The Way We Were

Laurie
The Way We Were
Starbucks, December 31, 2007

In The Way We Were, frizzy-haired Barbra Streisand longs for golden Robert Redford. It’s 1944, and she sees her college crush at El Morocco, dashing in a white naval officer’s jacket and dead asleep on a bar stool. The film, lushly photographed and scored, is schmaltzy in an unusual way: the lovers don’t mesh.

In Sex and the City, Carrie Bradshaw is similarly in thrall to Big, who resists her, and in one episode she replays the last scene of The Way We Were where Streisand’s Katy spots her ex-husband, Redford’s Hubble, in front of the Plaza Hotel, where he’s just married a pretty, young double of his Waspy college girlfriend. She smooths his hair saying, “Your girl is lovely,” and Carrie says the same thing to Big after he marries a Park Avenue socialite.

The Way We Were explores love that doesn’t end because it can't be gratified, and by centering on female desire it broke ground in 1973. Instead of floating moodily through male fantasies, the movie centers on a knowable female character. Hubble is the Garboesque figure: iconic, mysterious, and unable to articulate himself. Sex and the City goes a step further by suggesting that Carrie loves Big because he isn’t knowable or present; the blank of him offers space for the renewal of fantasy, a state she prefers to the unsexy repetitions of domesticity. Katy and Carrie try to discover what’s inside aloof men, but it’s impossible because the men are unknown to themselves.

The eros of unfulfillment is hope, these works show. Watching The Way We Were, we like to believe that the blue-eyed American will adore the passionate Jewish girl. We like to think that America will tuck the huddled masses into its voluminous coat. We liked to imagine that the brains and compassion of the funny-looking girl will outstrip her large nose and unsensual mouth and that she will stop proving and schlepping and melt into the beautiful man. We want to believe he will want her. That's all he needs to do. But he wants less from life and from himself. Her attraction to him makes him interested in himself, and he’s attracted to her attraction more then to her. Her belief in his talent makes him think he can be a writer, but writers need something they burn to say, and Hubble doesn’t want to speak. Redford is a fascinatingly frustrating presence on screen. As he paces silently, looking sideways at anything but the situation he finds himself in, his bottled emotions peek out of his eyes like hostages in a bank robbery before they are corralled out of sight.