Day 63: The Kids Are All Right

A tense family life leads to cheating and heartbreak (for me as much as anyone in the film, I’m sure). Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore) have been together for over 18 years and the cracks are starting to show. They’ve got two great kids, Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and Laser (Josh Hutcherson), who decide they want to get in touch with their biological father, Paul (Mark Ruffalo). The introduction of this new person into an already shaky family makes tensions reach boiling point and people end up being bastards. Heads up, this whole blog is basically me ranting about cheating. My advice is to skip this one.

Nic and Jules are constantly sniping and undermining each other all the time. Jules doesn’t feel like she is appreciated anymore and Nic feels under strain because she is financially caring for the whole family. It all gets massively worse when Paul is thrown into the mix. He’s easy going which serves to rile Nic at every point. Not helping matters is that everyone else seems to love him and they are all spending time with him and bonding. She feels like everything is slipping away so she tries really hard to connect with him. Eventually she manages it and it’s a really sweet moment with them singing a Joni Mitchell song at the table but then it’s totally ruined because of her discovery that Jules has been fucking him. My notes are just incoherent ramblings filled with swearing so I can’t remember specifics all too well but I take from that that I was incensed.

Jules bitches about Nic to Paul which pissed me off so much, you can’t be unloading the private problems of your marriage on him after you’ve kissed him. Not allowed. And then she says she loves Nic but then goes right ahead and fucks Paul anyway. There’s not a single part of me that thinks you can love someone and cheat on them. I just do not believe that it’s possible. Her ‘apology speech’ drove me mad as well, when she said “Sometimes you hurt the ones you love the most and I don’t know why.” Because people are selfish, that's why. There is no deeper, existential meaning there; people are selfish bastards and they will fuck you over when they want. I completely understand that Jules felt unappreciated at home, and that is horrible. But fucking some guy isn’t going to fix those problems, yeah you’ll feel appreciated in the moment you’re with him but you still have to go home to your problems, they’ve not gone anywhere because you haven’t dealt with them. You’ve created another problem now on top of all the ones you had before, and this problem is going to devastate the person you’re claiming to love. The way she said the line was as if she had no control over what she was doing, that hurting the people you love is just how it goes. She had a choice, there was a moment (in fact there were several, considering she fucked him a lot) when she could’ve said, ‘No, I’ll not cheat on my wife and ruin my kid’s chance at getting to know their biological father’ and she ignored it and went right on ahead with it. You can apologise all you want but the fact you willingly went ahead with it, knowing that Nic was going to be hurt is inexcusable. For me, anyway. In the film it looks like they’re going to try and work through it. That takes a stronger person than me, I just couldn't do it. Wouldn’t matter how long we’d been together or if we had kids or whatever, cheating is my ultimate dealbreaker. I don’t think I’d even fight about it with my person either, I’d just leave. It just drives me mad, I don’t understand it at all.

Somewhere in the film I couldn’t think about how awful it was that their family was being pulled apart so I went to my happy place. Mark Ruffalo was there, obviously. And it was just calm and there was no cheating or awkward sex (seriously, all of the sex scenes are just the most uncomfortable, man alive). He’s such a babe. You’ll need to go to your happy place when watching the film as well. It is really the only way to get through the sadness and awkward sex. In fact I’m sure that’s how like 90% of marriages work.

7/10

Day 62: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Painfully introverted gentleman, Joel (Jim Carrey), meets loud and exciting lady, Clementine (Kate Winslet), and understandably falls in love. But their relationship inevitably doesn’t work and they both end up getting involved with this company who can erase specific memories, and they decide to erase each other. While Joel is going through the procedure he realises that he doesn’t want to lose his memories of his time with Clementine and he tries to resist it but it’s too late.

To carry out the procedure, the company needs Joel to collect all the items he has that remind him of Clementine. Fair enough I understand there’ll be a lot of tangible things that he can hand over and be rid of but what about other things? You associate certain songs with people, and smells, and places. You can’t erase those, surely you wouldn’t be able to get everything together to make that possible. Of course this kind of procedure isn’t possible currently but maybe it will in future. Until then people will just have to stick with what they usually do when they’re trying to forget someone: get drunk. And that’s never all that successful. 

The film jumps from memory to memory as the technicians are erasing them. The last time he saw Clementine they had a fight, and I’m not surprised they broke up because this was what was said:

Clementine:  You’re freaked out because I was out late without you. And in your little wormy brain you’re trying to figure out, ‘Did she fuck someone tonight?’

Joel:  No see, Clem. I assume you fucked someone tonight. Isn’t that how you get people to like you?

In the immortal words of Cher in ‘Clueless’, that’s way harsh. Of course the thought of her off fucking someone was clearly what kept him up until 3am when she eventually got home, so it was obviously a problem for him but he definitely could've voiced his insecurities and concerns in a better way. You can’t just throw it out there in an argument, once you say something like that there is no going back. And obviously that’s what happened; they split up and she had him erased, prompting him to do the same. That’s not the only time he was so completely rude to her in their relationship though. At one point he tells her she’d be a bad mother. I mean, you can’t just say these things and expect her to be alright with it. She wakes him up saying that he never tells her things and that she tells him everything. He says that constantly talking isn’t necessarily communicating, and she is hurt by it. No wonder she felt bad being with him if he kept saying things like that. Although, of course, it wasn’t always like that. They are lying out on the frozen lake together under the stars and he tells her that he is the happiest he’s ever been, being right there with her. Which is sweet but then the memory is gone and he’ll never have it back.

I’m not sure about this memory erasing business. On one hand I can totally understand why you would have it done. If you’re having a difficult time moving on from someone, it makes sense you would want to do anything you could that might help. But then, you’re not just erasing the bad things that eventually spoiled the relationship, you are also erasing the good things that made you happy. Like with Joel, he’ll never have that memory back of being the happiest he’s ever been, and that’s just awful. Your relationships with other people (not just talking romantic ones) can give you insight into different aspects of yourself. With Joel and Clementine, he never did anything and always shied away from socialising with people, but then Clementine came along and just constantly pulled him out of his comfort zone, pushing the boundaries of who he thought he was. To erase that time together is to erase the knowledge that you can do so much more than you think you are capable of, that you don’t have to be who you’ve always thought you were. My thoughts on this always change from viewing to viewing of this film but today I’ve decided memory erasing is a bad idea. But I’m never consistent on that.

They both end up finding out what happened and they listen to the tapes of them talking about each other. I say talking but it’s really just a complete tearing down of the other person. He talks about how she’s insecure so will fuck anybody and she talks about how totally boring and pathetic he is. It must be so difficult to listen to all the bad points of your relationship before you even get a chance to have the relationship, and to have perhaps negative things about you pointed out so mercilessly. She tries to leave but he catches up to her and they both know it will probably not work but they decide to go for it anyway.

Joel:  I can’t see anything that I don’t like about you.

Clementine:  But you will. But you will, y’know, you will think of things. And I’ll get bored with you and feel trapped because that’s what happens with me.

Joel:  OK.

Clementine:  OK.

9/10