One of my favourite Ryan Gosling movies is Lars and the real girl, I think about it a lot. I frequently find myself drifting towards it when I am not sure what to watch in the last few months. Since the pandemic, I keep flashing to the first time I watched this movie. The moment he introduces his girlfriend a doll he ordered online. An anatomically correct sex doll. The true magic of this movie is not that Lars, created a fantasy of a person but how his family, friends and his community react. It would have been easy for them to shun him and say, this is not a real person. It would have been easy to say this is a doll, it can’t speak, it doesn’t have thoughts, it doesn’t have a soul but they chose to gently walk this unprecedented path with him.
A deeply lonely and isolated man, Lars suffered from unimaginable heartache that even he didn’t understand. A loss and a sense of abandonment, that he didn’t even know how to show up in his own life. He shutdown everything and everyone around him. Even when people reached out and they all tried to be there for him. They tried to open him up, he just couldn’t let them in. Their very touch burned his skin, he didn’t know how to escape himself, how to participate in his own life until Bianca – his life size doll girlfriend. He created a delusion to help him live through his own life and navigate the problems that exist in it and connect to people around him. Emily Mortimer’s character, Karin, in this film is possibly one of the kindest, most generous and gracious characters ever written. The way she sees his heart, really sees it unrelenting in her love for him. She chooses to help him and enlists the help of the community, even when he didn’t make it easy.
I think about our lives now, in this unrelenting pandemic and how we are with each other. I wonder are we gentle and kind? Like Karin, do we see people’s heart beyond their actions. Even when they seem unkind and unfair.
When Lars questioned the love of the people around him, when he questioned, whether they truly cared for him. Karin reminds him that everything that has been done was for him. The way Bianca has been welcomed to their community, was not for Bianca’s sake, but for Lars. A signal of how much his community loved him. So much that they were willing to bend their realities, they willing to ignore what they felt was normal in order to make sure that he felt comfortable and welcomed. Bianca was an extension of Lars that bore his darkness and his pain. It is how he engaged with the world, how he tried to make sense of it.
How many of us currently have been so broken, so shattered by this pandemic, that we have retreated inside ourselves. We are locked so deeply in ourselves that the thought of letting people into our space let alone our hearts feels like burning to our skin. The our very flesh will sear off if we open up for the possibility of one more hurt by a breaking world. I think about Lars on the real girl, a lot. I am Lars and the real girl. It reminds me that even actions that seem unkind and cruel are sometimes a desperate cry for help. The last way of reaching out to say, I am lost, I am alone, please help me.
There are so many losses and tragedies right now we can’t even have the most basic human things. When tragedy strikes people come and sit with you even in silence, in this pandemic we can barely have that. I hope that as we all muddled through what is happening to us. We remember a one cruel act does not deserve another but needs grace. It what I find to be the best way to make it through the breaking. In the last few weeks the more I see someone act out or behave in what I may think is an unkind way, my heart responded with so much for I thought I was capable of. When given that love and grace I have unkindness turn into peace, gratitude and equal measures of love.
Our pain is a lesson in courage and as Bianca helped Lars get through the pain of his life and find his way out, we too are making our way through.