Shut up and Deal
These last lines from the 1960 movie “The Apartment” reminded me of the huge chasm between the world I grew up in, and the one in which we live today. An unbridgeable gulf exists between how “love” was understood then, and how it is understood today. Since love is what binds the social fabric within which our lives are woven, modern ways of thinking about love require a radical re-conceptualization of “society” itself.
To take one randomly chosen but typical example of modern love, the movie What If? shows us how intensely side-pair Allen and Nicole love each other by showing how they cannot keep their hands off each other in public places. Love is reduced to lust. From the modern point of view, the ending of the Apartment (1960) is almost incomprehensible. In the last scene, after the usual plot twists and turns, when Baxter professes his deep love, Fran Kubelik responds using the famous lines “Shut up and deal”, continuing their card game. What happened to the deep and passionate kiss, that would be the obligatory response today, the only satisfying finale?
To understand this, we must look at how love is portrayed in “The Apartment”. How do we learn that they love each other, when there are no physical displays of affection? When Fran Kubelik learns that Baxter quit the firm, giving up on what she knows to be his highest ambitions, she realizes how deeply he loves her. The frantic pace at which she runs to his apartment shows us the depth of her love. Her anxiety at the door, when she mistakes the pop of champagne for a suicidal gunshot, shows us her love. And yes, her face does become suffused with a warm glow upon hearing Baxter’s declaration of love.
A crucial transitional movie, an early harbinger of the future of romance is “Summertime”. The heroine (Katharine Hepburn) is looking for traditional love, but she is persuaded to try the modern kind — a summer fling without commitment. The central metaphor at the heart of the movie is the sale of the red goblet by antique shop owner Renato de Rossi, who explains to Katharine that it is an ancient goblet from the Eighteenth Century and therefore expensive. Later, she learns that it is a mass produced modern imitation, which is quite cheap. The ‘romance’ between Renato de Rossi and Katharine Hepburn is also a mass produced modern imitation of the rare and precious genuine love. The movie is actually a powerful appeal to a conservative audience with traditional values, to allow people who cannot have the real thing, to be given an imitation as a consolation prize.
But, even the Apartment seems modern, in comparison with the genuine ancient treasures, in the greatest love-story movie of all time, Casablanca. Here, we have a depiction of eternal love which overcomes boundaries of time and space. But what makes the movie immortal is that this greatest of loves is sacrificed by both parties for the sake of the welfare of humanity as a whole. It is the greatness of our love for the entire creation, which allows us to love deeply on a personal level. In contrast, genuine love of the ancient kind is impossible when modern self-love conceives of sacrifice for others as a character defect.