Closer (2004)

Closer (Mike Nichols, 2004) is a "romantic" drama, featuring four clever ferociously articulate characters who happen to desire each other, but then can't help knocking out each other with ferocious words, finding a kind of guilty pleasure in it. Or an irresistible temptation they are quite happy to fall into.

"Without the truth we are animals" says Dan Woolf, Jude Law's character. I strongly uphold the concept of truth, but I am not so sure if Dan's assert is always right. I tend to think that eluding the truth, or at least its rougher versions, might be one basic ground of civilization, or a certain type of it.

I imagine there might be civilizacions or societies (they are in theory conceivable) -on Earth or elsewhere- that are strongly based upon truth no matter what, that are strong enough to uphold truth and not collapse under its heavy weight. And others, on the contrary, that are based upon some type of wishful thinking, a set of elaborate untested ideologies, dense narratives under or behind wich we can live safely. Western civilization since the 1960s might well be an example of the latter.

Same thing happens, in a minor scale, with human relations. Eluding the rough truths of existence, or encapsulating them with the aid of language, thus adding to them layers of meaning (or meaningless) to hide them or blur them. Not so in Closer. Here we have four people so attracted by the truth, so addicted to it, that they even wish to be hurt by those they desire or have desired, those they have been physically/emotionally linked to. Their pursuit of truth seems to be so obsessive they simply don't care how much it will hurt them, the most the better. 

Rom-coms are some sort of modern fairy-tales. Not few of them are clever enough, having at least a bit of truth in them, a literal or an aesthetic one. Other times, though, rom-coms are simply not only unrrealistic but silly. People who are not exactely into them (those self hurting truth seekers) will probably love Closer, the anti rom-com.