The Perfect Match Further Explains Heartbreak To Me
One of the things true art does is to tell or remind us of things about ourselves. Art imitates life and life imitates art. It is through this characteristic of reflection that art helps us understand ourselves better. Marcel Proust is famous for saying, “Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer’s work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader’s recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book’s truth.”
This is to say that to read a book is to read oneself because through the actions that the book invokes from us and the reaction it evokes, we are afforded a better understanding of who we are.
In the context of watching a movie, I could translate Proust’s words to mean:
“Every discerning viewer, as he sees a movie, is actually seeing himself. The art form of the screen is only a kind of optical instrument provided the viewer so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this movie. The viewer’s recognition in himself of what the movie says is the proof of the movie’s truth.”
The movie, The Perfect Match featuring (Terrence J) Charlie and (Cassie Ventura) as Eva drives this truth home through a mirror of emotions like the optical instruments which Proust speaks about.
It’s a simple movie, basically with a straightforward plot, tailored to pass a message about love, through the life of a philandering character. And it does it so well, that at the end of the movie, I see myself in Charlie, and empathize with him, whereas in the beginning I couldn’t relate and was indifferent. Charlie is essentially different from me, in the sense of his not believing in love at the beginning of the movie, and taking vain pride in the fact that he’s never been in a long term relationship before (and apparently wasn’t willing to do so soon). Charlie probably thought (or allowed himself to think) that he did not have the capacity for love. But then, as is often the case with humans, we are more often than not, wrong about our very selves.
Charlie is a young man with ‘rules’. He is handsome, charming, has a good job, and is excellent as a photographer, something he does as a hobby, for which he keeps a studio, and an Instagram account that has thousands of followers. So we could say that apart from being handsome, Charlie was a kind of social media celebrity who appealed to people charmed by aesthetics. For this reason, meeting women wasn’t a problem for him, neither was getting them in bed with him.
But Charlie’s superpower (as it seemed to him) is the fact that he manages to lose interest in each of these women after having sex with each of them. This is for him a source of arrogance.
But the whole thing comes to a head when Charlie meets a mysterious young woman blessed with imagination, who is the total opposite of himself. He makes a bet with his friends about her (that it was going to end like the others, even though this time, he was going to tango with her for a month). Unknown to him was the fact that he was going to share a chemistry so deep with this woman and she was going to come to his life with a certain sophistication he has not encountered, or allowed
himself to encounter in the past. Neither did he know that as time passed, he would grow fonder and fonder of her. And just when he was beginning to realize that because of this woman, he might have to change his ‘rules’, he discovered that his very ‘game’ has been played on him. It would have been for him, a fine play, something of an irony to be amused about, but there was within him at this time, no denying that Eva had woken something in him which he had never felt before. And the circumstances under which he got played is more or less, non-negotiable. And so, Charlie, the unfeeling and stringless player slips into heartbreak, very close to what he hoped would have been his best birthday yet. It is at this point in his heartbreak that my empathy is aroused for him. The most acute thing about heartbreak is the acute pain which one feels in the wake of its occurrence. Simple as this may sound, the experience itself is acute and profound as it gets. Emotional pain is real as real can be. Scientists have, in fact, discovered that the part of the brain which interprets the stimuli for physical pain is also responsible for interpreting emotional pain during heartbreak.
At those points in the movie where there was little or no dialogue, but just a moving visual representation of Charlie in his heartbroken state, trying to put out his grief by getting drunk, sleeping with different women, being absent-minded, staggering in the loneliness of his house, and somewhere in between those scenes, I saw myself. I saw myself most especially in how lonely heartbreak leaves us feeling. Emotional pain confines one to a greater deal of loneliness than physical pain because it comes with a certain depth that is not as negotiable as that of physical pain. C. S Lewis once said, “Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say ‘My tooth is aching’ than to say ‘My heart is broken.’” This is because even to the one whose heart is broken, it doesn’t make much sense to keep crying about a broken heart, despite how profound the reality is. Even when you do, you are asked to be strong. And when you whine too much, people begin to avoid you, because the world being what it is, is a battlefield and everyone has his own battles. The empathy which bridges the gap seems to be in short supply. In my young life, I have been heartbroken a lot, but for some reason, I have had to carry it mostly alone within me. I have had a yearning to meet someone who I trust, who is at the same time close enough, and who is willing to listen. But this is not where my point lies.
My point is the fact that just as in Charlie’s case, heartbreak is a result of all the love which one has been prevented from loving. Like the pains caused around a broken bone by the blood which has been prevented from flowing, causing them to congeal. Depending on how profound this love is, heartbreak can persist from as little as a few hours or minutes to a lifetime.
The story was made even more beautiful because of the direction in which Charlie’s life moved after that. There are some people who walk into our lives without our permission, effortlessly steal our hearts and leave against our greatest desires to hold them back. Of course, they leave us heartbroken. But for those of us like Charlie, they remind us, or they convince us that somewhere in our hearts, love lives and it breathes. It also encourages us to go into the world and search for that love, in a place where it is more long-lasting. And so like every double-edged sword, heartbreak has its good and its bad side; it is perhaps one of the most humane feelings, for it is through experiencing it that we get in touch with a very humane part of us. But what matters even most is how we react to it. How we do not just allow it to become a lens over our eyes which makes us see the people who broke our hearts as evil. But also what we allow the heartbreak to teach us about ourselves. One can through heartbreak become vengeful, one can also through it become more loving and forgiving too.
The lesson of the character Charlie is one we should all get acquainted with. We should also in the light of it, learn to see our heartbreaks in life from a different light. As Charlie’s elder sister, and therapist tells him, “I am happy you were heartbroken.” We should also be happy we have been heartbroken, take better lessons from our heartbreaks, and move on, without giving up on love.
