Marty

No thoughts, just vibes.

I played hooky the other day (I’m unemployed and on strike) and caught a matinee of Marty, the 1955 Academy Award winner for Best Picture. I’ve seen the film before, an enjoyable comedy-drama with a lean script from Paddy Chayefsky, a winning Ernest Borgnine performance, and a B-plot involving two scene-stealing nonnas (who warmed AND chilled my heart with their yenta-adjacent antics). Nevertheless, I liked it a bit less this go around.

The failure of Marty is in its structuring, with its first two acts overpowering the movie’s final moments. There’s a lot of set-up to get Marty, the well-meaning sad-sack, with Betsy Blair’s Claire, a socially awkward schoolteacher who—by the account of all the men she dates—is rather plain-looking and difficult to talk to. It’s only near the end, the day after their epic meet-cute where Marty promises to call Claire the following day, does the movie morph into something complex.

Throughout his day, the people in Marty’s life chip away at his confidence and leave him doubting whether or not Claire “the dog” is worth his time and energy. Is he better off a bachelor? Should he keep his job as a butcher and not go into debt buying out the meat shop? Wouldn’t life be easier if he only had his mother and their aging family home to look after? Isn’t a Saturday night out with the dudes more fun than all the drama that accompanies domesticity? These questions are answered in a tight twenty or so minutes, and after wavering on what to do about Claire, Marty ignores the noise, calls her up, and cue what feels like very abrupt end credits.

Dating is stupid and infuriating, and so much of what makes it devastating are the push and pulls of interest and disinterest, anxiety and avoidance. We’re constantly burdened with the idea of what else there could be, and if Marty reveals anything, it’s often the lofty pursuit of more that keeps us alone. I don’t want to be reductive, one of those people who argues that the failure of modern romance is a result of all the options that have been thrust upon us in social media era.

There’s truth to that, sure, but I think a grander truth requires us to go a step deeper: perhaps we’ve all just gotten too accustomed to thinking about our lives as too complicated.

—

I’ve been thinking a lot (the problem) about how I date, how I present myself when I first meet someone, but also what I become after a hang. I’m either riddled with anxiety— it went well, and I’m struggling to strike a balance between fantasizing/projecting and a more cool, grounded approach to ~what’s next.~ Or I’m riddled with anxiety—it went poorly and I can’t help but internalize how I failed, how I’m superficial, how I’m going to tell this perfectly open person that I’m just not going to want to get another drink. I’m constantly grappling with how someone could be additive to my life, and in the process of doing that, I also somehow convince myself that there’s so much going on in my head that I rather exist in the yearning state than in the pursuing one.

Lately my friends and I have developed an attraction to those of smooth-brained experience, people who are simple, stupid, hot and without thoughts. It’s always a half-joke, but I assume the seriousness stems from a desire to abandon intellect in favor of instinct. If we were less preoccupied with preoccupations, we’d be less paralyzed and more open. Marty’s smart enough to know he doesn’t have much to offer except for his decentness, and this serves him—until everyone else’s worries cause him to doubt what he immediately understood from his first date: there was a spark, and a spark is hard to find.

This is actually the plague of all relationship building. Marty reminded me of What Happened Was…, a 1994 indie that is perhaps the greatest movie I’ve ever seen about a first date. It functions like a play, dialogue heavy and contained to one set, and its tension lies in the back and forth between its two characters, who vacillate between want, fear, desire, avoidance — their own headiness. There are a lot of misunderstandings, left turns, and mind-changing condensed into one meeting that becomes a metaphor for every way we sabotage and self-sabotage.

I’ve talked to a lot of friends about dating woes, and even when they present differently, a person’s unavailability always seems tied to a complication that feels amorphous and intangible. “He got in his head” is a common refrain we tell ourselves after rejection. It’s also how we justify our own avoidance when the tables are turned. I don’t know how many times a day I wonder if I’m ready to meet someone, and in that wonder, I probably have dismissed a handful of really good people. And that’s if I even get that far. So many times I don’t even bother to try.

The stress of Marty and the tragedy of What Happened Was… is in this human inability to trust an actual truth: it’s really fucking hard to meet someone you connect with, and when you do, it may serve you to stop asking yourself questions and just lean the fuck in.