It's only real if it wrecks your life: HER, THE WAY WE WERE, LOVE AFFAIR

O Love, thou coaxer of dopamine and norepinephrine through miserly neruological alleyways, you can cure illness, reduce obesity, turn blue meanies into pink happies, you sound and sport horns like Pan. You creat flashes of lightning in the mind, every song sounds written just for you and your beloved, you love it all, you are alive, it's sparkling, the night, alive, and then... did I say alive? Twice? Shit. Not even once.

Not even the sound of a crash, just nothing, throwing you into anguished withdrawal. Where did that brain boost trigger go? Those norepinephrine juicings come few and far between so what is it, what trigger sets them off and why can't we just press a lever by our hamster wheel and feel that giddy rapture whenever we need artistic inspiration or to lose weight? Fuckin' Medical Association, man (and here I would sniffle and shudder like a junky if we were filming) they won't let us drill holes in our brain to let the air in, or let us insert electrodes into our pleasure centers. We have to wait, instead for the 'thunderbolt' (as Michael's bodyguards describe it in The Godfather). 

Her takes place in a Catfish future wherein everyone can be whomever else they want in virtual reality, and for some reason choose they selves. Love in the age of digital communication has led to something so instant it's impossible to internalize so no change in the persona is possible. We can't sit down at ye olde desk to write to our distant love with Ken Burns' fiddle music mournful in the backdrop because there's never a time when our lover's voice can't be there, here, wherever, Skype! Verizon... 4G. No distance is too great, no forest too remote, now your love is literally written on the wind, a billion cellular coded mash notes coursing through your atomic structure, a net of support so intimate not even the closest mask can keep it from exposing you.


Speaking of Barbara Streisand, Phoenix in Her and Robert Redford in The Way We Were (1973) make dependable bookends for displaying the spectrum of the masculine touchy feely love response. Like the less successful film Surrogates (see: The Wringer of Ringerhood), Her takes place in a Catfish future wherein everyone can be whomever else they want in virtual reality, and for some reason choose they selves. Meeting other 3-D real time people has lost much of its feigned jocularity in Spike Jonze's succinctly imagined future, no one smokes or makes wretched small talk or goes on benders and phone sex with strangers who want you to talk about strangling them dead cats as they come is as natural as Ambien. If Don Draper could see what his Madison Ave sincerity carousel would lead to, would he ever had turned against Lucky Strikes? Better to smoke indoors at the martini bar of masque-on-mask artificiality than be healthy in a bubble of self where a computer voice validates your every movement like a conductor on baby's first potty train. One ring to bind them all!

I'm more guilty than anyone when it comes to the crime of not being myself; I am the dude who went to the party dressed as someone else and came home and his old self was gone! I've had my soul shaved into infinity by transdimensional clockwork gorgons far too often to fall for the ego's hackneyed show and tell excuses why I continue to nurture antisocial attitudes and delusions of grandeur. I too, and hard, have for the phantom girls fallen, in 1997 enraptured by my love for someone who I hadn't met in person nor did even have a photo. No sort of real life love has ever compared to that delirious exaltation of me and my gray screen and then later a phone voice. After much nagging she sent me a photo but it was when she was a cute child with a cat. You can guess the rest. God was kind though, the Denver airport bar was serving doubles for the price of singles. I parked us there until she came out of focus. Nothing compares / 2U / screen at which now I stare.

Flash forward ten years, now sober, falling in love with a fellow writer on the phone from 3,000 miles away from me, who inspired a huge breakthrough in forging the style of writing here on this blog. I wrote this post on Coming Home(1979) for her.  Photos galore to vouchsafe mad hotness. Twelve hour stretches whisked, hardly daring to switch my phone to the other ear lest I miss a second of her thrilling voice. A bad cold brought my voice down an octave and the magic cough syrup I was on worked with the fever to make me sound sexy and assured, brilliant and able to modulate even casual out breaths into curlicue hissing perfection. Christmas came, dragging us apart, shouting into elderly phones just for our mundane pleasantries to be heard. No magic or immortality just the feeling of being chained to a lineage of death, most ancestors obscured by the cold dark sea and me second to next in line on the chain to be dragged deep deep down. I couldn't smoke in the O'Hare Airport hotel so my voice got smooth and the demons of despair that tobacco keeps at bay descended like a fog. My phone love didn't return my call for months, it seemed, or a few days in linear time. Finally, in despair, I called my real life lover back in New York. She picked up right away. Consolation prizes are the true prizes in this world, what you can touch, see, feel, the rough stuff of earth and matter, this, Her you can't trust.


Five years later, or rather last year--2012--during a three month flash of blissful enlightenment brought about by pre-apocalyptic euphoria and  galactic alignments, I figured out where 'everything looks rosy' or 'rose-colored glasses' comes from. I did see the rose-tint and everything seemed to be infused with a healthy crimson, a flush in the world's cheeks. The concept of being washed in the blood of the lamb truly does stand with this, as in this blissful state one sees other humans only as inherently beautiful, fear and desire slip away, one gets all Saint Francis-ish and has no desire except to bless those around them and celebrate the crazy moment-to-moment glory of living. I had forgotten about the rosiness, as one is apt to do, until today seeing Her. The whole damn film is rosy. But maybe that's the problem. Any acting teacher or therapist would surely weep with joy over Phoenix's sublime and constant state of emotional nakedness, his wrenching honesty. But that's all we really see of this guy - honesty. It's a such a lonely word and everyone is so / untrue for a reason. A man without a mask unnerves even his gooiest friends,


On the other hand: The Way We Were (1973). Robert Redford's final teary eye at the end--the first real emotion he has in the film and maybe in his whole career--is so powerful, I cry every time... or would if I had seen it more than once. I can't help but feel that a lot of this was improvised and paraphrased because how else could it be so natural and perfect? Redford can't act--at least not in the emotional naked Phoenix style --and that is his strength. When he finally does crack the mask,  the walls come down where you didn't even know walls were. His entire stone-faced oeuvre is worth enduring for this one crystal-like clear water fountain / to the sea tear moment. Is that one crack equivalent to or equal to all of Phoenix's performance in Her? At one point does a man being sensitive and loving go from touching to maudlin and even a little douche chill-icky? Answer: when he had no mask to shed in the first place. Men put these masks on for a reason, bro. Make 'em look good, look sharp, like the V for Vendetta mustache or the great Edward G. Robinson, who in 1931 once snarled, "Love?!! Women?? Gah, soft stuff. Joe, yer gettin' so ya can't take it no more." - That's Her all over.


But that's a different genre and TheWay We Were is a romance, a true story memoir about a beautiful golden WASP Adonis lured out of his quail and ale club by a bohemian Jewess intellectual socialist played by Barbara Streisand. He goes for it against all his better judgment, partially perhaps because girls in his circle don't take lovers, only husbands. But she's got such a light spirit you can see why he comes to see her as more than a round the 'way girl. There's a complex layer of completion-seeking added when a bronzed Adonis not in touch with his feelings melts for an Brooklyn motormouth. Opposites attract for a reason, it's a polarity thing. A north needs a south for a proper axis. That's why you can tell the love affair in Her isn't real, not that it matters, which is the point. Minds meet, excite each other, enrapture and engage and then they are no longer the same minds. You can't expect them to stay with the person their older, unchanged mind chose as a lover, that would be cruel. But TRUE love is just that cruel. Opposites can change all they want, there's no overlap. They can never make each other's input redundant.


Redford and Streisand's characters part, and only later, at the end of the film, when they run into each other on the street, all betrothed to proper class and religious affiliated spouses - and only then, after it all has happened - does Redford finally crack. And I, at least, cried like a motherfucker. It's so worth waiting for, that moment, because unless the guy has proven he's tough, that his facade is in place, who cares if it comes tumbling down? That's why, when Bill Holden breaks open into a child-like smile of rapture and awakening on the beach in Breezy, my shell, too, cracks to pieces. In the epiphany moment of the hopelessness of love, that impossible star-crossed fate where even if you shuck it all and together make your grab for it will never survive, just as it can never die, and at times you wonder if it even ever existed, just this moment stands tall as a reminder of all that you could have been, the vast acres of self you could have claimed that are now forever lost no matter which road you take. But in just that moment at least, you are high as a Georgia pine.


But in Her there is no mask to crack. Phoenix the actor stands naked before us, hitting these painful notes that are masterfully honest and hurt and Jones' script backs him up with eloquent moments like him crouched on the subway steps while a rush of commuters file around him, hearing of how his digital love has united and is haivng intimate conversations with thousands of other operating systems, juxtaposing how cut off we are from even the surface of our fellow man once he gets up and running. All we have maybe is the illusion of connection, and the hope of one day uniting with the machine reflection of the soul, our Frankenstein Skynet Robbie the Robot This is for Pris Cherry 2000 Absolut vodka love child.

Moseying along the crowded bubble boulevard

The woman looking outside the bubble / i.e. a communist

All alone together in the shipboard bubble

Then there's Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne in Leo McCarey's Love Affair (1939). Now as a man who only cries when he passes a liquor store window display, I don't care for Irene Dunne in most things. Studs like Cary Grant and Charles Boyer are too good for her. I hate her trill-laden singing. But in Love Affair her prissy ball-busting schtick is needed because she is so unlike Charles Boyer, who is such a nostril-breathing sensualist. They're each alone on a trans-Atlantic cruise brought by tables for one into one another's sights, at first disliking each other for being so obstinately opposite. Director Leo McCarey is peerless at matchmaking, wooing them collectively with precision walk-ons: a talkative chipper landlady, a trio of weird little girl harmonizers (with Irene Dunne on ukulele), an endearing orphanage manager the kids call Picklepuss, a charming art gallery owner, a smitten club manager, a drunk guy carrying a Christmas tree all the way up to 182nd Street, a heavenly orphan choir singing not too loud there's a baby upstairs, gathered around Dunne's sick-bed, and the celestial Maria Ouspenskaya in her greatest role as Boyer's wizened Yoda on Owsley acid-style grandmother. Nor a single mean word or ill will in the whole film, just two people cautiously reading the signs fate's throwing at them and quietly slipping free from all their original plans. And we worry about the final big meeting like saps, because everyone else in the film is also aware of how vital these meetings are, not just for them but for the world. Without the reunion of meant-to-be lovers there is no hope, no reason to keep shambling through the desolate CGI airport. We need this one thing that can cut through all the crap and yank us right out of our lives, even if it's for the worst. Fortune favors the bold but love doesn't give a shit about fortune or anything else. Hawke misses his flight, doesn't cancel or change it, just outright misses it, because Delpy's smoldering to her tape of a live Nina Simone. Amy Jolly kicks off her thousand dollars shoes and barefoot marches off to follow the Legion. It's the grand gesture, so make it while your high enough on love to not think.


And over it all not just the lovers but the romance of light and shadow and sound caressing Boyer and Dunne together over glistening rear projection seas, the facts preventing them from being together like some poison chocolate pink champagne aphrodisiac. You know it's love when it wrecks your life. If your favorite thing was golf love will ensure you can never golf again; if you loved to touch, love makes sure your new lover hates being touched; if you like to ski your new lover stabs you in the kneecap. You must give up all the other precious thing you held dear for they are not just a friend and a lover but that thing - you are giving up the shiniest cheap car collection for one battered but sturdy BMW to last you the rest of your life.  Imagining being with other people loses all its lusty luster. Before in relationships you would just mark the hours 'til your escape even if they were perfect for you, but even a Boyer or Redford becomes just a smoov version of Emil Jannings in The Blue Angel! But dig, the trick is 'becomes.'Now crow! Crow into the empty screen for a chance to glimpse your soul's secret stash, just a glimpse before the charm's unwound.