choice-tired part 2: Terms of Endearment
on intimacy, emotional regulation, and Dostoevsky's thoughts on secret sharing
And we’re back… picking up where I left off in part 1, where I attempted threading a throughline between two films: Stalker and Terms of Endearment.
Since we covered Stalker more last time now we’re focusing on the second film, the 1983 classic which centers on a mother/daughter relationship.
Like with the character Stalker and his clients, there’s a power dynamic at play in the primary relationship unfolding throughout Terms of Endearment. It’s not a sentimental movie; it has characters who feel like real people reacting to their circumstances and observing [loving] each other in all their complexities.
A theme of both films is the loneliness of existence even within relationships. I have felt my most lonely while being surrounded by people. In the case of Terms of Endearment, the mother and daughter experience their realities completely differently.
Despite constantly sharing with each other, there’s very little mutual understanding—or seeking to. However, there’s investment and intrigue on the other end of the phone when one of them is telling the other everything from the mom’s sexual awakening in her fifties to the daughter’s affair.
Chris Kraus wrote in I Love Dick about the couple no longer having sex, so “the two maintain their intimacy via deconstruction: i.e., they tell each other everything.”
I am questioning if that level of tell-all is for me or not. I’ve had it before and while it’s nice and leads to closeness, it can also cause friction between the people. Or perhaps more negatively, it could become an emotional crutch—if we develop a dependence on telling someone a daily play-by-play and having someone on the other end of a phone comfort us, we will lack the ability to self soothe. Emotional regulation is a challenging skill to develop but having it is freeing. When we learn to tolerate a broader spectrum of emotions we’re no longer forced to turn to someone outside of ourselves to process or find comfort. We can do that in-house… and what a savings!
Of course we still need each other and, as a verbal processor, I’ve found talking out decisions and certain situations with neutral caring friends or therapists to be enormously valuable.
I’ve had periods of sharing way too much as I wrote about here:
…and now I might be sharing too little in certain situations, to attempt to maintain mystery or, as Esther Perel puts it, my “secret garden.” I might be kidding myself that I ever have the ability to appear mysterious; I’m a real open book or as I like to joke… they don’t call me let it out for nothing…
I’m still finding a Goldilocks balance with this and thought this would be a fun way to discuss:
What do we keep for ourselves?
What do we share and why? And to whom? Selfish? Or intimacy-building?
What to hold in / let out is the constant question…
In his novel Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky explores a similar concept, that everyone has secrets that they keep from others, even from themselves. He argues that these secrets are a part of what makes us human, and that they are essential to our individuality. The narrator of the novel says:
"Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has others which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But finally there are still others which a man is even afraid to tell himself, and every decent man has a considerable number of such things stored away. That is, one can even say that the more decent he is, the greater the number of such things in his mind."
The connection between decency and secrets is most perplexing: is he saying that it is emotional intelligence to know when to hold onto secrets and to not dump energy onto others?
idk…Perhaps I don’t understand the quote? What do you think it means? Would love to discuss.
As I talked about in my last dispatch, in the movie Stalker, a character called Stalker guides his clients through the “Zone” to the “Room” that grants the most cherished wish to anyone who is inside it. However, it’s the desire of their subconscious and the desire that has led to the most suffering, which is perhaps something private.
Maybe those internal desires should not be shared? Or maybe this is a complete misreading? As always, I’m the first to say, idk…
“We have to share things. That’s what intimacy is.” says Clementine in Eternal Sunshine…
But do we though? And how much and to whom, that is the question. Is it nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of our own outrageous intrusive thoughts or to dump them onto another?
There’s nuance to everything so, the only life philosophy I subscribe to wholeheartedly is a big… idk, which this tweet says it best:
And with that….
…idk…what do you think?
Love,
KD
PS.
For today’s list, here are all the other movies I’ve seen at a theater last year in case you are also choice-tired and would like a guide:
After Hours
Past Lives
One From the Heart
Barbie
The Swift Movie … at 10:30 pm on a Tuesday in the theater in my neighborhood. I was the only one there, it was wild, and honestly the best $19.89 I’ve spent. Made this about it, then deleted that app.
Latest episode: Phoebe Lapine returns
Last week I spoke to my close friend, chef, author, and screenwriter Phoebe Lapine. She is one of the most creative people I know, and I deeply admire her and her work. She has a new cookbook out now, called Carbivore. We talked about, of course, carbs: including what led to them being demonized by the diet industry, what sugar and carbs actually mean for our blood sugar, food sequencing/ combining, digestion, how overthinking all of this can be damaging, and how we’ve both been on the extreme ends and how to navigate that. Let us know if you listen. : )
