Skip to main content

Beyond Range

Watched In a Lonely Place recently. The story is about love and fear, set in a time when societal norms were very different from what they are today. As the plot unfolds, the modern viewer must find a way to parse out the element of time and find the kernel that is story - a flawed man who is attractive but volatile in love with a kind, sweet-tempered woman. She loses power in the equation as soon as she falls in love - is no longer being wooed and pursued. 

The more she entangles herself emotionally, the greater her loss of agency and equilibrium. Dix Steele played by Bogart acts out in proportion to the woman's closeness to him. Dix needs a therapist well before he needs a relationship with anyone - but those were not the norms of the times. As his agent puts it - anyone who wants to deal with him needs to take the good with the bad. There was social  (and even medical) acceptance for behavior that would be considered outrageous today. 

The dynamic between Bogart and Grahame is played out brilliantly. There is a kind of man who cannot separate love from control and subsumption of the woman he loves. They naturally gravitate to the kind of woman who cannot calibrate how much of her self she must or will give up in the name of love - she does not realize she has the choice to give up none at all and that relationship would be as loving as it would be empowering. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...
5 comments
Read more

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more