Garden Party

There's this guy sitting at the therapist, or councilor or whoever, and he has just broken up with a girlfriend, and she's moved out of his house, and he's saying to the therapist, "We broke up." 

Long pause.

"Why?". 

"I don't think she thought I loved her." 

"Did you?" 

"I don't know.  Do we have to get in to this today?" 

So there it is.  This is a perfect picture of our time.  A man is sitting with a therapist.  The therapist is paid or bartered to be there.  You're alone with the therapist and the therapist is there to help you, and is also bound to privacy, so it's like talking to God almost.  And then you come up against this event that is fairly major in your life and you're unsure of the details, and then you tell the therapist that you don't really want to talk about it right now, in which case, if you're the therapist, the next question should be something on the order of "What on earth are you here for?".

Our world now is so filled with vague and diminutive language, and our thought processes so diluted into cliche or non-thinking parlees that it is difficult to imagine that anything meaningful or multi-dimensional can come of our common discourse.  We cannot relate.  We do not have depth.  The "fly-by" mentality of recyclable relationships creates an atmosphere that is always just on the edge of disrespect, contempt bubbling just beneath the surface, only a blink away.

The disposable relationships in this film, after you dispose, that is, of the titillation factors of risque behavior, juvenile plot interest, and gratuitous on-screen flashes of semi-porn, are left barren and wanting.  This may have been the filmmakers' desire, to demonstrate the vacuous culture.  In that case, they did.  It is our culture in summation.  A horrible feeling surrounds this story, if you can call it that.  There is no beginning and no end, just a middle.  The middle is the traveling adventures of several parallel stories that do not parallel each other very much at all, further driving the isolation of the characters along the path of incongruency.

So as a film this was terrible.  As an accurate picture of where we are as a culture, it's pretty much on the money.