It was far better than the old tent pole movie Kramer vs. Kramer which splashed into our culture about divorce in modern America many years ago. Marriage Story, which is on Netflix and can be watched by everyone without an excuse is a fantastic film about the creation of families and how they can disintegrate over little issues. Its one of the best that I can think of and should be a must watch for anybody over ten years old. If you can watch the movie, it may be the best thing you could do for yourself today. The movie directed and produced by Noah Baumbach is a labor of love that tackles divorce in a startling way with humor, hope and tragedy rolled all up into one well done package that is more beneficial than just another offering for entertainment.
Even more stunning was that these big name actors, like Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson, Laura Dern and Alan Alda set loose a story that really shows in this day and age what happens when a mother puts a career in front of her family and expects everything to work out. Without question Adam Driver’s character of Charlie was the victim. He hadn’t done much to provoke the divorce, it was mostly Scarlett Johansson’s character who was seeking her own identity after doing what happens to most couples, finding a guy she liked, landing him, then trying to change him. When he continued to eclipse her socially, she wanted out of the marriage which a lot of women in this #metoo age feel pressured to do. The results are often divorces like the one shown in Marriage Story.
Rather than give a regular review for a film like this, other than to say, SEE IT, I’ll instead give a much needed lesson on the birds and the bees because so many people just don’t understand, including poor Charlie in this movie. He had sex with his girlfriend who became his wife. She got pregnant and he worked hard to be a good dad. So what in the world went wrong? A lot of people are asking those questions these days and our society does very little to explain it to them. That’s why movies like this can be so important, and why everyone should see this movie.
Forget about political correctness for the duration of this article, the nature of all human beings at a very biological level is to eat and reproduce. Young girls are pretty as humans define them because they are like flowers just blooming. The pretty ones attract the best DNA in male bees seeking to pollinate the most attractive females so that those DNA matchups are optimal and good children are produced. That is the divine way of the universe, we are all programmed to think in such a way. As women start to wilt beyond age 25 they come to understand that their value as females is going away. They had been taught that sex was their power since puberty, and they are about to lose that power so they enter a phase of crisis which in the modern sense of things is to replace their sexuality with a career.
Men are programmed to be ready anytime a woman is ready to be pollinated, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Often men get married so that they don’t have to waste time looking for sex, so they can do other things with their life like develop hobbies, and spend time with friends. Even after thousands of years of evolution they have not learned that you don’t get married to have sex. You get married to be a stabile biological contributor to a woman’s offspring and once she is pollinated, and wilting rapidly thereafter, sex is the last thing she cares about. She wants to raise her children and she wants resources. Men go from being showered with attention while the woman wants to be pollinated, to being a very low priority in the scheme of the family and they never seem to understand why. Charlie in the Marriage Story didn’t, and he had a really wonderful breakdown toward the end of the movie that was honest in ways I’ve never seen before, yet most of us go through it in some form during our lives. Because it is the story of all marriages. The only differences are that some learn to deal with it while most never do.
We’ve tried to turn marriage into some Disney fairy tale where people live happily ever after and that just isn’t an intellectual argument that belongs outside of the mind of a 7-year-old. Marriage is only about making a family. Happy couples who stay married learn to do things together that they both enjoy. But couples working in different directions don’t stay married because it just doesn’t work for the human mind. People are drawn together by common goals. If a couple does not have common goals, marriage is all but impossible. For most marriages obviously the production of children is enough to keep people working at a marriage to construct a family. Many people struggle to stay married once there are no longer children as the common goal, but in the case of the Marriage Story, it was the mom who needed something of her own identity as she could feel herself wilting as a flower and she wanted to replace that sinking feeling with a career. That was certainly the case of her friend and attorney, Laura Dern’s character who played a wonderfully accurate busy body modern day feminist who was a disaster of a personality. There are so many people like her functioning in the world its no wonder so many families break up and why so many kids are growing up messes of people.
The way its supposed to work is that a woman marries a man while she is still a nice-looking flower to pollinate. The man seeks to protect that image for the rest of his life even if he has to dehydrate the flower to preserve it in a book or something. It may look gross to outsiders, but the man remembers the flower he pollinated and the children that came from the experience and he tries to protect it for the rest of his life. But when we add complex social experiments to the nature of biology and psychology then we get variations of success in the experience of a happy life, leaving most people miserable. That’s when people start cheating on each other or seek to divorce so they can get that pollination feeling again, because they didn’t take the time the first time around to enjoy the experience. But its never the same the second time, or the third, fourth, or fifth. Humans just aren’t built to have that many complex relationships in their lives, it destroys them at a core level every time they do it because the goal of the entire experience is to produce children. Not to have the fulfilment of an individual experience.
Couples who learn to play together at life, do things together are the ones who are happiest. By design, after 20 years of raising kids, there should be enough there to have a decent marriage. But men who leave their wives for younger women are doing so because they failed to launch past their biological necessities as the pollinators of young flowers. Maybe when they were young the attractive flowers wouldn’t give them the time of day and now that they are older with more money, they can get the attention of the flowers in full bloom with all their nice colors and thin stims. But it doesn’t last long, and the male soon finds themselves in the same cycle. Sex is used to secure the relationship and if kids aren’t produced there is no reason for the initial union, and the relationship dissolves.
We’re not supposed to talk about these things because we are supposed to have gay marriages legalized, and men and women are supposed to have their own careers and leave their kids to the state to raise in public schools, and its all supposed to work out. But that’s all hog wash. I’ve been married over 30 years and I know lots of people who have been married for 50 or more years. Take a little advice, watch a Marriage Story and learn from it. Avoid the mistakes because you’ll wish later that you listened and learned what the true nature of marriage was, and to build your life appropriately around it. If you want sex, don’t get married, rent a whore, find a knothole in the fence somewhere, or stay in your mom’s house and go to skank shacks at night picking up wilted flowers that spray-paint themselves up to look fresh under dim lights that are dying fast. But if you want to raise a family, which everyone should strive for in my opinion, take a number, be very patient and learn that nothing you do in a marriage is about you—its mostly for what you can build with someone else after the sex of youth has long gone, and what lasts in the realm of immortality, the things you do while you are alive that people remember.
Watch Marriage Story, its simply fantastic!
Rich Hoffman
The Gunfighter's Guide: 