Greetings!
Here’s a transcript of a recent email exchange (between myself, Jamie Popowich and Angela Szczepaniak) concerning Derek Cianfrance’s much-hyped Blue Valentine–starring Michelle Williams, Ryan Gosling and the demented gender dynamics of our society.
Comments and retorts would be much appreciated!
=====Jamie (in response to a link I put up on Facebook to the film’s theme song–”You and Me” (by Penny and the Quarters)
Dave-O,
I was sent a rumour that you enjoyed this vile piece of saddo. Please tell it not be true. This is the anti-Minnie et Moskowitz. Valentine is a heavy handed, Hollywood version of what popcorn eaters believe a failed relationship should look like. I did laugh loudly at two scenes 1) when the wrestler puts Michelle Williams in a Boston crab after sexual completion and 2) when the dad says “Did you lock the door. Dean, let me in. I don’t have my oxygen tank.”
Please, for the corpse of Cassavetes, look into your soul and realize that every moment of happiness is shattered by Thor’s mighty hammer in this movie. Relationships are hard, getting old is difficult, but you know what, in the middle of all that is happiness and jokes, and some satisfaction with the struggles. Peter Falk running after his children on the beach in Women Under the Influence, Moskowitz cutting his beard, we all have moments that let us rise above our present circumstances. Blue wants you to believe all is shit or will be shit or is in the midst of shit.
Ask yourself, when the only understanding people in a movie are an abortionist and his nurse is there any truth here, or any enjoyment or are we witness to a director’s “serious” turn, with raw, pure emotions, a director who should be taken seriously because he’s willing to film sex as it should really be! No, we are in for an after school special for adults, with some shots of tits.
Fight the injustice!
======Dave
ah yes!
I agree that this isn’t on the Cassavetes level! On the other hand–in some ways, I think this film does a braver thing by giving us two utter saps as protagonists (and by refusing to give us that comforting sense that there is something at all “right” about the Cassavetian craziness transacted between them). I agree that this is not how my relationships have failed. However, I think there are a lot marriages like this. Most people live in a far bleaker world than we do, and the film captured that (and the double-edged romanticism they use to get by in it) in a way that I didn’t expect it to!
=====Angela
what i find so awful about the film is the film itself–i don’t even think it’s worth debating what the film argues and how successful or interesting it is at achieving those aims…. it’s about on the level of a first-year creative writing workshop script–one of those students who strives to “be real” and “tell it like it is” and “gives it his all.” oh, and to “write what he knows.”
=====Dave
oh for sure! but I think that’s what people are responding to in it–it is defiantly amateurish, employing stock scenarios, characters and dialog all the way through… but that kind of works to its advantage, ’cause it frees the film from even trying to account for the psychological processes underlying these attitudes… Ultimately, I think it was the internet comments that sold me on it (the response critic hangover is hard to shake!)… there are hundreds of people out there who believe this is a true account of their romantic fortunes, and there’s something about that collective earnestness that appeals to me!
=====Angela
it does not work to its advantage! just because people are saps… well, that’s no excuse for tolerating (worse, celebrating) bad art. so-called “psychological depth” would be just as awful, and not what i would substitute. invention and intelligence in writing isn’t the same as the pretense to depth. i see no difference between this film’s cliches and the ones in “the time traveler’s wife” or “speed” or “speed 2,” etc.
=====Dave
ah but I’ve got a much softer spot for the saps I think… there’s something quite disturbingly affecting about them embracing a film which tells them that their sentimental attachment to gender roles makes them utterly unfit to even participate in a relationship!
(the preceding sentiments have been brought to you by deep immersion in Paradise Reaganed)
=====Angela
oh and didn’t the film attempt to provide psychological depth? michelle williams never learned to have a good relationship because her parents had a bad relationship…. wasn’t that the psychological explanation to account for her inability to connect, etc? isn’t that what all the shoulder hunching over meatloaf was about?
=====Dave:
re: meatloaf–you’re right, I guess that’s what that was for, but it’s so rote that I think it just passes for stock environment! Or take the scene with the mover and the old man and his fuckin’ military accoutrements, for example–that is prime cinematic “art naif”
=====Angela:
you can find similar arguments you see and love in this film in far better work, where you don’t have to rely on seeing the sapline as the excuse for turning its faults to triumphs.
“peepshow” uses all the same cliches, but with astuteness that actually gives those arguments legs.
it’s just as impossible to learn something from westerns if you identify with their ethos, as it is with something like blue valentine. i guess where you find it intriguing that it hits all the right sapchords, i find it a little frightening…. and a lot tiresome. it’s the “true grit” of relationship movies.
The argument, ‘well the movie must have something if it’s started this much discussion’ won’t fly either. Blue Valentine is the epitome of poor Hollywood trash. Showgirls had some humour, and a tough cookies protagonist. What’d this have? A few people bitterly caught in ‘life is shit’ without any sense of breath.
I really didn’t follow every comment, but why does every film have to be a masterpiece? I enjoyed (and shuddered) at this one, because it went some directions I haven’t usually seen in commercial cinema. I know it’s easier to take apart a film that tries to do what you want, and fails, but I’m giving it some credit for trying.
thanks Jack!
that’s a perfectly valid point of view, but my argument was that Blue Valentine DOES do what I wanted it to do (demonstrate the utter bankruptcy of the gender assumptions which structure most of the filmed love stories–”mainstream”, “indie” or “other”–that audiences encounter)
my interlocutors definitely had a lot to say about what they considered to be poor execution on the film’s part–but from where I sat, the film as is was the perfect realization of a deeply flawed (but instructive) design
Dave
I don’t know you guys, but this transcript of emails was pretty entertaining to read and I won’t lie- my view on Blue Valentine has slightly changed. It’s true that the image of the relationship is a little too dramatic and in between bad moments, there are always moments of laughter and happiness which are here non existent, but the fact is that the characters are persuasive enough to believe that this particular couple just wasn’t meant to be. Against everything else.
Great post! Very good points