love in context: a double feature

-The movies: Punch-Drunk Love (2002) and Monsoon Wedding (2001)
-The link: They're both love stories. I didn't say the link had to be terribly specific.
-The comestibles: Gouda cheese, Clementines, and the leftover Shiraz from when Leah was here. I have no idea how these things are going to go together, or how they'll go with the movies, but they're what I had on hand, and tonight was kind of an afterthought. Plus, the wine really needs to be drunk.
-Thoughts and expectations: Monsoon Wedding is one of my favorite movies. Punch-Drunk Love is a movie I've wanted to see for a long time. Pretty much I walked into Blockbuster looking for a movie I that I hadn't seen, wanted to see, and could make a plausible pairing with Monsoon Wedding. I did say tonight was something of an afterthought. It'll be interesting to see what happens.

Now, for the movies.

***
Wow. What an interesting combination. I'd really love to write a separate blog entry on each one, but I don't have time. So we'll stick with a brief overview, with a particular eye to how they comment on each other.

I knew they were both love stories, and I had a hunch I'd be able to make the link more specific, but I didn't know enough about Punch-Drunk Love to be sure. Now, though, I can say that they're both love stories deeply embedded in a cultural context. The romance itself in each takes up a fairly small amount of screen time (in Monsoon Wedding, of course, there are several romances, as well as other storylines.) So you have a love story with lots of other stuff going on around it.

I'm struggling to define the culture that Punch-Drunk Love lives in. It's contemporary American, obviously, but it's more specific than that. It's a culture that hasn't been named, as far as I know, but it's very familiar to us. I might even say it's the default culture of Americans: if you don't have a group-- family, ethnic, religious, activist-- then you probably live in this culture. It's the culture of isolation and alienation. Its hallmarks are a craving for intimacy and a profound distrust of people and institutions alike. There is a desperate need to be heard, to be understood, to connect with someone, anyone, but the knowledge of how dangerous it is to reach out for that is crippling. And it's not paranoid: they really are out to get us... if not to crush us maliciously, at least to use whatever we give them for our own ends.

Punch-Drunk Love is not subtle on this point. Twice, early in the movie, Barry Egan tries to break out of his isolation. He knows the dangers. In both interactions he voices, repeatedly, his worries about what the other person might do with the information he is giving them. They assure him he's safe, protected, that this is confidential. They lie.

And this is the culture the movie lives in. How do you have a love story in this kind of world? The movie skirts this question, simply allowing, almost miraculously, that Barry meets a woman who does love him, protect him, and forgive him. He can't possibly reach out for her: the avenues he attempted earlier to break out of his isolation were both much more clinical, professional. He was looking for closeness, but a distant kind of closeness. The idea of actually looking for a woman, an intimate companion, was inconceivable to him. He did everything he could to avoid it. She found him, she pursued him, she made it safe for him to come to her.

So the hope-- I might even say the daydream-- is that a Lena Leonard will someday appear in our lives, and like us enough to persist through our weirdness until we can bear to trust her. Then we will no longer be alone... and on the strength of that astonishing, wondrous not-being-alone, we can brave and conquer all the other hostilities of our world.

The culture of Monsoon Wedding is, of course, a family in India. I don't know enough about India to judge where it fits into modern Indian culture, but I know plenty about families, so that's where I'm going to focus. Family comes with its own problems, and its own kind of isolation. Paranoia is not an issue... you pretty much know who you can rely on for what, and when there's a betrayal of trust it's shattering (as opposed to PDL, where it's expected.) But just as there is an isolation of solitude, there is an isolation of belonging. In PDL, Barry Egan says, "I don't know if there is anything wrong because I don't know how other people are." That's the isolation of solitude... you are horribly conscious of the gulf between your mind and anyone else's and you have no idea what's going on on the other side. You can't define yourself in terms of other people, as we all for some reason feel compelled to do, because other people are hopelessly distant from you.

In the isolation of belonging, you have no problem defining yourself in terms of other people. You can't escape it. Everybody in a family has their labels, and the family as a whole has an identity against the outside world. The isolation comes because you're not really defined by those labels, and you know it. You have your secrets, and you have the pieces of yourself that no-one sees. The torment here is to be in a room filled with people who know you well, and yet don't see who you are; to have someone give you a glance of understanding, and yet have no idea where your pain really comes from (I am thinking of the scene when Tej has just offered to fund Ria's education, and amid the celebration someone mentions Ria's father, and Ria's eyes fill with tears.)

In the love stories of both movies there is a moment of honesty, where one character reveals to the other something they've kept hidden. And it is that moment that forges a union between the lovers: suddenly they are no longer isolated individuals, but allies against the rest of the world, whether it is the cold, bare hostility of Punch-Drunk Love or the noisy, nosy crowd of Monsoon Wedding.

Monsoon Wedding, of course, doesn't stop there. Being about a family, it displays a range of relationships in many stages. And it is clear that the moment of honesty is not a one-time thing. As relationships continue over time, there is a continual ebb and flow of concealment and authenticity. Isolation-- reaching-- and rebuff or embrace, leading to further isolation or another moment of unity, solidarity, lasting for a while until the process starts over again. And in between? The patterns of family life, the everyday conventions we use in dealing with those close to us. The quality of these patterns largely determines whether family is a comfort or a misery, and also either facilitates or inhibits the moments of authenticity. But I have strayed now from talking about movies, so I will end here.