Getting back to the way we were
When Robert Redford died recently, it gave me a good excuse to rewatch one of his most famous movies, The Way We Were, a classic tale of star-crossed lovers with the added benefit of a dramatic theme song. In many ways, it was, as I expected, still great: Redford still stunningly handsome, Barbra Streisand still impressively passionate. What I didn’t expect is how well the movie would hold up thematically.
On a surface level, The Way We Were is no different than any other romantic tragedy. Polar opposites—Redford the wealthy, WASP, golden boy Hubbell Gardiner, and Streisand the working-class, Jewish, political activist Katie Morosky—meet in college then go their separate ways until fate brings them back together in New York City after World War II. Despite their differences, romance ensues. Conflicts arise, conflicts are overcome. Until the inevitable moment when they can’t be. Cue sad music.
What’s striking watching the movie after such a long time is how much the core dispute between the couple resonates in today’s political climate. They nominally break up after Hubbell cheats with an old flame who triggers all of Katie’s deepest insecurities. But as Hubbell says himself, the real problem in their marriage is not another girl. It’s their incompatible values, revealed most starkly when Katie and Hubbell are fighting about how to respond to the cruelty of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anticommunist crusade:
Hubbell: I’m telling you that people—people—are more important than a goddamn witch hunt. You and me. Not causes. Not principles.
Katie: Hubbell, people are their principles.
Compare that message to the recent essay in the New York Times by Cornell professor Karl Pillemer and author/ podcaster Mel Robbins, “Life Is Too Short to Fight With Your Family,” which set social media on fire with its painfully simplistic advice on how to get along with relatives at Thanksgiving. One example: the authors note that a holiday dinner isn’t the right time to try to convince your aging parents to sell their house and move into assisted living. A fair point ruined by what follows: “Let [your parents] make their own mistakes, even if you might have to deal with the consequences. Your parents are adults. Give them the dignity of their own experience.”
WHAT?!!! (Says everyone who’s ever had to observe an elderly relative enjoy the “dignity” of a life-threatening fall in a house they can no longer manage.)
Pillemer and Robbins (the latter the author of the popular advice book, The Let Them Theory) offer a similar, dismissive solution for “political” disputes. “Your husband’s side of the family has politics that bother you?” According to the essay, the answer is simple: “Accept it and move on.”
What the writers ignore, of course, is that in the Trump era, “moving on” could mean accepting people who support masked men kidnapping your landscaper because he looks Hispanic and left his driver’s license in the car. Or support lethal attacks on innocent Venezuelan fisherman with no ability to travel all the way to the United States because in some fictional world they might be drug dealers. Or support cutting off SNAP benefits to the poorest, most vulnerable of our citizens in order to make a “political” point.
When I first saw The Way We Were as a naïve young girl in the late ‘70s, more than twenty years after McCarthy had been vanquished in shame, the Katie character struck me as unduly idealistic. After all, Hubbell wasn’t supporting McCarthy, he just didn’t want to actively oppose him and risk their comfortable life in Hollywood. And in a cynical post-Watergate world, Hubbell’s argument made some sense:
Hubbell: Nothing is gonna change. Nothing! And after jail, after five or six years of bad blood, when it’s “practical” for some fascist producer to hire a communist writer to save his ass because his hit movie’s in trouble, he’ll do it! They’ll both do it! . . . Now, what in the hell did anybody ever go to jail for? For what? A political spat?
That appeasement philosophy hits differently now.
When the political “spat” involves core values like democracy and due process and free speech, all of which are under attack by the current Administration, Katie’s position no longer seems excessively idealistic but necessary: people are their principles.
In recent days, I’ve found myself thinking about another scene toward the end of The Way We Were, when Hubbell is only staying with Katie until she gives birth to their child. She fantasizes about a future in which they’ve overcome their difficulties and found a way back to their prior happiness:
Katie: Wouldn’t it be lovely if we were old? We’d have survived all this. And everything would be easy and uncomplicated, the way it was when we were young.
Hubbell: Katie, it was never uncomplicated.
Katie: But it was lovely, wasn’t it?
As the first year of the second Trump Administration winds down—unbelievably enough, it hasn’t even been a full year—it feels like a similar yearning is everywhere. For the knowledge that we will in fact grow old. That we will in fact survive all this. And that someday, everything will in fact be, if not easy and uncomplicated, at least better.