By Lotus Chen
Marriage Story (2019) is directed by American filmmaker Noah Baumbach, who is married to the excellent director Greta Gerwig (Little Woman, 2019). It is a moving family story divorce told through the lens of divorce.
In Marriage Story, Charlie Barber is a successful theater director in New York City. His theater company is currently producing a play that stars his wife Nicole, a former teen film actress. They with their son Henry are living in New York City. The couple is experiencing marital troubles.
Nicole is offered a starring role in a television pilot in Los Angeles, and she decides to leave the theater company and temporarily live with her mother in West Hollywood, taking the couple’s young son Henry with her. Charlie decides to stay in New York, as the play is in the process of moving to Broadway. Despite the couple agreeing to split amicably and forgo lawyers, Nicole hires Nora Fanshaw, a family lawyer. Nicole tells Nora the full story of her relationship with Charlie and how she gradually felt neglected by him and how he rejects her ideas and desires. Nicole also reveals that she thinks Charlie slept with the stage manager of the theater company. Charlie flies out to Los Angeles to visit his family, revealing that he has won a MacArthur Fellowship grant, but Nicole serves him divorce papers. The couple began the divorce “war”.
Many have pointed out that the film serves as a textbook on marriage, with one reviewer saying on Empireonline.com "Movies like marriage story are real thrillers. Compared to the real horror when two people who were closest to you go far gradually from each other day in and day out, and you start to brutally hurt someone you never thought you'd hurt, a serial killer on the rampage killing human beings is not that scary. "
It often feels like marriage has become increasingly difficult to equate with happiness, with divorce rates rising year after year, and divorce dramas playing out all around us. Marriage Story cruelly reveals the plainest and starkest truth of marriage in modern times.
Is the Husband and Father Charlie the “Ideal Man”?
Perhaps, most people may blame Charlie, the husband for the breakup since he did not want to move to LA and slept with other woman. It seems that the director played down Charlie’s love affair. Obviously, marriage is an issue regarding two people, but it seems that the people who are willing to face it and suffer most in marriages are generally women, like Nicole in this movie. Many female online influencers and authors Monica Thakrar and LaRae Quy emphasize that women need to have high emotional intelligence. It feels as if the responsibility for a happy marriage needs to be taken on by women. Is this all because men are naturally "dumb", so women primarily play the role of defending and saving marriage?
Judith Butler, a philosopher at the University of California, Berkele in California, US, placed the answer to the male species riddle within her seminal "gender performativity" (gender performance theory).
Performative, here, refers to a performance that simultaneously creates an identity. For example, at a wedding, when you say, "I do," your behavior is a public performance. But you are also performative because the wedding is changing your status from single to married.
According to Butler, the concept of masculinity is not based on biology, but on a set of social rules that dictate how people behave. Men like the husband and father Charlie in this movie are more selfish and less emotional than women because they have always accepted and followed the social stereotype of the ideal man. That is why the “audience will sympathize Charlie too. A failure in marriage is the two’s fault,” according to Baumbach.
The "ideal man" as defined by society is usually brave, cold, respectable, strong and capable, excels in areas including sex and violence, and can often be found in movies. Heroes and villains in film usually perform well when it comes to sex and violence. However, their purposes are different. A good man will protect his family and use violence when necessary, and this violence will be recognized, celebrated and even honored.
“‘The ideal father’was only invented like 30 years ago. Before that fathers were expected to be silent, absent, unreliable and selfish. We want them to be different. We accept then, we love them for their fallibilities. But people do not accept those same failing in mothers, neither structurally or spiritually, largely because the basis of our beliefs are Judeo-Christian. Look at Mary, Mother of Jesus. She’s perfect. She is a virgin who gives birth, unwaveringly supports her child, and holds his dead body when he’s gone. And father is absent. Ok, that father does happen to be God, but God is not showing up.” What Nicole’s divorce lawyer Nora Fanshaw(played by Laura Dern) said in the movie also reveals the “ideal fatherhood and motherhood” myth.
This standard of the "ideal man" has a subtle effect on every man. Every day, men may subconsciously ask themselves: "What would the ideal man do in this situation?" and then make a comparison to see if your behavior is correct. He may not always appear to be successful and mentally strong, but he knows that is what society expects of him. As we can hear from Charlie, he does not want to get married, but you want, so we get married.
Therefore, the point is, men do not simply, spontaneously choose their own behavior, they are not free to do what they want. Because only when his behavior conforms to the standard of "ideal man" will he look more like a real man in the eyes of society and the public. When he doesn't act like the "ideal man," he gets punished. Gender is, Butler's words, "a phenomenon that has always been created and replicated."
Cruelest of all is society's number one measurement of men: in order to support a family, one must be financially capable. When evaluating a man's suitability as a partner, we often hear the question, "does he have a house or a car? How big is the house? Is it a BMW or a BMW?"
Thus, in a man's world, as long as he can climb to the top of the pyramid, he is respected as a real man. And if a man can't be the winner of the money and power game, he's a loser. In other words, as long as a man has no money, he is considered worthless.
In order to gain external recognition and respect, men are required to work hard. This is what drives them to succeed, but too much immersion can isolate them from others. Many men become impersonal in their pursuit of "success" and find it difficult to communicate with others, which makes it difficult for them to have true friendship and love. That's the problem with the Charlie and the Charlies around us. They are not bad by nature. It's just that they are caught in a vicious circle where society requires them to be the "ideal man."
The Wife and Mother Nicole is Both Strong and Vulnerable
Nicole is played by Scarlett Johansson. She is always without makeup in the movie, which perhaps serves to illustrate the gritty reality of marriage as opposed to the Hollywood glitz with which we would usually associate Johansson. Nicole is strong, vulnerable and emotional. When this couple is experiencing marital troubles and sees a mediator, who suggests that they each write down what they like about one another. Just as this letter she wrote to Charlie said, Nicole knows that she does not always knowing what she wants, but Charlie does.
It is Nicole who proposes a divorce. You might ask, “are these ideal menhiding?” In fact, they are all around us, they are the ordinary people around us.
When we take an objective and honest look at Nicole's role as a traditional woman in marriage. We find that Charlie is not the only one to blame for the breakdown of the marriage. As Charlie grows into a traditional dominant male, Nicole obediently reverts from a modern woman with a career and a dream to a traditional female role. But Charlie never abuses, forces or even belittles Nicole in the process. He also tries to play the role of what he thinks is a good husband, completely unaware of the darkness and loss his wife is experiencing.
Why doesn’t Nicole just tell Charlie she is getting less and less happy? When he asks her, shocked, why she divorced him, she says she has suggested moving to Los Angeles. Charlie admits that they have had this conversation but says he had never known it was so important to her.
During their decade-long marriage, she never articulates her real needs. Why is that? I guess it is because she started the relationship when she was in her 20s, which means she's only 30 now. Probably for most of the decade, Nicole did not know what she really wanted. Her husband was stronger and more outspoken, so she instinctively followed and supported his needs.
Such stories are repeated all around us.
Men, like Charlie at the end of the film, often discover that they also need true love and genuine relationships, that these are not just for women. In order to achieve this, they finally abandon the outdated rules of gender.
And when both men and women are free of gender, something amazing happens. Women can become stronger and braver, just like men. Men, like women, can become better at expressing and taking care of each other. As we all shed the pretense of gender that society imposes on us, both men and women become better and more able to express their true selves.
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