings, chocolates and flowers – which are significantly inoffensive as barter gifts. The worst offender is jewelry particularly in the form of diamonds. As DeBeer states a diamond is forever – I doubt most relationships that focus on such commoditized exchanges of love are.

Believe it or not,  even this cynic heart can be melted by love. This Valentine’s Day I went out to dinner and then to watch the film Blue Valentine starring Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams– which gets to the real purpose of this post. Don’t get me wrong dinner was nice and the company was great.

What a brilliant film– the narrative centers on the two main characters, Dean and Cindy– and their own highly dysfunctional relationship. The tale is told from present perspective with flashbacks to Dean and Cindy’s earlier days when they met and how they fell in love. Young, naive and very much in need of each other they marry and Dean takes on the responsibility of father to a then unborn child although you don’t discover this fact until nearly the end of the film in a flashback, all the while having been witness to the endearing relationship he holds with his daughter Frankie in his present life. Indeed the opening scene of the film is perhaps the only scene  in the present tense narration where you see a happy and beautiful exchange of love and it occurs between Dean and Frankie.We realize at the end of the film the foreshadowing that these first few minutes actually represent.

For me the film was such a powerful message of love, family and dysfunction portrayed in  a realistic, absolutely genuine fashion. In  recent conversations with my own family we had been discussing dysfunction and how growing up in a home were your parents hold a tumultuous, unsteady or even abusive relationship profoundly and subconsciouly impacts your own adult perceptions of what love between a man and a woman is and for that matter between father and/or mother and child. My cousin made such a simple  but astute point by declaring that it’s the easiest thing to fall into the same pattern as the one we knew as children and in order to break the cycle of dysfunction you must truly be conscious and aware of your own flawed notions of love and actively work to be  better. You have to achieve self realization, act upon agency and promote something different than is known to you.

This film exactly captured what happens when the cycle is not broken and dysfunction is perpetuated. Dean is a hopeless romantic, abandoned by his mother and neglected by his father he has little motivation in life. His greatest want and need in life is to love someone and to receive back the love, support and nurturing he unfairly missed out on as a child. He starts a young man full of romantic notions and with a tender open heart. He let’s himself go and in the course of his relationship with Cindy who does not fulfill his ultimate desire, becomes a waste of a man unmoved by much and relinquished to drink himself into a daily state of altered reality. Cindy conversely is an only child whose focus in life is limited by her lack of confidence or self worth. Her male model is her asshole father who emotionally abuses her mother who in turn is a defenseless weak woman with nothing to show of her own. Cindy’s own lack of self-esteem, joy or dignity is exemplified  in a  scene were we clearly see Cindy mid-intercourse  in a submissive position leaning against a futon couch not seeming to enjoy herself while her lover satisfies his own needs and irreverently comes inside of her.  It is from this act that she ends up pregnant shortly before meeting Dean.

The deterioration of their relationship is directly attributable to them succumbing to the dysfunction that has permeated their lives. They’ve permitted the damage caused in their childhood to impede upon their success as adults and moreover together in a relationship. Dean seeks a love that Cindy is unable to provide him– she in turn is left unsatisfied with the man he permits himself to become.

The culminating moment that fully embodies the severity of their dysfunction and crescendos into the end of their relationships is symbolically played out one night in a dingy hotel room. Dean seeking intimacy with Cindy, Cindy completely turned off by him by not being treated aggressively, by his passive desire for her. She lays herself on the floor, submissive — assuming a role she knows well in her sexual relations – assuming Dean will just take her and use her body  to fulfill his needs.  What he needs however is more emotional than physical and in turn he denounces her, demands to know why  it isn’t enough that he has been a loving husband and dutiful father to her daughter? It’s tragic, it’s twisted and sadly in that moment both characters destroy any remnant of the  love that may have once existed between them. What is most unfortunate is the ending. Although you see Dean and Cindy’s relationship unhinging, Dean was a loving and caring father to Frankie and at the end as his heart is left broken by Cindy he also walks away from his daughter. You  feel an ache in your own heart for Frankie’s suffering and for the vicious cycle she as a child is cruelly and involuntarily pulled into.

It may seem an odd choice of movie for Valentine’s day– a feel-good film it is not- but I’m a realist and this is a great movie. It pulls you into the story as if you were partaking in the lives of two actual people and not enough accolades can be given to Gosling and Williams for their performances. This is what good film is meant to do- prompt an emotional response and move you.  The  greater implication of this post however, is my own realization that despite my general disdain for V-day, how fortunate I am to go out and celebrate the superficiality of the holiday with all it’s romantic notions with that special someone  in a completely functional, normal way.  It took me a lot of work to get to where I am but I wouldn’t have it any other way and for that I am extremely grateful.