i watched this on hulu tonite. i should probably be embarassed to admit that, because at least on it’s surface, it was smut smut smut. however, i became wrapped up in the story – it spoke alot to my thoughts about women, and men, and relationships.
firstly, that women are godawfully mysterious creatures. i am a woman, for anyone who falls upon this without knowing me. we are driven by so many things, so many feelings, desires, intuitions, both from within and from without us. i think in many instances, we are so sensitive to others desires, expectations, we are almost powerless to deny other people. their desires, expectations, become our own. this tangles and holds us up, and i find that, at least of myself, we become contradictions. beautiful, tragic, melodic, contramelodic contradictions. i think sometimes, we seek that out, to remain mysterious. mystery is power. we are knowing, we are cunning, and we seduced adam to take the apple. there is no doubt in my mind of this…
the main female character is this movie embodies this feminine need to have mystery, to have some secret, to have a piece of herself all to herself, unshared and unknown. once she has become “an open book” in her relationship with her boyfriend, once she has shared all her secret places and thoughts and feelings, and he managed to stay, she had lost that mystery. she needed to regain it, to remain who she was… to regain something in herself. so she had an affair, with some ripped eye candy she met on the street, with someone so unlike her boyfriend that he could be totally secret. she had to regain her wildness, her untamed places. and to me, that made so much sense (not that i would do such a thing!!!!)
of course, it got complicated. both men ended up loving her, and the regaining of her wildness brought shadows to her life. the boy toy on the side wouldn’t let her go, wouldn’t let it end. the boyfriend wanted to marry her. she couldn’t undo what she’d done, and she couldn’t end it. she’d already lost control of the men, and she began spinning out of control of herself, feeling trapped, powerless, and i suspect, undeserving of love, dirty and dark. so, she killed herself.
now the men in this movie seem unreal to me. i think i may have an unhealthy view of men. they both loved her, one sweetly, the other sickly. she of course needed both from one person. she needed someone to capture her good and bad, equally, but leave something unknown, uncharted. each of them had aggression, masculinity. but something about them seemed too emotive, too sensing. they got too hurt by her death. i guess it’s because i don’t believe men capable of being really hurt by a woman love, because i don’t believe men put themselves out there for love like women do. men put themselves out, vulnerable and open, for friendship, for a companion, but not for love, and not even for family in many cases. thus, it was unrealistic to me that both men be so broken by her taking her life. men don’t break so easily. i think if only they did, women would understand them a bit better.
i think what struck me the most in regards to relationships is that we can never ever have what we desire out of them. as women, we will always feel some restlessness, either from our man “not understanding” us, or not “feeling” enough, or from him being too “selfish.” we have to decide if we’d rather live with restlessness, or shadows so dark we can’t live with them. we can put ourselves in the harsh light, and examine ourselves. i think we’ll find we are far more selfish and desirous of power than we’d ever care to admit.
