In Trouble
I remember washing my hands in the Alamo Drafthouse bathroom, webs and fingertips, counting to twenty. I don’t want this to be an essay about the pandemic, and it’s not – it’s about art and love and a movie and music – but Emma was the last movie I saw before the pandemic, and among all the things it is, it will always be that.
February or early March, then late summer, once or twice since then and again last night. I put a couple bits on Instagram, including Johnny Flynn dramatically tearing off his waistcoat and cravat, flinging himself onto the floor so overwhelmed he is with love. I recorded it on my phone and then added, “me after watching Emma.:” And then people thought it was exasperation, not the most intense romantic overwhelm. So I’m here to evangelize.
But also here to figure things out. Because just a few days before, I’d finished reading Fleishman Is in Trouble. And so my brain was a mess with age and love and commitment and parenthood and partnership. And then I decided to watch the most painfully romantic movie I know, a kind of beautiful self-harm, watching people realizing they’re in love, their first kiss. Love so strong you get a nosebleed. You don’t get nosebleeds from love after a while anymore. (Or maybe you do, and that’s the problem. That question is the problem.)
Toby Fleishman is 41, and middle-aged, not just in math but his whole vibe. He has an 11-year-old daughter and a divorce. I read the book because the trailer for the TV show came out, and looked so good, but let’s be honest, all I really ever watch is basketball and Taskmaster and movies I already know that I love. And yes it did wig me the fuck out that Jesse Eisenberg, boyish and my contemporary, has aged into playing a middle-aged man. He’s 39, like me, but freshly so as of October; I’m turning 40 in, well, less than a month. It’s not the number but the category, middle age. I’m teaching 18-year-olds this semester but still feel closer in age to them than my peers sometimes.
Granted I have a toddler, not a tween. But that’s no excuse. I honestly think freelancing is part of it, and even before that the peripatetic shape of my work life. I’ve only ever had one “promotion,” from front desk assistant to agents’ assistant at the talent agency I worked at straight out of college. I was 21. Otherwise it was agency to theatre to nonprofit receptionist to grad school to Google to freelancing. We shouldn’t need the shape of a work trajectory to validate our maturity, but I sometimes feel like it would help.
But the fact is, I’m basically 40. I’m a parent. I’ve got a— I ran out of words there. “A career”? “A nice clutch of steady gigs”? “A book coming out”? Really can’t count on professional life for what I’m looking for.
I don’t feel my age but I also don’t feel young, because I wish I felt young, which I wouldn’t if I did. “Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.” Okay so I’m literally twice her age. And the whole thing is how she’s essentially a baby. With little to distress or vex her, no challenges or hardship. It’s not a matter of age but of circumstance. At the end of the movie, having earned some maturity and by that earned some love, she’s still innocent in one moment: Finally alone, by way of a set of room screens, with Knightley, she steals a glance at him and pecks him on the lips. You can tell that she thinks that she’s done it. But then he puts his hand to her face and, in the words of romance novels, really and truly kisses her. (Yes of course Knightley is older than her, but it really does chafe me, just like in romance novels, the endless imbalance in age and experience between men and women in stories like this.)
The reason I love this movie most is its Mr. Knightley, and that’s what brought me back to watching it again. Johnny Flynn, lumpy-faced and rumpled, unbearably romantic. (He's 39, it turns out, just like me and Jesse Eisenberg, so he was, what, 36 when they made the movie? Kissing nearly twenty-one-year-old Emma Woodhouse, 23-year-old Anya Taylor-Joy, like that.) The scene after the couch-kiss is the wedding, and we go to black after holding on Emma’s veiled face, and then, the credits, and the song. His voice! You’ve heard it already in the movie, in a duet with Jane Fairfax—she’s on piano with a soft, lovely voice, and he’s playing violin passably well, but then he puts down the violin and starts singing along with her, this rich, scuffed cello voice. Is it beautiful because it’s beautiful or because Emma’s in love with him, the same question about his beautiful face. And it’s back again over the credits, in a folk lovesong, because, as I discovered that spring of 2020, he’s a singer, too, and his music was a life raft in that month-long panic attack. It’s really so good.
I’m writing this all with a song of his stuck in my head, actually, “The Water,” a duet he sings with Laura Marling. I love singing this song in the car, always her part, the melody floating to the surface, but the last few days I’ve been cranking the balance in the car all the way to the left, the speaker his voice comes out of, to learn the harmony part, too. I’m not a great singer, even worse with harmony, but it’s something to do, a little project, loop the song and get closer every time. (I think I’ve wrecked myself, though, for being able to sing the melody now for a while.) With only the left-hand sound coming out, you hear all the creaks and textures of his voice, too, otherwise all a bit underwater. So after a few days of that, I had to watch Emma again. An antidote to the drudgery and doubt of Fleishman Is in Trouble, somewhat, but also, like I said above and, let’s be honest, on Twitter, the loveliest self-harm. All the swooning beauty of all that first love. All the girls half my age. A good cry. An ache that’s sticking around the morning after, “The Water” stuck even more solidly in my head. I still sang along to it in the car this morning, nothing excised or purged.