11:19:23

What I have learned: People tolerate relationships—of all kinds and all types of dysfunction—only if those relationships and dysfunctions let them off the hook and allow them to remain they way they are comfortable being. They prefer that over having their true needs met and their deepest dreams realized. It takes courage to dream and courage to want to be happy. As my mother always says, love and happiness takes much more work than mediocrity and unhappiness.

A useful book on this subject is Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving as well as Adam Phillips’ great essay, “On Frustration” (which I have written and taught a lot about). I disagree with Phillips’ argument that happiness is the same as hedonism—nothing could be further from the truth. Happiness is a communion with Spirit—it is, as Lloyd Dobler explains about Diane Court in Say Anything (1989) “feeling satissssssfied” in the deepest sense. Struggle and frustration are not the antithesis to love and fulfillment. Phillips: “If someone can satisfy you, they can also frustrate you. This is ineluctable. What we’re starved of now is frustration.”

There is no mastery or maturity (Phillips: “I think we need better enticements to adulthood.” Does our culture gives us any? Not anymore. There is no mystique around adulthood now, only arrested development and victimhood) or depth without knowing how to deal with—handle—and face pain and struggle, as James Baldwin told us. We must learn the lessons of suffering and love deeper because of it. Phillips always talks about learning to understand what we are willing to do to get what we want, which is also the fight against melancholia and the festishization of lack. There is no greater film about this, really—although all classic romantic Hollywood films are about this—than Moonstruck (1987).

Susan Bordo describes the important role of frustration-satisfaction in the old screwball film comedy this way:

“The hero and heroine of the [1930s] screwball comedy may decide to attempt a life with a more conventional person (e.g., ‘the rube’). It can’t work; and learning that—learning who one really is and whom one really needs to be with in order to fully realize that—is the arc of the comedy.”

“We need better pictures of satisfaction” (Phillips). Pictures in the case of cinema are literal. We are living with a cinematic bankruptcy of inspiration, guidance, and example.