To all of you who saw that embarrassing, border-line incomprehensible and hastily removed post from a while ago - I'm sorry for being weird about it and I hope this serves as an explanation of some kind.
Officially "breaking up"(so-to-speak) a month after the fact is a weird, weird thing. But, good ultimately. i guess. No. It's good. It's completely terrifying and hard, but good and necessary. Closure is truly an amazing feeling, I've found. It was great to talk, and learn about scary new jobs and new long-distance boyfriends and other things I would have not missed out on knowing about if we weren't being so stupid. We talked everything out, and I could tell that it was a good conversation because I lost my appetite and wanted to cry. driving home and listening to a mix* I later found out was made for her by the new boyfriend before he headed home to LA, I kind of did a little.
These were straight up hardcore over-the-top "I love you" jams that completely tore me up late 2004. Jams that I remember specifically putting on so many similarly themed tapes back then. By the end of Electrelane's "birds," a song that even under normal circumstances already totally slays me, I started to breakdown a little. It was like I was in this weird depressing time warp that instantly forced me to recall every other failed relationship and why it failed. It was such a terrible feeling. Oh and there was rain. Oh god, there was rain. "This sucks" we both agreed and like some sick cosmic joke, "I don't blame you" by cat power - cat fucking power - came on the stereo. I didn't absolutely lose it in the car, but walking up the steps to my apartment is a completely different story.
Ever since I discovered it on PBS at like 430 in the morning on a saturday sometime in high school, every time something went wrong in a relationship - or not even wrong I guess, just not how I probably would have liked at the time - I would watch Casablanca. One year, at exactly the perfect time in my personal life, the late alpine 4 played a weeklong Bogart double feature of the Maltese Falcon and Casablanca. I watched Maltese Falcon only once, but I caught the showing of Casablanca every night that week. Time would stop when i watched Casablanca, i was enthralled. I think that I must have thought it was soothing somehow, but in actuality, watching Casablanca in any kind of romantically depressed state is about the worst idea of all time. Its torture, really. Like bashing your skull in with a large polo mallet, it only serves to make things worse.
About a year ago, however, I realized the solution. Casablanca as romantic catharsis only works with a mandatory 4 hours of additional commentary: A screening of Casablanca followed by Woody Allen's Play It Again, Sam and Rob Reiner's When Harry Met Sally. Watching these films in this specific order makes a cinematic breakup mix tape (one that Beezy refers to as my "boner jams '03") that both reaffirms Casablanca's place and importance in the history of romantic film, but also completely cheers me up. Somewhere between "Here's looking at you kid" and "Don't *** with Mr. Zero" I end up feeling pretty OK.
The logic of this juxtaposition is clear in both chronology and influence. These films build upon each other. Play It Again, Sam picks up exactly where Casablanca leaves off - opening with nebbish film critic Allan Felix (Allen) watching the closing scene of Casablanca, mouth agape with situational lust. Play It Again, Sam references Casablanca so intensely that through much of the film Allan gets romantic advice from the ghost of Humphrey Bogart and eventually recreates the classic's closing scene as its own conclusion. "If that plane leaves the ground, and you're not on it with him, you'll regret it - maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life." Allan tells Linda (Diane Keaton), the love of his life. "That's beautiful!" she cries. "It's from Casablanca." he says, "I waited my whole life to say it." And I completely understand how he feels.
The problem with Casablanca as a romantic model, I think, is that it is a TOO perfect example of tragic love. An example that jerks like Allan Felix and I idealize too far out of proportion. I think I had seen a half dozen Woody Allen films before I saw Play It Again, Sam, but seeing this film was a completely epiphanous experience, and reaffirmed everything I loved about him at the time.
Play It Again, Sam was the first film where Woody Allen and Diane Keaton shared the screen together (she had been previously cast in the play version of the story), but When Harry Met Sally is the direct descendant of their later work together, Annie Hall in particular. Screenwriter Nora Ephron clearly worships at the alter of Woody Allen, and has even appeared as an extra in a couple of his films.[1][2] Not only does When Harry Met Sally mimic Annie Hall thematically and formally (opening titles, score, split screens, the film is intercut with direct camera interviews, etc.) but I have always felt that Billy Crystal plays Harry like a more personable Woody Allen (Woody Allen-lite!). I can just imagine Nora and Rob directing Crystal to “Be more like Woody!!” (Apart from this sentence, right here, I will not attempt to make a connection between this opinion and the fact that not quite 10 years later Billy Crystal played the devil in Allen’s Deconstructing Harry. It’s a bit of a stretch, even for me.)
For all of its similarity to Allen’s work, it shares a healthy obsession with Casablanca as well. The score consists mostly of a young Harry Connick Jr. covering jazz standards made popular by their inclusion in Casablanca, most notably As Time Goes By and It Had to Be You (a song awkwardly sung by Annie Hall in a bar on one of her earliest dates with Alvy). Another reference to the classic is made in When Harry Met Sally’s opening sequence (as Harry and Sally travel from Chicago to New York) and is then mirrored a decade later in the film’s chronology when Harry and Sally recall that conversation on the phone while actually watching Casablanca on late-nite cable. Though each is in their respective bedroom, the scene is mostly shot from behind in split screen, making it appear as if two are sharing a bed.
Casablanca is a straight up weepy through and through. Play It Again, Sam recreates the same trajectory but lightens it up with some CLASSIC one-liners and the slapstick humor typical of Allen’s earlier work. Play It Again, Sam still ends sadly, but softens the blow along the way leaving When Harry Met Sally function as cleanup. It’s the part of the mix that makes everything OK. It takes the tragedy of the first two films, and spins it around with the kind of totally-Hollywood happy ending that I am an absolute sucker for. While the endings of Casablanca and Play It Again, Sam are more like real life (who am I kidding, it’s nothing that noble, Annie Hall is like real life), When Harry Met Sally provides the TRUE escapism necessary for this mix to work. It projects the (false?) hope that maybe someday something will work out alright, even if it takes 30 years to happen. And by six hours into the cycle, it’s this kind of hope that I need.
Normally I watch these films back-to-back, but I started this cycle again a couple weeks ago and only got through Casablanca before I needed a break. I plan on finishing it after the potluck tonight. Maybe I should start the whole thing over again.
Anyhow, I am so glad she and I finally got the chance to talk about everything that was upsetting us. And I’m pretty much over everything. I have obviously had a lot of time to think about this, and it was really just the acknowledgement that I needed. Now it won't be weird when see each other around town anymore and I think we will be back to being good friends in no time at all. I really look forward to that.
*I'm trying super hard not to be catty about the new boyfriend thing, because that is totally not the classy way to go out. But I am reserving the right with regards to absolutely the most superficial thing: the mix tape. So superficial, in fact that it makes me a little guilty. The guilt and the cattiness cancel each out, right? Right? But Buena Vista Social Club?!? Are you kidding me? i mean we all love Wim Wenders, but come on, man. That’s what white people put on mixes to show how cultured they are. Well, now I feel like a jerk again and that makes everything seem alright, i guess. It’s the little things that reinforce the status quo.
ps. mad shouts to nina for late night/early morning chats. even from berlin you still know exactly what to say.
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Originally posted on:
mixed feelings