Sometimes the gf can make you unbearably mad. You get angry and you keep pushing against the gf, assaulting her with words and gestures. The scene devolves.
The five stages of a fight with the girlfriend:
1. The girlfriend is shocked.
2. The girlfriend is sad.
3. The girlfriend is frustrated.
4. The girlfriend is angry.
5. The girlfriend is indifferent.
The smart guy, usually sprinkled with a generous dose of callousness, knows how to keep the girl at stage 3, with the occasional shift in emotion to 2 or 4.
If you are a guy, never, ever push your girlfriend to stage 5. If not, you will be like Dan (i.e. Jude Law’s character in Closer) who returns to the room to find that Alice (i.e. Natalie Portman’s character) has stopped loving him.
Further notes:
Closer has, for some time, been my favorite movie about love. Excellent commentary about the movie over at IMDB.
An excerpt:
Marber seems to be preoccupied with the way a slighted lover will beg or even demand to know every excruciating detail about their lover’s infidelity. This inexplicable and seemingly masochistic phenomenon pervades Closer on both a literal and thematic level, because Marber has a very simple and universal idea to present. This need to hear these painful truths is the thesis of Closer. What we’re soon able to see through the weaving of the characters’ relationships is that this desire is a manifestation of any lover’s need to possess his or her beloved. The victim of an infidelity grapples not just with the pain of betrayal but also with the inescapable knowledge of a most intimate element of their lover that will never, ever be theirs. In the same way that a man might find himself unable to live with the knowledge of his girlfriend’s past sexual encounters (a la Chasing Amy), the cheated-on man or woman has to confront their pain, however irrational, for being unable to think of every element of their partner as their own.
Closer revolves around this theme. On the one hand, it does this through the literal story of a man wanting to know the details of how and where and with whom his wife cheated on him, vainly trying to take back those intimate moments and claim them as his own. On the other hand, however, Closer uses this theme in a much more general way. A man may grasp at the lustful experiences of his wife, trying to reverse his exclusion from them, but the way that grasping is employed in Closer shows us that even if it weren’t for the infidelity, he would be grasping anyway. We all would. Our need to feel we have complete possession of our lover is what drives us to desperately dig deeper and deeper, trying to gain some secret knowledge of who and what they are at their most pure and uncompromised level.
In the end, however, this level doesn’t exist. The digging, the struggling and the grasping is futile as no person can be reduced to a singular truth. We are an entirely different thing, practically a different animal, from moment to moment. As Natalie Portman’s character so perfectly illustrates by the end, even the most mundane details about who we are can turn out to be transitory or meaningless.
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