Spring is in the air, and with the renewal that the season brings, it is hard to stop the mind from wandering, wondering, playing. It could be that the days are getting longer or that we are emerging from a winter slumber refreshed and curious, but it seems the temptation of love (or is it lust?) lurks in the strangest of places, a mischievous beckoning that will not be denied.
In David O. Russell’s Academy Award–nominated Silver Linings Playbook (2012), Pat, the central character, finds himself in just such a situation, face to face with a woman, Tiffany, who feels the pull of attraction and will not turn away. After being released from a court-ordered stint in a mental health facility to manage his bipolar disorder, Pat is rejuvenated and determined to mend his broken relationship with his wife. However, the world has it in otherwise for Pat, and when he meets Tiffany, also a survivor of mental illness, at an otherwise dismal dinner party, this fresh course is set. The silver linings of the film’s title refer to Pat’s newfound attitude to allow optimism to rule his understandings of the world. Although it takes him a while to come around, Tiffany’s challenge to his life plan reveals that silver linings can be found all around us, even if we are not looking for them.
However, unlike the proposal embedded within the closing of Silver Linings Playbook, love is not a tonic for the ills of the world. As the opening scene of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) suggests, “Happiness is not always fun.” Widely considered one of Fassbinder’s most powerful films (he made over 40 before fatally mixing cocaine and sleeping pills at the tender age of 37), it tracks an unlikely romance between Emmi, a 60-year-old German widow, and Ali, a Moroccan guest worker in his 30s. Uncaring of the racial, cultural, and age differences between them, Emmi and Ali find in each other radical acceptance and adoration. And yet, in the world around them, their relationships with others turn sour as prejudice and small-mindedness rule people’s reactions to them individually and as a couple. Eventually, these poisonous attitudes seep into Emmi and Ali’s relationship, providing a heartbreaking example of the title’s claim: fear will eat up the inherent goodness of the soul. But in the spirit of silver linings, Emmi realizes that “when we’re together, we must be nice to each other. Otherwise, life is not worth living.” And at the film’s closing, Emmi delivers on this promise, caring for Ali when he is weakest.
Sometimes, though, the person we must be nice to is ourselves. Daniel Barrow, winner of the prestigious Sobey Art Award in 2010, struggles with this knowledge is his short film Artist Statement (2004). Barrow begins by admitting that his artistic practice once provided relief from anxiety and depression, but as he has aged it has become “the dull habit of a lonely man.” Sometimes the candidness required to be kind to oneself means to admit fear, and to admit victory too, if only to admit that so much of what we do falls between these poles as the ordinary struggle of what it means to be in the world. Life often, simply, requires us to be brave. In Barrow’s case, in exchange for being “gratuitously honest at the risk of public humiliation,” he is able to craft a meditation on solitude that reaches out to his audience. In exchange, we must hope (here’s the silver lining) that he can feel us reaching back when we recognize ourselves in his bare honesty.
Where does love come from? It’s not only the season. In Silver Linings Playbook, there is the attraction of sameness—two people who have both struggled with their mental health recognizing the comfort in shared experience (as much as they recognize the unexplainable electricity that compels all kinds of lovers). In Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, love cares not for shared experiences, but uses difference as a way to enact the tenants of love: respect and adoration. In Artist Statement, the movement toward another derives from the awareness of self, hinting that for whatever reason that love moves us, it must do so deeply.
