People Who Watch Movies: Or A Few Thoughts on The Heartbreak Kid

I am occasionally repulsed by the central conceit of film. It is so wantonly an imitation of life, one which takes from us the animation of expectation and imposes in return the stillness of artifice, which is always complete from the beginning– for film is a medium meant for recollection. And in this act of memory, bolstered by a tendency to follow sensation, we can understand life as narrative. In narrative, someone must do the telling; the protracted contestation of who this someone is and ought to be pushes us into the future. The philosopher Immanuel Kant might allow you, if he could get over himself, to distinguish most clearly between the appearance and the thing in itself – real life and film. Unlike Kant and unlike Freud, I think that you can experience things as they really are. The trouble is that most people prefer narrative, for they take things in exactly the wrong direction. You must start as an end unto and within yourself to lift experience out of occurrence. But those who watch movies begin from the end, lift glasses to the fact of the plot, and assume that the character is already present among them.

The movie itself is apparently regarded as good, according to some friends of mine. I found The Heartbreak Kid (1972) to be tremendously painful and, if often funny, not a lot of fun. The basic premise of the film is that we attempt, at a very high cost, to avoid each other – trying to get near is impossible, for nearly everyone lives in his or her imagination. Lenny wishes to have sex with Lila, his girlfriend, and so must marry her; the marriage begins to collapse on the honeymoon, as they drive from New York to Florida. Her voice is grating, her hair at once sculptural and untidy – she likes egg salad and makes a mess eating it. She can’t stop singing, though she can’t sing at all. He is repulsed by her desire for him and her wish to be assured. She is an anxious figure, always wishing to assert the boundaries of her life as she understands it. Lila’s recuperation from a self-inflicted sunburn (she’s foolish, she’s gross) inadvertently facilitates her husband’s courting of the insouciant, blond Kelly. The vacation ends after a week; in a truly terrible scene, Lenny ends the marriage. Lila disappears from the film, and Lenny follows Kelly to Minnesota, where he pursues her against her father’s wishes. The film closes with their wedding reception; Lenny, bored and alone, sits on the couch and hears – whether in his head, on the radio, or not at all, save through the experience of the audience – the tender song that he and Lila listened to in the car. 

The obvious thesis is that Lenny is in love with ideas rather than with people – in fact, he can hardly stand the latter; perhaps that is why he is so excited by the challenge that Kelly poses. But I would push it a little further – he is in love with memory, and we may therefore let Kant’s frustrating distinction between appearance and the the thing in itself (probably developed with a subtlety that I might appreciate had I read beyond the introduction to The Critique of Pure Reason – but it is one adequately popularized in its coarser form) fall away. For to be in love with memory is to operate at a greater and more devastating level of abstraction, one ultimately hostile to the faculty of perception that is the beginning of true experience. Memory operates as the conversion of people and things into ideas – it is the attribution of the individual perspective to an objective experience. To be lost in memory is not only to be hostile to present occurrence but to the very idea of a distinct self. It is forbidden to demarcate the individual – “that’s how I remember it, at least.” We never mean it – the phrase always occurs at the end of a monologue to which it instantly yields – for we employ in the most ironic sense the heuristic of quantity in the rejection of the tangible. When Lenny breaks the news to Lila, she expects to throw up; the whole scene occurs in the context of the couple’s attempt to procure a piece of reputedly unusual pecan pie. But she doesn’t want it. And when, in the end, he is happy to eat the pie, you feel the difference between them again – she is trying to expel things from herself, to make the moment as distinct as possible – and he is interested only in acquisition, in time as perpetuation, and the obliteration of the self through conquest. A great deal to see in a single piece of pecan pie. But this, too, is what I see in those who watch too many films or listen to too much music. I am often such a person. Only be separate – because the character consigned to heartbreak is the one who cannot be in himself. He’s no one really, decent-looking and prone to enthusiasm, and he won’t fall in love because nobody else can ever break what refuses to be whole.