To count down to the Sundance Film Festival, we’ve been blogging about some of our favorite movie moments in the festival’s history. We’ve covered the Top 10 Lessons in Love, Top 10 Lessons in Young Love, Top 10 Oddest Couples, and Top 10 Sexy-FAIL Moments. This week is the final installment, and we saved the worst for last — infidelity, so bad for marriages, but so good for movie-makers. As Tolstoy sort of said, all happy marriages resemble one another, but each unhappy marriage is unhappy in its own way. Have a nice day!
PERSONAL VELOCITY: THREE PORTRAITS: This movie is soaked through with infidelity, in particular the knock-on effect that infidelity (and its close cousins, abandonment and divorce) has on the kids. Philip Larkin put it best: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do. / They fill you with the faults they had / And add some extra, just for you.”
THE INFORMERS: Based on Bret Easton Ellis’s story collection (’nuff said, perhaps?), this film’s speciality is early ’80s L.A. infidelity. In other words, the sex is fueled by booze and drugs and is even emptier than your average illicit shag.
If you’ve listened to Howard Stern even once over the past decade (that’d be Em, not Lo), then you know that one of his most loyal advertisers is the Ashley Madison Agency — the online dating site that caters to married people with the tagline “Life is short. Have an affair.” Charming. On and off over the years, we’ve thought about reporting on Ashley Madison, but every time we did, steam would come out of our ears and we’d realize that our entire article would consist of seven words, most likely typed in all caps: “Stop cheating you slimeball pieces of shit.” Just because the site sounds like it was named by Nora Roberts, as Jezebel so brilliantly notes, doesn’t mean it’s any less sleazy, immoral, unethical, or just plain wrong.
The other week we explained how evolutionary psychology can be so annoying sometimes, what with all its assumptions about modern-day dating and mating behavior based on hunter-gatherer societies. Sure, sometimes those theories are fascinating and even enlightening, but sometimes they’re just plain wrong.
