Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday

The Jesse Eisenberg Special: Love isn't real & the end is inevitable

Let me preface this by saying I am not a nihilist. My writing is that of pre-industrial revolution thought. Sticks make up my fingers, stones my keyboard tiles, my brain is a mixture of everything I have been itching to say but simply can’t. It’s an annoying type of beckoning to force myself to write something with meaning. Unfortunately for the rest of you, and myself, I’m afraid there isn’t much meaning in anything. I don’t mean to say this as some type of dull pseudo-philosopher, life has just been coming and going, and then coming again. The entrances are dull. The stops are abrupt and mean. 

I’ve been going to therapy, which should make all of this end up to be extremely untruthful and honest to God might feel like twelve steps back to my therapist, but I guess at some point you have to make room for the discomfort that seeps into your home and tell it to take a seat. Positive affirmations will not help me sleep better at night. Really.

Recently, my parents have separated. This is a truth. It cannot be fixed, nor can it be erased. In a way I have let this information fester inside of me so long I kind of forgot how to feel. I have always had too late of a reaction for any kind of feeling to be truthful. I’m not a liar, I guess just a little apathetic. There’s been lots of room for arguing, screaming matches, and movie watching. 

In the months of this heated change, I’ve been trying to find my voice in various movies and t.v. programs, which does not sound very good regardless of how I put it. The irony in all of this being that I watched The Social Network the day of my parents split. 

The almost pathetic part of this being that I fell so oddly into Jesse Eisenberg’s filmography as a direct result of my discomfort surrounding my family. There was something very truthful to his demeanor in the film, his physicality towards the situation he had so firmly placed himself in the middle of. The idea of right and wrong, a moral obligation to those you love, and the taste of blood in his mouth once he strips it all away from himself.

I don’t mean to shove myself into the roles of my parents, or rather put Mark Zuckerberg into that role either, but seeing these two side by side has put a thick taint on the way I’ve been viewing the world around me. 

I’ve seen the movie before, this was definitely not my first time watching it. The headspace I was in, I guess, in a way, made me feel about forty times more hurt than previously. The element of betrayal. It felt real enough, like I could have put my hands through my television and placed them firmly on Andrew Garfield’s pathetic little shoulders. I understood what was happening as if David Fincher had handed me a costume that just so happened to fit perfectly. I didn’t need to read the script, I already knew it.

The aftermath of the vitriol is as uncomfortable as it is just plain boring, sometimes. You go to court. You figure it out. You never speak to each other again.

The week after my annual The Social Network watching, I had watched The Double. The movie contains yet another saddened, beat down Jesse Eisenberg character as the main role except at the end he doesn’t get the satisfaction of saying he beat the odds that were held against him — whether he loses the only good thing in his life or not.

I guess the point of the movie, or rather the ending of it, was its ambiguity. The act of killing yourself, metaphorically, resonated a lot with me after this crash-and-burn week. It really allowed me to look into the way that I was feeling outside of my own home. It allowed me to look at the way other people in relationships interacted and didn’t give me any pointers on how to mimic, but how to kill it. He jumps. It’s over.

I’ve always been a very avid and all-encompassing movie fan. Watching Richard Ayoade’s The Double felt like staring down the tip of a double-edged sword that was held, on purpose, by another me. I find Eisenberg’s performances in both films to be always so monotonous. It always feels like he knows it’s over before anything even happens. 

How do you become so entangled with the idea of a permanent nothingness and then have to confront a new type of reality? Do or die, life or death, it appears that with anything there really are only two options.

A large, and annoying, defining feature in these films, or at least how I see it, is how the end is awful and yet the world keeps turning. You may not learn to get over it. Love ends, sometimes, and that fact is unfortunate but it happens. The divorce rate is 50/50. What can I do about it?

Of course, after viewing this, I was told by a friend of mine about the movie The Squid and the Whale, directed by Noah Baumbach.

I’m fairly familiar with Baumbach’s work, and I know how much this man loves to write about divorce. Lucky for him, I happen to be the target audience for this genre of movie.

You always see movies about the uprising and of course, inevitable downfall of what was once thought of to be the most perfect marriage. The most dashing relationship ever lived in can fall apart within a three minute on-screen fight. What I think you rarely get to see any of, is how the gargantuan split affects the children. I have seen the adults talking and I am quite tired of it.

Admittedly, I felt nothing. Really. However, I didn’t realize how much my own biases were changing the perceptions of the parents I had always known. I am not going to debrief my entire family history in this but it felt really truthful to see a family on screen that was so eager, so complex within their issues.

The humanity of this family was heartbreaking. There was a piece of every character I could find myself empathizing with, and ultimately relating to. Within all of this madness all anyone really wants is to find an emotion to cling onto. There’s an essence of wanting to conquer all of them, as if you are the most stable person dealing with the most unstable of issues. I woke up everyday and felt like I had invented a new type of grievance. There was a burning inside of me that tried to put all of that fiery emotion into playing mediator, or arguing for the sake of just saying mean things. 

Jesse Eisenberg’s character, as per usual, was the one I ended up clinging to. I felt his performance accurately captured the feeling of crawling to be stuck in the middle of it all — no matter how badly you also wanted to run from it. There was this chilling, really douchey teenager dealing with really douchey parents just trying not to break apart. There’s no way to console someone who at first was really lucid about the whole thing and then began to fall out of the bubble he had built around him. There’s this feeling of his character that felt so nihilistic, it was so exhilarating seeing someone just be an asshole about what he was going through. Like, real teenager shit.

I find the core connecting factor of all of this being that I love the way Jesse Eisenberg is just god’s perfect little freak, and I love the stand-out feel that comes with the characters he portrays. That feeling of inescapability and panic is something he’s magnificent at and why I feel so drawn to him. Or maybe I just felt consoled by movies where everyone feels bad the whole time.