Celeste and Jesse Forever (2012)
DO YOU WANT TO BE RIGHT OR DO YOU WANT TO BE HAPPY?
We saw Celeste and Jesse Forever last week, before we caught a late flight back to the Midwest and I cried and cried and ached for how true it was and how terrible that truth is.
If weâre being honest, though, I maybe cried less at the love story and more because I recognized in Celeste the most dangerous parts of myself. The parts Iâve turned down to low, but which still crouch and flicker and stand ready to rage at all the wrong moments. The parts Iâve managed to subdue, but which my better angels havenât yet learned how to defeat, how to drive out.
Afterward, we walked back down Sunset in the dark, hearing the approaching clatter of skateboarders and stepping out of the way just in time. You were calculating the traffic to the airport and worrying about shuttles while I was walking a step too slowly and thinking This is a Movie to Own. By which I mean: This is the only sort of movie I am ever moved to buyâthe kind you can watch over and over and lament and love and be devastated and warned by.Â
Maybe it meant this much just to me. And maybe I am only writing about it now because today has been a hard, heavy work day and Iâm feeling extra tender and sad. But I just want to lie on a bed, head in your lap and cry fat, ploppy hot tears while you play with my hair. And Iâll explain to you how tiring it is to be a person who must be Right. How it feels to be naturally at a grace-deficit and to have to mine for it, to frantically hunt for it and patch it on and pray it holds.
How I will spend my whole life trying to soften myself.Â
You know when you lie down in yoga and they say, âFeel yourself release. Let go of everything in your head. Feel your shoulders fall back. Relax your arms. Soften your fingers. Feel your legs let go. Your stomach. Your knees. Your thighs. Soften, relax, release, let go. Let go. Let go.â ?
This is my living monologue. This is too much of my whole life, turned in, turned out. The judgment and frustration and anger and demands I try to restrain from everyone I encounter, even from myself. How often I work to not tsunami everyone I know and love with the crush: âWhy canât you all be what I think you should? Why canât you do it like I would?â
You know what killed me? What made me flinch with recognition? The very beat after Celeste casts herself in a confessed, broken rumple at Jesseâs feetâlamenting and repenting for her damned need to be Right above anything elseâshe rallies and screams âWhy couldnât you change for me!?âÂ
We know, you know? We know that this relentless, dictatorial, score-keeping, possessive need to be Right is all wrong. We know that it is crushing to the people we love and work with and live below and meet in line at the coffee shop and in boats in Bali. We know it has broken youâor if not yet you, then the line of contenders that came before you. And we must change. We try to change. We change. But itâs as immutable as the compulsion to drunkenness, humming along just below the sweet soft skin. Just waiting for enough slack in the line to charge and demand: Why couldnât you be more (for me)?
I know I am a hard person to work with.
I strive not to be. I thank and praise and ask nicely and support and coordinate and share or bypass credit and want so much to be loved as a team player because I love my teammates. I am also, regularly and insufficiently, holding back my frustration at the worldâs indifference to the list of mantras that gong in my head all day long and wonât be silenced until I nag:
Why didnât you do it better?
Why didnât you do it my way?
Why didnât you ask me how it should be done when I clearly have the most experience?
  I know itâs ugly. And as much as I try to spray over it with the other half of meâthe half that is kind and good and appreciative and supportiveâthe smell of my disappointment and control can never be obscured. I know that. I am better than I used to be and yet still 50% more exacting and demanding and tiring than most of the good people I work with. Part of me wants to change. And part of me selfRIGHTeously canât do that without first knowing exactly who will keep watch if I were to set it all down.
And Celeste and Jesse Forever isnât even a movie about work, really. Worse. Itâs a movie about what being this brittle and Right person does to our marriages. Itâs about divorce. (And if you have been divorced, let me warn you about how this will take any latent pain of yours and will add water to it like a pancake mix and you will fatten and fluff with contorting old remorse and guilt and mourning until you can barely move. And by that I mean: the largest possible compliment to the screenwriters who somehow found a way to tap and run out of me every sadness I thought had managed to harden into amber. Kudos!) Itâs about being so radically blinded by the conviction that we deserve Better, that we canât even see Good anymore, you know? Itâs so good. Itâs just really so good.
I cried too long at this movie. Because I have been there and I donât ever want to go back. I sat and watched Celeste and Jesse and afterward I wanted to call up Rashida Jones and say âYou got it so right. How did you know?â  But my throat is just too thick and rubbery for words. I canât even say it all to Chris. All I can do is just say: This is Too Much. I relate too well. Congratulations.
Itâs so tenuous, you know? It takes a movie like this or a book that stops me and crushes me into convicted pulp to remember how fucking prone we are to ruin the things we love. And that terrifies me.
Do you know how easy it is to ruin the people we love? Â
Obviously, I have no small and simple way to say that this movie gutted me. I wish I had coherent words for it. An articulate review. But all I have is the ability to stand with my hands holding my own wet heavy heart and stomach and liver and nod at it and say:Â
Youâre right. I almost forgot, but youâre so right.
Thank you. Iâll work harder.
Erica U. is a writer (RIGHT-er?) and person living in California. You can read more here.
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