Boys 2 Men
Theatre reviews now live over here but that doesn’t mean I can’t review the occasional movie back at TAS, does it?
Now that my main occupation is writing screenplays, I’ve been making more of an effort than usual to see movies as they come out. Pathetically, that means I’ve seen only half this year’s Best Picture nominees. The mere fact that I wanted to see that many, though, and that most of them seemed worthwhile whatever my criticisms of them, speaks well of the year in movies. But it’s still striking that my own pick for best film of the year, while it did garner one nomination in a major category, isn’t on the swollen Best Picture list.
That film is Blue Valentine.
I have rarely seen a film that is so effective and so subtle in communicating ugly truths about the world. In this case: that a woman can fall completely out of love with a “nice” man, to the point that their marriage cannot be saved.
Other critics have already commented on the many virtues of the film. The acting is raw and powerful, the writing spare and perfectly pitched. The structure of the film is brilliantly conceived, running on two parallel tracks: the present, depicting the final collapse of the marriage, and the past, from first meeting through the wedding. The camera work reinforces the distinctions between the two tracks: the scenes in the present are shot in a cold light and framed to reflect the claustrophobia of a failing relationship, while the flashback scenes are warm and open.
But I wanted to take a moment to talk about one aspect of the film that I’m not sure has been properly understood, and that is the husband’s character.
A lot of people have reacted to the movie as the story of class-crossed love, of what happens when a woman with ambition marries a man without any. Cindy (Michelle Williams character) once wanted to be a doctor, and still has ambitions to better herself; Dean (Ryan Gosling) is more satisfied the way he is, focused on the home. That is certainly part of what’s going on – but it’s not all of it, and framing the story this way, it seems to me, is too easy on Dean and too hard on Cindy. Others have highlighted the fact that Dean is a high-functioning alcoholic, and the toll this must be taking on the marriage, but that strikes me as wrong as well – we don’t really see the kinds of screw-ups that we associate with even high-functioning alcoholics, and Dean’s drinking struck me as primarily a symptom of a marriage going sour rather than a cause.
The key thing about Dean is not that he’s of a lower social status, nor that he lack career ambition, but that he is a child, and specifically a child still looking for a mother. Very late in the movie, in one of the flashback scenes, we learn that Dean’s mother abandoned him and his father during his childhood. Just walked out. It’s tossed out casually, so you almost might miss it, but it’s an absolutely essential biographical detail that pulls the different strands of the character together.
Dean is generally described in reviews as being a “good father” – and that’s how he thinks of himself. But what does his “good fatherhood” consist of? What it mostly consists of is being a good playmate for his daughter.
Let’s take a close look at the first sequence in the movie, when the family, already falling apart, wakes up and gets ready for work and school. What does Dean do? He discovers that the dog is missing. He pretends to be a tiger and playfully wakes up his wife (which she doesn’t appreciate). Eating breakfast, he laps up raisins like a cat (a leopard, he says). All this he does alongside his daughter.
What does he not do? He doesn’t go out and find the missing dog. That’s mom’s job. Instead, he complains that it’s her fault the enclosure was left open. (Which, by the way, suggests she was also the last one to walk the dog in the evening. Another job that’s apparently hers.) He doesn’t make the breakfast. That’s mom’s job. Instead, he complains that she made breakfast wrong (she just poured boiling water over instant oats instead of boiling proper oats in the water). He doesn’t get the kid ready for school. That’s mom’s job. Instead, he complains when she tells him to stop playing with the food because they are on a schedule. He insinuates that she’s a bad mother because she lacks a sense of play, yet Cindy is perfectly capable of turning getting dressed into a game, a game the daughter enjoys. She just doesn’t lose herself in the game. The game, for her, is a means to an end (getting dressed and out the door), not an end in itself. Because she’s a grownup.
It is a phenomenally economical sequence. It doesn’t just show how little love is left in the marriage (which is what every reviewer has picked up on). It doesn’t just show that he’s good with the kid (which is what every reviewer has picked up on as well). It shows us how his way of being good with the kid is not actually good parenting, how it reflects his lack of adult responsibility and over-identification with the child, rather than actual “good father”-hood. It’s a perfect counterpoint to another exquisitely economical scene of a marriage falling apart, the opening to Kramer vs. Kramer, when we see, in just a few short phrases (“you’ll be real proud of me,” Dustin Hoffman says to Meryl Streep, apropos of some kind of gold star he got at the office) that the husband relates to his wife as if she’s his mother, there to take care of and praise him, and that she just can’t take it anymore; a brief interaction that’s nonetheless enough to show us why she’s willing to abandon her own child to be rid of the responsibility for the overgrown boy she married. Hoffman’s character is hard-driving and successful, a typical “male,” while Gosling’s is domestic and child-focused, a typical “female” role, as Gosling himself put it. But what they have in common is more important than what divides them: they are both boys, married to mom, whose job is to take care of them.
A second key scene: how does Dean find out that Cindy is pregnant? They are walking over the Manhattan Bridge together, and he knows something is wrong. “I’m very intuitive,” he says, and demands to know what’s up. When she refuses, repeatedly, to tell him, what does he do? He climbs over the fence and threatens to jump off the bridge! Mind you, this isn’t a scene from when the marriage is falling apart. This is back in the warm-lit, open and spacious flashback period, back when they still loved each other. It’s a massive, huge, flashing red light of terrifying neediness, that Cindy ignores because she is so desperate to find someone who will save her from the fate of single motherhood, but it’s there for us to see it. Dean cannot handle her being emotionally remote – whether because he is convinced she’s pulling away from him because of something he did or simply because he can’t bear the feeling of withdrawal regardless of the reason (again, the abandoning mother is there in the background). He just can’t bear it, to the point that he resorts to a hysterical threat of suicide. That’s how needy and vulnerable he is. Before the marriage goes south. Before, in fact, they are married at all.
When Cindy quizzes Dean at their hotel about why he doesn’t have any ambition, why he doesn’t want to make something of his talents – for music, for example – I had to remind myself that this was a wife talking to her husband. It sounded so much like a mother berating her lazy son. And his reaction – I’m just a domestic guy; I didn’t aim to be, didn’t plan on marrying and raising a kid, but it turns out that’s all I really want to do – is a lie he tells himself every day as self-justification. Because he isn’t being the good mother. Where is the scene (to compare again to “Kramer vs. Kramer”) where Dean expertly makes French toast for his beloved daughter? Where, for that matter, is the scene where he tells Cindy he will fight for joint custody? The fact is, he isn’t running the house, managing the kid’s life. He’s doing more than many dads, but much, much less than the typical mother – and, again, he’s constantly on his wife’s case that she’s not doing enough on the domestic side even though not only is she the primary breadwinner with a much more difficult job than he has, she’s actually running the house as well!
Judd Apatow, our most sophisticated purveyor of false hope to the boy-men of America, should be forced to watch this movie. Because this movie tells the truth. There is no hope for those boys, unless they become men, and neither the love of a good woman nor the sudden confrontation with actual children (their own or somebody else’s) will do it for them.
I haven’t seen the movie but this really rings true. Many popular movies lean toward greater sympathy for the parent who is most childish. It can be very funny to watch in movie form but not so funny for people who are living it.
— Joules · Feb 8, 06:27 PM · #
Spot-on, and I’m glad this was posted at the Scene. You know, I seem to remember a line from Dean during one of the arguments in the car: “What does it mean to be a man? What does that even mean?”
— williamrandolph · Feb 8, 06:39 PM · #
Thanks for this great review. It’s the first one I’ve read that has made me want to see the movie. As Joules points out, “many popular movies lean toward greater sympathy for the parent who is most childish,” and my impression of the movie from reading other reviews has been that this movie leans that way as well. Yours is the first review I’ve seen that suggests that this identification with the more childish parent doesn’t necessarily produce the only (or the most thoughtful) reading of the film.
You’ve also got me thinking about the depiction of parenthood in film. Hmmmmm… If I were designing a course on the depiction of parenthood in film, which films would I teach?
— Kate Marie · Feb 8, 06:47 PM · #
Kate Marie:
I’m assuming you’re talking English-language films only, and that you mean films about parenthood, not childhood or “family.”
A lot of films “about” parenthood are, unfortunately, really didactic and not actually very good movies. Like, for example, the move, “Parenthood.” That’s not necessarily a problem if you’re doing cultural analysis. But it’s a problem if you want to actually study decent films.
Here are some suggestions, off the top of my head:
- Kramer vs. Kramer (obviously) – Flirting With Disaster (very funny, and very much a modern film) – Bambi (a classic) – Mary Poppins (also a classic, and lots of detractors, but too obvious to ignore) – Finding Nemo (a much more contemporary film – but quite didactic) – Ordinary People (not sure since the kids in question are grown) – The Searchers (cultural icon and I think quite on-point to your theme) – The Squid and the Whale (scarifyingly painful contemporary film) – Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (obviously, though it’s a film of a play)
That’s a start, anyway.
— Noah Millman · Feb 8, 07:33 PM · #
Great suggestions, Noah. I love The Searchers idea. How about Stella Dallas (another one with lots of detractors, I know), You Can Count on Me, and maybe a Tree Grows in Brooklyn (the last two also explore the “childish parent” theme, I think).
I thought about The Squid and the Whale, too, but I still can’t figure out whether I think of that movie as a scarifyingly painful look at parenthood/divorce or just a scarifyingly painful depiction of child abuse. But maybe that’s part of the point of the film.
I haven’t seen Flirting With Disaster. I’ll have to take a look at that one. Thank you!
— Kate Marie · Feb 8, 07:53 PM · #
Child abuse? Really? Yeah, I didn’t get that. My question would be: is it really about parenthood? Because the kids are really the central characters, so it’s arguably about childhood, and going through divorce as a child/adolescent, rather than about parenthood.
Haven’t seen Stella Dallas or A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (read the book, a looooong time ago). Don’t remember You Can Count On Me very well.
I’m curious: is this what you do – teach film?
— Noah Millman · Feb 8, 08:05 PM · #
More suggestions:
- Raising Arizona
- Rebel Without A Cause
- Shane
- Slums of Beverly Hills
- Terms of Endearment
- Tender Mercies
- The Graduate
- The Ice Storm
There’s also “The Kids Are All Right” from this year, though I didn’t think that film was terribly deep.
— Noah Millman · Feb 8, 08:24 PM · #
I can’t help but think of this in relief with Hannah Rosin’s “The End of Men” thing. It seems to me, having seen the movie quite recently, Dean is a character who is making a go of the world that Rosin wants to live in. And while I recognize the ways that Dean is failing to do all that he should do (although I think you are a bit hard on him), I also think that if Rosin is right and men have to adapt to this new role, I don’t think that we can expect much better than Dean from most men. Men still grow up subject to relentless propaganda insisting that their value is a matter of their income, or their climb up status totem poles, or their number of sexual conquests. It’s not easy to transition from that to the maternal men that Rosin predicts and that Dean represents, and it’s no wonder that someone like Dean would react against that attitude by rejecting it so forcefully that he doesn’t commute that drive into being a productive domestic partner but into not really trying at all.
It’s worth saying that I’ve brought up Rosin’s ideas, in a casual way, with a lot of my male friends. And the reaction is almost exactly the same: many wouldn’t mind the kind of role evolution Rosin advocates, except that they perceive it to be death for themselves as a romantically or sexually desirable person. “That’s how you get cheated on”/“that’s how you end up single your whole life” is a common refrain. Blue Valentine seems to reinforce that message, although I understand the subtler messages that you are describing.
For me, personally, I think that you have a little too much faith that being a grown up can be cleanly divided from the age-old tradition of being Category: Man, with all of the repression and reductive attitudes that comes with it. But I suppose this is too abstract.
— Freddie · Feb 8, 10:55 PM · #
I’m curious: is this what you do – teach film?
Heh, no. I just love movies. I used to teach literature. Now I just stay home and teach my daughters (including evolution, and it’s sad to have to include that disclaimer all the time, but otherwise people get the wrong impression). Anyway, a class on the depiction of parenthood in film is one I’d love to take — or teach, for that matter.
I suppose I don’t remember The Squid and the Whale all that well, either. Maybe the painfulness of it just turned me off, but I remember thinking that the parents’ treatment of the younger child was so neglectful at times as to seem abusive.
I recommend A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I think it’s one of Elia Kazan’s most underappreciated films. The focus of this one is on the child, too, but the film really does a masterful job of portraying the complicated relationship between the responsible parent and the child-like parent and of suggesting the daughter’s shifting allegiances between them.
Great suggestions, especially Raising Arizona, The Ice Storm, Shane, and Tender Mercies.
— Kate Marie · Feb 8, 11:08 PM · #
If the film doesn’t have English subtitles I probably don’t have the stomach to watch it, though you’ve almost got me interested in this one. But for a movie about parenting, and a relationship between a father and sons, I would recommend Vozvrashcheniye (Возвращение). It was almost the first Russian film I ever watched, and many Russian movies later I still think it’s near the top.
— The Reticulator · Feb 8, 11:21 PM · #
Excellent insights, but I think you are overstating the perceptiveness of critics when you write:
“A lot of people have reacted to the movie as the story of class-crossed love …”
I read dozens of reviews of “Blue Valentine” and most didn’t notice the class differences. The conservative reviewer in the NY Post did a good job on class in “Blue Valentine,” but he stood out.
In general, most film critics don’t consciously notice stuff that requires a knowledge of the world outside the history of film, like “How much does a nurse make these days relative to a house painter?” That doesn’t mean they get the thumbs up / thumbs down decision wrong — the critical consensus is usually quite accurate as to whether a film is well made or not.
It’s just that reviewers can’t explain the real reasons why the “Blue Valentine” struck them as realistic, fresh, interesting because they don’t have the mental categories for thinking about subversive questions like: Why do working wives tend to fall out of love with domestic-oriented husbands? All their feminist indoctrination has let them know it’s safer not even to consciously notice what the film is about.
The other stand-out review of “Blue Valentine,” along the lines of Freddie’s comment, was Roissy’s:
http://roissy.wordpress.com/2011/01/18/beta-valentine/
Warning: Very Roissyesque.
— Steve Sailer · Feb 9, 12:34 AM · #
Noah gives a list of very good reasons that Michelle Williams would have gotten tired of Ryan Gosling, but I notice that he omits what may have been the most important one.
How did the older Michelle respond when meeting the selfish, macho wrestler who callously schtupped and thoughtlessly impregnated her? With disgust? With anger? Did she rip into him and tell him what a jerk he was? Or… did she show some small signs of being smitten again?
Yes, she was undoubtedly tired of the child-like Gosling, but her desire for a “grown-up” man clearly isn’t leading her in search of a well-balanced, well-adjusted man. On some level, she LIKED the macho jerk a lot more than the pleasant guy who actually wanted to be with her, and still does.
We’ll never know how life turns out for Michelle, but my bet is, she’d wind up marrying a guy like the selfish jock. Her idea of a “grown up” male is a guy who’ll be no more likely to make breakfast or get the kids dressed than Ryan Gosling.
— astorian · Feb 11, 06:54 PM · #
That’s a hell of a point astorian makes, I’d like to see Noah’s response.
— Freddie · Feb 11, 07:40 PM · #
Let me state at this point: I really don’t know if Derek Cianfrance had one clear theme in mind when he wrote the script for “Blue Valentine,” nor do I know whether he thought of either the husband or the wife as the hero or heroine of the film. I do know that the characters he created are real enough and multidimensional enough to inspire both sympathy and contempt, at different times.
My sense is, Noah Millman has been thinking for some time about the modern “Peter Pan” phenomenon of men who never grow up. And Poissy, obviously, has long bought completely into the “Chicks love jerks and hate wimpy nice guys” theory. Hence, each man looks at the movie and sees a story that seems to confirm what he already believed.
Mr. Millman looks at Dean (Ryan Gosling) and sees the dark side of Seth Rogen, a hapless, clueless loser who shirks real responsibility and who DESERVES his wife’s scorn. Poissy looks at him and sees the quintessential “nice guy” that women use as a doormat because, despite what Gloria Steinem has told them, women still secretly want a dominant, selfish Alpha Male. Thing is, there’s plenty of ammo in “Blue Valentine” for both guys. There’s also much that lends itself to other interpretations, while undermining the Millman and Poissy pronouncements.
Mr. Millman is NOT wrong in his assessment of Dean- but let’s be honest, now. Does Mr. Millman really think the marriage would have been significantly happier if Dean had done more laundry, more cooking and more child care?
On the other hand, can Poissy deny that Cindy (Michelle Williams ) had a lot of very legitimate reasons to be frustrated with her husband? Does Poissy really think Dean was a stellar husband that only an ungrateful bitch would have tired of?
There doesn’t ALWAYS have to be a clear good guy or bad guy, you know. Even if Dean and Cindy were BOTH, in completely different ways, decent people, it’s still easy to see why she’d end up despising him and he’d end up resenting her. Even people who genuinely like each other can hurt each other terribly if they ultimately don’t want the same things out of life.
— astorian · Feb 11, 10:19 PM · #
Hi, Kate Marie, long-time fan. Late to the thread and Noah’s got the good ones but others with a different perspective off the top of my head: Mermaids; Eat, Drink, Man, Woman; Six-String Samurai (a Brattle fave…); the Grifters; Citizen Kane.
— Kieselguhr KId · Feb 14, 12:17 AM · #
Thanks Noah for the thoughtful review. My wife and I saw the movie last night and we’ve been talking about it all day. Very subtle and powerful.
— Scott McConnell · Feb 14, 01:23 AM · #
Oh, ick — and there’s Tideland which is certainly an interesting take on parental relations. And of course Precious.
— Kieselguhr Kid · Feb 14, 02:08 AM · #
Interesting perspective from Peter Lawler on the movie here:
http://bigthink.com/ideas/26698
— Ben A · Feb 14, 06:52 PM · #
Okay, I’m late to the party here as well, and I’d like to respond to astorian.
My post was about Dean, so I didn’t say much about Cindy. So let me say a few words here.
What kind of family does Cindy come from? How does her father behave towards her mother? What kind of expectations might that have set up for her about how men behave towards women? About what constitutes “real” male behavior?
Her father is an absolute ogre. And for all that Cindy is clearly terrified of him and dislikes his behavior, inevitably that is going to seem normal to her.
Her relationship with the college wrestler is an interesting one, because she’s the one who breaks off with him. Roissy seems to think otherwise, but he clearly didn’t dump her – he follows her home with flowers, complains that she’s not letting him talk to her; and, when he finds out that Cindy is planning to marry Dean, he beats the crap out of him.
Do I think he’d actually have married Cindy? No way – she’s got his number right. But rejecting him proves that she learned something. Her instincts still are to prefer a man like that – a brute who takes what he wants. But she knows enough now not to trust her instincts.
And that’s what I think is going on in the liquor store. You bet she’s still attracted to him. That freaks her out. And she externalizes her confusion and anger by picking a fight with Dean in the car immediately afterward.
If I had to predict what happens to Cindy after the movie ends, I don’t think she ends up getting to a jerk like the wrestler, like her father. I don’t think she gets married again at all – not for a good long while, anyway. She’s been with Dean for five years and hasn’t had more kids, so she’s learned to control her own fertility. To provide for her daughter, she’s going to be working long hours on top of the time she needs to spend with her child – she’s not going to have a lot of time to find another man. Her erotic life has, for the time being, come to an end.
Here’s a point: how does she react to the doctor who propositions her? Is she flustered the way she is with the father of her child in the liquor store? Here’s a guy who certainly could provide for her, if she could snag him. But no: she seems to have learned enough to know that his proposition is an insult rather than a compliment.
Does she instinctively prefer guys who are macho jerks? I bet she does. I also bet she doesn’t trust her instincts anymore. She had 20-25 sexual partners before she finished college. I’m betting that number hasn’t moved much if at all by the time she’s 35.
Now, as for your other question – about whether Dean could have saved the marriage by doing the laundry. In a word: no. My point wasn’t that he should have been domestic, but, rather, that he’s deluding himself if he thinks he is, and that reviewers who saw him as a “good father” are misreading him as well.
On the other hand, I also don’t think Dean needed to be an “alpha male” in order to have a successful love life, whether with Cindy or with another woman.
If you want to know my opinion, it’s this. What makes people interesting to other people, first and foremost, is whether they are interesting to themselves. People – men and women – are attracted to people who manifest a certain degree of confident self-sufficiency.
Roissy’s whole program is teaching men how to pretend to be the confident, self-sufficient guy in the most superficial and brutal ways, the better to get into the pants of insecure and superficial women. I bet it works. I’m not sure what the long-term point is, though, because in the long term, if you’re trying to sustain a relationship, pretending doesn’t work.
I don’t think there is a clear villain in the piece – and neither, by the way, does Roissy. I think his read is misogynistic not because he says that Cindy has contempt for Dean’s weakness – I think that’s true – but because he denies Cindy any agency, implicitly absolving her of doing anything “wrong” in leaving a “good guy” because she “couldn’t help it.” And I think that’s bullshit. She knows what she’s doing. When she says she’s thinking of her daughter, she’s telling the truth.
Dean is showing who he really is – and who he really is is a sweet guy who’s also weak and needy and childish, who can’t give Cindy what she – or any adult woman – needs. Roissy’s solution is to say: don’t let a woman see that you’re weak and childish; act like a self-confident jerk; have some “game.” My counter-suggestion is: grow up; don’t pretend to be a self-confident jerk, actually become self-confident so you don’t have to be a jerk. It’s a lot harder. But it might actually work for the long term.
I don’t think there’s a villain in the piece. But I do think Dean is the one to focus on if you are asking the question, “how could this have ended differently”? I mean, ask yourself: what could Cindy have done differently to save the marriage? Can you think of anything? I can’t. That’s part of what makes the movie so painfully sad.
Finally, yeah, the whole “Peter Pan” thing is a hobby horse I’ve been riding for a while now. I think anybody brings to works of art what they were carrying already, and obviously that’s a theme that means a lot to me. Hopefully, though, I’m not imposing it on “Blue Valentine” but rather finding things that are genuinely in that movie that resonate with me. I think that’s all you can expect a critic to do – and, precisely because different people have different sensitivities, it’s worthwhile reading more than one critic on any work of art worth analyzing.
— Noah Millman · Feb 15, 06:56 PM · #
Mr. Millman:
I appreciate the thoughtful reply.
Incidentally, I have no idea why I kept calling Roissy “Poissy” in the earlier post. I’d never heard of him before seeing Mr. Sailer’s link, and I must just have misread the name. In any case, Roissy had a few valid insights and a few very funny lines, but mostly… he seemed to be channeling Frank T.J. Mackey from “Magnolia,” and I still don’t know whether he’s for real or just a brilliant put-on artist.
Speaking as a high-IQ beta male myself, I can confirm a few of his “maxims” from experience (a woman who has fallen out of love with you IS as cold and cruel as if she’d never known you)… but even if I bought into more than a little bit of his philosophy (I don’t), I have no idea what good his philosophy would do me.
I CAN’T become a macho jerk, even if I occasionally see how that would benefit me. My introverted nature (weakness, if you prefer) has undoubtedly cost me a chance at some romantic relationships. But I’m just not capable of being the macho guy that some women need (and no Roissy screed or T.J. Mackey seminar could teach me that, either!). Better just to acknowledge that and not get involved with women who would surely tire of me or resent me in time for NOT being what they crave.
Dean probably CAN’T be the man Cindy wants, either. She settled for him at a low point in her life, but she was almost bound to get her head on straight again, and when she was no longer desperate, she was BOUND to find Dean wanting. He probably knew that long before things went South.
— astorian · Feb 15, 08:26 PM · #
Millman,
Your observations about Blue Valentine are strong and engaging. I especially liked your emphasis on the tiny but important scene where Cindy makes a game of dressing her daughter for school, revealing that she is not, it turns out, a killjoy matron. Also, until I saw your review, I never realized that Dean’s reprimand of Cindy in the school auditorium betrayed not only Dean’s flaky temper but Cindy’s role as dog-walker. Subtle read.
However, as you refute the notion of Dean as a “good father,” I think you overcompensate and place too much emphasis on his childish behavior.
I agree with you that he is indeed childish and needy, but I’m skeptical that these qualities are as overwhelming as you make them out to be.
Start with the dog. Is it really “mom’s job” to find the missing dog, as you write? When I watched the movie, my impression was that neither parent immediately scoured the neighborhood. Like a lot of pet-owners, once the animal got loose, they worried but didn’t launch the search-party right away. They went to work, probably hoping that the dog would return. When Cindy finds the dog, my interpretation was that she just happened to see him while in route to her daughter’s recital. So, she in fact made no special effort beyond Dean’s, and more importantly, isn’t Dean already at the recital, having made it there on time, waiting for her? And doesn’t he promptly bury the dog, taking care to wrap her in a tarp? Finally, which parent is it that the daughter chooses to wake that morning when she finds the dog missing? It’s not mom.
Now, is Dean pulling more than his weight where the dog’s welfare is concerned? I doubt it, but the movie leaves many clues that responsibility for the dog is shared between the parents, not simply shirked by Dean. In other words, the entire dog episode— like almost everything else in the movie— brings us to ambivalent, complicated conclusions. Yes, Dean is cruel to impulsively scold Cindy when she has just discovered the dog’s body, and yes she might have walked it a lot. On the other hand, we have no reason to believe he didn’t walk it a lot, too. When his daughter discovers the dog gone and stirs Dean from his doze in the Barcalounger, it’s safe to assume that he’s a little hungover. In spite of this, he does not get pissed off and tell her he needs more sleep (as Cindy will subsequently do). Instead, he gets up and at least walks through the yard, calling for the dog. After he buries the dog, he sobs, which I think reveals not just his love for the dog, but the mature obligation he feels to it.
I don’t mean to quibble here. You’re right, Dean is essentially childish and more prone to behaving like a playmate to his daughter. However, I differ with you on the ultimate incompatibility of his personality with long-term marriage. He’s plenty playful, petulant, moony and clueless— “You’ve gotta soak your oats!” he says, thinking he’s correcting Cindy about instant oatmeal. However, he’s not abusive, addled or absent. As the dog episode shows, he may actually be doing his share in many arenas, even if Cindy is more admirable in others.
All of this is to suggest that many spouses have endured worse in a marriage. When you ask, “what could Cindy have done differently to save the marriage?” I would counter by asking, would every woman reach the same impasse in the same relationship? No. I suspect many women actually take more pleasure than irritation from long-term unions to Dean-like men. Is Dean an ogre whose tendencies would bring any marriage to keel? No, not at all. Many, many marriages have yielded mostly cool, interesting offspring from lesser material than Dean.
This gets to my larger point. If Dean has grown unbearable to Cindy, this has as much to do with her quirks as it does Dean’s. Several times in the movie, we see her inclination to withdraw from and shut people out. You can argue that this is because both the jock and Dean have it coming, but I’m skeptical. While the jock clearly committed a rotten betrayal by slipping the condom off, mid-balling, without telling Cindy, we get a sense from their earlier encounter that she has had her guards up all along. He calls her a “freak” as she draws away from him in the wheel chair. While you might take her reticence to be her own sensible fear of what attracts her to such a creep, I don’t think it’s that simple.
She ultimately opens up to Dean, embracing his whimsy, his impulsiveness, his determined pursuit. These same qualities are tied, of course, to the fragile day-dreaming that Dean exhibits years later. The question is, do the qualities turn from entrancing Cindy to revolting her because she is older, wiser and responsible for a child? I think it’s more mysterious than that. I sense in Cindy a tendency toward withdrawal and dissatisfaction. I don’t mean to criticize her, here. I think many of us feel the occasional pull of vague sorrows, longings, dissatisfactions. In Cindy’s case, this pull seems especially strong and vicious. Further, its origins may be obscure, difficult to name. When she calls out Dean about his low ambition, his missed opportunities to tap his talents, I’m not convinced that she’s pointing to a flaw that has doomed their relationship. Rather, it’s like she’s asking for empathy. Aren’t you unsatisfied, too, she wonders, perhaps anxious about her own missed opportunities (remember, she wanted to be a doctor, not a nurse).
In the end, I think she carries a kind of core sorrow that is liable to turn into revulsion, no matter who her partner is. Perhaps Dean is noteworthy for keeping her close as long as he does. For all his shortcomings, which I concede are varied, he does better than anyone who came before him (well, minus the whole impregnating her part).
I don’t think Cindy is a shit or a snob, at all. But she is certainly guarded, and she’s more than a little dark, as the relish she takes in the child molester joke shows.
To the question, “How could this [relationship] have ended differently?” I’d answer, maybe it couldn’t, but it’s not just Dean who makes it impossible as he shrinks, child-size and pie-eyed, from its requirements. It’s Cindy, too, who retreats from its slight, raisin-splattered pleasures, into darkness.
— turnbuckle · Feb 15, 10:29 PM · #
I didn’t immediately notice Dean’s man-boy qualities upon seeing the film. After reading Millman’s review, they are glaring. Chalk up my oversight to the ubiquity of male immaturity. I was rooting for Dean throughout.
The film is not terribly mysterious to any spiritually well-adjusted person. It is food for thought about the modern condition and the confused war of the sexes. But it’s not hard to figure out what’s going on.
Both protagonists are monstrously selfish in distinct ways according to their sex, and the few lights during the dark movie arrive in those rare, almost accidental, moments of selflessness: Cindy refusing the abortion, Dean agreeing to be the father to her child. The cultural lies around which their sexual identities have been constructed (albeit, through no fault of their own) could not bury those moments of truth. All the rest is spiritually confused babble as two isolated souls attempt to make sense of their impoverished lives with deeply inadequate language.
— King · Feb 17, 11:08 PM · #