Blue Valentine and the Lovely Transience of Love

Go, pretentiously.

There's a sense of permanence fuelling the desperation behind Valentine's Day. “If I don't have a partner for this one, I never will”. Obviously that's not the words actually flowing through singles' minds at the time, it's more of a subtext, an unconscious feeling that gives the whole thing a sort of existentialist dread. The same dread, in a way, pervades Blue Valentine. Derek Cianfrance's grungy, grimy, all close-up look at the two-day expiration of a marriage is laden with references to ageing, death, and impermanence... all framed within the context of various supposedly permanent institutions: America, capitalism, family, and most importantly (but never without ties to the others), marriage.

The film takes place in two timelines following the lives of Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams), one a grim procedural of what might be their last two days as a couple and the other a greatest hits tour of how they met cute and got together quick some five years prior. Cianfrance expertly flits back and forth between the two, giving us a truly insightful look at how the lives of couples are a mishmash of memory and perception and history, how both subtle, passive-aggressive jabs and brutal, knock-down arguments are often tied up with emotionally positive moments of the relationship's past.

Obviously, this isn't your typical Valentine's Day film, one that I only retroactively realized had “Valentine” in the title, weirdly enough, but while a lot of people would find it overly depressing and not in the spirit of the holiday itself, this writer would beg to differ. Of course, the (possible, goddamn spoiler alert) dissolution of a marriage is not a good thing, but Blue Valentine's aforementioned emphasis on the very ephemeral pleasures of the current moment are what I think power the film's essential meaning: find pleasure in the current moment, for it could fade and disappear at any time.

This may certainly be the waylaid desires of a critic/bachelor attempting to salvage hope from a film that, ostensibly, is about the futility and impermanence of “love”. After all, it's fucking Valentine's Day, and holy shit isn't that just a great reminder that you have failed at the Great American Dream of two cats and a fence or something.

It may be, but I've seen enough films to realize that it's not the ones that everyone else calls “depressing” that depress me. Things like your typical romantic comedy are the depressing ones, because you know there's no goddamn way your lower-middle-class butt is going to ever be that repressed millionaire who booked it halfway across Manhattan to make sure your Manic Pixie Whatever Girl doesn't get on the flight to London.

No, films like Blue Valentine, films that acknowledge that love is temporary, that love would mean absolutely freakin' nothing without the possibility that it could someday end – like life, amirite – these are life-affirming. The way in which Cianfrance muddles the timelines of the events makes the chronology of them immaterial. It doesn't matter when Dean and Cindy were so truly in love, his shitty ukulele playing and her awkward tap-dancing staging a gorgeously perfect moment of connection on a Brooklyn street, that moment is completely out of time.

In this way that I, a single man who ain't quite Hey Gurl young no more, can look back at my own past moments like this and acknowledge that their past-ness doesn't matter. I mean, you'll never see me singing with a ukulele, but I have ripped off a drunken serenade of “All of You”. It's as if love is always and will be always. And all of you in couples right now, maybe having just made love, or sitting waiting for your lover to come out of the bathroom so you can make love, or even parked on the couch Netflixing without any likely Chill to come (heh), reading this, remember that this moment is right now, but in a way it will always be always.