Plot Twist
The comedian Catherine Cohen has a bit about “lady in a movie” moments: moments when you can’t help but see yourself as a character in a movie, though the scenario may be—and often is—mundane. The example Cohen gives that makes me laugh the most is: washing dishes while gazing out a window. Another example: using a small key to open a mailbox.
I love this bit because it’s both self-evidently true and dense with meaning. We have all, pretentiously, portrayed the lady in a movie in the cinema of our minds. Why, though? One reason is our diminishing ability to live without reference to media in a world where representations of reality (i.e., ladies in movies) are becoming more omnipresent than reality itself—but, ‘nuff said about that. Another, more timeless reason is our need for our lives to take narrative form. We can’t just gaze out a window, washing dishes. We have to be a character, with relationships to other characters. We want to exist at some point in a plot. Most importantly, we must have someone to tell the story to.
I’ve been thinking about lady-in-a-movie moments because a relationship I was in ended recently. I’ve been through break-ups before, of course, but this time, for the first time, I’m seeing that these events aren’t just sad things that happen, or losses to grieve—they are dramatic narrative shifts, radically altering the story we’re telling about our experience.
These shifts start with the self. The self, after all, is just a character in our story, whom we understand through character traits and development along a character arc: I am like this. I used to be like that, but I’ve changed. (We understand other people as characters too. It’s how we shrink the infinity of a human being into a unit we can comprehend.) When we’re in a romantic relationship, our character grows. Our partner draws out from us qualities we desire. (Our sense that they’ll have this effect is part of what attracted us to them in the first place.) But the end of a romance calls these newfound characteristics into question: Have we truly become more like this? Or were we only so within the relationship, like the tide is high under the influence of the moon?
The end of a romance also spells the end of a dialogue. A lover is an interlocutor—now more than ever, in the smartphone era, when our texts are continuous ribbons weaving between, through, and beyond our IRL interactions. Our romantic partners hear us; they respond; they add to the conversation, in a way few if any others do. (I don’t know; maybe y’all have besties or cool moms with whom you’re texting all day, every day.) When our lover leaves the chat, so to speak, the prose of our lives becomes abruptly first-person singular.
A romantic partner isn’t just a participant in the dialogue of our story. They are also, more significantly, the reader. Or viewer, or even listener—take your pick of media metaphors; the point is, when someone loves us, they are our primary audience (and in a healthy relationship, we’re theirs). To be sure, we have other audiences—family, friends, colleagues—but the intimacy and emotional intensity of romantic relationships lends them special existential significance. When our lover is in the front row, face lit up by the footlights, our narrative feels more meaningful. When we can no longer tell them the story, we have to start telling it to ourselves. This is a dramatic structure that more closely reflects the human condition, for better or worse—visceral, albeit lonely.
A love story is a plot line. We usually don’t know where it’s going, but at least we know we’re on it, progressing through other, infinite possibilities. A break-up blows up this relative certainty. Our narrative becomes completely open-ended, like a badly designed choose-your-own-adventure. We never really know what’ll happen next, but seeing our lives in storylines creates an illusion of foresight. Without such constructs, trying to look into the future is like straining to see, eyes wide open, in the pitch black.
Until, as miraculously as our pupils dilating, a new narrative comes to greet us from the dark.
JF