7
Relationships

Make Way for Tomorrow (USA, 1937)

Directed by Leo McCarey, written by Viña Delmar

Barkley and Lucy Cooper (Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi) have their home taken from them by the bank due to ageism, fear of asking for help, and the individualism of a new generation.

Love Is Strange (USA, 2014)

Directed and written by Ira Sachs

Ben Hull and George Garea (John Lithgow and Alfred Molina) have their home taken from them, effectively by the church, due to homophobia, fear of asking for what they deserve, and the individualism of a new generation.

Gareth

Love is strange—perhaps the thing that most affects us but that we least understand. It shows up in a vast range of our popular culture and most meaningful exchanges (we say it conquers all and that we can’t live without it), but we rarely define love beyond vague sentimentality. Or worse, when we say we love someone what we really mean is we love what they do for us, or that we need them. How strange that we can’t thrive without love—indeed, the path to a whole life depends on love—but we might not be able to say what the word means.

Movies, like music and literature, not to mention religion and politics, have helped and hindered how we understand love, especially in the context of relationships between people (as opposed to the love a person can have for the ecosystem, a cause, or life itself). It would be obvious to explore the question of love through cinematic depictions of marriage and partnership, but it would also be limiting. Many permutations of meaningful relationship deserve attention in an exploration of cinema, spirituality, and the cycle of life, so while this chapter focuses on two films ostensibly about marriage, it aims to take friendship and community seriously too.

The meaning of marriage is changing (as it always has), many people aren’t married, and of course there is so much more to relationships than marriage. Yet movies about love usually focus on the courtship of two people, sometimes featuring conversations with their friends, perhaps with a culminating wedding scene. They typically don’t tell us much about the complexity of love—to begin with, the way that love is at least as much about how we serve each other’s well-being, not just how someone else makes us feel. Such movies often hermetically seal the protagonists, relegating others to window dressing. This isn’t realistic; even for those of us who are in the happiest of marriages or partnerships, there is far more to life than that principal relationship; and of course, you don’t have to be partnered to have profoundly meaningful connections with others.

Some of the best films about marriage are actually about divorce, and they serve as reminders of the tenderness required when two people who once found their home in each other later discover that it has an irreparable fault line beneath it.

And good films about friendship help us see what the most integrated friendship always does: reflects the light and shadow within us, points the way to alignment with our truest selves, and shows us that we don’t have to be alone.

Then there are stories about “chosen family.” I’m thinking of relationships involving more than two people not partnered to each other, in which a deeper experience is occurring about our callings, gifts, and needs; where people know they are safe, or at least safe enough, to be themselves; and when things go wrong there is a place the community members can fall without harming themselves.

As with all stories, what sometimes matters most is not so much what happens but what doesn’t. Seeing a codependent relationship portrayed can heighten our awareness of what an interdependent one could look like; seeing loneliness calls forth hospitality; seeing people dancing on the edges of what’s real but never quite getting to the heart of the matter can leave us more committed to making our communities more authentic.

Two films that consider all kinds of relationship, despite on the face of them being about marriage, are Make Way for Tomorrow and Love Is Strange, made over seventy-five years apart (one is a definite homage to the other). Each is about a couple forced to part because of the selfishness or lack of awareness in their circle. Each is also about the friendship between the couple and among others, the impact of the marriage on the community, and the community’s relationship with the marriage.

Many traditions invite the wider chosen family to support people getting married. “In sickness and in health” is supposed to be a community effort, although we may rarely see such commitments embodied. Poetic words may be ritually spoken, but the aspirations behind these words often remain merely wishes.

In Make Way for Tomorrow, which Orson Welles called “the saddest movie ever made,”1 Barkley and Lucy represent the first generation of people in the industrial age whose children don’t see it as their duty to care for their parents. The emerging nuclear family colliding with the end of interdependent villages, the thirst for city life, the magic of a memorable day in which the tenderness between two people represents a lifetime’s relationship—this film is handling a lot.

And Love Is Strange lets us see Ben and George’s wedding, the role they play in their community, and how homophobia and other structural nightmares add unnecessary burdens and give other people the excuse to pretend they aren’t their brothers’ keeper. It’s a more sophisticated film than Make Way for Tomorrow because it lets us see into the lives of their extended family. We see Kate (Marisa Tomei) and Elliot (Darren Burrows) dealing with how a yearning for purpose often collides with egotism and competition between partners and how parenting is frequently a stumble in the dark. The most hopeful element of Love Is Strange is how it points to a new generation nurtured in the embrace of multiple interdependent and open-minded connections, with an understanding of community that transcends the independent nuclear household economy.

As I said, what’s strangest about love is that for something considered to be universally important and that should be prioritized over everything else (not just in the teaching that says “Love God and love your neighbor as yourself” or all the other synonyms for the Golden Rule), it’s almost never defined in public. We find it easier to talk about taxes, war, and shiny objects worn by celebrities than about the thing we most want and need.

Love—the willingness to give yourself for the benefit of another—is alive between Barkley and Lucy, and between George and Ben. Their children, both literal and figurative, don’t love Barkley, Lucy, George, and Ben that way, probably because they don’t love themselves that way yet. But it may be that witnessing this kind of love, even when the people involved in it must part through cruel circumstance, helps others grow. I sometimes wince when I think of how as a child I might have hurt my parents through a lack of gratitude. Of course it’s unreasonable to expect a child to know that, and part of the reason we have such experiences is so that later when other people are absent or ignorant, we get to pay the patience forward. We often learn love in the light of seeing it expressed to us when we needed it, even if we couldn’t honor it; sometimes the learning comes a long time after the teaching.

Ben, George, Lucy, and Barkley don’t dwell on the self-centeredness of the people in their lives whom they could have reasonably expected to take care of them. That’s partly a function of their own kindness, but it’s also a problem. Barkley and Lucy don’t know how to ask for what they need, never mind what they want. What their culture calls “good manners” (but is actually emotional stuntedness resulting from social repression) mingles with rugged individualism to produce a lie that sounds gentle but is utterly toxic: people should be able to take care of themselves, so let’s not bother anyone else with our problems.

Ben and George do ask for what they need, to begin with, and they have a deeper community network. But what oppresses them is not just the cruelty of the church firing George, or the relative uselessness of the well-intended but hopelessly inadequate city-subsidized housing program, but also the internalized homophobia that leads them to believe (or at least act as if) they are not worthy of the support.

If George and Ben were to believe “We have served this community for decades, and we are suffering because of dehumanizing prejudice and a refusal to take seriously contemporary wisdom in favor of willfully misreading a two-thousand-year-old book—all we are asking is that we not be separated,” what sane person could disagree? They shouldn’t have to say it, of course. Their allies should be ready to jump in.

And if Barkley and Lucy were to say, “We raised you—we gave you more than we had for ourselves, and we came of age at a time when elders had a reason to expect to be cared for by their children. We haven’t asked for much, and we’re nervous to do it now, but today we really are saying: please look up from your lives—all we’re asking is that we not be separated,” what sane person could disagree?

Marriage and partnership can be insular or selfish, as with deep friendships and community. Marriage and partnership can carry an air of superiority, as if it is the best or most important form of relationship. But partnerships, friendships, and communities committed to learning love and wisdom can show the world how to live together.

As the relationship teacher David Schnarch brought to the fore, people can learn how to differentiate from others, to regulate our own anxiety, to know ourselves, to be nonreactive, and to tolerate discomfort for the sake of growth. Schnarch called this the “crucible approach,” because close relationships are where the work of becoming human is most intense.2 Learning the tools of the crucible deserves sustained attention throughout our lives; I don’t know why we don’t teach it in schools. Actually I do know: because our culture doesn’t know how to love itself, never mind teach about love. Superficial songs and movies fake love, and political figures usually think it’s a losing game to talk about love at all. But a serious engagement with love is a fundamental part of the kind of politics that the world actually needs.

If fascism is the belief that some lives are worth more than others, at the expense of everyone else’s life, then the antidote is acting on the belief that everyone is equally worthy of love. Such a belief calls forth the mutual service of an ever-expanding loving relationship with all things, in which we would learn to stretch ourselves to serve one another’s needs, without denying our own, so that everyone can flourish. Our posture toward one another would be nothing less than asking of everyone we meet, “How can I help make their life more whole?”

Such deep relationship takes more than two people. Those of us who are partnered had lives before we met the person with whom we are now sharing ours, and when one of us dies, the other will go on to more life without them. It’s insane to expect marriage and partnership to survive without wider community. And it’s not just offensive but painful to tell people who are not partnered that their relationships don’t matter as much as the ones that include vows and parties and anniversaries.

Covenantal and sacred friendship matters just as much as marriage and often outlasts it. Even the people in a marriage might find that the sacred friendship between them is the most enduring part of the relationship.

A story is told of an anthropologist studying a hunter-gatherer community and witnessing the major annual hunt. Seeing the community’s leader parcel out meat for the whole village, she was perturbed—he had caught most of it, so why not keep it for himself?

The answer to the anthropologist is an answer to why Barkley and Lucy’s children, and George and Ben’s chosen family, should have gone the extra mile: “I store my meat in the belly of my friends.”

When we believe the story that human beings are merely private individual economic units, more or less productive, responsible only—and entirely—for ourselves, we act more like robots, hoarders, or sentries. That individualistic story is a lie. What we really are is a dysfunctional but repairable family of interdependent beings, sacred and beautiful, called to love and serve from the resources we hold and to ask for help in the places we experience lack. We get to discern the safer people to ask for help and where to offer our gifts. Authentic relationship should help us transcend the shame of asking for what we need. Sometimes an urgent reality—like someone losing their home because of other people’s selfishness—creates the circumstances where we get to help save someone’s life. Sometimes it’s we who are vulnerable, and the only way for our lives to be saved is to let others do the saving. We’ll learn more about ourselves through participating in the messy, confusing, envelope-pushing, boundary-learning crucible of relationship than we ever can on our own.

Relationship is a huge risk—of being rejected, judged, misunderstood, and ultimately of experiencing the loss of the lover or the friend.

But the experience of being reflected back by another who knows us well, whether they are spouse, partner, friend, or community, may be the greatest location for spiritual growth.

We need living monuments to such relationship.

We need to study them.

We need to imagine what it would be like to join them.

And someone always needs to go first.

Kathleen

I’m glad Gareth noted that one of the strangest things about love is the difficulty we have in defining it. It may be our deepest need, but when it comes to love we expect our words to cover too wide a ground. We see the adolescent in the throes of a crush that mainly reveals that they’re in love with love (I gasp in writing this, recalling my own youthful follies in this regard). We see that the sentimental love that initially makes a romance feel exciting tends to wither in the demands of the day-to-day, plunging us into heated arguments over whose turn it is to take out the garbage. And if we are fortunate, we’ve known the heartfelt, unconditional love of a parent and recognize that their example has allowed us to find ways to pass that love on to others.

Films can be invaluable in teaching us what love means in the context of our lives. Two films about divorce, Kramer vs. Kramer and Marriage Story, serve us admirably in revealing people who set aside their conflicts as they come to understand what it means to genuinely love their children. I found the ending of Marriage Story especially inspiring. It was sad to see that two people who had once loved each other could no longer stay married. But the love they had for their young son had transformed both parents into people who realized that their main priority was caring for him, and this set them free from the selfish concerns that had preoccupied them in a bitter divorce battle.

Films are so brief that they sometimes struggle to convey what a lifetime commitment to another person can mean. Both Make Way for Tomorrow and Love Is Strange are welcome exceptions. In one we have an elderly couple, Bark and Lucy, who have raised five children in the fifty years they’ve been married and are still very much in love. The other film gives us a middle-aged, childless gay couple, Ben and George. They’ve become devoted to each other over a forty-year relationship but have had to wait for laws to change to allow them to wed.

My parents were married for sixty-four years, and I’ve helped many Benedictine friends celebrate the fifty-year or sixty-year anniversary of their monastic vows. In all that time these people had to contend with a daunting amount of pain and trouble, struggling as fragile, vulnerable human beings to honor the commitments they had made when they were too young to fully understand what they were taking on.

But eventually the value and even the glory of their persistence had made itself known. I would even say that it had become visible in their faces, in their way of speaking and walking. Growing old together as a couple, or as an individual vowed to remain for life in a monastic community, they had found the “solace in love” that the apostle Paul speaks of in his letter to the early Christians of Philippi. The key, as Paul notes, is learning to “do nothing from selfish ambition or empty conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests but to the interests of others” (Phil. 2:3–4).

We speak of “falling” in love but of “making” friendships. And I don’t believe I have ever witnessed a long-term relationship in which the initial experience of love didn’t evolve into a friendship by deliberate acts of self-sacrifice, choices made that allowed the relationship to continue and flourish. But this kind of maturity in love is remarkably difficult to achieve in a culture in which we are encouraged to resist deep commitments and keep our options open to take advantage of the next best thing. All that Paul recommends for enduring relationships is exactly what our society rejects.

The tragedy in both Make Way for Tomorrow and Love Is Strange initially comes from the outside: a bank foreclosing on a mortgage, church officials intolerant of a same-sex couple’s marriage. But the sadness is compounded from within, by dysfunction and lack of empathy within the family. In both films the relatives don’t truly see the couple or understand what it will mean for them to be separated. One wants to scream at the uncomprehending relatives and friends: “Pool your resources and find a place where this couple can live together; can’t you see that they will not survive a separation?” The last image of Make Way for Tomorrow is haunting: we know Lucy to be a strong woman, but as she stands alone on a train platform, her face reflects utter disorientation at the departure of her beloved Bark.

The director of this film, Leo McCarey, made some of Hollywood’s finest comedies, working with Mae West, W. C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, and Laurel and Hardy. And he allows humorous elements to emerge in this more serious film, as some of the couple’s children are portrayed as comically clueless, shallow, and miserly. But one strength of both films is that the directors ask us not to judge these people. Especially in Love Is Strange, except for the narcissistic niece who is absorbed in New Age therapies for her imagined issues, we can probably relate to people who want to help their displaced relatives but are overcome with the pressures of parenting a teenager and trying to make a living, especially in the difficult fields of writing and entertainment. Good angels appear in both films, strangers who help the couples in unexpected ways, but they can’t make up for family members who are unwilling or unable to offer adequate care. They also demonstrate that it is often easier to offer care to strangers than to relatives who can make legitimate, long-term claims on your time and attention.

Both films raise fundamental questions about how families and society care for people when the going gets rough, and that makes them contemporary to the core.

Make Way for Tomorrow was released in 1937, two years after the Social Security Act had passed Congress and before the act had been implemented and payments began to go to the elderly. Darryl Zanuck, the film’s producer, wanted McCarey to provide a happy ending, and while the film garnered praise from major directors such as John Ford and Frank Capra, Zanuck was correct in sensing that the film would not do well with people mired in an economic depression. They preferred to be entertained by cheery musicals, Shirley Temple, and Mickey Mouse. Even today a film depicting people in their seventies who are deeply in love would be a hard sell to studio executives and the public. But hey, let’s loosen up, and revisit Make Way for Tomorrow and Love Is Strange, humming a chorus of “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” or “Baby You’ve Got What It Takes” as we go. Let’s value Bark and Lucy and Ben and George for the old lovers they are, and picture them dancing happily into the past and even the future.

Questions and Conversations

1. What are the most life-giving relationships you have known?
2. What do you believe about what makes marriage or partnership thrive?
3. Describe the best friendship you’ve had—what was it like, and what are some of the things you learned from it?
4. What has been the most important factor in sustaining the long relationships in your life, in friendships, marriage, or with family members?
5. What are the ingredients of an interdependent community, and have you experienced such a community in your life?
6. How do you contemplate your life and that of your significant other(s) or closest friends changing as you grow older? Where will your support come from?
7. Outside of your immediate family, what ties do you have with a broader community? How does that community affirm and sustain you?