Maybe you can picture it. Ryan Gosling’s strumming a dinky ukulele. He’s standing in front of an empty storefront, serenading a dancing Michelle Williams, mannequins in wedding dresses arrayed in the windows. You always hurt the ones you love, he sings, his tone a mash-up of falsetto and croon. It’s all one take. She’s falling for him, and so is the audience. The ones you shouldn’t hurt at all.
In this case, he meant me—I was hurting myself, enacting a form of cinematic emotional self-flagellation, catching the film alone in theatres not long after its release in the bleak midwinter of 2011, a few months after what was then—and still is—the toughest breakup of my life, a year-and-change relationship that was my first love, full of self-consciously cutesy gestures and the mythologizing that poets engage in when under the influence.
"I knew, going in, that the movie would wreck me, on some level. So why watch it? What was I after?"
I knew, going in, that the movie would wreck me, on some level. So why watch it? What was I after? I still have the texts from my ex that I got when I told her what I was doing. They’re the last four messages in a TextEdit document where I collected the texts from her that felt the most meaningful, the most redolent of emotion, because my then cellphone, a Motorola Razr, only held 50 texts at a time. Looking at them now, the lacunae of my replies make it a kind of erasure poem, the time stamps telling a little story of their own:
I hope you didnt
Feb 4, 11:29 pm
You are the least smart!
Feb 4, 11:31 pm
Hope you at least saw it
with someone comforting.
Good luck.
Feb 4, 11:34 pm
Ugh. Im sorry.
Feb 4, 11:42 pm
In the movie, Gosling and Williams play Cindy and Dean, two twenty-somethings who meet in an old folks’ home (Dean going above and beyond on a moving job, Cindy taking care of her grandmother). Their fledgling relationship slowly dies out against the backdrop of its own birth—or plays out against the backdrop of its own death?—as writer/director Derek Cianfrance switches back and forth between the powerful whoop of young love and the ossified frailty of an ending relationship, six years down the road. In the future (or the present?), their lives are pockmarked with the incipient complexities of adult relationships, once the honeymoon period has receded into the rearview: childcare issues, career struggles, the passion that flits in and out of sight like the moon in a cloudy sky.
The film’s structure is a bit of time travel magic, forcing the viewer to confront the two realities simultaneously. Is the eventual acrimony between the two redeemed by the sheer beauty of their past love? Or is the initial spark cancelled out by the tragedy of the ending? Does Dean burning “You and Me” by Penny and the Quarters, with the impossibly bittersweet warble of its Motown tenor, onto a CD for Cindy get cancelled out when he drunkenly causes a scene at her workplace half a decade later?
"It’s an eternal question when it comes to romantic relationships, whose nature is to start beautifully and then sour to some degree or other."
It’s an eternal question when it comes to romantic relationships, whose nature is to start beautifully and then sour to some degree or other. If we know we’re in for pain, why do we keep putting our hands back into the trap? The truth, of course, is that the infinite bliss that love seems to promise, well, springs eternal. And so we forgive Cindy for falling for, in Dean, a handsome, boundary deficient man-child; and we forgive Dean for pinning all his heart’s hopes on a beautiful stranger. We, too, have been there; we, too, have wanted someone else’s love to fix the holes in us.
Revisiting the film in order to write this essay, I read the script and was struck by Cianfrance’s treatment of the streetlight serenade. While he builds hiccups into the dialogue very intentionally throughout the script, here, an especially apt parenthesis marks a moment where he lets the meat of acting—two people in a space together, interacting with each other in real time—take over. To some degree, this is something you can’t write into existence, as the reality of Hollywood chemistry tests attests to. Some people have the spark together, and some don’t. Some love stories break our hearts, and some just leave us cold.
He begins strumming the upbeat chords of The Mills Brother’s
“You Always Hurt The Ones You Love.” She begins tap dancing.
(The actors experience this for the first time too. We should
witness and experience them falling in love).
They end the scene in an embrace.
Blue Valentine is the movie that Marriage Story thought it was. That’s what I repeatedly told people after seeing Noah Baumbach’s 2019 much-ballyhooed divorce flick, enacting a sort of fun-house mirror machismo where emotions were things to be bragged about, like someone who cares too much about hot sauce. Oh, Marriage Story? That movie’s for pussies. Watch Blue Valentine if you’re a real tough guy. That movie will kick your heart in the nuts.
Really, I was just disappointed. The two movies have their share of surface similarities, but Marriage Story just doesn’t hit the same. There’s something pure and rush-y about self-inflicted romantic sadness, the way certain powerful negative emotions can be, in their intensity, preferable to vaguer feelings. Like hot sauce, they let you know that you’re alive. And watching Blue Valentine’s two young, beautiful leads genuinely fall for each other (the dumb jokes, the goofy grins) at the same time as they fuck it up irrevocably (the slow fade, the cruel words) is like an uncut drug.
I re-encountered the structure of the film recently, reading James Baldwin’s exquisite Giovanni’s Room, a novel about a doomed queer relationship in mid-century Paris. Baldwin understood what Baumbach didn’t—that the breakup is meaningless without the build-up, that braiding love and loss together is like certain kinds of candy, where you find yourself chasing the sour with the sweet until your hand’s scrabbling around at the bottom of an empty bag. Blue Valentine has its cake and throws it away, too.
Maybe you can picture it. Ryan Gosling’s strumming a dinky ukulele. He’s standing in front of an empty storefront, serenading a dancing Michelle Williams, mannequins in wedding dresses arrayed in the windows. You always hurt the ones you love, he sings, his tone a mash-up of falsetto and croon. It’s all one take. She’s falling for him, and so is the audience. The ones you shouldn’t hurt at all.
In this case, he meant me—I was hurting myself, enacting a form of cinematic emotional self-flagellation, catching the film alone in theatres not long after its release in the bleak midwinter of 2011, a few months after what was then—and still is—the toughest breakup of my life, a year-and-change relationship that was my first love, full of self-consciously cutesy gestures and the mythologizing that poets engage in when under the influence.
"I knew, going in, that the movie would wreck me, on some level. So why watch it? What was I after?"
I knew, going in, that the movie would wreck me, on some level. So why watch it? What was I after? I still have the texts from my ex that I got when I told her what I was doing. They’re the last four messages in a TextEdit document where I collected the texts from her that felt the most meaningful, the most redolent of emotion, because my then cellphone, a Motorola Razr, only held 50 texts at a time. Looking at them now, the lacunae of my replies make it a kind of erasure poem, the time stamps telling a little story of their own:
I hope you didnt
Feb 4, 11:29 pm
You are the least smart!
Feb 4, 11:31 pm
Hope you at least saw it
with someone comforting.
Good luck.
Feb 4, 11:34 pm
Ugh. Im sorry.
Feb 4, 11:42 pm
In the movie, Gosling and Williams play Cindy and Dean, two twenty-somethings who meet in an old folks’ home (Dean going above and beyond on a moving job, Cindy taking care of her grandmother). Their fledgling relationship slowly dies out against the backdrop of its own birth—or plays out against the backdrop of its own death?—as writer/director Derek Cianfrance switches back and forth between the powerful whoop of young love and the ossified frailty of an ending relationship, six years down the road. In the future (or the present?), their lives are pockmarked with the incipient complexities of adult relationships, once the honeymoon period has receded into the rearview: childcare issues, career struggles, the passion that flits in and out of sight like the moon in a cloudy sky.
The film’s structure is a bit of time travel magic, forcing the viewer to confront the two realities simultaneously. Is the eventual acrimony between the two redeemed by the sheer beauty of their past love? Or is the initial spark cancelled out by the tragedy of the ending? Does Dean burning “You and Me” by Penny and the Quarters, with the impossibly bittersweet warble of its Motown tenor, onto a CD for Cindy get cancelled out when he drunkenly causes a scene at her workplace half a decade later?
"It’s an eternal question when it comes to romantic relationships, whose nature is to start beautifully and then sour to some degree or other."
It’s an eternal question when it comes to romantic relationships, whose nature is to start beautifully and then sour to some degree or other. If we know we’re in for pain, why do we keep putting our hands back into the trap? The truth, of course, is that the infinite bliss that love seems to promise, well, springs eternal. And so we forgive Cindy for falling for, in Dean, a handsome, boundary deficient man-child; and we forgive Dean for pinning all his heart’s hopes on a beautiful stranger. We, too, have been there; we, too, have wanted someone else’s love to fix the holes in us.
Revisiting the film in order to write this essay, I read the script and was struck by Cianfrance’s treatment of the streetlight serenade. While he builds hiccups into the dialogue very intentionally throughout the script, here, an especially apt parenthesis marks a moment where he lets the meat of acting—two people in a space together, interacting with each other in real time—take over. To some degree, this is something you can’t write into existence, as the reality of Hollywood chemistry tests attests to. Some people have the spark together, and some don’t. Some love stories break our hearts, and some just leave us cold.
He begins strumming the upbeat chords of The Mills Brother’s
“You Always Hurt The Ones You Love.” She begins tap dancing.
(The actors experience this for the first time too. We should
witness and experience them falling in love).
They end the scene in an embrace.
Blue Valentine is the movie that Marriage Story thought it was. That’s what I repeatedly told people after seeing Noah Baumbach’s 2019 much-ballyhooed divorce flick, enacting a sort of fun-house mirror machismo where emotions were things to be bragged about, like someone who cares too much about hot sauce. Oh, Marriage Story? That movie’s for pussies. Watch Blue Valentine if you’re a real tough guy. That movie will kick your heart in the nuts.
Really, I was just disappointed. The two movies have their share of surface similarities, but Marriage Story just doesn’t hit the same. There’s something pure and rush-y about self-inflicted romantic sadness, the way certain powerful negative emotions can be, in their intensity, preferable to vaguer feelings. Like hot sauce, they let you know that you’re alive. And watching Blue Valentine’s two young, beautiful leads genuinely fall for each other (the dumb jokes, the goofy grins) at the same time as they fuck it up irrevocably (the slow fade, the cruel words) is like an uncut drug.
I re-encountered the structure of the film recently, reading James Baldwin’s exquisite Giovanni’s Room, a novel about a doomed queer relationship in mid-century Paris. Baldwin understood what Baumbach didn’t—that the breakup is meaningless without the build-up, that braiding love and loss together is like certain kinds of candy, where you find yourself chasing the sour with the sweet until your hand’s scrabbling around at the bottom of an empty bag. Blue Valentine has its cake and throws it away, too.