By Katy Thompson
You Always Hurt The One You Love
I was fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to study a wide range of cinema throughout my degree - which I hastily took up. Yet, there’s always been a genre of film that I return to with a slow resistance: Romance. I grew up with sleepover Rom-Coms, Christmas compilations and this permeation of courtship as a constant B-plot to most mainstream films. My first memory of this true romance tangle however, began with the quirky (500) Days (2009). I’ve only ever intently watched it with one person and has since refused to watch it with anyone else. But, there’s one romance film that some refuse to watch with me.
Blue Valentine is Derek Cianfrance’s 2010 own personal cathartic clusterfuck. Although its catharsis merely applies to Cianfrance himself, who wrote the film based on the disintegration of his own parents’ marriage. The film presents a non-linear narrative of Dean (Ryan Gosling), an idealistic dropout, and an aspiring doctor, Cindy (Michelle Williams), in the beginnings and endings of their relationship. It leaves much of the middle to the minds of the audience, forcing them to fill in the fractures.
The bittersweet, ukulele-tap rendition of "You Always Hurt the One You Love” by The Mills Brothers sums Blue Valentine up quite un-nicely. With the film predominantly improvised, both Gosling and Williams portray the distinct beauty of falling in love in this scene. The sense of immediacy that comes with its improvisation is familiar to many in the early stages of a relationship. Small moments of excited discovery, in stolen glances and lingering grins, fuse with the uncertainty faced in one’s own body and its movements.
Outside a wedding attire shop, Dean queries, “can you dance?”Cindy hesitates before pulsing into a small tap dance. “Can you?” she asks. Dean can’t but is quick to draw out his ukulele. The pair enthusiastically arrange one another. Dean frames Cindy in front of a floral heart garland on the shop door, yet faced with the immediacy of the situation, he pauses to deflect himself and states, “I can’t really sing. I have to sing goofy in order to sing. Like, I have to sing stupid.” Cindy dances through a few lines, but stops to catch herself too. “You’re actually good,” she remarks.
Blue Valentine emits the same sense of heartache in its extreme examination of love that Michele Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind radiates. The pairings in all these films, from 500 Days to Blue Valentine to Eternal Sunshine, at one point so deeply in love; do hurt each other. It seems inevitable and inescapable, ‘always hurting the ones you love’.
This is the beauty of human irrationality. Schopenhauer saw this kind of existence as a mistake, with little meaning or purpose and, in fact, believed the best solution to be non-existence. Nietzche, on the other hand, advocated for embracing the repetition of life - what he terms the ‘eternal return’. This includes all the things we regret, loathe, or wish we were never stupid enough to do in the first place. For Nietzche, we are not necessarily doomed to repeat our past mistakes so much as live our lives over and over again in the continuum that is never ending. This is intended to be a liberating concept, suggesting that we should then behave as though our lives are all that will ever be. Film can capture this, and replay it again and again for the broken hearted as Netflix queries us ‘Watch this again?’
This moment in Blue Valentine is a wonderful stab to the heart. The film uses its narrative creativity and innate elements of the genre to capture and portray human experience in a way philosophers can only theorise about.