What makes love possible?

It may seem that Jerry Maguire is living the good life.  He’s a successful sports agent who has several clients, he’s surrounded by people that admire and envy him, and he’s engaged to a beautiful woman.  But his relationships with women seem to be lacking in the “I am in love with you” department.  What makes love possible in this new world disorder of work, work, work?  Or is this ideal love that some people aspire to have in their lives just another idea and not reality?

Since the invention of the conveyor belt and its ability for mass production, society took a turn for the better when it came to having several options to buy the things that would make their lives better, and in some cases, making individuals feel better about themselves.  The industrial era made it difficult for people to keep up with their social lives and personal relationships.  From working the graveyard shift to having a pile of bills, having a job became a necessity and a priority.  The primary goal was and still is to move up the social ladder, getting a raise, getting that promotion.  It’s people like Jerry Maguire who have had it all, who have become successful in their profession that they are failures when it comes to their personal lives.

It’s common for employees to put their jobs first so that their work basically becomes their primary and only relationship.   The significant other begins to take on the role of a cheerleader.  Even if both partners in the relationship are working and they become a support system for one another, I think most couples tend to put their jobs first and family second.  And usually, one person loves and shows that love more than the other person does

And in Jerry’s case love is just another word.  He was with his fiance because she was successful in her own right and if he did love her than he wouldn’t have broken off their engagement so easily.  Jerry doesn’t have a stable foundation of his own and so he needs to move onto the next woman to fill that void.  And maybe that’s the way some relationships have been forged, a party is able to provide one another with the minimum until something better comes along, like a company.   He needs others to forge that stability within his life since he’s unable to see that he’s expecting for everyone else to make a commitment to him, that they should demonstrate their loyalty without reciprocation.  Just like an employee, you are expected to meet these expectations in order to maintain your status of employment yet you are to expect very little in return.

For a relationship to work, for love to grow and thrive one needs more than just empty promises of servitude and loyalty, and more than just respect and a mutual desire to forge something worthwhile.  It’s more than the attention and devotion that a person can give you. It begins with yourself, who you are as an individual, where you stand in society that shows you’re happy with where you are in life.  Once you have that you should be able to show that devotion to someone else. And the love that forms, the bond that grows may just allow a couple to make it.

A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof - What’s mendacity got to do with it?

Maggie and Brick exemplify the mendacity of life – of what love, family and happiness really mean – or the lack thereof.  A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof shows how the role we take on in society can be a detriment to our happiness if we don’t follow our true desires.

Maggie may be this selfish cat clawing her way through the Pollitt family trying to protect her share of the inheritance, but it’s her true desire to end the caged life with Brick that matters most.  She lets her own greed and jealousies cloud her mind, comparing herself to Sister Mae and the zoo of a family her in laws have become.  It’s this false notion that because Mae and Gooper have children and that they’re professionally and socially established, Maggie feels this desperate need to bear a child with Brick.  It’s the countless failed attempts at establishing some sort of intimacy with Brick that shows Maggie’s true desire is to regain that love, and then the future baby.  Although she may want to guarantee her financial future, Maggie has a stronger desire to be released from the cage and to regain that intimacy with Brick that rules her actions, unfortunately her other goals tend to cloud her mind.  Money is at the top of her list, but her relationship with Brick is vital for more than just one reason.

Big Papa’s inheritance, a raggedy suitcase containing his dad’s uniform, turned into a cold reminder that there was no one to care for him anymore, no permanent home to go to.  Despite becoming a successfully rich man, he wasn’t that much to be envious of.  Having led an opulent life filled with material things, he forgot what it was like to appreciate what matters most, family.  Everyone in his family is a stranger to each other, each playing their respective expected role, playing a game of chess trying to outsmart the other to gain control of Big Papa’s money.  And it’s the fantasy that having money will bring happiness.  It didn’t bring Big Papa much happiness now that he has a plantation and all this junk in his house.  These things are just that, things, incapable of showing and giving him love.  He lost the meaning of love the day that his father died.   If it weren’t for facing his own future death and Brick reminding him of what his father gave him, Big Papa wouldn’t really be able to put his own life into perspective and value what matters most, his family.

Although Brick plays his own role of superiority, dispensing words of wisdom and truth for the other characters, he’s unable to see his own life without a bottle of liquor magnifying the lies.  Despite being a 30 year old child, rebelling against the social norm by doing as he pleases, Brick escapes his own reality.  He’s more than willing to shove the truth into everybody else’s face yet when the other characters attempt to do the same to him, he uses excuses to escape his own set of responsibilities, his own reality, his own feelings.  Brick consumes himself with the shortcomings of others to entrap them in their own lies so that they won’t get to his own.  It’s as if he blames everyone else for his own set of troubles.  It seems appropriate that Big Papa is the one character whose just as strong as Brick to dispense his own set of truths to him, to be relentless with him until Brick is able to look into a mirror and see his own lies, his own reality.

It makes me wonder about our own lives, our own value systems and the lies and excuses we make to get what we want.  I think we become our own addicts feeding into the emptiness of things, of obtaining those goals that we think will make us happy.  Maybe we need to take on that role of Big Papa and Brick, dispensing and receiving truth to one another, helping one another to put the liquor bottle down, or smashing all the glasses long enough for the sobriety of reality to settle in.  Or is that just being to ideal and I’m seeing things through a drunken lens?

The Second Sex

Mildred Pierce

Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Woman as Other may seem like a feminist empowerment piece of literature to some, but it’s more of a deliberate attempt to bring the issue of women being oppressed by the male dominating society to the forefront so that as a collective group, women’s rights, opinions, and even their role in society may be viewed differently. That a woman is not just a body with ovaries, but a being that possesses conviction, values and intellectual input that has the capacity to offer the world more than just a subservient role placating the masses.  With de Beauvoir’s research and facts interspersed throughout the Second Sex, the reader is able to infer that this is an intelligent woman who is able to use these examples to show how woman’s rights or the lack thereof, have been attacked/thwarted by men throughout the ages.

Although I haven’t seen the 1954 movie Mildred Pierce, the clip I’ve selected demonstrates the struggle between mother and daughter and their conflicting values and upbringings that it relates to de Beauvoir’s Other Sex wanting more out of life, out of society – the desire to not mimic the mother’s role.  Just as man can use the excuse that because a woman is not a man she must follow the rules of x, y and z, woman can manipulate man’s perspective by feeding him a similar entrapment, which in this particular film lies with a promise of a baby.  Veda, the daughter, uses her womanhood as a means to obtain money.  Money meant power then and it still holds true today, and in this film it’s the power of freedom for Veda to escape the normalcy that has been forced upon her.

She wants a different future for herself, not one with a white picket fence, being the demure housewife cooking all these dishes for the family.  She wants to be free of that life her mother lived.  De Beauvoir states in her introduction that women are tired of the subject of woman, but maybe it’s because those same woman have succumbed to their societal roles as woman and the restrictions that come with it.  Whereas Veda wants to escape the town she lives in to get away from the women who wear uniforms, living a drab and boring life.

It’s these women in uniforms and mothers like Mildred who to some extent, through their complacent actions, have aided in keeping woman’s position in society as such, confined.  Whereas someone like Veda, being somewhat of an extremist, and de Beauvoir through her writing, have used their own methods to confront or evade their respective prison cell who in the end both want more power, the freedom to select and choose as she pleases as man does.