Blue Jasmine and Living With Anxiety

I hesitated when setting up to write this, because it would be so easy not to get personal with this blog.  I could write a pretty sharp essay about the similarities between this film and A Streetcar Named Desire.  A huge part of my psyche is screaming "For God's sake, Emily, don't talk about anxiety.  No one wants to read about anxiety.  This is a blog for reviews, so you can show people how much potential you have as a playwright."  But of course, the primary job of a playwright is to reveal herself on a personal level. 

So I'm going to write about anxiety.

In Blue Jasmine, Cate Blanchett plays the title character, the former trophy wife of a brilliantly wealthy financial genius - who turns out to be a brilliantly wealthy financial criminal.  And a cheat.

 After the FBI confiscates all her money, Jasmine finds herself heartbroken, broke, disillusioned, and on the verge of a mental breakdown.  As she explains, “There’s only so many traumas a person can withstand until they take to the streets and start screaming.” She returns, out of necessity, to the dilapidated home of her sister, Ginger, played by the delightfully sunny Sally Hawkins. (Happy-Go-Lucky, Made in Dagenham).  The two sisters, despite each having gone through their share of difficulties, have utterly divergent outlooks on life. 

Ginger, who worked bagging groceries while her wealthy sister ignored her for years, is generous enough to open her home to Jasmine, despite the fact that this prevents her fiance from moving in with her. Jasmine cannot stop comparing the run-down house to the mansion she lived in before.   Ginger, who also went through a nasty divorce, has opened her heart to a new man and is ready to move on.  Jasmine sees no one wealthy enough, successful enough, classy enough, educated enough, good looking enough… you get it.  She is constantly criticizing Ginger’s admittedly imperfect fiance, even to the point where Ginger starts to have her own doubts.

But Jasmine isn't really a nasty person.  Jasmine is living with acute anxiety.  Living with anxiety feels like the layer of skin just below the surface is constantly vibrating.  You wake up in the middle of the night or early in the morning with your heart pounding and a million frightening thoughts running through your mind.  “Is my neighborhood safe enough?  Do my friends really like me?  Am I doing well enough at my job/school? Is my relationship on stable grounds?” And then there are the really frightening thoughts.  “Is the world around me one great lie?  Am I lying to myself?  Am I really happy?  Do my loved ones really love me, or are they just pretending?  Am I just pretending to love them?”

We live in an unstable world.  As Blue Jasmine portrays, we’re in an economic crisis caused, in part, by unethical business practices.  Politicians, financial institutions, and other powers we trusted have deceived us on numerous occasions.  Our climate is changing, and no one really knows what to do about it. On the personal level, the people we love sometimes don’t love us back.    To top it all off, our culture’s expectations for quality of life are going up and up, to the point where many find it difficult to be satisfied with what earlier generations would have deemed enough.

I don’t know about you, but I see this especially played out in our relationships.   This is where my anxiety has recently settled.  (It hasn't always settled there.)  My grandparents, both sets, married very young by today’s standards. They were not necessarily financially stable by today’s standards.  I can’t say for certain, but I’m guessing they probably weren't Hollywood good-looking at the time. I’m also guessing - and this is just a guess so please correct me if you happen to be my grandparent reading this - that they weren't passionately “in-love” by today’s standards.  What I mean by that is they probably weren't running-through-an-airport-quoting- the-Notebook-never-had-a-doubt-you’re-my-soulmate-you’re-perfect-no-work-involved-the-end “in love.” I’m certain they don’t feel that way now.  But my grandparents, both sets, still seem like each other’s best friends.  They still seem to like each other a lot.  They still seem to love each other in a quiet way, which is more than I can say for most other couples I've seen.  So how does this relate to Blue Jasmine? 

At the top of the film, we hear Jasmine describing to a stranger on a flight the way she felt when she first met her husband, Hal. (Played by the ever-more-impressive Alec Baldwin.) Hal, she describes “swept her off her feet.”  They have a song together.  She just knew.  He was The One.  To top it off, he also happened to be filthy rich and good looking.  He buys her all kinds of crazy presents.  He is the perfect guy.  Except that it turns out he never stopped cheating on her and most of his money was stolen.  So it would seem that all of Jasmine’s initial instincts were, maybe, wrong.  She picked the wrong guy.  She made a mistake. 

Or did she? 

Is the problem actually not the man at all, but the criteria by which she judged him?  For myself, I feel a great pressure to judge my mates by Hollywood standards.  I feel like we should have a song.  I feel like I should look across the room and “just know.”  This pressure comes partly from society, but I also largely from myself.  I find myself looking at perfectly good relationships my friends have and thinking “oh he is so quiet/loud/skinny/fat/whatever.  She could totally do better.”  This is the root of anxiety.  Good is never enough.  Reasonable advice such as “don’t settle for someone who doesn't treat you well or who you don’t love,” has morphed into “don’t settle for anyone that isn't perfect in every way and who you’re not so in love with that you will chase them through an airport to keep them from leaving.”  Note that I am contrasting love and “in-love” in this statement.  Feel free to disagree with me in the comments.

The modern, anxious, mind, has a tough time being happy.  It has a tough time knowing when it truly loves another person.  It just has a tough time connecting with people.  What makes Blue Jasmine a great film, in my opinion, is that is challenges society’s deeply help value of “never enough.”  The movie isn't about how Jasmine fell for the wrong guy and moved on until she found the “right” guy.  It’s about how her conception of right and wrong so drastically contrasts with that of her sister.

In one of the most telling lines of the movie, Jasmine  shouts at Ginger “You choose losers because that’s what you think you deserve and that’s why you’ll never have a better life.”  This sounds reasonable, but what do we consider a “loser” by today’s standards?  Flawed human being?  Average job?  Average looking?  Not the guy from The Notebook? (Or the original fiance from The Notebook, who actually was a pretty good guy, right?)

 SPOILER ALERT (not major)

 Ginger doesn't choose losers because she doesn't think she can do better, she chooses the best of the average guys that come her way and make her happy.  As Ginger describes, the better guys just aren't beating down her door.  And when a guy does come along that seems like a step up, he turns out to be a liar as well.  Rather than wallowing in self-pity, Ginger returns to her fiance, happier again to have him back.

Hal may be highly romantic, and he may have made Jasmine feel madly in-love, but he ultimately did not care about her or any of the people he came in contact with.  In contrast, the most romantic thing Chili says in the entire film is probably “Some of the stuff she said made me really mad, but I kept it on the inside.”  It might not seem like much, but this means he cares enough about Ginger to try to improve himself and his temper.  So I’ll take it.  And she seems comfortable enough with herself to realize that a mate isn't a status symbol and how much you laugh with someone may be just as important, if not more, than how many butterflies he gives you. 

I get Jasmine.  I've spend a lot of time in high anxiety worried about whether I have the perfect relationship.  It’s hard not to, looking at the divorce rate in our society.  Look at what Hollywood teaches us about love.  (They are probably connected.) But then I look at my grandparents and I look at Ginger, and I think...

I’m so lucky that my guy took me to see Blue Jasmine.

It’s probably okay if I don’t marry that dude from The Notebook.