I woke up this morning and watched clips of the movie Closer on YouTube. I remember watching it back in my early 20s. I used to sit in my dorm room and watch movies with my headphones on. I didn't have an ordinary college experience, but who really does anymore? Anything considered normal tends to be some type of commercial experience marketed to—and only accessible to—the median rich. I grew up rich but by no means median, due to the whole devout evangelical/Calvinism/expat stuff.
Anyway, Closer—good cast, probably a good film. Who am I to judge? I like the character Larry, who for most of the film is in a relationship with Anna, who is having an affair with Dan, who's cheating on his girlfriend Alice. Larry is a rich doctor, but gets cucked by broke, sensitive artist-writer Dan. Even when Larry runs into Dan's jilted ex, Alice, in a strip club, she's seemingly not interested in him. Lots of wisdom in there.
I definitely wasn't old enough to understand this film back in my 20s, and I'm still probably not old enough in my 30s. I heard somewhere that schools manage to ruin reading by making 14-year-olds read books written for 50-year-old men. Having children write critiques of books they could never have the skill to write themselves—kids talking about how a story is racist or misogynistic. The children truly do yearn for the mines; that's a hill I will die on. My best memories as a 14-year-old were either rowing crew (pulling an oar while a 90 lb girl screamed at me) or working with my dad and grandpa renovating old homes (demolishing old kitchens/bathrooms, moving heavy things around). My grandpa lived the American dream—the real one. He immigrated to the US as a teenager and then (allegedly) eloped with his boss's 20-year-old daughter, had seven kids, and retired in a seniors-only condo association where he continued to work as the groundskeeper, trapping skunks while flirting with the widows in the community. He really took care of my grandma before it was popular for men to do that. They both got graduate degrees—maybe it was the guilt of being a poor immigrant boy who got a rich girl pregnant, who can say. He was a good man, a good grandpa.
"It's a lie. It's a bunch of sad strangers photographed beautifully, and all the glittering assholes who appreciate art say it's beautiful ’cause that's what they want to see. But the people in the photos are sad, and alone, but the pictures make the world seem beautiful. So the exhibition’s reassuring, which makes it a lie, and everyone loves a big fat lie."
In the film, Larry is yearning for something real. That desire for reality is what ends up giving him a happy-ish ending, despite his own issues with actually understanding reality. Larry is smart—he's a doctor—but he's also a brute. In one scene, Larry yells at Anna: "Because I'm a fucking caveman!" Larry's yearning to have something real, combined with his aggression, leads him to go looking in bad places for it. Early in the film, he's in an anonymous sex chatroom while at work and unknowingly chatting with Dan, who is gleefully enjoying lying about his identity (foreshadowing). Later, Larry goes to a strip club looking for some "real intimacy." For all his stupidity, Larry is admirable in that he takes action. He works toward a goal: having something real and true.
Larry's desire for something real contrasts with Dan. Dan doesn't want the truth; he wants love. But Dan lies to everyone, even the people he loves. He might even think that to love is to lie. Over the course of the film, we see Larry getting better at chasing reality, while Dan eventually has a change of heart—from wanting love to wanting something real. Eventually, Larry's love for the truth is what gives him a happy ending with Anna and also ends up ruining Dan. In their final scene, Larry confesses to Dan that he slept with Alice but also tells Dan that Alice still loves him. Dan doesn't care about love anymore; he wants something real. When Alice won't confess to him that she slept with Larry, she and Dan break up. Realism trumps romanticism. Idealism keeps losing to cold, hard pragmatism.
In summary, I'd recommend watching Closer.