turn around and see me cry

Last night I watched Against All Odds, an 80s film I’d never seen before despite my love of Jeff Bridges and the fact that the video for the Phil Collins song from the film had been inescapable on MTV and had etched itself into my brain. 

Early in the film, football player Terry (Jeff Bridges) is hired by the controlling, manipulative Jake (James Woods) to find his girlfriend Jessie (Rachel Ward). Of course Terry and Jessie fall in love and, for a little while, share a romance in Mexico, far from the realities of their lives in Los Angeles.

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Then Terry starts to tell Jessie a story about some trouble he got himself into–deep debt, rigging football games–and Jess doesn’t want to hear it. 

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I love that he says that. “I want you to.” To know who I really am. 

One time a person I was in love with said to me that if we had dated (which we didn’t), there were a lot of things about them that I probably would not have liked. But I just wanted to know them. In a real way. I was engaged by the differences between us. I wanted to explore them. I felt like there was a lot for me to learn in the space between my experiences and theirs. 

I think sometimes people think that because I write about love so much, I’m expecting something perfect, something amazing. But I actually think it’s closer to the opposite. I know that I need space to be honest about my rough edges, my fears, my insecurities, and I need someone else who I can see the rough humanity in as well. I need room to build a bridge with someone, and that can’t be done if we’re trying to live up to some notion of the other person’s ideal and not connecting in a real way.

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And I think that’s what Terry is trying to do–he’s trying to tear down any illusions Jess might have and to connect with her in a real way. As Peter Gabriel sings on “In Your Eyes,” “the grand facade so soon will burn.” 

Peter Gabriel has a song on the Against All Odds soundtrack but of course it’s his Genesis bandmate Phil Collins whose song was the smash hit, staying at #1 on the U.S. Billboard charts for three weeks in the spring of 1984. It’s typical, overproduced, sickeningly slick commercial 80s pop, and yet just as Jeff Bridges’ performance in this shallow and slick 80s film gives us something real to engage with (as Masha put it to me, Bridges’ Terry is “a lover, a mourner”), the song has something real to it as well. It reflects Terry’s desire to connect in a real way, to really be seen and known, to really see and know. 

That’s what I want, too.

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