After watching The Bridges of Madison County quite a few times and for that matter, Out of Africa too, the sense of lost passion overwhelms me to the point of severe introspection. For a while I just thought it was the love affairs in those movies that made me swoon with heated want, but now I realize that it wasn’t just the love and lust the characters felt for each other; it was the sense of adventure and getting lost in those stories that fueled my own sense of passion and my search to rediscover myself. Regret will no longer hinder my life. I will seek my own life adventures and passionate love.
The Bridges of Madison County introduces us to a housewife in Iowa who falls in love with a distant traveling photographer in a period of just four short days. The beginning of the story shows the tiresome, day-in-day-out routine of a family and how hard life gets and how easily things that might have once been interesting and purposeful can become mundane. It seems like her efforts at being a good mother throughout many years of dedication have been overlooked or quite simply taken for granted. Her needs as a woman and gratitude from her family have been cut short along the way and the loneliness in her eyes (like only Meryl Streep can enact) makes you identify with her right from the start. It is only when her family leaves for a short trip to a neighboring state fair that she finds herself with a lost stranger who gives her the best gift of her life: true love.
In this short time she travels to many places through stories that he tells of the places he has been, but the main place she goes is within herself. Through the passion they share, She discovers that the person she was capable of being all along was right there within her. He opens a door in her that had never been opened or had been previously locked. As a viewer of this film, you see her world open up to possibilities that we each ache for, ourselves. The human part of the story makes us need and feel the love that they share and want.
Despite their "adultery," the audience falls in love with their affair, which is more than OK for us because everyone loves a good love story--we long for that kind of undeniable passion in our own lives. And through it all, we all find ourselves wanting to go with him when he gives her the chance. In our minds, we had already packed our bags and have them waiting by the front door. We would have walked away from our routine lives for true love, to escape the mundane.
The choice of leaving her family to go with him is in conflict with what she knows in her heart to be right. Even when he is standing in the rainstorm in the middle of the street longingly calling her in silence through the storm, we want her to leave. Hell, WE WANT TO GO! But she doesn’t leave, and as she releases the door handle from the inside of the truck, we sink back down in our seats with regret and despair. Our hearts are broken and our own tears we shed for them stream down our faces in agony. The tears fall and the tissues we have waded up in our hands hold only six words: “Get out of the damn truck!” But she stays, for the selflessness she has always had is strength, too. She is a wife, a mother, and duty to her family comes first. Ultimately, she lets go of the ”could haves” and focuses on the now, always carrying the love for the life that he gave her in her heart forever.
I can never finish the movie. Watching the end is just too painful (I have honestly seen it all the way through only twice). The pain it gives me leaves me empty for the rest of the day. I pity the poor people who have to endure my sniffling and wailing, which is likely pure hell for them. It’s pitiful, I swear--trust me.
Now, I’m not saying that running out to have an affair is what you or I should do to make our lives more interesting and fulfilled. I’m just saying that this sort of thing just happens sometimes. In this story in particular, no one gets hurt and the children (now grown adults) who have come home to sort out things for their mother who has passed find out about the affair only through a letter their mother has written to them (they discover that her dying wish was for her ashes to be spread on the very bridge in the county where this love started). Reading the story their mother has written for them helps them to discover how to put the spark in their own lives and perhaps to redirect their own passions. They learn that although her heart was with another man, she stayed with her family because it was the right thing to do.
I find myself sometimes looking for that kind of love. I think we all do, no matter if we are married or not. We find ourselves looking for the true us that could or could not be with the ones we have chosen for ourselves. The daily routine bogs us down where there is no spark and we know in our hearts that there is something more out there--there is simply more to us as human beings. It is a passion that exceeds everything we have ever known in our lives. Some of us have given way to the idea that this is all there is and some of us know there is more in life than we can possibly imagine. I am of the latter camp.
The movies gives us a place to live those lives we long for and maybe even to discover something in ourselves that is missing. That is why I love them. They give us a place to hide within our own lives that have been caught up in routine. It is the safest escape that I can find, for now....
I urge you to look deep within and seek out that missing piece of your life and find the spark that has been dulled within routine. Create a fire in your lives by doing something different, find a passion that you’ve always known was in you, harness it and fly within your own life. Kiss your husband deeper, move the living room furniture back and wrestle with your kids. Hell, I don’t know: wrap yourself in saran wrap and greet your husband at the front door with a glass of wine or make passionate love to him on the linoleum if you so choose, but do it!
If you are single and feel trapped in a mundane life, find what it is that you love and go do it. Movies have always been my drug of choice and my passion is to make people feel the way these movies have made me feel. I can only hope that after writing my stories and perhaps making a movie or two, someday I will have some of you shouting at the movie screen, “Go!”
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