(no subject)

[zana16]

cshuski and I saw Love Happens this afternoon. THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS. A few reactions:

1) Seriously? They couldn't give a single person of color a speaking part? What the fuck? Yes, it's set in Seattle, but they made sure to add the requisite number of brown and black faces to the crowd; not one of them could have been even a minor character?

2) Martin Sheen will always be President Bartlet to me. Sorry, Martin. My reaction was, "Why does President Bartlet live in the suburbs?"

3) I cried. A lot. It's about a man coming to terms with the death of his wife. ...Saved by the love of a good woman, which kind of pisses me off, because she got no character development whatsoever, and wtf nobody can "fix" someone else. I was sitting in the theater, feeling pretty silly, with tears streaming down my face; because despite its manifest flaws, the movie was good, and it explored a hard subject, and did it pretty well.

...Except it didn't. I got the impression that the writer of the story was trying to sort out hir own feelings about losing a loved one, and knew the steps, but not how to make the mental leap. Cause I know there's a mental leap that has to be made (and the movie is about how this guy teaches other people to make the mental leap cause he's a self-help book author, but he can't make it himself). And I relate, cause I've tried for more than half my life to make the mental leap from devastation to integrated sorrow, and I never have been able to. It's an internal process, which makes it hard to document onscreen, and has to be done through symbols that don't ring entirely true -- we all knew the elevator scene was coming as soon as the subject was introduced, didn't we? Only life isn't that easy. Overcoming our fears isn't anything like stepping onto an elevator. It's more subtle than that.

And I've been struggling with this one scene in my story, which touches on the exact same topic, and it's a two-page scene that I keep rewriting and rewriting cause it doesn't work, I can't make my character figure out how to move beyond her grief when I haven't figured it out myself.

And okay, I know on one level that it's pretty obvious, there will never be a time when the person that I am isn't profoundly affected by my mother dying, and there will never be a time when I am not at least a little fucked up because my sister was raped and murdered. But it's been a decade and a half, I need to move somehow beyond where I am now, because it not I'll be left where my stepmother is, too emotionally traumatized to love anybody.

Only I don't know how, and this is the first mainstream thing I've seen that even addresses the issue, and it doesn't quite do it.

Comments

[helenish.livejournal.com]

I'm so sorry for your losses.

Here a series of articles here--the ones that start with "The Long Goodbye:" about the author's mother's death which you might find interesting.

They were difficult for me to read first because a lot of the things about her sadness were so familiar and painfully immediate to me (my mother died in 2002) but also because so many of the things about her mother's death were very different. For example, she had the opportunity to say goodbye to her mother, which I did not.

Anyhow, BLAH, I don't even know what I'm trying to say--I don't want to pretend to know what your grief is like, but I think it's just really hard and painful and difficult to lose someone, no matter which way you come to it. And it shocks me to write down 2002 because that seems like a long time ago, but my mother's death doesn't feel like it's very far away at all.

[zana16.livejournal.com]

It's really hard to talk about death, even with someone who understands, isn't it?

I'm sorry about your mother. I wish I could say it won't always feel so close, but that's not the case for me, so I don't know what's possible.

Thank you for the link and for your kind words.

[msmoat.livejournal.com]

I saw Love Happens this weekend too and, yeah, same reaction. I think I would have been happier with it if they hadn't tried to shoehorn in a romantic comedy. This movie really was more about trying to deal with grief...and they didn't quite get that right. Much of it didn't seem real. And yet there were scenes that were very effective for me.

I hadn't expected so much emphasis on grief and was caught unprepared for it. My father died when I was a child, and grief became part of the fabric of my life. I haven't seen or read much that truly deals with that's like in a way that rings true to me.

[zana16.livejournal.com]

We went expecting a romantic comedy. It was really trying to do too much for one movie. The scene in the bathroom, for example, was brilliant, but it didn't fit into the plot.

I lost my mother, and now it seems like "figuring out how to be female" and "figuring out how to not let grief own me" are two things I have no role models for. I keep figuring it has to show up *somewhere* in popular culture. Or maybe no one has figured it out, and they're just muddling through...