On-Screen Love and Loss

Watching any on-screen love story (tragic, cheesy, bittersweet, sentimental, or ecstatic), I can easily transport myself right into the heart of it.

1.

After watching 45 Years, the story of a couple married for 45 years, Cindy and I talked to a few women in the lobby, and we all identified with some aspect of it, and we all left feeling a bit sad.  For me, it was that awful, beautiful and memory-loaded song, "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes."  It made me cry.

I used to like looking at Fifty-Year-Anniversary pictures in the paper. So often the couples I used to call "old" have grown to look alike and even wear uncannily similar facial expressions.  Now, many of my friends have reached their 50th anniversaries!  Had I stayed married, I'd be less than two years away from my own. I fell in love (or whatever 15-year-olds fall into) dancing to "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes."

In the movie, the final scene focused on the very fluid and bereft facial expressions of Kate, the wife.  The music throughout the film was a  haunting soundtrack of the Sixties,  back when we believed that we were headed toward a lifetime of marital bliss, when all we really heard in "better and worse" was the first part.  These songs shaped our attitudes about men and women and marriage, and I can only listen to them sparingly.

2.

Last week, I watched a series on PBS recommended by Freda.  Afterlife is the story of Robert Bridge (played by Andrew Lincoln), a psychiatrist and professor who's writing a book about the paranormal.  He's skeptical about it all, but follows his friend Alison, a medium, as she uses her powers to connect with the spirits of the dead.

I fell a little bit in love with Robert Bridge.  He was a kind and generous soul. His speech was measured and slow, British style. And he was an incredible listener.  (He must have been written, cast, and directed by women!) Unfortunately, he's way too young and he's not a real person and by the end of the series he's actually dead.

American ghost and after-life films have never appealed to me, but I liked this British one.  Americans talk and speechify more than the British and leave less to the imagination.  Conversations in British dramas are usually more nuanced, the faces and gestures speaking as much as words.

3.

Chip on Fixer Upper is also worthy of a crush--a man I see as a younger version of Mike. A Texan, he's more lively and talkative than Robert Bridge, and he's always wonderfully sweet, easy-going and upbeat.  He loves his wife and four children and he knows how to do anything with an old house.  Even when he accidentally rolls his new Jeep into another vehicle, he's only momentarily shaken. He has a great sense of humor and playfulness--very much like my real off-screen Valentine!