is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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silver linings.
I woke up today thinking that Silver Linings Playlist is better than I thought it was yesterday right after I saw it. Yesterday I liked it. I thought it had good moments but wasn�t David O. Russell�s best. Today I probably think the same thing, but I have greater appreciation for the whole of the film. What I think it did very well was show how easy it is to get stuck in your thinking, and thus in your acting (and by �acting� I don�t mean the thespian craft but how you live your life). So, sure, on one level the movie is about mental illness. It even does a good job capturing, all at once, these potentially conflicting truths: how difficult it is to accept a diagnosis of bipolar disorder when you�re already an adult who has been suffering from it all along, how much of a relief it is to have what you�ve been struggling with explained, and how having it explained doesn�t fix it for you.
But if you step back and look at the larger plotline, almost every character in the film, even the ones who aren�t rumored to be mentally ill, are living some version of being stuck in a sad or destructive way of thinking. Most obviously the Robert DeNiro and Jennifer Lawrence characters, but also the friend who is letting his stress about how to make his wife happy ruin his marriage and the mother who, in a misguided attempt to make everyone happy, enables a lot of bad judgment and crazy behavior. I woke up today thinking: everyone has been there, in that place where you are stuck. Stuck in your thinking and therefore in your acting. And being there, in that place, if you don�t mark it as a place with boundaries you might step beyond, renders you unable to think beyond, colors how you see things. It makes some things that are barely there seem huge. And it makes other things that could be there if you just gave them a try invisible. Mental illness can do that, but so can a perfectly healthy mind. That�s what the film shows.
Interesting sidenote: it�s always the craziest people in the film who give the best advice, or make the most honest pronouncements�Bradley Cooper defending Jennifer Lawrence�s honor on the doorstep of her parents house; Jennifer Lawrence saying she likes every part of herself, even the nasty dirty parts; Bradley Cooper telling his friend not to throw away a marriage without trying to fix it; Robert De Niro telling Bradley Cooper not to fuck up a chance at loving someone who loves him back; Bradley Cooper telling Jennifer Lawrence that it took him a while to realize he loved her because he just got stuck; and so on.
Of course, one can�t watch the end of the film and think �happy ending��and that is a good kind of Russell move, I think. It�s not like two mentally unbalanced persons are going to make a smooth transition into well-adjusted bliss. But perhaps that is not only because they are mentally unbalanced. Any adult knows that being in a long-term relationship is a form of being saved that also takes a tremendous amount of work (so, joke if you will about Ben Affleck yelling to the world as he received an Academy Award that his marriage takes work but is the best kind of work a person can do�. when I heard that, I cringed for a moment and then thought: well, there is a person who knows what love really is).
Having another person (or persons�sustaining relationships come in many forms, some of them friend-groups) to build you up, accept you for who you are, and help protect you from the larger world (which will not always build you up or accept you for who you are) saves you. From all kinds of things that would be worse otherwise. But relationships take work. They don�t survive if you just rely on them without putting effort into them. So of course these two difficult and strange people are going to have some rough times as they head off into the sunset. Who doesn�t? Their rough times may be rougher, given what they�re dealing with. But, like most of the rest of us, maybe they�ll both still be better off together than apart if they both keep trying. So much fragility built into that! If one or both of them stops trying, the thing might just die. If they both try their hardest, the world might still do its best to make everything too difficult. If they�re really lucky and not lazy, they may keep themselves safe from all the damage the world can do, so be each other�s refuge. A form of being saved that also takes a tremendous amount of work.
All this may make me sound tremendously jaded, like I think love is more about the work than it is about the its tremendous gift. But that�s at least in part because the ways we talk about love in this culture tend to be kind of silly and unhelpful. I do believe in love�that it is transformative, that life is worth less without it, that it is worth all the words put toward describing it, even if they mostly fail to capture it. (Or, as Levinas says: �The caress of love, always the same, in the last accounting (for one who thinks in counting) is always different and overflows with exorbitance the songs, poems and admissions in which it is said in so many different ways and through so many themes, in which it apparently is forgotten.�) I�ve always been a bit of a romantic. What that means has changed over time. A younger me would be impatient with all the talk of work and fragility. But that chick had no idea what she was doing.
9:36 a.m. - March 02, 2013
Donovan - 2013-03-02 17:36:42
I also really liked it. By accident I saw it twice. Part of what made it for me was watching this interview with David O. Russell, where he talks about his son's own bipolar diagnosis and how he made the movie in part to show his son that he could fit into the world.
http://www.nytimes.com/video/2013/01/02/movies/100000001983766/a-chat-with-david-o-russell-.html
I think Hollywood movies have a particular set of genre conventions that come with them, and one of those conventions is a happy ending. I think rather than moralizing about the genre convention itself as some of the film's critics have done, the more interesting question is to ask how the genre conventions are used--what ends they're put towards, in this case, how it was inserted into the theme of healing.
So like you, I felt like the movie was sort of about becoming unstuck, but about still being sticky. It's about, as you say, being uncompromisingly honest and making people uncomfortable because of that, but being able to heal other people by that same virtue, and getting to the point where that virtue can heal others but no longer makes you sick.
The last thing was the way that medication was shown in the film--when Pat takes his pills it's the turning point from bonkers-4 AM-rant to determined but thoughtful. I feel like the convention in Scientology-dominated Hollywood is to represent medication as a villain. Here it seemed to be part of the engines of healing that were running through the narrative, a way for him to steer away from suffering but not completely dismantle who he was.
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Charlie Bertsch - 2013-04-06 07:44:58
I was reminded tonight of this entry and that I wanted to comment on it. I laughed a lot when I first saw the film and certainly enjoyed it, apart from a minor -- but to me egregious -- slip with regard to football scores that activated my worst OCD tendencies. But I thought it was too pat at the end and questioned Jennifer Lawrence's casting, even though I admired her acting. The longer the film settled in my mind, however, the more it seemed stronger than I'd initially concluded. And your post reinforced that reassessment by providing the perfect frame within which to think about it anew. So thank you.
(I do stop by here regularly. For some reason I got into a multi-year funk of not commenting outside of Facebook. I'm trying to overcome that laziness.)
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