Things Lonely People Do
The Green Ray
There’s a frustrating but interesting category of person I often think of: people who are lonely and clearly long for human connection, but who behave in ways that seem designed to alienate people, even (especially) people who are making a good-faith effort to be friends with them. For a while, I thought about writing a list-format essay titled “Things Lonely People Do,” with items such as:
Devise little tests for their friends to determine whether they are “real” friends or not
Monitor, with paranoia, which other people their friends are hanging out with
Refuse to dance, sing, play games or sports, or participate in any activity where they risk looking inept
… and so on. I know, of course, as an introverted person, that I could have easily fallen into those habits myself. I remember reading the entirety of Succeed Socially, a website from the early blog era with gently-written articles about how to avoid becoming this kind of person. One of my favorite comic internet essays is Rosa Lyster’s “What Are Nerds,” describing one adult variant of the phenomenon:
I explained that a nerd is a person whose outer appearance inadequately masks a deep terror that everyone will always see them the way their classmates did in high school. People who invested their personalities in being clever rather than in being good company, who are even right now toiling away under the delusion that overt displays of precocity are tolerable. People who make a big performative deal about how shy they are but are not actually vulnerable in any human way and think nothing of foisting their issues onto others. People who use you as a prop to get people to see them while pretending to be so afraid of everything.
Instead of writing the essay described above, I wrote a short story, “The Good Sport” which you can now read in the Kenyon Review. The narrator’s antagonist, Amelia, alienates the women around her through a combination of fussiness, self-protectiveness, and refusal to participate in group activities. She harms no one, she is never unkind, she does nothing wrong — and yet everyone winds up disliking her.
Last week I saw for the first time a 1986 Eric Rohmer film called The Green Ray (Le Rayon vert), which you can stream on the Criterion Channel, and saw almost a perfect French version of Amelia: the protagonist Delphine, played by the film’s co-writer Marie Rivière. Delphine frustrates and annoys everyone around her — I as a viewer was frustrated and annoyed, too — but the film takes her seriously, and by the end I just wanted to give her a hug and tell her things were going to be okay.
Delphine, as the film opens, is thrown unwillingly into a situation that forces her to confront her loneliness: the prospect of spending her two weeks of summer vacation alone. She originally has plans to visit Greece with a girlfriend, but the girlfriend decides to take her new man on the trip instead, leaving Delphine at loose ends. She’s not over her ex-fiancé, Jean-Pierre, and dreads being alone.
Delphine laments this state of affairs to various friends and family, who all rush to help her. They offer up empty vacation homes owned by relatives, they invite her along on camping trips, they suggest male friends who might want company. She shoots them all down: too lonely, too cold, too unsuitable. When they suggest that she travel alone and meet some new people, she rejects that idea too. One friend becomes visibly frustrated and begins to berate her; Delphine retreats, weeping.
Eventually, she joins another friend on a visit to family in Cherbourg. The family tries to engage her, but she resists talking about herself. She won’t go on a boat ride (she gets seasick), won’t flirt with men at the seaside (doesn’t feel right), can’t eat the food they cook (she’s vegetarian). Another guest picks flowers for her, and she won’t take them (“I didn’t pick any for you,” she says). After a while the others start to tease: why is it so difficult to please you? Why do you reject every activity we suggest? She is wounded: she’s not difficult, she protests; didn’t she do the groceries, help with the dishes? Hasn’t she been friendly to everyone?
Before long she bails on Cherbourg and returns to Paris, only to make a few more aborted attempts at having fun. Various people try to engage and befriend her, and inevitably push her to lighten up. But it’s not in her nature to lighten up, and she doesn’t know how to be different. They can’t understand why it’s so difficult for her. She tries to make them see how impossible it is for her to play the role they all want her to play.
Poor Delphine! At the beginning of the movie, she’s annoying in her seeming determination to be unhappy, but as she drifts alone from place to place, she becomes sympathetic: why tolerate the inanities of small talk, the humiliations of making nice with incurious strangers, the constant pressure to mask unhappiness and keep things light? And towards the end, when she finally allows something good to happen to her, the joy and relief is almost overwhelming.
I enjoy pretty much every Eric Rohmer movie I watch (soon I will have exhausted all of his Criterion Channel material) but this one was especially tender. The typical Rohmer film explicitly poses a philosophical or moral problem and has the characters act as its avatars, both discussing and embodying it. In The Green Ray he and the creative team of mostly women ease up on the philosophy and takes as the problem the simple fact of a human being in pain. Delphine is, in many ways, her own problem, but she is solved not by argument but by love.