Re-blogging this post of mine, which I originally posted nearly two years ago. I watched this incredible scene again last night as I thought about Kathy Acker’s love advice to Robert Gluck, “Bob, you’ve got to beg.” And that is what Beatty’s Jack Reed does this in the scene, begs Louise Bryant, who has traveled across the world to find him, who thought he was dead, not to leave him the moment he finally gets her back. No one begs like that anymore.
“…Time is never linear. You always feel that everything happened just yesterday but also 100 years ago. I don’t want to experience time in a line.”
-Jeanette Winterson
“You and me, we always sweat and strain.
You look for sun, I look for rain.
We’re different people, we’re not the same.
(The power of the sun.)
I look at treetops, you look for caps
Above the water where the waves snap back.
I flew around the world to bring you back.
It was the power of your heart.”
The moments I’ve left pieces of myself in, the moments that are always still happening. The right song, the right smell, the right word, being in a certain place, the death of a loved one can make time fold back on itself, bringing moments I haven’t thought about in years back so vividly that I feel as if I can step into them.
I’m reminded again of these words from that piece of Masha’s that I’ve gone back to so many times, ”No, That Wasn’t Our Happiness.“
You know how in movies people realize, change their minds, go after what/who they once let go of—act? Love strikes, love emboldens. Love returns, haunts, is more than just a random occurrence. Love changes being and how to be. You know how in the movies people realize they were wrong and then mend that wrong? Get in the car and on that plane and mend that wrong. The way mending wrongs—since we can’t seem to not wrong each other—becomes one of the odysseys we must all go on, and what movies are largely about. Worse not to mend a wrong than to commit a wrong, I think. Shit happens. Lots of shit happens. But to not mend? Not knowing when and how you should mend? Not feeling anyone is worth mending and being mended for?
The scene from Reds is interesting to me because Louise is the one who has sought Jack out but Jack is the one who must do the mending. She seeks him out and gives him the chance. It is a gift.
I’m reminded, too, of another scene of mending, this from Say Anything…, a scene in which a character tears away the pretense with which she’d previously protected herself, and then reaches out in the hopes of tearing down the walls another character has built to protect himself. Ione Skye is so good in this scene, so truthful, and we see her face so clearly.
I refuse to accept that this is a thing of the past, a thing that only happens in the movies now. If it’s love, if it’s real, we have to at least be willing to beg, willing to lay it all on the line, willing to admit that we need each other.
(via mashatupitsyn)
Notes
omgcolostomeboy liked this agameofme reblogged this from mashatupitsyn and added:
The scene from Reds is interesting to me because Louise is the one who has sought Jack out but Jack is the one who must...
awkwardfoal liked this
kenotype liked this mashatupitsyn reblogged this from mashatupitsyn and added:
Re-blogging this film clip, which I originally posted nearly two years ago. I watched this incredible scene again last...