Their shared sense of self was based largely on the comaraderie which shared difficulty, shared apparent danger, shared uncertainty, shared desire, enables. Such larger selves are always temporary constructs, when the cause itself is temporary. This is why they drifted apart. The war ended. They got straight. The fog of war disappeared. As William Hurt points out: they never really knew him at all. They still don’t. They don’t know each other, really.
What they love is a memory, of a time when everything felt fresh, when they felt alive and well, and open to whatever life brought. We all need times like this.
But the residue of this era is precisely why sanity is impossible in our media. Most of the people running our media either lived in that time, or wish they did. They reference, in the process of ignoring the gaping holes in Obama’s story while intentionally misrepresenting the very talented history of Ben Carson, who actually DID grow up a poor black, this memory of purpose, of meaning, of living for something bigger than a paycheck.
It is very romantic, and then as now, quite morally wrong. I cannot help but feel that if they had something else to cling to, they might be capable of telling the truth. I don’t think most of them are bought. I don’t think they need to be bought. They come up with the bias naturally.
And I don’t think Tom Berenger–who along with the husband whose wife cheated on him I found the most likeable characters in the movie–is going to see his lover ever again. which I suspect he knows, and knew. I actually excuse this sin. I do not think perfect monogamy is healthy for everyone, all the time. I personally would make prostitutes legal everywhere, but in my dream world they would be in Temples consecrating them as holy, as in the ancient world.
One of the reasons so many white Americans got syphilus–which the Americas shared as their part of the Columbian exchange–is that Indians would often share their wives.
Sex is neither moral nor immoral. It all depends on the context and the emotional maturity of those involved.
I think it’s 50/50 William Hurt imitates Alex in killing himself, likely even the same way, in the same house, with the same woman, probably AFTER he makes a fortune with Kevin Kline. Absent his cause, and the inability to find a new one, he has nothing to live for.
I think the woman Kevin Kline slept with, if she gets pregnant, does in fact prove a loving, if neurotic, mother, but that her child always feels a sense of lack he or she would not have felt with a caring father in the house.
Jeff Goldblum, of course, continues to be an obnoxious womanizer, writing bad fiction for a time, then doing bad journalism again for the money, incapable of deep connection, unable to love any woman foolish enough to fall for him.
We do all need deep friendship, but one based on a stable foundation of mental wellness, which includes the ability to meet our own needs endogenously, as it were, to be emotionally open, and to be committed to firm and unchanging values.