n'est pas

One of the things that makes The Graduate such a great film (in my opinion, though it's not as if I am attempting to defend something like Gangbang 5: The Musical!* That is to say most people would agree that The Graduate is no waste of celluloid.) is the final (diagetic*^) moment, as the getaway bus is driving away from the church. Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross, having just caught their collective breaths from the exhilaration of being those never-happens-in-real-life wedding crashing type romantics, stop looking at each other and stare forward. Just before the credits begin to roll, both characters experience a slight shift in facial expression- from adrenaline rush happy to slight worry/ slight panic/ okay what now. It's only a few seconds, but it changes the ending of the film so completely, so much so that missing it would be missing the entire point of the film. It shifts from an audience fulfilling happy ending to hmm...maybe they won't live happily ever after. Maybe if the cameras were still rolling they would capture the bride returning to her estranged fiance, maybe it's not so easy after all, maybe it's more like real life than scripted time frames. It's absolutely amazing that Mike Nichols managed to capture more in those five seconds than some directors do in an entire body of work. We can attempt to do what makes us happy, what seems to make us happy, to be selfish, to achieve so-called spontaniety, but there's still always that grain of doubt always so restless in the back of our mind, restless and shouting the details of forthcoming disappointments. Expectations can be such a facade, especially those involving the emotions of another human being.

Driving past the airport, the very thing which inspired the above paragraph, always makes me want to take that exit into the terminal and get on a plane. And just go somewhere, just escape. Except I always want to be with someone, preferably someone who means more than just something, and I never seem to have said accompaniment, much less the guts. I don't think it's hopeless romanticism so much as hopeless hope. Tell me everything's impossible you television cliche of a cynic, tell me nothings worth losing face and I'll tell you how little some faces are worth.

Something has to be real. Something has to be worth the doubt of living happily ever after.


*not a real movie, i don't think.
*^that was just an excuse to use the word "diagetic", such is the case with 99% of the time you happen across diagesis in all it's written incarnations. I think I've said that before, oh the deja-pointlessness.