#12: Fourteen Romantic Things

Mike Wazowski, B-tier couples, Stephen Sondheim & more.

I love romance in all its forms. I like young love, old love, arranged marriages, doomed affairs, relationships that just didn’t quite work out, falling in love as friends, falling in love as enemies, falling in love instantly, falling in love by accident, settling down, refusing to settle, being in love with two people at once, finding the kink that works for you, being married once, being married four times, idiots, insane girls, patient men, being independent, being friends. I have preferences of course (matching wits over himbos, loud secondary couples over main characters), but great art can convince me of anything and in the course of my life I have been convinced of every conceivable version of love by film and literature and art. I believe completely in the power of love, and I believe love can take a thousand different forms. I have no firm feelings about love except that in real life you should definitely find a partner who is nice to you and your friends and you should have similar basic values and they should basically have their shit together.

Today is the 10th Valentine’s Day I’ve spent with Adam, and our first together in 2 years. We’re going to Arturo’s for some dumb New York Italian (big plates of pasta, cluttered walls, warm yellow lighting in a dim room) & then we’re going to see Lisa Frankenstein (because the Amelie showtimes are way too late).

I am still in the throes of moving—surrounded by boxes, googling “best shoe racks” every chance I get, eating all my meals on the rug—so forgive me for being a little slapdash with today’s post but in honor of Valentine’s Day, here are the 14 most romantic things I can think of right now:

1. Birthday by Marc Chagall - This is what I have always thought and what I currently think being in love should look like and now that Adam and I live together, it kind of does! Should I get micro bangs?

   

   I’ve had this postcard on every apartment wall of mine in the last decade.

2. Pocahontas going back to John Rolfe in The New World - I should point out that nobody ever says “Pocahontas” in Terrence Malick’s transcendent masterpiece The New World¹, but for the sake of explaining the scene I’ll go with Pocahontas.

   In the scene in question, Pocahontas (Q’orianka Kilcher—luminous!) is now married to John Rolfe (Christian Bale, in the role that initiated my childhood crush on him) when her ex² John Smith (Colin Farrell, beautifully slutty in a series of deep v-neck blouses), who broke up with her by lying about being dead, comes to visit their English estate. Rolfe knows his wife has never really stopped loving Smith (in his proposal, he says he hopes in time she’ll come to love him. Pocahontas, not that attached to the Western conception of marriage, considers Smith her husband) so he lets them go for what may be a reconciliatory/marriage-ending walk in the garden while he hunches over a windowsill with his face in his hands. As someone who grew up under the influence of the two famous Brontë novels (sorry Anne), I obviously find it romantic when a man is in agony.

   This is their exchange when he lets her go:

   John Rolfe: I think you still love the man, and that you will not be at peace until you see him. In my vanity I thought I could make you love me, and one cannot do that or should not. You have walked blindly into a situation that you did not anticipate.

   Pocahontas: You are the man I thought you were and more.

   Later, Rolfe has graduated from windowsill fretting to pacing around the gardens when Pocahontas comes up behind him and loops her arm into his. They kiss. She doesn’t have to say a word—he is the man she thought he was and more, and it turns out she loves him back. I can’t tell if this sounds as emotionally destructive as it plays for me, but the love theme³ titled “Pocahontas and Smith” plays over this scene, a love theme now transferred to her marriage to John Rolfe. I don’t think there’s anything more romantic to me than “falling in love with your own husband.”

   

3. Before Midnight - I think all the Before movies are romantic, but Before Midnight is by far the most romantic. Before Midnight finds our two lovers Jesse and Céline in Greece, 9 years into a relationship after their reconciliation 9 years after they got off a train in Vienna together and failed to exchange phone numbers. There is a school of thought that finds this film nasty and pessimistic—Jesse and Céline fight ruthlessly, accuse each other of various infidelities, and Céline claims she no longer loves him. I think this is apiece with the school of thought that holds that love shouldn’t in fact, be hard—with the right person, love is easy. I think both are true, or neither. I don’t care. I just know Jesse saying “If you want love, then this is it. This is real life. It's not perfect but it's real.” is as romantic as anything else I’ve ever heard (although “I am just trying to make you laugh” is close).

4. “The Little Things You Do Together” from Company - Maybe Company was the most formative work in shaping my understanding of romance and relationships as a kid (don’t worry, my dad always skipped “Tick-Tock” when it came on in the car) in the sense that I absorbed it’s all-encompassing quality as gospel. You can have cold feet before a wedding but that’s the love of your life, you can have an amicable divorce, you can have three husbands, but you have to open your heart up to love. The most romantic song is actually probably “Sorry-Grateful” (you always do and don’t regret marriage, it changes everything and nothing) and “Being Alive” (you have to open your heart up to love!) but “The Little Things You Do Together” is the one I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. It didn’t make much sense to me as a kid and even now I wonder if I’m misinterpreting it, but to my eyes (ears?) it is about sustaining a longterm relationship through bits.

   I thought about it just now writing about Before Midnight and that last scene where Jesse and Céline reconcile. After she declares she does not love him anymore, Jesse writes a fake letter from Future Céline where she reflects on this bump in the road & reminisces that the best sex of her life was on that very night in Greece. This is what being in love for a decade plus is all about—goofing off, getting a laugh out of each other, sustaining the joke.

   

5. Golde and Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof - This is a perfect musical & film full of perfect romantic moments—Motel Kamzoil’s on-top-of-the-world jubilance when Tevye says he can marry Tzeitel, Hodel running off with a hot socialist—but I am partial to the parents Tevye and Golde reflecting on their relationship. They unquestioningly entered an arranged marriage 25 years prior and are now watching their three oldest daughters marry impractically for love (surely their younger two, destined for America, will choose their own husbands too). They wonder—do they love each other? Their conclusion:

   (Golde)

   For twenty-five years I've lived with him
   Fought him, starved with him
   Twenty-five years my bed is his
   If that's not love, what is?

   (Tevye)
   Then you love me?
   (Golde)
   I suppose I do
   (Tevye)
   And I suppose I love you too
   (Both)
   It doesn't change a thing
   But even so
   After twenty-five years
   It's nice to know

6. This line from Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd, spoken by Gabriel Oak: “And at home by the fire, whenever you look up there I shall be— and whenever I look up, there will be you.” - Best of all, Alan Bates delivers this line in the 1967 John Schlesinger adaptation. Handsome!

7. Jane Eyre, the original Alma Phantom Thread, refusing to be with Rochester until he’s the dependent one - While I was always destined to be a “13 year old reading Jane Eyre,” I read Jane Eyre for the first time because of The Princess Diaries. In the book (I have since come around to the charms of the film, but the book is better in ever way), Mia Thermopolis’ caustic, Elaine Stritch-ian dowager princess grandmother tells Mia to read Jane Eyre as a lesson in playing hard to get (a perfect joke). If you’re unfamiliar with Jane Eyre, Jane Eyre is a poor and not particularly beautiful orphan who becomes a governess in the home of Edward Rochester, the brooding, wealthy, “ugly” (hot) master of Thornfield Hall. After a lot of mind games, Rochester admits he loves her & tries to marry her, only to get caught with a mentally ill wife in the attic at which point Jane leaves because she may have nothing, but she has her dignity. I love her so much! Anyway, technically, Jane doesn’t know Rochester has been blinded in a fire/that his wife is dead by the time she returns to him from self-imposed exile with her hot but extremely un-fun cousin St. John, but she is at least in possession of her own small fortune and besides, in function Jane only gets her happy ending with the love of her life once he has lost his position of power over her. They are equals! She is my favorite character in all of literature.

   

8. Celia Mae and Mike Wazowski from Monsters Inc. - They just seem really nice together! I like when Celia yells at him like Karen in Goodfellas.

   

9. Mr. Darcy bolting up from his seat when Elizabeth enters the room in Pride & Prejudice (2005) - I think a lot about how if you tried to explain human mating rituals to an alien it would be like “okay so basically you become completely embarrassing around someone and pretend you don’t care until they notice or you explode.”

10. Will & Elizabeth’s Wedding in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End - They get MARRIED by an UNDEAD PIRATE CAPTAIN in the RAIN on a SHIP going into a MAELSTROM during a BATTLE.⁴ The rite of marriage is punctuated by the clanging of swords! They’ve been through so much together and they like each other so much! This is the Keira Knightley part of the list I guess. This is also another case where I am heavily influenced by the score, because this whole piece is so good.

11. “Loretta, I love you. Not like they told you love is, and I didn't know this either, but love don't make things nice - it ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess. We aren't here to make things perfect. The snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us. Not us! We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and die. The storybooks are bullshit. Now I want you to come upstairs with me and get in my bed!” from Moonstruck

12. Louise Bryant traversing Finland and Russia to get John Reed out of jail in Reds - The worst fight Adam and I ever got in was when, while listening to “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” he sweetly and casually asked if there was a mountain high enough to stop me from getting to him, babe and I said “Yes.” I’m sorry! I do think that if I tried to climb the HIGHEST mountain, I would literally die (asthmatic, out of shape, lazy, ill-suited to any degree of physical discomfort) and what help would that be but I apologized profusely a few days later. Of course I would! I’m assuming he’s like, trapped somewhere over a mountain and I *have* to go get him, not that he’s capable of getting on a plane and just coming back to our apartment, but of course I would.

    Reds is, on many days, my favorite movie of all time. Giving you the full rundown on Reds would take another 5,000 words but in brief: John Reed (Warren Beatty, star and director!) and Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton) are hot communist writers in the 1910s who fall in love. They fight about their unbalanced writing careers, cheat on each other, prioritize their careers over each other, but they really, really love each other. Late in the film, John Reed gets arrested in Finland trying to cross the border from Russia. The U.S. government is no help because Reed is a communist and wanted in the U.S. for sedition, so after many failed attempts at diplomacy, Louise decides to travel to Finland herself. It’s a perilous, snowy journey and nobody has phones. By the time Louise arrives, John’s been freed in a prisoner exchange. Watching Reds, I thought to myself—would I do this? Illegally cross borders on sleds and shit? Wouldn’t I stay at home writing petitions and harassing embassy employees? I’m not sure. I’d really like to think I’d go. I’d definitely climb any mountain, complaining the whole time, inhaler in hand.

    

13. Jess and Marie in When Harry Met Sally - My other favorite movie of all time is When Harry Met Sally. I love Harry & Sally. I love the speech he gives on New Year’s Eve about all the things he loves about her—the way she gets cold when its 71 degrees out, the way it takes her an hour and a half to order a sandwich. But I have a real soft spot for the secondary couple of the film, Jess (Bruno Kirby) and Marie (Carrie Fisher). Jess and Marie like each other immediately and their relationship moves fast from there. Adam and I started dating 2 weeks after we met. Also, Adam’s grown a Kirby-esque mustache a couple of times and I could absolutely see him acquiring a wagon wheel coffee table. In their most famous moment together, Jess and Marie are sitting in bed when they both get calls from their best friends, Harry and Sally respectively, in need of relationship advice. After they hang up, Marie says “Tell me I'll never have to be out there again.” Jess confirms, “You will never have to be out there again.”

    

14. George & Mary’s Honeymoon in It’s A Wonderful Life - Every bit of George and Mary’s relationship in It’s A Wonderful Life is achingly romantic—lassoing the moon, when they both have their ears to the telephone receiver and George realizes he’s fucked—but my favorite is Mary’s makeshift honeymoon. When they use up all their honeymoon money to keep their company running & support the people of Bedford Falls, Mary takes it upon herself to transform an abandoned house into a romantic dinner “abroad.” She sets up a candlelit meal by a warm fire, Hawaiian music playing in the background and travel posters pasted on the walls. George spends much of the film struggling against what he perceives as the confines of his life in Bedford Falls and by the film’s end, he realizes that duh, his wife is Donna Reed (have you seen Donna Reed?) who loves him so much and he has sweet children and great friends and life is good. Obviously there is nothing more romantic than Mary’s honeymoon—a thoughtful, charming attempt at making her husband feel better but also an attestation to the fact that she wants nothing more than this, dinner with the love of her life in their dilapidated future home. It’s the romance of being poor together (as Tevye says of Tzeitel and Motel, “They’re so happy they don’t know how miserable they are.”) and also of being able to make your fun anywhere. Like George, I want to go everywhere, see everything, be somebody, but for nearly a full year of quarantine, the universe shrank for Adam and I. We cooked elaborate meals, took up watercoloring outside, watched 600 movies, and we were happy inside.

1. Full disclosure: my dad worked on this! And I spent maybe the most magical summer of my life in Virginia and sometime soon I’m dragging Adam back with me for pulled pork and a ride down the Chesapeake.

2. Apologies for the glib term, but I find the phrase ex-lover/former lover to be tacky/repugnant.

3. James Horner famously fucking hated Terrence Malick for chopping up his score for The New World, using themes sparingly and then throwing a bunch of Wagner and Mozart in as he pleased, but a) Malick was right and b) goddamn nobody writes a love theme like James Horner. One of the beautiful things about the movies is when a bunch of geniuses get together to ruin each others lives, and somehow the result is a perfect showcase of their individual talents.

4. My dad worked on this too.