Marriage Story and the Myopia of New York (Patreon)

Make no mistake, the film is a dagger. 

If you’ve never experienced the specific, haunting, and gutting pain of divorce, know that I am nothing but happy for you. Really. It’s not just that the process goes beyond the already-gutting pain of losing a long term relationship. The kind of break up where years of your life, your greatest intentions, your deepest commitment, and your fighting for selfhood comes out on the other side like a wounded bird. It’s taking all that, every second of it, and being like, “hey, know what would be fun? Let’s get the government involved!” As the film states, the system is genuinely meant to protect the worst of the worst. But even at it’s most humane, the terrifying legal nature of it changes the tenor of so many things. Because it dehumanizes the process. It inspires fear. It takes every aching human moment of vulnerability and turns it into reductive transaction, furthering the worst of the existing heartbreak. It maims both you and the person you love more than anything. Much like the keychain in the film’s pivotal moment, it cuts deep, fast, and with staggering consequence. And there is nothing of solace to be found within it. 

Marriage Story articulates all this with laser-like acumen. And in doing so, it somehow makes me feel thankful that my own process was able to avoid many of the pitfalls show within. That somehow, someway, it was a kinder and more understanding process, though no less heartbreaking. Because the film understands that essential emotion of it, too. It stares right into the heart of our sorrow, regret, guilt, shame, and the ways we wish so much was different. But like most regret, it knows that the changes that come from it are often the changes that come too late. And while there’s so much validity to the raw and unblinking portrayal of divorce, I look at the specifics of the conflict in Marriage Story, I can’t help but let a troubling, foolish, and weirdly-specific concern linger inside…

But before I get to it, let me make this clear: Noah Baumbach has great insight into pain. An impossibly personal insight into my own. ForThe Squid and the Whale remains one of the most devastating films ever made. I cannot watch it again. I will not watch it again. And I wish the painful specificity of his work ended there, but Margot at the Wedding struck just as hard (my mother’s relationship with her sister), as did Greenberg (my own relationship with my brother). In short, we both come from deeply similar shit. And I want to argue that nothing in my life is quite as bad as some of the painful comedy you find in his work, but I’m probably making excuses. The overlaps are clear. And while his background was more venomous New York academia and mine was more Northshore Boston working class, that just means some parts were better and some parts were worse. Either way, what Baumbach has always had is this uncanny knack to understand human beings at their worst and the way it affects us in turn. 

But this is all to say that perhaps it’s no accident that his best work, which is to say his most humane and empathetic work, comes from that which was co-written with Greta Gerwig. Like Frances Ha, which takes that same aching vulnerability of being and instead fights for the space of openness and growth, rather then dwell on the parts that are the most selfish and betraying. It’s a noticeable change in tone that I can’t help but see when Baumbach is left to his own devices. While We Are Young is meant to be a thoughtful mediation on aging, but it also gives into Baumbach’s most petty instincts. Because it’s a film that ultimately wants you to empathize with demonizing youth and evoluation, all made clear by the ending coda in which a couple stares wide-eyed in horror as a young toddler has the gall to use an Iphone in an airport. An Iphone! Gasp!

But to the kid, it’s just a phone. No different then if they themselves picked up a rotary phone as a toddler. Which means there’s absolutely nothing about this action to be scared of. And this should be the very real lesson learned in the film and yet the characters are completely unable. The scene just plays straight. And it’s this kind of pearl-clutching myopia that haunts some of Baumbach’s best intentions. And as much as I wish it wasn’t the case, as much as Marriage Story is so devastating in its articulation of legal cruelties, there is unfortunately some of the same pearl-clutching bullshit at the center of the film. To the point that my jaw’s almost on the floor with how the entire conflict of the film comes down to a single, solitary issue…

The myopia of being a New Yorker.

Now, I don’t bring up this myopic attitude from a place of automatic disdain. I bring it up because that’s once who I was, too. I grew up on the east coast, a part of the sprawling Megalopolis that has this innate belief that they are at the center of the world. And at the center of that center, lies New York City. A city whose identity is so ingrained in popular culture that it scarcely needs explanation. It’s a city full of vibrancy, verticality, and verve. A city that, if we’re being honest, actually IS at the center of the world in many ways. And this understanding is so built into the American identity that the entire country seems to know it. As a result, many other cities on the east coast, from Boston, to Philadelphia, to Baltimore, can’t help but have a chip on their shoulder because they can’t help but compare themselves to the impossible grandeur that is New York City. As is often said, proximity breeds contempt. And from this, you should assume that I have some kind of lasting baseline resentment for New York in my bones. 

But I have the furthest thing from that. I loved New York from the very second I stepped foot in it. Even as a kid, it was a place that supplied a kind of dizzying, rapturous love. The kind that at first makes you want to gawk upward, while constantly stumbling over your two feet. It feeds your energy, whisking you away like some enchanting lover you see in a movie romances. It’s the only place I wanted to be. But it actually gets even better when it all becomes familiar. When you learn to navigate the labyrinth of joys, from the food, to the theater, to nightlife, to the crashing, smashing, cultural exchange of both pain and evident empathy. It’s a place that has no time for bullshit, especially yours. A place where hustle and bustle is a mere fact of life, part of the very essence of it’s function. And my god, the fucking pizza. For all this, New York is so specifically, urgently important to me. A place I grew up with. A place that felt like a refuge to Boston in so many ways. And whenever I return, there are the things I simply HAVE TO DO, as if I’m fulfilling some critical life essentials and stocking up on water before a long day’s journey into night. 

I love New York. But loving it comes with an important admission. No, not about the skyrocketing, dystopian cost (that’s a separate conversation). It is that when you life a life there, and particularly when you let the city itself define you, then you sometimes you don’t realize the ways it changes you for the worse. The ways it curls up into your body and grabs hold of your bones, not in a way that it helps settle you, but in a way that confines you. The way it puts blinders on you. The way it makes you stop seeing other places as relevant, let alone something that could compare. Because when you are “the best,” then how could anything ever compare? The rest of the world knows this feeling acutely. And all this is true especially…

When it comes to Los Angeles.

I know this because i had that very bias. In so many ways, it’s the world’s punchline. And when I moved here some 15 years ago, I remember judging everything so quickly and easily. I remember finding every cliche I ever heard about the city to have some facet of truth: the showbiz insincerity, the ostentatiousness, the seeming cultural vacuousness, the sprawl, and the traffic (to be fair, nothing will ever be as bad as Boston’s rush hour. The cars here at least move). I remember laughing at people who talked about it being “cold out,” as I stood there in short sleeves. I remember taking immense pride in my east coast identity in comparison. And I remember feelings so damn right about everything I was saying.

Then things started to change. Even a mere six months in, I realized that the sunlight was putting me more at ease. I realized I was in a better mood a lot of the time. I realized I was having fun. I realized that I could feel free and easy and not have to put up such a tough front. I realized that people were kinder here. That they were understanding and less judgmental. And when I finally started letting go of my assumptions, I started finding these little nooks and crannies of things that were joyful, strange, and vibrant. Soon I learned that the only reason I thought every bad cliche about LA actually existed was simply because I wasn’t looking hard enough. Because I wasn’t trying to see what I was looking at in a different way, and a more earnest way. In short, I wasn’t seen these things because I was being a myopic asshole. 

Now, with every passing year, i have fallen more and more in love with Los Angeles. To the point that it feels like the same dizzying love I still feel for New York. And the more in love with it I fall, the more I discover. The more I realize I don’t know about yet. The more I think of this amazing quote from Jonathan Gold, “If you live in Los Angeles, you are used to having your city explained to you by people who come in for a couple weeks, stay in a hotel in Beverly Hills and take in what they can get to within 10 minutes in their rent-a-car. The thing that people find hard to understand is the magnitude of what’s here. The huge numbers of multiple cultures that live in the city and come together in this beautiful and haphazard fashion. And the fault lines between them are sometimes where you can find the most beautiful things.” You just have to be willing to find them. You have to be willing to get away from the cliches. You have to be willing to get into a car. And most of all, you have to be open to the possibility that everything I am saying is actually true.

But I was recently reminded how unwilling people can be to that. I met a few recent New York transplants and the definitive way they started talking about Los Angeles was, quite frankly, nauseating. Not just in the way it reminded me of my younger self, but it was when someone who had been here for 3 months (repeat: 3 months) had the gall to say there is was no good Chinese food in Los Angeles. This is a common myth, of course, as it’s literally the subject of a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode. But as I tried to explain that best Chinese food in America from “northern style dumplings, to Shanghainese seafood, to braised meat from Hunan province, to spicy Sichuanese hot pot” to pull a quote, all rests just twenty minutes east of where we were sitting; right in the San Gabriel Valley, where a population of two million people, most of whom are Chinese Americans, exist in the country’s “biggest and best” version of Chinatown. And thanks to the quality of California produce there are many that even argue it is the best Chinese food in the world. I tried to explain the very simple basics of these utter and undeniable facts and yet… it was met with a simple retort:

“Come on,” complete with an eye roll. 

But every other account, these were kind and open people, socially, politically, and sexually. But their New York Centrism was so insanely oblivious to the truly horrible and, yes, racist behavior at the center of these common belief. Lucas Kwan Peterson wrote a scathing essay on the subject https://www.latimes.com/food/la-fo-nyc-restaurant-scene-april-fools-2019-story.html directly and satirically calling out the city’s food writing for their racist, myopic viewpoint and it mostly fell on deaf ears. Even the most understanding New Yorkers went “lol, ya got us,” and went about their lives, unchanging to this most essential view.

And as I sat there with those New Yorkers who just so staunchly were assuming… what? That I was making this all up? That I was saying all this out of a sense of inferiority? That I didn’t know what I was talking about? The truth is they just couldn’t believe that anything that actually mattered to them could be good here, let alone better. And if we have to call a duck a duck, then there is nothing more stupid, childish, and reductive than that behavior. Take it from someone who was guilty of it. It is ignorance combined with the very act of willful disbelief, no different than a flat-earther mindset. I mean that my core. Because it highlights the exact way that they don’t really care. And that they don’t want to care. 

Because caring means they might actually have to change.

Now, this may seem like a lot of words of lead up to talking about a damn movie, but I can’t believe how much this attitude of New York myopia plays into the heart of the central conflict in Marriage Story. Shockingly so. For while it tries to frame the battle of the relationship with fairness and understanding of both sides (and succeeds on some emotional counts, not so much on others), the whole film can’t help but drip with outright disdain for everything about Los Angeles. To the point that it’s representative of everything I just laid for you. Even when characters try to speak to it’s finer qualities of the city, they don’t list the endless beautiful things the Los Angeles has to offer, but instead the same tired refrains that other New Yorkers often say about “the space!” 

It’s the same “one week in beverly hills” mentality Jonathan Gold outlined above. And for Adam Driver’s character, it an attitude felt in every choice he makes to try (along with the directorial choices around him), from getting a saddest possible apartment, to the driving and traffic complaints, to the portrayal of suffocating vacuousness of the people who reside here. Meaning it’s all the hallmarks someone “trying,” but not actually trying. Because these choices are so clearly the actions of someone resigned to failure, who wants it to be this shitty, who wants it to not work out in order to prove that it shouldn’t be, and who wants to complain about how hard their trying without actually bothering to understand.

In truth, it is the same exact selfishness at the heart of Adam Driver’s character. Yes, he wants to be good father. In many ways, he is a good father, especially if we are to take the opening montages at their word. But when Scarlett Johansson’s character speaks of his self-centered behavior, she outlines this exact kind of silent refusal. The way everything get a “yeah, yeah, maybe” forever. It is a psychology many men employ because they have learned to, and a psychology many women have learned to endure. And while she begs and pleads with him constantly, a thought still sits there in the back of his character’s mind, as if he’s constantly dumbfounded, “how could anyone NOT want to live in New York?” And by holding onto it, it swallows everything. It becomes the epicenter of the ugly custody battle. No, not all the things that have to do with their relationship, but instead just that one thing. For him, it HAS to be New York. Because it just has to. To him, there is simply nothing outside of it.

But what’s shocking is how little Marriage Story seems to be able to process this fixation. Both Adam Driver and the film could make so many arguments about the human reasons to stay in that city from friends, to community, to responsibility. But instead they sit at the edge like vague implications. Instead, his character just clings again and again to the same tired refrain, “we’re a New York family!” As if this should be inherently rooted for and understood. Hell, the film could even argue that it’s about the financial viability of broadway in comparison to other cities, but it only dabbles in that idea. And this is also where I can’t help but have the autobiographical details of Baumbach’s life seep into the text. Because making Driver’s character a theater director can’t help but feel like a purposefully convenient choice in the portrayal. 

Now, this all comes with the caveat because it’s dangerous to project autobiographical motive. The art has to stand as the art. Trust me when I say I get that. But when an artist so clearly embarks on making semi-autobiographical art, the details of what we pick and choose in terms of details can sometimes bring us not closer to the truth, but further from it. If Baumbach was a real life theater director (in reality, his wife was the one on broadway), I’d have an easier time understanding the impulse to tell the story this way (as would the movie itself). But Baumbach is a filmmaker. Los Angeles would be MORE professionally advantageous, which is part of why I feel the film avoids the conversation so much. 

The whole “lack of talking” just brings us right back to how the real issue is that he grew up there and loves it there. Which is totally an understandable human instinct! And it even gives lip service to the idea that that’s her relationship to Los Angeles, too. But for him it is the act of fixation. And when you make the city, any city, more important than your family. Or when you make your job more important than your family, then that’s what you really think about your family.

But I feel like the movie doesn’t quite understand that. 

Or in the very lease, the totality of it. I mean, the film is smart enough to admit the flaws in his viewpoint. It directly points out the irony of him being willing spending a summer in Copenhagen, but not one in LA. But to what ultimate purpose? His fixation on not giving up New York, even temporarily, causes so, so much pain for everyone. It motivates every mechanism of the divorce proceedings. It is the utter architect of their pain. And even at the end, even when he’s going to stay to Los Angeles, he’s still really not letting go of his want. He hasn’t changed. He is merely defeated. And relenting is the not the same thing as learning. 

You could argue that the film is attempting to portray this very idea, but I really just don’t buy it. After all, “relenting but not learning,” is thing that haunts all of the most myopic elements of Baumbach’s work. Sometimes he can be so insightful and pointed about a character’s stubbornness, but sometimes his work can’t help but embody that same stubbornness and let the most petty hang ups linger. Put simply: if those hang ups were the point, they would be the point. But instead, parts of the ending feel just like the Iphone moment all over again. The film truly fails to understand that all this times people were talking about “the space” of Los Angeles, they were really talking about the space we allow ourselves to grow. Because the things that it takes to love Los Angeles, to break out of myopia, are the same thing it takes to grow as human beings.

To whatever credit I can bend toward Marriage Story, the film allows a climactic moment that might understand some vague part of that notion, at least in terms of how others see us. For when he stands before her and admits he’s taken gigs at UCLA so he can be around for a bit, there is overwhelmed look upon Scarlet’s face. You see a million emotions cross her mind. The most central note is that of a deep, gutting feeling. it is the essence of “Now?! Now you will? After all that anger? After all this time? After all this money? After all this pain? NOW you are willing to spend time here???” It’s the worst kind of feeling: a concession that comes far, far too late. 

But at the same time, she knows that it will probably be good for her son and so smiles through it. A gesture that feels at once empowering as it does, nullifying; perhaps par for the course in a film that very slowly and subtly eschews her viewpoint by end. A film whose final catharsis come in the relishing of her deepest appreciation of him in the letter. A film that perhaps not realizes that shoe lace moment implies that his greatest regret is that he lost someone who helped mother him, too. In truth, everything about the film’s ending feels like Baumbach searching for a desperate kind of relief; a little boy lost in his own right. It evokes this simply, cleanly, and plainly. But it all stems from the lack of true change. Yes, he understands that it’s a concession that comes too late. But I’m genuinely not sure if Baumback knows that it never, ever should have felt like a concession in the first place.

Because I get it, man. I love New York. I love it fiercely. But it’s just a city. Same goes for Los Angeles, too. In fact, people look at the mutual sniping between the two cities with same kind of disdain for our myopic feuding (and they should). We have to remind ourselves of these kinds of things, again and again. Because it’s true of every geographical resentment in the fucking world. Your home is just like other people’s homes. And your city has all the lovely and bad elements just like every other, with nothing that puts it above or less than anyone else. We may find love in our the affinity of a city’s particulars, but we blind ourselves when we let ourselves become defined by them. Because the great irony is the real things to love about Los Angeles are not the wide-open spaces, nor the beaches, nor the endless sunshine. It is that it has many of the same cultural touchstones that people love about New York, or any of the other great metropolitan areas of the world. Which means it’s not really about the limitations of our cities.

It’s about the limitations of us. 

And it’s a shame, really. Because Marriage Story can so deeply stare into the heart of a very specific form of love and loss and evoke truth. It guts like and dagger and yet, it has an essential empathy that knows that on the other side of divorce, there is no one you will ever love more. No one you could ever love more. No one have put more into. No one you wish more well. Even if you can no longer be together. And that aching, specific heartbreak is so outrageously powerful to me, to everyone, really. It’s power undoes me like a knot, crashing my soul to the ground. And that’s why I wrote so much about this. Because to know that someone went through all that hardship, that they caused all that pain, simply because they were too myopic to see that any other city could be just as beautiful as their own?

Well, there is nothing more tragic than that.

<3 HULK