Tuesday, November 22, 2011

How we hate being tested!

I found the speeches I will produce below by a character in the movie Separate Lies fascinating. The first is spoken by a woman to her husband while they are trying to get their marriage back on track. They need to get it back on track because she has had an affair. She has further complicated matters by driving her lover's Land Rover while drunk and killing a man. This has brought the affair to light and forced her husband to cooperate with her lover in an attempt to keep her out of jail, not least because her actions threaten to disrupt his career by causing a scandal.

He asks her why she did it? He wants to know what was missing to cause her to do such a thing. At one point in the discussion, she says, "He's easy to be with. He doesn't seem to want anything from me." Her husband says, "And that's good is it?"

And then she gets angry. Consider the context. She has really screwed up—so much so hat someone has been killed—and she admits it is entirely her fault. Despite all this, she is angry that her husband had expectations of her. Ask yourself, How did we ever get to the point that talk like this seems reasonable?

Here is how she goes on in speech number one, in her angry tone:
Yes, it's good! It's very good!

You have such standards James. Whatever I do, I always feel that I'm letting you down in some way, that I'm not measuring up, that I'm getting it wrong, that I'm disappointing you.
As he points out, she killed someone. But this is taken to be reasonable talk from women today.

So she leaves her lover and tries to make the marriage work and things go fine until the husband learns that her now-former lover is dying of cancer. Being the sort who always does the right thing, he tells her. And she leaves him to be with her dying lover. The husband asks her, as she is packing her bags, if she thinks it would have been better if he hadn't told her. And here comes the second speech:
Oh James. Good? Better? Bad? Worse? I'd still have been with you. As it is, I'm going away. You know me, I fail every test you set me. But you keep setting them. Why?
The fact that this woman keeps failing is never her fault, it's the fault of the  man who keeps "testing" her by daring to have expectations. But why does she always feel that she is failing, that she is letting him down? She feels it because she does keep failing.

It's not the movies' fault. Quite the contrary, it is almost inevitable in our modern moral climate that someone who disappoints or hurts you will accuse you of always setting tests for them thus making it your fault that they failed.

No comments:

Post a Comment