Seeing Each Other
Oct 11, 2020 | By Sharla Moody BK '22
There are few things harder to grapple with in this world than the realization that our loved ones are just as imperfect as everyone else. This perhaps marks the change from child to adult, when we learn that our parents are not gods, but rather complex and flawed people just like ourselves. When we meet a new romantic partner, at first it seems that they can do no wrong. Yet the U.S.’s depressingly high divorce rate suggests otherwise. We sometimes view love—not just romantic love, but also familial—through rose-colored lenses. But the people we love dearly can also cut us deeply precisely because we love them.
American film director Noah Baumbach has spent much of his career addressing this bitter experience. His works are, as a friend of mine said, “existentially nauseating.” Still, Baumbach produces some of the most touching scenes I have ever watched. This past weekend, I watched his 2005 film The Squid and the Whale, which is centered on the collapse of a marriage between Brooklyn intellectuals and its effects on their two sons.[1] The elder son, Walt, idolizes his father, a once-acclaimed selfish novelist, and despises his mother, an academic who has recently earned a coveted book deal with Knopf, a highly esteemed publishing house. The younger son, Frank, loves his mother despite her infidelity, and has a tense relationship with his father. Throughout the movie, Walt and Frank boomerang from parent to parent, at times refusing to see each other or their other parent despite custody arrangements. Walt and Frank also act out in ways that clearly stem from the turmoil of their parents’ separation. After Walt is found to have plagiarized a song for a school talent show, he begins seeing a therapist. During one session, he mentions that his mother, who up until this point of the film he has had a tenuous relationship with, had taken him to the Museum of Natural History when he was a child, before Frank was born, and that he had always been too scared to look at an exhibit of a sperm whale eating a giant squid. His mother had comforted him afterwards.
In the movie’s final scene—a total tearjerker—Walt runs to the Museum of Natural History and stands in front of the exhibit, staring at the squid and the whale, unblinking. The exhibit is a poignant metaphor for how the parents’ problems and separation eat away at the souls of their children, and this scene of a son looking nakedly and without fear at it for the first time is heart-rending. For the first time Walt recognizes his mother’s love for him and faces the damage his parents’ divorce has wrought. But in real life, without an invisible hand pulling the strings of plot and figurative devices, it’s often more difficult to truly understand relationships and people—even, or perhaps especially, people with whom we are intimately connected. We love and hurt each other because we are imperfect, but we do not usually view the sum of all our actions, good and bad. We rarely see each other for who we wholly are.
In contrast, Baumbach’s later comedy-drama, The Meyerowitz Stories, lays bare to viewers the intricacies of familial relationships and inherited traits.[2] Meyerowitz focuses on Harold (played by Dustin Hoffman), a once-acclaimed sculptor and a bitter and judgmental father with various disagreeable mannerisms. His children, played by Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, and Elizabeth Marvel, grapple with him and with each other. Throughout the movie, it becomes increasingly clear that each child has been heavily influenced by their father in one way or another, with regards to their career choices or relationships with their siblings, but also in that they have inherited many of his unpleasant mannerisms and wayward methods of parenting. It’s intensely “existentially nauseating,” and I imagine Meyerowitz is the worst movie to watch as a parent.
We see the Meyerowitz family from a position of omniscience, and with this see them for who they completely are. No action or dialogue is hidden from the audience, so viewers can see characters in their totality. Our heart breaks for them, despite all their shortcomings. Do they ever see how deeply their father has affected them? Does Harold ever recognize his impact on his children? It’s hard to say. But at the emotional climax of the movie, when Adam Sandler’s character Danny says goodbye to Harold as he leaves for a trip, Danny says, “I love you,” and then whispers, too quietly for Harold to hear, “I forgive you. Forgive me. Thank you. Goodbye,” a sentiment previously explained in the film as a method of reconciliation with family members on their deathbeds.
In his review of the film, critic Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote, “They’re a smart and sophisticated and relatively privileged bunch, but they’re miserable and ridiculous, which makes for some poignant insights and some sharp comedy. We enjoy the Meyerowitz clan, even as we praise the heavens we’re not like them and we don’t live next door to any of ’em.”[3]
The truth of the matter, though, is that we do live next door to them, and probably live with them, and might even be them. I’m sure we all have at least one person in our lives who drives us up the wall and who we still love deeply, despite the very real pains they bring us. Baumbach’s strength in portraying this, from the claustrophobia of The Squid and the Whale to the slightly more detached Meyerowitz, allows us to see people for who they really are: deeply, catastrophically flawed, yet loved and cherished beyond their recognition.
Rarely does life offer us the opportunity to see the people who so vex us in the same terms. Rarely do we see the whole person or know our full selves. Baumbach makes us uncomfortable because he holds this mirror up to us. He demands we dwell on these characters and ourselves. Though we might find it impossible to reconcile the paradox of vice and virtue existing in ourselves and in others, it is altogether comforting to know that God sees us for our whole selves, and loves us so much that He became man to be with us, and to die for us.
[1] The Squid and the Whale. Directed by Noah Baumbach, performances by Jeff Daniels, Laura Linney, Jesse Eisenberg, and Owen Cline, Samuel Goldwyn Films, 2005.
[2] The Meyerowitz Stories. Directed by Noah Baumbach, performances by Dustin Hoffman, Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, and Elizabeth Marvel, Netflix, 2017.
[3] Roeper, Richard. “‘The Meyerowitz Stories’: Playing normal again, Sandler pulls it off.” Chicago Sun-Times. October 13, 2017.
