What I Learned about ❤LOVE❤ from the Movies: "Silver Linings Playbook"

This is a tricky story. What is more romantic than two hurting people finding understanding in each other and working together in the fight for a better, more positive life? This is a story that says you don't have to have your shit perfect in order to find love. Nice stuff. IF it were true.

Some writers are impractical. They write the world as they'd like to see it, rather than how it really is. They twist real laws to try to justify the illusions they create.

In this case they get their math all screwed up. Since everyone knows that "double negatives make a positive," they try to apply that law to stories in which:

DCP+DCP=SMFB (dysfunctional crazy person + dysfunctional crazy person = soul mates in functional bliss.)

That's just plain bad math. The idea of double negative doesn't apply to adding two negatives to each other. (-1)+(-1) will never be a positive.

That law speaks of a very different scenario. The doubling doesn't refer to two negative addends, but rather a negative function combined with a negative addend. 1-(-1)=a positive 2.  Applied to relationships this would mean subtracting, getting rid of, or just plain avoiding, the "negative" or undesirable" (unstable) person. ie. when instability is spotted in a potential partner, the only way to get a positive result is to flee ASAP!

This is helpful knowledge if you are a stable person, but what if you're the unstable one? Don't go falling for some silver lining myth and hitting up the local insane asylum for your dream soul mate. That doesn't work in reality.

The best thing, of course, would be to fix yourself so you become stable, normal, and mateable. But there are many of us for which that ideal is out of reach within the limitations of a lifetime. Does that mean we have to just say goodbye to love?

If that's our reality, it can be very freeing to live in fantasy land. The problem with that, however, is that if the other is not in on your fantasy games and calls you out on the delusions you're entertaining, the gig is up.

This is a major problem with an erroneous interpretation of the double negative rule in relationships: that equally screwed up guy or gal understands screwed up, recognizes it too easily, and with an ounce of common sense, he or she will retreat from such imminent disaster . That's wisdom born of pain. Crazy people stand less of a chance romantically with other crazy people than they do with "normal", healthy people because crazy people have better crazy detectors than normal people.  They will run.

Our best hope is fooling a sane person into thinking we are sane.
Sure, it won't last, but it's a good feeling to share the illusion of love, if only for a season. It will end, but there are more gullible fish in the sea. All you have to do is RINSE, and REPEAT.

Lesson learned: You're better off looking for the formula for love in shampoo commercials than in Hollywood movies, because advertisers have a better grasp of real world mathematics.

What I Learned about LOVE from the Movies: "While You Were Sleeping"

I'll admit that I'm an absolute sucker for a good romantic comedy like "While You Were Sleeping." It's not just a "story about love at second sight" -- try third, forth, fifth, and so on... I fall in love with Bill Pullman all over again every time I see this movie. It's like... It's like... the most potent form of self-injury imaginable. 

I bet you thought I was going to say something sweeter than that... I might have, but I'm helplessly honest. You get the truth here. Nobody likes to admit it, but we don't really watch these flicks because they make us feel good or hopeful or anything like that. We watch them because they remind us we're alive. I mean, what reminds you you're alive more than pain? And when I look at the Pullman/Bullock chemistry on screen in this fairy tale, I want what they have so badly my heart nearly explodes. Right before it sinks, deflated, right back into the clutches of reality. The emotional rollercoaster boosts adrenaline and we try to ignore the lows, just to briefly feel the highs.

I'm embarking on a series of reflections on Looking for Love Lessons in Cinematic Tutelage. Each post will deal with a different movie, and will extract the love lessons embedded in the story. (Speaking of which, I'd like to be embedded, but that's another story...)

Without further ado, here's what we can learn about dating and mating and love from the story, "While You Were Sleeping":

• If you're going to fall in love with someone who is not available, make sure he has a brother who is available and that you live in a climate in which wearing your deceased father's winter coat as a security blanket doesn't make you look like a bag lady on Venice Beach.
• If you ignore these details, you may wake up one day (from a heatstroke-induced coma) to his runaway dog licking your face and tugging at your tattered coat to get the crumbs from your pocket, as handsome Kens skip by hand-in-hand with their bikini-clad Barbies, not even noticing you are there.