Holding Back and Being Alone (or: The Tragic Allure of Uptight Men)

 I'm too busy trying not to get shot. This was the answer I finally arrived at, to my satisfaction, in the bathtub, a week and a half after my best friend asked me about romantic prospects. (Never mind that my answer since second grade has been the same, people still double-check and I love them for it.) It felt good to finally come up with an answer--the truth, even--after a week of itchiness about the question. I have never been less concerned with finding someone, which is unexpected considering that with every passing week the list of friends who have been single as long as I have dwindles rapidly.

After I came up with my answer, and delivered it at rant volume to Roommate J when we Skyped (one friend is as good as another for clarification purposes), I felt better.

Then, today, I saw J. Edgar.

Unsurprisingly, I've always been drawn to characters who can't quite spit it out. There's a reason my spirit animal is Cyrano de Bergerac. The bravery required for grand declarations of love, or interest, or desire for a phone number strikes me as so immense so as to be almost unattainable. It is so much more compelling, on an entertainment level, to watch someone want to say something and fail than just say what they mean and go on with their life. There has to be conflict, and internal conflict is the best there is, on any scale.

We've established that characters unwilling to put themselves on the line are my drug. You would think, therefore, that J. Edgar would leave me with a 24-hour high. You would be wrong.

Sidebar: Once upon a time, when I was still in high school, I went to see Capote in theaters with my parents and grandparents. I walked out of the theater drained, shocked, convinced I had seen one of the most amazing, brilliant, disturbing, dark movies ever. I couldn't believe I had brought my grandparents to see it. I was shaken to the core. My grandfather's response was, "That was great! What's for dinner?" Since then I've had quite a bit more exposure to the whole In Cold Blood saga and today I would probably not be so thoroughly rocked off my hinges. Still, the fact remains that Capote was the first movie to bring to my attention that different people can have drastically different reactions to the same material depending on what they bring with them to the table.

My reaction to J. Edgar was less extreme. For one thing, it is a pretty conventional biopic. It takes a biographical outline and plugs the holes with poetic license. It's perfectly solid, and not particularly cinematically innovative. I knew more about J. Edgar Hoover going into this movie than I knew about Truman Capote in high school, and Leonardo DiCaprio is Leonardo DiCaprio. He doesn't dissolve like Philip Seymour Hoffman. I knew what I was getting into. What I couldn't anticipate was how sad the movie would make me.

Part of it came down to Armie Hammer's facial expressions. This is an actor who already took me by surprise once in The Social Network; I wandered out of the theater on that occasion dazed, my extremely latent Aryan jock frat boy attraction receptors fully activated. This time his was like one big audience teleprompter: this is the emotion this scene is supposed to evoke in you, this is the exact expression you would have on your own face in this situation. It doesn't hurt that he's an incredibly good looking actor, but at least 25% of the time he's coated in truly impressive old age makeup and it still happens.

Unrequited love rocks my socks. It usually resolves itself favorably, but even when it doesn't there's usually some kind of closure. What left me upset and fidgeting on the bus today was the same genre of thing that had me crying for a solid hour after I watched the Homicide movie: missed opportunity, missed communication, unfinished business, lack of action, requited feelings that never intersect. The wrong people. The wrong era.

I treat pretty much every biopic I see as fiction. That doesn't make it better. There is no situation or emotion that exists in fiction that hasn't happened in real life first. To quote Sherlock Holmes and the Bible simultaneously, "There is nothing new under the sun. It has all been done before."

I don't think this is something I've done. I don't think I've held myself back at the key moment when someone else was trying to reach out. I think my romantic desert can be chalked up to garden variety laziness and lack of opportunity. Since this is the case, most of the time I'm fine with it. Like I said, and as should be apparent if you've read even one other blog entry, these days I've got bigger fish to fry. I've never been someone who can't handle being alone. I've always enjoyed time to myself. Still, sometimes, like that woman at the end of Paris, je t'aime, sometimes it would be nice to be able to turn to someone and say, "That's nice, isn't it?"

Knowing that you have someone to turn to and speak with and nevertheless holding yourself back from it? That's tragic, and that will leave me introspecting for hours on a Saturday. What can you do but pray that you never find yourself in a position where you're at your loneliest sitting next to someone you love and who you know loves you.

But he
retreats and, fleeing, shouts: "Do not touch me!
Don't cling to me! I'd sooner die than say
I'm yours!"; and Echo answered him. "I'm yours."
--Ovid, Metamorphoses