Eucatastrophe Reader

“If we had not met again, everything would have come to a natural conclusion.”

Innocence REVIEW

Innocence (2000) is about a couple separated by circumstance who agree to meet again 40 years later, now in their 70’s. Claire is still married while Andreas is not. The connection they shared in youth is abundantly present from the moment she steps off the train to meet him. The film is a playing out of the opposing forces of love, loyalty, morality, and mortality.

The reunion is initiated by Andreas in the politest way possible. He is not assertive or uncareful. “I would like to meet you again. Is this possible?” he asks. She is hesitant at first. ““I shall always love you but please dear Andreas . . . “ but then feels compelled by forces of curiosity and memory to meet. When explaining her relationship with her husband, she says “We are good friends. That is all that really matters in the end.” And yet this is precisely what she concludes is not actually true. Her life without what her and Andreas share is actually a form of death while living 

Andreas and his daughter have a conversation where this subject is raised.

“So many people are dead inside. Nothing. A few memories. A few thoughts of the past . . . We should live. Its now that matters. You know what really matters in life? Love. Everything else is rubbish.”

“I am in love again,” Andreas says to his daughter, “With my very first love.” She is delighted to hear of it.

“You’re a wonderful child,” he says to her.

“Your’e a wonderful child too,” she says noting his giddiness.  

Claire’s husband is clearly hurt by the news of this rekindled flame (even though he knows just how cold the embers between he and Claire has been for decades). When he asks his son to talk sense into Claire, Claire responds,

“Life is brutal at times. Don’t judge me lightly . . . It isn’t always possible to resist. To obey the rules and deny the things that really matter.”

 Her son seems to understand and tries explain to his father that his mother is not in need of a doctor. “You have to live for something or someone,” he explains “Otherwise it doesn’t make sense.”

Eventually, Claire and Andreas meet again and eventually the discussion turns to what happened back in their youth. We are given to understand that the breakup was imposed upon the couple by a disapproving parent. Claire confronts him for not being tenacious enough. “You never really fought to get me back,” she says. “I expected you to come every night and save me but you didn’t.” Andreas can only apologizes and say that regardless, the love never abated. The two become “involved.”

Her relationship with her husband begins to deteriorate. He is hurt, wounded, angry. Claire wonders if she should have agreed to meet Andreas again. Everything has gotten ever so complicated. “If we had not met again,” she says, “everything would have come to a natural conclusion.”

“Or unnatural conclusion.” Andreas responds.  

The concluding line of the film is a voiceover a scene in which Andreas and Claire’s husband are walking together in the woods after she hs passed away. “I caused such hurt allowing love to blossom again,” Claire says, “I ask you all to forgive me but any other way would have been wrong – would have killed me. I have loved you both differently but completely.”

Question for Comment: What is the relationship between healing and wounding in these matters? Is it wrong to wound people in an attempt to reconnect with a relationship that should have never been disconnected?  

“Doesn't feel good to have people you trust be reckless with you, does it?”

Say You Will REVIEW

This is one of those movies that requires a sequel to know if it ends well. Not everything is wrapped up with a bow by the time the final credits roll. The story line keeps coming back to a central theme about whether or not people should be judged for leaving relationships they are expected to stay committed to. Over the course of the film you learn that high school senior, Sam’s mother left a previous relationship to marry his dad. Twenty years later, Sam’s father leaves the family by ending his own life. In the year since, Sam’s mother has been distancing herself from Sam in her grief and he feels it. She is depressed and he feels guilty for his decision to leave her alone in order to attend college.

There are two kinds of people," he says in his English class journal. "People who leave and people who stay."

Sam is just graduating from high school and starts to develop a close friendship with Ellie, a classmate who is still figuring out who she is (and who she wants to be with). “I like you, Sam, she says when explaining why she keeps seeing her old boyfriend even though she has started to get attached to Sam. “But I'm not really an all or nothing sort of person like you.”

When Sam finds a box of letters that were written between his mom and the man she loved before she married Sam’s dad, Sam decides to see if he can arrange a reconnection between them so that he can leave home to start his own life without feeling guilty.  He tries explain his reason to Ellie:

“Found all these photos of my mom with this guy. -Some guy before my dad.
-Like a high school boyfriend?
No.
It was serious, they were engaged. There were all these letters.
Did you read them? You did.
They were so different.
Different how?
My mom really loved this guy. She loved my dad too, but these letters... Every single one of them was about forever. My parents never talked like that.”

When Sam meet’s the old flame, he discovers that the man is still interested. “It's easy to draw lines in the sand,” the man says, “But trust me, people don't exist... on one side or the other.” “The truth is people are much more complicated than that,” he adds later, “They don't exist on one side or the other. You have to let them in just as often as you let them leave.” He explains to Sam that he had issues when Sam’s mom left and that there were good reasons why she chose Sam’s father.

 “Not everything has to be one way or the other, right?” Ellie tries to explain to Sam later when her commitment to him is demonstratively erratic.

“Haven't you ever been unsure about anything?” she asks Sam.

“No,” he replies, “Not when it comes to you.”

There is moment in the film when Sam promises to back up Elli in a difficult decision she has to make and he elects not to follow through because of her fickle commitment to him. “Yeah,” he says to her later, “Doesn't feel good to have people you trust be reckless with you, does it?”

Towards the end of the film, Sam and his mother have a conversation. “Dean's a good guy,” she says of her old fiancé’ “He did not deserve what your dad and I did to him.” And then she tries to explain her silence over the previous year.

A couple of months before it happened... we got into a really bad fight. I was just so sick of him making me suffer with him, you know?
And...
He asked me if I regretted choosing him over Dean.
And...
I just didn't answer, I just didn't say anything.
I just let him sit in it, you know, just let him wonder.
Mom.
Then a few months later he did what he did.
I really need you to forgive me for that because I can't forgive myself, Sam.“

In other words, her emotional abandonment was coming from a place of guilt.

I suppose the point is that in every one of the relationships of the movie someone stays at one point and leaves at one point and comes back at one point (except the father who made it impossible for him to come back) and in each case, they have their reasons. People are not stable. Sometimes, they are in the process of sorting themselves out and they make decisions to connect with you and abandon you for reasons that are not always about you.

In a moment of honesty, as the film concludes, Ellie tells Sam that she hopes that sometime in the next decade, she will grow up and be more committed than she is at the moment. “I wish we could've met down the road. When we were like 27,” she tells Sam, “and we have everything all figured out.”

I wonder if 27 is some sort of magic number. Is that when people are supposed to have themselves figured out well enough to make commitments?

Question for Comment: Have you made decisions to stay and leave someone? Have you been reckless with people who trusted you? Have they been reckless with you?

“I don’t think I was quite ready for a goodbye.”

Monsoon REVIEW

Imagine that you are young and have your entire life ahead of you. You are about to head off to college and your life-long friend and next-door neighbor have a decision to make: Do you love each other? There you are alone together swimming in the pool in the back yard, obviously attracted to each other. You begin to talk and it is clear that you are best of friends. You go for a drive together and spend the day in each other’s company experiencing the sheer bliss of being with someone so attuned intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, physically. The outcome of the day is a sense of profound happiness, satisfaction, affection, desire, love, and commitment. The car can barely contain the joy of the life-long decisions that have been made that day. “It wasn’t complicated. That is what makes it great,” Sarah says about the relationship.

And then “WHAM!” The car is struck on the passenger side and she is dead.

Gone.

Its over.

If something like this has ever happened to you, you probably know that it is not over. Love can often be impervious to death. This film is about that reality – the reality of people you love who are lost to you and yet won’t go away. This is a movie about the grieving process. About the different things that people will say to you as you try to “get over it.” Some will just demand that you move on. Some will tell you that grief never ends. Some will tell you that at some point, you have to take risks and jump into new relationships. Ultimately, John concludes that however moving on happens – whether neatly or raggedly, you have to be ready to move on before you can. If only the one we miss most could come to us in a vision and tell us that it is okay.

Throughout the film, we see John driving back to the scene of the accident. “I just wanted to finish that drive home,” he says. “That’s not going to happen, is it?”

“I can’t stay. I am not real,” his imagined Sarah says,

“You are to me,” he replies. “I don’t think I was quite ready for a goodbye.”

As the movie ends, we can hear Yael Mayer's song Carry On playing in the background. 

How do you know when it is time to let go?
How can you tell when it is time to farewell?
All things have a season, it all comes to an end
It's hard to follow reason when the heart won't bend

How do you know when it is time to make a change?
How can you tell, when it all feels so strange?
To leave friends behind for unknown things to find
Whether it makes sense we will only learn in time

And you win some and you lose some
And there's no right or wrong
And you look back at what you used to have
But now it's all gone
So you give up or you make up
For what you have lost

And you carry on, carry on
You carry on, carry on
Yeah you carry on, carry on
You carry on, carry on

Yeah you carry on, carry on
You carry on, carry on
Yeah you carry on,…

Question for Comment: The film raises an interesting question for people dealing with loss. Should one be over some past attachment before they move on to another? Or do we really need some new attachment to help us disconnect from the previous?

Something I Cannot Say

The Things We Cannot Say REVIEW

In the spirit of Kate Morton (an author I have reviewed several times lately), the author of The Things We Cannot Say, Kelly Rimmer, has written another story about the search for a parent’s past - a story about Alice, a woman who has been sent on a mission to uncover the story of her grandmother and what happened to her during the Nazi oppression of Poland in the 1940’s. Alice’s dying grandmother cannot speak (due to a stroke). But she has a story that she has never been able to tell. As fortune would have it, Alice also has an eight-year-old son with autism who also cannot speak. And, as we begin to discover, there are many issues about which Alice and her husband, Wade, cannot speak. Apparently, the assembling of so many things that cannot be said makes for a good story.

This particular novel involves the telling of two stories. One is the story of Alice and her quest to uncover her grandmother’s secrets and the other is the story of a young couple in war-torn Poland, Alina and Tomasz. Figuring out how the two stories connect is what keeps you reading.

Both stories are told in alternating chapters and both weave in the theme of secret telling and secret keeping. “No one ever wants to talk about it,” Emilia says of the way that her family keeps her from knowing what is actually happening in the world as the Nazi’s take over her country. “Everyone is so angry with me when I talk about it. Why do they want to pretend it’s not happening? Why can’t we talk about it?” Her request for more information receives the following response:

 “It’s just our way, Emilia. . . . Sometimes, talking about things makes them seem more real. Do you understand that?”

“I do. But I feel better when I talk about it. I want to understand.”

Decades later, an old woman who only speaks Polish and who’s ability to speak English has been crippled by stroke realizes that she must be open to having a long held secret uncovered if she is ever to find out what happened to her own life all those decades before.

One of the central themes of the book is well expressed in the paragraph below:

“I'm suddenly thinking again about Babcia [Polish word for Gramma]and Pa's inability to share their stories from their lives here, and wondering about all the things they surely must have seen and experienced that will never know about now, no matter how the trip goes. What happens when stories like theirs are lost? What happens when there is no one left to pass your experience on to, or you just can’t bring yourself to share it? Just once when I asked my grandmother about the war, instead of her telling me ‘that was a terrible time, I don’t want to talk about it,’ I wish she’d been able to say something more. Anything more. Maybe if she could have shared some of her story, I could have learned from it, I could have taught my children from it – we could have built a better world from the hard lessons she surely learned.”

Alice decides to fly to Poland to get answers. “It's too late for Babcia to tell me her story.” She insists, 

“It's too late for me to understand all of the moments big and small that led to the family I have in America now . . . But it is not too late for me to plant my feet hard against this carpet and to give this bewildering mystery absolutely everything I have."

It is a powerful story of love in a time of war. I should not wish to give the plot away but I will say this: I think it would be a precious gift to anyone’s life to eventually find out before it is all over “what happened?” and specifically, to find out what happened to a great love. By the time the novel concludes, Alice is able to reflect on all of her grandmother’s painful secrets and she is able to say:

“I'm grateful that she entrusted me to uncover a little of her story, because I can't help but feel that in finding her past, I found a lost piece of myself too.”

Question for Comment: Have you ever found out “what happened and why it happened” many years after something important in your life happened? In this novel, there are characters who believe that the past should be left where it is and others who decide to go and find out answers to such questions. Are those who go to uncover the past always right to do so? Or are they often wrong?

La Belle Dam Sans Merci

Waking REVIEW

Ben has a tough choice to make. He has to decide between the perfect relationship or a literal dream. His girlfriend of six years has just moved back into time and is ready to marry. Her father, a therapist, is ready to retire and hand over all his clients to Ben. Ben’s friends are all jealous of how everything is falling into place for him.

Enter Nadia. A girl that Ben has been dreaming about since he was a child. And as he soon discovers, she has been dreaming about him too. They start going on frolics with each other in their shared dream lives while both of them have significant others in their real lives. Ben is able to discover that his dream girlfriend actually lives in Sacramento and now he has to decide if he is willing to break up with his real fiancé’ to go running after his La Belle Dam Sans Merci to use the words of John Keats (“the beautiful woman without mercy”).

I met a lady in the meads,
       Full beautiful—a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
       And her eyes were wild.

I made a garland for her head,
       And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love,
       And made sweet moan

I set her on my pacing steed,
       And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
       A faery’s song.

She found me roots of relish sweet,
       And honey wild, and manna-dew,
And sure in language strange she said—
       ‘I love thee true’.

She took me to her Elfin grot,
       And there she wept and sighed full sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
       With kisses four.

And there she lullèd me asleep,
       And there I dreamed—Ah! woe betide!—
The latest dream I ever dreamt
       On the cold hill side.

I saw pale kings and princes too,
       Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried—‘La Belle Dame sans Merci      
       Thee hath in thrall!’

I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
       With horrid warning gapèd wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
       On the cold hill’s side.

And this is why I sojourn here,
       Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
       And no birds sing.

I suspect that the writer and producer would have us believe that Ben makes the right decision in the end. But perhaps that is something the film is asking us to debate.

Question for Comment: Have you ever sacrificed, or refused to sacrifice, a good life for a better mirage?

“We need to break up.”

See Girl Run REVIEW

Closure. “The act of ending something”

See Girl Run opens with a series of interviews with women talking about high school sweethearts. We learn that they are being vetted for a reality TV show that involves being re-introduced to their high school flames 20 years later. We soon discover that this is a movie about moments in people’s lives when they start imagining “what if” scenarios with people they were once attached to. “In reality,” the central character in the film says of her high school boyfriend, Jason, “We didn’t break up. We never have. . . . . technically, we never broke up.”

Emmie is now in her early forties and she is married but going through a marital conflict of sorts and she is given cause to wonder if maybe pursuing her marriage is the unfaithful course of action to take since it has become apparent that Jason is still living in their old hometown in Maine and still carries a torch for her. She is critical of one her employees who she deems unvirtuous for her serial infidelities. She begins to wonder however if the person she married was simply a person she settled with rather than the person she should have settled down with.

And so she heads home for a visit planning to get answers.

Jason, as luck would have it, is working in the same restaurant he was working in in high school while he strives to be a self-supporting cartoonist.

From here on in, the movie is an exploration of the question of commitment. When is it okay to let go of a dream, a fantasy, or  relationship? When is it not okay? How do healthy adults navigate the waters of their disappointments, their broken hearts, their losses, their experiences of falling out of love?

Perhaps it helps to examine the different minor characters and work our way back to Emmie and Jason.

First, there is Emmie’s widowed eighty-year-old grandmother who has begun to see and fall in love with an elderly man. She feels guilty that somehow she is being unfaithful to her husband even though he has been dead for 14 years. She has arrived at the place where she is ready to move on, afraid that her children will not forgive her if she does. She is overjoyed when she discovers that they like the gentleman and think it is a great idea.

Then there is Emmie’s brother. He is a depressed alcoholic who is himself stuck. He is in his mid-thirties, living with his parents and clearly unable to overcome his addictions. When he is asked about what he had going that he quit on in life, all he can say is “Something. Something great I think.”  At some point drinking became more important than any particular thing he had going and now he does not even know what could be more important than drinking if he wanted there to be something.

Next, there is an old high school friend of Emmie’s that Emmie meets in a clothing store. They take a moment to reconnect sitting on a bench and Emmie finds out that her friend is on her third marriage. When Emmie asks how she knew her friend’s relationship was over, the woman explains that her and her husband liked watching TV and since they liked different shows, they got extra TV’s for different rooms so that they could watch their own shows. Then they realized that even when they liked the same shows, they preferred to watch them in their separate rooms. And that was all the evidence they needed to part company.

We can follow that up by looking into the lives of Emmie’s parents. They seem to have agreed to maintain their marriage together by not really being married. They seem to have no intimacy and they fight about their alcoholic son a lot. When Emmie asks her father why he and her mom stay together given how much they seem to dislike each other, Emmie’s father gives her a metaphor as a way of explaining. His metaphor draws from his life in the navy and describes the difference between ballistic missiles and a cybernetic missiles. Ballistic missiles just land where you pointed them, he says. They do not alter their course just because the target moves. Cybernetic missiles change course and remain flexible as the target relocates. We are left to assume that there is some wisdom for relationships embedded in this metaphor – perhaps that it is best to know when a fantasy is not worth locking in on when the result is the loss of the actual target.

I used to ask myself “What if?” Emmie’s father says, “But you can live your whole life with ‘what ifs.’ Don’t you ever have to relish the choices you made?”

This brings us to Jason. The director leaves his character difficult to judge. It has been twenty years that he has stayed in town working at a seafood restaurant and trying to support himself as a cartoonist drawing frogs – the same frogs he was drawing in high school. It seems clear that he is never going to make a living drawing cartoon frogs but - he cannot disengage from his fantasy life. And so he keeps drawing them – he keeps refusing to take promotions in another location at the restaurant chain not wishing to give up on his fantasy that Emmie will come back. He is simply unable to move on in life from his high school job fantasy or his high school crush. Is he noble? Or immature? This crippling commitment to an idealized life becomes apparent when we discover that his father has been covering a lot of his expenses for him and buying his frog paintings. Jason cannot even afford the flowers that he sends to Emmie without a credit card his father gives him for essentials.

I think the point is that sometimes people change – sometimes they move on – sometimes they do not. And a person cannot afford to lock in on fantasies and projections of imagined people or even on real people when they die (in the case of gramma).

I hate to spoil the plot but when Emmie and Jason do meet, her message to him is short and sweet and poignant.

“We need to break up.”

Question for Comment: Is there any person or fantasy that you need to break up with?

Welcome to Eucatastrophe Reader

Esteemed Reader,

I have been posting book, poem, and movie reviews to this blog for about a decade. There are now almost 1300 book and movie reviews to be found here. Some are short. Some are extensive. There are reviews of documentaries, romance movies, dramas, novels, textbooks, primary source anthologies, biographies, memoirs, poems, plays, and etc.  I suspect that I average about two posts a week. I have several purposes for writing these reviews.

First, I often do not know what I think about anything until I write about it and I am a person who prefers to know what I think about things. 

Second, I am a college teacher and I find that writing down my analysis of what I watch and read provides me with a formidable file of thoughts I can later refer to in my teaching. 

Third, as I live alone, it is a surrogate way to have good conversations (if not with people present and living then with people distant and/or dead). 

Fourth, it is way to make a public service out of what is a rather attention-consuming and introspective use of time. I hope people on the internet who search for ideas can find some here. Statistics suggest that about 35 people a day log in here to get something out of all these pieces of analysis.

Lastly, I figure that this may be some form of immortality if I am suddenly taken in a car crash or a pandemic.  Maybe someday, some descendent (if I have any) will be interested to find out who great great Grampa Phil was. This will give them a good deal to go on. 

I think you may find a variety of eclectic interests here. I tend to pursue intellectual resources in phases. There is a Robert Frost phase, a Romantic era literature phase, a U.S. History phase, a Thomas Hardy phase, a Shakespeare phase, a ninth grade English literature phase, etc. But some idiosyncratic interests are scattered throughout - economics, psychology, religious history, popular culture, etc.

I hope you enjoy. 

Phil 

"I don't want to be perfect. I want to be us."

The One I LOVE REVIEW

The One I Love is a movie about this couple who are about to divorce. Their marriage counselor recommends that they go to this retreat house in the mountains for a weekend. When they arrive, they find that something bizarre is going on in the guest house on the grounds. Whenever one of them goes in there, they find an ideal version of their partner that they begin to relate with. Basically, it is his partner if his partner would just be who he wanted her to be (Or her partner if her partner would just be who she wishes he would be) i.e. the guy in the guest house exercises to stay fit while her "real partner" says "I ain't doin that.” Similarly, the woman in the guest house will make him bacon for breakfast while the “real” spouse won’t.

The viewer discovers over the course of the film that only two of the four people (I will call them “messy Ethan” and “ideal Ethan” and “messy Sophie” and “ideal Sophie”) will be allowed to leave the property (I know, a bit bizarre). In other words, real Ethan could fall in love with ideal Sophie or stick with messy Sophie. Or ideal Sophie AND messy Sophie could decide that they both want to leave with ideal Ethan. Ideal Ethan might decide that he will leave with either ideal Sophie or messy Sophie. Or both Sophie’s could decide that they do not care for ideal Ethan. All we know is that none of them can leave the grounds by themselves.  It appears that the rules of the game are set up such that the couple in the guest house have been told that the only way that they can leave is if they can get the visiting couple to break up.

Things go amiss however when ideal Ethan decides that he prefers “messy Sophie” And "messy ethian" decides he would rather be a messy couple: 

"I don't want to be perfect. I want to be us'" he says. Real Sophie is not sure she agrees. She finds an improved Ethan rather fetching. 

The question they face is an interesting one: “Would you rather leave with the messier - less perfected version of your partner if it means that you do not have to strive to be better yourself?” Or would you rather accept responsibility for improving yourself and thus get to leave with a partner who has done the same?” 

 It is an interesting conundrum. 

Question for Comment: If you have a partner, do you work as hard at improving yourself up to their expectations as you do at pushing them to live up to yours? Do the two of you put an equal amount of effort into self-actualization?