Tonight I saw an interesting movie, Serendipity, which is pretty much standard Hollywood romantic fare. Basically, it’s the story of two lovers, who meet by accident, are torn apart by a Hollywood plot device, and then reunited under such contrived circumstances that it could only be fate (of the Hollywood variety) once again. The specifics of the movie really aren’t that important, however, if you do decided to go see it, leave when Cusack is walking through the park, reading his “Obituary” and it will actually be a damn good movie. Stick around (if you’re with a date) and it will be a standard piece of Hollywood fluff, but a decent date movie.
What is disturbing about this movie is what it reveals to me about the American mindset when approaching issues of love and life, especially where the ideas of fate and destiny are concerned. It’s frightening how soon we all give up on something that takes work, if we can write it off with “it wasn’t meant to be”. God forbid the relationships in our lives should take effort, or that the people in our lives should happen to be less than perfect. Hollywood movies like this work because we’re conditioned from an early age to be dreamers. We’re taught from day one to dream big in this land where dreams come true. Or do they?
Take the mythos of the “American Dream”: you start off as a busboy, but through diligence and hard work, you end up owning the restaurant. Maybe even a chain of restaurants. It sounds like a movie plot, where suspension of disbelief is essential, but everyday millions upon millions of Americans buy into it, working towards a dream they will likely never see realized. Americans are not lazy. We’re dreamers, and we often delude ourselves beyond reason in our fervent pursuit of those dreams. We are a tenacious bunch, and when it comes to our careers we don’t give up so easily.
It really is a pity that ethic doesn’t seem to carry over into our personal lives. As a culture we put in long hours to succeed at the workplace, but we’re reluctant to put those same hours into making our personal relationships work. Instead, we put our lives in the hands of fate. What would you say if I told you that my strategy for finding my dream job was to go to my neighborhood bar, and strike up conversations with people, until I found someone who was looking for an employee and who also had a job I found interesting? You’d think I was nuts. But how many people do that regularly in order to find a date?
Why are we conditioned for patience, hard work, self sacrifice, and struggle to make our careers, but in our personal relationships we want to fall madly and deeply in love with the stranger on the train, ride off into the sunset and live happily ever after?
I certainly don’t have an answer. I think it would be easy to blame the media or the entertainment industry, but I think that is a cop out. Hollywood perpetuates the myth, this is certain, but only because it is the myth that we so desperately want to believe. I consider myself a critical thinker. I know people are fallible. I know that relationships take work, hard work. I know that what makes a relationship work is not bailing out at the first sign of trouble. I know these things. I can write them down, and I can speak them aloud. But I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t dream of romance, of being carried away by raw emotion, ruled by my heart instead of my brain.
I just wish I understood why that is.