Love Junkie

So, for reasons that are unimportant to the purpose of this rant, I found myself in a hotel Sunday night. Late at night and lacking anything better to do, I stumbled across the movie The Notebook on cable. Now normally, I avoid this type of movie like the plague. I have the same allergic reaction to this type of open faucet of tear-jerking swill as I do to any other book written by Nicholas Sparks - an author who never met a romantic cliché, dramatic contrivance, transparent plot point or insipid line of dialogue he didn't love like a dog in heat. The Notebook is, in fact, a laughable story all around.. a cheesy, dopey, by-the-numbers affair that fails in its every attempt to be anything other than painfully predictable. The characters are clichés straight out of the Stock Character Handbook, their actions a seemingly endless parade of poorly constructed hazy lens falling-in-love bits, mixed with the occasional limp confrontations, all supported by bad dialogue. There is not one single millisecond of originality or opaqueness of plot in the entirety of The Notebook. Yet somehow, even while rolling my eyes and sighing dramatically at the aggravatingly trite and predictable corniness of the character's circumstances, I still became honestly and emotionally invested in the story. By the end of the movie, I found myself in tears, hoping that the main characters would end up together, and sobbing like a child at the final conclusion.

Going into it, I didn't want to like this movie. In fact, I wanted to hate it with all the fury that I normally reserve for all so-called "chick flicks". And really, after watching it, I still cannot say that I liked the film. Actually, I disliked The Notebook, not because it's a rotten movie, because it IS that, have no doubt. Rather, I disliked The Notebook for what it forced me to discover about myself. At the end of the movie, as I wiped away my tears, I realized that for all my toughness, my impervious to the world facade, I'm nothing more than a hopeless romantic at my core. And the reason I avoid these films is because, often, my own life is nothing like that depicted in movies such as The Notebook.

What these types of films fail to recognize is that real life never plays out the way it does in the movies. The guy doesn't always get the girl, true love doesn't always win. But then again, if the movies were like real life, who would go see them? Nobody wants to sit through ninety minutes of actors struggling and failing with the same issues that they face in their own lives. Real life, real love, as opposed to what we see on the big screen, is messy. It hurts. It's ugly far more than it's beautiful. That's not to say it isn't still great, but it's never the way it is in the movies - all wrapped up in a neat little package, all the loose ends tied up, everybody living happily ever after. It's this vast separation between fact and fiction that is where I run into trouble.

I find myself embittered, not because I've been hurt so badly in the past and in such a spectacular manner that I no longer believe in love - that's far from the truth. I'm somehow bitter because despite how many times I've had my heart broken, I still believe in love. Deep down, I believe that love conquers all, even though I've been shown time and again that it doesn't. Despite my past, despite what common sense tells me is impossible, I believe in that all-consuming, passionate, torrid love story. That desperate, triumphing over all obstacles, clinging to the object of your heart's desire, as depicted in the still image above, from The Notebook. The kind of story where the knight rescues the damsel in distress, and they ride off into the sunset, to live happily ever after. And that proves to be my downfall time and again - ignoring what I know to be reality, while looking for that perfect movie ending.

So really, while on the surface, this appears to be a rant about a spectacularly schmaltzy movie, it's really more a rant about myself, and my mistaken ideals. They say that the first step toward recovery from any addiction is realizing that you have a problem. I consider The Notebook to be my intervention, my wakeup call. Like the heroin junkie who wakes up one morning in the gutter, I have hit bottom. It's time to pull myself up, dust myself off, and start being realistic about my expectations in the romance department. Because until I can do that, any and all relationships I'm in will be doomed to fail.

Now, if only there was a Love-aholics Anonymous...

Neurotically yours,
--jen.