I don’t want to watch movie marathons that show me all of the good, unrealistic things I’m missing – all of the meet-cutes, the friends turning into more and the Ryan Goslings of the world. Instead, I want to watch movies that show some sort of truth about love and relationships. I want to watch a movie that shows the crazy, the messy and the brutal of relationships.
This list of movies is just that– movies to watch if you're disillusioned by everything love is supposed to be.
1. "Heathers"
This movie shows all the ways, and more, that infatuation can corrupt. Veronica was initially attracted to JD because of his realistic perception of his peers, his remarks about the stupidity of popularity and his ~super cute~ hair. The bad boy turns worse, however, through his psychotic tendencies and nihilistic ideas about life. Faced with the murders of classmates, posed suicides, and a grand plan to blow up the school, Veronica must dig her way out of a relationship that keeps getting worse.
2. "American Beauty"
This movie is all about voyeurism– who it is appropriate to look at, when it's appropriate to look at someone and the power that exists in the act of looking. There's a lot of broken forms of love in this movie. A father falls for his daughter's cheerleading friend. A film-making, drug-dealing boy falls for the daughter of the man to whom he deals marijuana. A homophobic colonel represses his own homoerotic desires until the ultimate scene *spolier alert* where a rejected kiss leads him to killing his neighbor. Sound convoluted? It is – just like relationships in real life. They're hard to live and even harder to explain after the fact.
3. "The Virgin Suicides"
This movie explores the way a family from middle-of-America begins to come apart at the seams. After the youngest member of the Lisbon family commits suicide, neighboring boys try to piece together the mysterious existence of the Lisbon girls. This is a story of American adolescence, repression and rebellion, love and longing, sex and death.
4. "William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet"
We all know the story – love at first sight that's forbidden by ruling families, thus driving the two adolescents to hide their love.Through lust, confusion and desperation, the two end up killing themselves. This adaptation has modernized settings, wardrobe, and weapons but keeps the original lines, showing the timelessness of the original text and its original themes.
5. "(500) Days of Summer"
This movie explores the entire arc of a relationship– they meet, they fall in love, they love, they fall out of love, they separate. "(500) Days of Summer" shows that sometimes, without much reason, relationships can't and won't last. On a happier note, just because love falls apart doesn't mean that the love they once shared is any more devalued.
6. "Blue Valentine"
OK, I know at the beginning of this article I said that I didn't want to think about all the Ryan Goslings of the world that I was missing. "Blue Valentine" is different. In this heartbreaking film, we see a couple in a failing relationship contrasted with flashbacks to happier times in their relationship. This movie is brutally honest about how and why relationships end – someone falls out of love.
Whether you're single, mingling, or in a relationship, it's important to watch movies that cast a different light on love and relationships. Check out any of the above for a little bit of honesty and a lot of disillusionment.
