In one class we talked about the movies Her and Lost in Translation*, how they are sort of letters from ex lovers to each other. I was reminded of those movies again while watching the movie Marriage Story on Netflix. I feel like every time I google Scarlett Johansson's age she's younger than before, and I joked to my boyfriend that by her next movie I'll be older than her. She's 35 now and in 2003 when Lost In Translation came out she was 17 years old. I saw the movie in theaters and as a teenager assumed she was an adult. After all, her character was married!
Like those aforementioned Scarlett Johansson movies, Marriage Story seems like it was probably largely inspired by a personal experience of the person who wrote and directed the movie. I mean, the divorcing couple are an actress and a director - how could it not be? If you manage to write something that rings this true, maybe you have to mix in a lot of truth about how you yourself are in the world.
In Marriage Story the best thing, I think, is how both of these characters seem like whole people, and they do decisions that make sense for themselves. Neither is the bad guy. They're both extremely frustrating but understandable and lovable, and their relationship makes sense as much as their break up does.
There's a TVTropes page called "Most Writers Are Writers", because... yeah. Basically if everyone wrote about what they know, all stories would have writers in them. (Out of Stephen King's 300 stories maybe a fifth have author characters, and a fifth of those authors have substance abuse problems.) There's also a truth about writers and directors in Hollywood, that Sofia Coppola is an exception - most writers and directors are men, so usually it's just one side of the story we get to hear and it's his.
La La Land, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Her, 500 Days of Summer, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Before Midnight come to mind when thinking about movies about break ups. Incidentally all of them feature an artistic man (often even a writer), in a relationship with some extraordinary woman who dumps them to pursue her own goals. (In Before Midnight they don't actually break up, although they discuss it extensively and it's Celine's dissatisfaction with the current state of their relationship that is causing all the drama.)
Marriage Story is the one that states it plainly in the dialogue in the scene where the main characters try to one last time settle their separation between themselves.
Charlie: We had a great theater company, and a great life where we were. Nicole: You call that a great life? Charlie: You know what I
mean. I don’t mean we had a great marriage. I mean, life in Brooklyn.
Professionally. I don’t know. Honestly, I never considered anything
different. Nicole: Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it? I mean, I was your wife. You should’ve considered my happiness too. Charlie: Come on, you were happy. You’ve just decided you weren’t now. Nicole: The only reason we didn’t live here is because you can’t imagine desires other than your own, unless they’re forced on you.
In real life it's also women who usually instigate break ups. Always after these movies, you could ask "why didn't she stay" - and I'm over here screaming with frustration - "why didn't he just change for her?" He always ends up changing after she dumps him, anyway. She tried! She waited! And still she should've waited and tried some more.
*
I re-watched Lost In Translation some time ago and it hit me just how
stupid it is. "Oh when I was in my twenties I was sort of lost, you
know. I was absurdly famous and rich and didn't really know what to do
with all of this massive amount of resources and talent and connections
that I had." We're supposed to feel for Sofia Scarlett Johansson's character,
who has everything anyone who could ever dream of and her whole life
ahead of her. We're supposed to feel for Bill Murray's character and his
middle age crisis while he hits on a teenager and cheats on his wife,
as if he didn't have all the choice in the world about how his life has
gone and what to do with it from now on. I used to think these characters were so cool.
On Friday evening I went to the center to get something and noticed that there were a few thousand people gathered at the square, staring at huge screens. I didn't know what was going on and went to see what was on the screen - football, apparently. The very minute I was there, Finland scored their first goal against Liechenstein in the UEFA Championship qualifications, and the crowd cheered.
I'm what you might call a bandwagoner. If someone is doing exceptionally well, well enough to become a meme or news outside of it's main audience, then I'll care for a short while. I didn't stay to watch the game, but on the bus on the way home I listened to the radio broadcast of the game anyway, and I thought how nice it would be for all those people at the square if Finland won. If I hadn't seen all those people be so excited, I wouldn't have known about the whole thing or cared at all.
This is generally considered to be the wrong way to care. You're supposed to earn the wins by sticking with your team through the hard times, disappointments and losses. A bandwagoner is only there for the wins.
I'm interested in good stories and seeing what makes people excited and interested, but I don't have teams that I follow. I don't care about sports or competitions if I don't personally know someone playing or if I'm not playing myself. I didn't have any normal sports hobbies when I was a child so that might explain part of it. (The voluntary fire brigade and folk dancing are both surprisingly competitive but so niche that it's hard to follow as just spectator sport.)
Despite all that, here are some games / battles / wins that I remember seeing on TV and for a very short while intensely caring about the outcome of it just because of the story. (Not included are elections that have actually meant something to me.)
Hockey Championship -95
Of course; where it all starts. I was 5 years old and it
was past my bedtime. I had to go to bed but I didn't want to fall asleep before the game ended. I could hear the TV in the living room, excited voices. My mom came
to the door to whisper that we won. I was so happy!
Mika Häkkinen wins his first Formula 1 race in -97
My dad has always
been a Formula 1 fan, he watches all the races every time. It's the only
"sport" anyone in my childhood family was ever interested in. Many weekends
as a child were spent watching the qualifications and races, and the rivalry between Mika Häkkinen and Michael Schumacher was the stuff of legends. It was obvious to me then that Schumacher was the bad guy and Häkkinen was the good guy.
Formula 1 is the weirdest competition, because the drivers compete in pairs and some cars are so much worse than others that with the equipment available it's impossible to win a race anyway, let alone a whole Grand Prix. Behind this win there's actually a lot of controversy because a crash with Villeneuve disqualified Schumacher from the whole season and a whole conspiracy between the teams of McLaren (Häkkinen, Coulthart) and Williams (Villeneuve, Frentzen) to help each other went unpunished.
Tarja Halonen wins the Presidential Election in 2000
I remember watching the counting of the votes of the second round with my parents. I asked them who they think should win, but I didn't get a clear answer. My dad told me that it's a secret and against the law to tell who you voted for, so I had to make up my own mind.
The historical significance of electing the first female president was totally lost to me and I didn't yet know anything about political parties, so I picked my favourite mainly on looks. I chose Esko Aho because he had very sad eyes and I didn't want him to get any sadder.Unfortunately I couldn't find any of this on Youtube but here's some footage on Yle Areena:
Tatu and Eeka in Far Out(2001-2002) Season 2
Far Out was a Finnish reality show that lasted for two seasons and was a bit like Amazing Race but maybe more of a youth program, where competitors traveled in different cities doing small assignments and the audience would vote for who they wanted to stay on the show. Two friends called Tatu and Eeka became pretty famous for their funny antics. I found this clip and wassort of shocked at the casual racism against the romani in it! It was indeed a different time. Tatu Ferchen is nowadays the CEO of the Finnish branch of multinational media monstrosity Banijay Group that's responsible for all the shittiest and most watched programs on TV, like Temptation Island and Vain Elämää. It's pretty crazy that he got all the way there and it all started from this - the network offered these guys their own TV show solely based on them being so well liked by the audience in this program.
Honestly, at the time I didn't really get what was so great about them. I mostly pretended to understand because everyone at school seemed to love them.
Lordi wins Eurovision Song Contest in 2006
It used to be that "when Finland wins the Eurovision Song Contest" was a saying that was used when talking about something extremely unlikely that would never, ever happen. It was used right alongside "when Hell freezes over" and "when pigs fly". In 2006 I watched the contest during a training weekend with my folk dance group in some camping center in the middle of nowhere. When it was certain that Lordi was going to win, we all went outside to see if there were any flying pigs.
For several years afterwards, the Finnish media always thought that the chances to win were pretty good, and they were always shocked the next day when we did as horribly as ever. The chances to win were the same before and after Lordi - not very good. The way probabilities work though is that something that has a 99% chance of failing still succeeds one time out of a hundred. This was that one time.
Finland wins Hockey World Championship in 2011 and 2019
In 2011 I didn't watch the game, but through the walls I heard my neighbours shouting on all sides. I had Uutisikkuna on and it said that 10 000 people were gathered at the central square, so we went outside to see people swimming in the fountain. It was madness! In 2019 I lived a biking distance away and went by myself to see the celebrations again, because a bit of anarchy on a Sunday night is always fun to witness. I had this weird feeling while there that most people were there like me - rather to "see the celebration" than to celebrate themselves. Maybe it hasn't been long enough since the last time, so winning is just not as noteworthy anymore. How many times are we all gonna go torille until it gets old?
FIFA World Cup 2014
In the summer of 2014 I spent so much time depressed and unwilling to move from the sofa that I almost accidentally got invested in the World Cup, much to the detriment of my sports-adverse spouse. I tried to care about something and tried pickinga a team and rooting for them through the whole competition. My team of choice was Italy with old man Pirlo and hothead Balotelli, based on their 2-1 win against England. Italy sadly didn't even make it out of the group stage. I kept watching anyway, because the more interesting story turned out to be the tournament as a whole. How important the event was to Brazil as a football country, the sheer weirdness of the venues being built in the tropics just to be used a couple of times and controversies surrounding their construction and the cost of the event, and to top it all off the home team was not playing very well. Brazil managed to somehow limp to the semifinals but it wasn't considered much of an achievement, and they were absolutely crushed by Germany in an unprecedented 7 - 1 loss, ending in 4th place over all. It was amazing TV because it seemed like even the German team was feeling sorry for the Brazilians.
The International 2014
I can't even remember how this came about. I don't play or have ever played Dota 2 nor do I know anyone who does. I generally don't care about esports any more than any other sort of sports and I don't follow anything or anyone. However, for some reason, I remember being intensely invested in how a Chinese team called DK and especially a player called BurNIng fared in a yearly Dota 2 tournament called The International. Maybe I saw a trending clip on Reddit or something? Anyway. I watched all the games they were in, they didn't win, and I forgot all about them and the game they play.
Iceland in UEFA Euro 2016
Like who the hell wasn't on this bandwagon. It was great! 10% of a whole country traveled somewhere just to see a part time dentist kick a ball and then we all clapped!
