A Single Man on A Single Man : A Breakup Essay Slash Film Review

What this essay is about: Your life as a cinematic experience, narratives as emotional crutches.

Question you may ask yourself halfway through this essay: How many times can a writer make reference to John Cusack while ostensibly reviewing a film starring Colin Firth?

Relevant quotation from my notebook from a couple weeks back: Bitten by the wind, turned around fast, and punched in the face. A frozen moment in a sea of time.

Legend: She/ Her=Ex-Girlfriend

I spent Tuesday in shock. It was 6 PM when my driver’s training class started and I was sitting ignorantly in the corner of the Starbucks inside the Indigo book store inside the Manulife center - I needed the layers of corporate/architectural protection - writing a poem about imagining the Apocalypse called Scorpio Death Moon Sonata in E Minor; a broody, broken up, rambling nightmare. When the poem was finished I took out my driver’s ed workbook and studied the four habits and sub habits of defensive driving. I had trouble keeping them all straight, I was distraught and my head was teeming with confusion and anger. By the time I got to the classroom it didn’t matter; I had messed up the times, I was half an hour late and was told that I could not attend the class. This is the second time that I’ve made the exact same mistake. She says I’m not responsible, I guess she’s right.

My girlfriend broke up with me on Monday night. I was blindsided, didn’t see it coming at all; we’d been together for almost two years, the longest relationship I’ve ever been, and I was happy. So Tuesday was a bit surreal. I hadn’t slept, felt like I’d been turned inside out, but still wanted to portray myself with the melancholy charm of depressed John Cusack in Say Anything and depressed John Cusack in High Fidelity. You see, I have a hyper-active imagination and sometimes think that my life is part of a film or novel, this owing to my addiction to these narratives that have sucked up so much of my time, and perhaps prevented me from focusing on more “serious” things.

When I got back out on the street I had a couple of hours to kill, it was 6:40 now. I walked over to the Cumberland theatre and saw that A Single Man was playing at 6:45. Let me explain something: also owing to my hyper active imagination, I tend to write the premises and stories for films and novels that I know very little about. The best example I can offer is that once, in a George Orwell class I was enrolled in, I decided that Keep the Aspidistra Flying (a mediocre early Orwell novel about a frustrated young poet) was probably a prequel to 1984. I decided that it was about a rebel airship called The Aspidistra and chose the book as the subject for my class seminar without having opened it.

On the one sheet for A Single Man, we see Colin Firth - the indomitable Mr. Darcy - looking sleek and sexy, and Julianne Moore in the background looking betrayed and forlorn. “I can only assume,” spouts my brain “that this movie is about a sleek sexy single man who lives a secretive life and romances and betrays many beautiful women” (Julianne Moore being one of these women). In actuality A Single Man is about and aging homo-intellectual who is mourning the death of his long time partner and contemplating suicide.

Right away, watching abstract images of Firth's George Falconer writhing and twisting underwater, kissing a dead man at the scene of a snowy car crash and hearing his introductory voice over lines: “For the past eight months, waking up has actually hurt. The cold realization that I am still here sets in.” I knew that this was not the film I thought it was; this was a film about loss, about horrible, horrible depression. I sat alone, in the dark, stuffing my face with popcorn and diet Coke (Tuesday is after all free concession stand voucher day at the Cumberland) and tried to open myself up to the transformative power of cinema.

When you’re young, you want narratives to make a grand impression on you, to help shape who you are. Youth is a time of such great confusion that the search for meaning through mediums outside of you becomes an urgent obsession. I’m going to take a leap of faith regarding the demographic of people reading this magazine and offer up JD Salinger’s Catcher In the Rye as a novel that probably shaped the way you saw the world when you were a teenager. It’s not that Holden Caulfield teaches us anything definite or useful about life that makes it such a compelling read, so much as it is the accuracy of Salinger’s articulation of adolescent confusion. Here’s the passage that the novel derives its title from, spoken by Holden Caulfield:

…I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of Rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around - nobody big, I mean, except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff... That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy.

Holden emphasizes the fact that he knows what he wants is crazy; he can’t figure out how he fits in with the rest of the world, he’s having a crisis of identity and he’s created an irrational poetic fantasy to escape into. You’ll notice throughout the novel that these irrational fantasies are recurring, such as the one where he moves to a small town, pretends to be a deaf mute gas station attendant and marries a beautiful deaf mute woman. Most of us, in our childhoods, experience this exact crisis; we don’t know what is going to happen to us, but we want to know and we create fantasies. Some of us in our twenties are still experiencing this crisis, myself included. Adolescents (especially awkward adolescents) can relate easily to Holden Caulfield because he is confused and angry and these feelings are manifest in his actions whereas they lie dormant in most youths. He can’t figure out where the ducks in central park go in the winter, he hates going to the movies. He helped us understand that our secret, individual anger and confusion was not so uncommon, we started to feel more at ease expressing them, and here we are.

When someone breaks up with you, it is as if you are returned to a state of adolescence. You start asking yourself clichéd existential questions like “Who am I?” “What am I doing with my life?” and, worst of all, “Is life worth living?” From the emotional crater that one resides in post-breakup, narratives, art, and music become more important because, as with adolescence, we are left searching for meaning, trying to piece together some understanding of what is happening. I spent two hours today trying to figure out how to play Without You by Harry Nilsson (arguably the greatest breakup song of all time) on a synthesizer, I find that the calm clarity with which Dostoevsky writes soothes my wicked anguish and I may or may not watch Say Anything (Cameron Crowe’s 1980s teen heartbreak masterpiece staring none other than Mr. John Cusack), depending on how bad things get. These capsules of human expression and emotion are objects that we need to cling to in difficult times. That is almost precisely what they are there for, to enrich life when it’s good and make it bearable when it’s bad.

The reason that it hurts George Falconer to wake up in the morning is that his lover is dead. George and Jim met, fell in love and lived together in a glass house for sixteen years. One night George gets a call, Jim has died suddenly in a car crash. George never got to say goodbye. What’s worse, although they shared a long monogamous relationship, George is denied the right to attend the funeral by Jim’s family, because they were gay and it’s the sixties. That scene, with Firth sitting in his chair, rain splashing down on his glass house and he is given the terrible news sticks with me more than anything else in the film because it is a hyperbolized version of what happened when my girlfriend looked me square in the face with tears in her eyes and said “I can’t do this anymore.”

Colin Firth and I, we fell apart. The feeling hits you right in the chest and the physical effect is extreme. I’ve never been shot in the chest before but I imagine that it might feel similar to getting stone cold broken up with… or being told that your lover is dead and you will never see them again (admittedly much, much worse). I couldn’t breathe - I started dry heaving, nearly threw up. In the film, Falconer runs to his best friend Charlie (portrayed expertly by Julianne Moore) weeping and gasping in the rain, like a man who’s drowning (a metaphor that the film needlessly spells out for you). What causes this physical effect is the sudden realization that somebody has been irretrievably removed from your life. When I was told that our relationship was over I was told firmly and decisively, even though she was still standing in front of me she was already gone.

The basic philosophy of recovering from a breakup derives from one simple fundamental assumption: things will get better. Right now I’m still in the immediate turmoil, feelings of inadequacy and jealousy reign supreme, so that it’s almost annoying when people who care about me uniformly offer up these sentences: “you’ll be okay,” “things will get better,” “it just takes time.” Often we wear our misfortune like a badge of honour, not wanting to get better, clinging to that pain like it means something. In the end it’s like Ron Livingston tells it to a heartbroken John Favreau in Swingers (a fantastic breakup movie): “one day you wake up and you don't think of it at all, and you almost miss that feeling. It's kinda weird.  You miss the pain because it was part of your life for so long.” I know, because rough breakups are familiar territory for me, that this is true, that I have a long painful but life affirming path ahead of me that I will feel stronger and wiser for having traversed. But for George it’s a different story; Jim is gone forever and eight months after his death it still hurts as much as it ever did. That last question on my clichéd post relationship checklist “is life worth living?” is something that George has been considering every day, and now he’s thinking that the answer is "no."     

Once we get the back-story the remainder of the film depicts a single day in George’s life, the day on which he has decided to kill himself, peppered with flashbacks of George and Jim in happier times. The film is essentially a series of ponderous sketches, conversations with different characters, some of which are loaded with poignancy, others that are simply amusing and a couple that seem to have no relevance or purpose whatsoever. The film is drop-dead gorgeous: the acting, the colours, the clothes and sets are all impeccable. The film’s director is Tom Ford, a gay man who is famous for his “turnaround” of the Gucci fashion house. With this in mind it makes sense that some of the actors look like models, everyone is immaculately dressed and some of the scenes look like a homo-centric Guess jeans advertisement. In one scene, George meets a beautiful Hispanic man named Carlos outside of a liquor store, he gives him some money, and Carlos follows him to his car, but George doesn’t want sex so they talk. The scene seems to be an excuse to include a shot of this beautiful Hispanic man (who literally looks like he walked off the set of a sexy fashion shoot), set against a smoggy pink L.A. sky. It’s an alright scene, but it clashes with the rest of the film - it’s sort goofy and campy. There are a few moments like this in the film that betray the fact that it was directed by a fashion designer.

The most important character in the film aside from George is a beautiful, mohair sweater wearing young man named Kenny, played by Nicholas Hoult (who as it turns out, played the kid in About a Boy, an excellent film starring Hugh Grant, based on the novel by Nick Hornby who also wrote High Fidelity [a fantastic break-up novel] which was adapted into a film starring John Cusack… haha!). George teaches English at a University and Kenny is one of his students, he is attentive to George’s eccentric class rants and wants to get closer to him, to learn from him outside of class and to offer him his friendship because, as Kenny tells a nervy George in the school parking lot, he looks as though he could use a friend. As we follow George through his day, we can see that he is overwhelmed by the beauty and pain of the world that he is leaving.

In a breakup, once the decision has been made, the problems that lead to the breakup seem to subside, there is a parting fondness, you may say to your ex something like “this is for the best, but we’ve been through a lot together. You really are an amazing person, I hope you live a long happy life, I will always love you.” If this is the final exchange before the initial radio silence, then it is a very happy thing indeed. If somebody picks up the phone the next day in tears it can be disastrous. Once George has decided to leave the physical world (which is precisely how George thinks of suicide, saying to Carlos as he pulls out of the parking lot, “I’m going away”), he is faced with a profound bittersweet sensation, everything becomes sharper and clearer. As with a breakup (and here we can even make the comparison that George is “breaking up with life” because things “aren’t working out”) the decision to execute makes it hard to walk away.

For a few years now, at least, I’ve been obsessed with the question of whether or not we are alone in this life. This is a bit embarrassing, but I’m going to drop a quote from an angsty short story I wrote a few years ago to illustrate my point:

As he stood, shaking on the bridge, he perceived the motion of the cranes, the splitting of the train tracks and the pink streaks that appear in the maritime sky in the evening. It occurred to him that these moments of experience, of beauty and harmony, individual or shared, these moments that flew from some frantic corner of his mind out into the ether, were all that he valued, all that he found any worth in. And yet there was no measure, no verification, no way in which he could properly convey the meaning of these moments, he could only assume and hope that other people felt them as well.

This question, of whether or not we’re alone in this world, is brought up incessantly in philosophy, film and fiction, a big ontological question that can never be answered correctly: is it possible in our mortal lives to break down the barriers that divide individual people and share something real? My undergraduate thesis presented a sort of theory that the author writes to try and create an object that contains within it truths that are inexpressible in the common language of everyday life. These objects, according to my thesis, refract infinitely in the individuals who read them, elucidating something that was on all of the their minds. But each reader is moved for different reasons, the same words always seen from a slightly different angle, triggering different memories and emotional reactions.

In my mind, I always think that the writer is trying to reach out to me and indicate a shared sentiment; that he is trying to usher me into the blind spot of his mind so that for a brief moment we can share something real together. When a narrative addresses in its themes what I suppose to be its originating purpose (when it does this well at least), it folds back on itself, over stimulates my brain and causes my heart to swell. I want to cry out to the solemn artist behind the curtain “yes, yes, exactly! You’re not alone!” A phenomenon that I’d be tempted to describe as post-modern, if only I understood that term a bit better.

According to George it is possible to conquer this barrier. Late in the film Kenny seeks out George at his local bar, they drink Scotch together, Kenny puts the question I was rambling about in the above paragraph concisely: “…we’re born alone, we die alone. And while we are here we are completely, absolutely, sealed in our own bodies… we can only experience the outside world from our own slanted perception of it.”

George disagrees: “you know the only thing that has made this whole thing worth while has been those few times that I was able to truly connect with another person.”

As the film advances we see something a of a “real” connection forming between Kenny and George, not necessarily anything sexual, more like an agreement that one should want more out of life than the status quo; they are both dissatisfied, but Kenny is young and appears hopeful while George is old and desperate. Kenny offers George a reminder of why life is worth living; they swim naked together in the ocean and drink beer back at George’s glass house, exchange words urgently, with great joy. A Single Man is jam packed with so many beautiful cinematic moments that are doubly, or exponentially, cinematic (I know this may seem like a bizarre statement) because beyond telling us a story, it seeks specifically to remind us of those clear, beautiful, time stopping moments that seem to exist outside of “everyday” or “common” life. I want to quote George Falconer one last time before coming down the homestretch, part of his final monologue (sorry to anyone who hasn’t seen this yet, but I think it’s almost out of theatres so you’ll probably forget all of this by the time its available on DVD):

A few times in my life I’ve had moments of absolute clarity. When for a few seconds, the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think… and things seem so sharp and the world seems so fresh. I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything else they fade.

I remember the first time I saw her, at the Value Village at Bloor and Lansdowne: she was looking at books and I was too nervous to talk to her. The time we were at the beach, it was sunny, and she said her mother thought she was difficult and would I be able to keep her in line? Early on, again, getting out of a rock show, drunk on a Friday night, hoisting her over my shoulder and spinning her around in a busy intersection. This past Labour Day, airshow jets screeching overhead, lying in Trinity Bellwoods park. She rested on my chest as I, too jacked up on coffee, wondered if her parents liked me, thinking about the apocalypse (it’s a strong preoccupation). It’s like a montage from Annie Hall, actions and events shared words, charming outfits, tender kisses, melancholy goodbyes (throw a little clarinet in the background if you like), it’s cinematic when I play it back alright, but does it mean anything? I’m left asking, did we share anything real? Did we really know each other? She tells me there are parts of her that she felt like she could never share with me… I’m left searching for the part of me I didn’t share with her. I think it must have something to do with narratives.

So this is it, the last scene. It’s the first thing I wanted to tell you, the thing that got me started thinking about all this but I saved it for the end. It’s 8:15 on Tuesday, the movie’s over, I’m walking east on King Street, going to C’est What on Front Street to play a show with my band. My head is all over the place, images of Spanish midnight cowboys and handsome dead gay guys kissing each other clouding up my brain and it comes to me, the cinematic moment, the moment of clarity, of sharpness.

It’s started snowing, small flakes but really dense, and I get to this street corner, and this light is coming through the snow from between two big buildings like some kind of celestial gift from heaven and I stop and I stand there and just stare for about thirty seconds. This light, and the white snow is just flooding into me, blocking out everything else, I am just standing on this fucking street corner, happy to be alive. I try and cling to it.

When I keep walking this bright cluster of lights hits me right in the eyes so that I’m squinting. I look down the street and I see that it’s a movie set. There’s hired city cops talking to onlookers, there’s foamy white snow mushed in with the real snow and they got these big lights up on the this crazy goddamn crane lighting the scene. But I don’t give a shit, I just laugh and keep walkin' down towards the park and I’m feeling alright ‘cus everything that day was just so surreal and life’s always got this funny way of hittin’ you with these moments when you don’t think you can take it anymore. Sometimes your life is like a movie, sometimes a movie is like your life. Where you want to draw that line is up to you, but don’t ask me, I’ve never been too good at it.