Death becomes her / Choice of drink
Today: Misha Angrist, a senior fellow at the Initiative for Science & Society and associate professor of the practice at the Social Science Research Institute at Duke University (the views he expresses here are his alone); and Miles Klee, senior writer at Wired, author of the novel Ivyland, and co-author, with Mads Gobbo, of the story collection Double Black Diamond.
Issue No. 559
A MAD Melodrama
Misha Angrist
Fountain of Truth
Miles Klee
A MAD Melodrama
Love Means Never Having to Say “Metastatic”
by Misha Angrist
If you want to squander three excruciating minutes, I can recommend the interminable trailer to Love Story (1970), the Arthur Hiller exercise in tragic schmaltz starring lovely ingenues Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal. The trailer is a series of stills unencumbered by a single line of dialogue, and overwhelmed by Francis Lai’s cloying earworm of a theme—of its seven nominations, Best Music (Original Score) was the only Oscar Love Story took home the following year.
Though the film ultimately succumbs to its own sticky-sweet sentimentality, Love Story has its virtues. MacGraw is a guilty pleasure as the doomed Jenny Cavilleri, endearingly making relentless fun of O’Neal as preppy nepo baby and Harvard hockey star Oliver Barrett IV. Jenny is poor, unselfconscious, and whip-smart, not to mention a virtuoso at that preppiest and tuberculosiest of instruments, the harpsichord. The impoverished Radcliffe girl falls for the bilious squash-playing rich boy because he is gorgeous, sure—and maybe she sees promise in him? Maybe her love could change him? And spoiler alert: maybe it did!
What’s weirdest about the film is that more than two-thirds of it is a fairly predictable rich-boy-falls-for-poor-girl rom-com. And then, 70 minutes in, after the madly-in-love couple has been having trouble conceiving, “Dr. Shapeley” informs them that “Jenny is very sick.” Not only that, he warns Barrett that “she will need to be told very soon.” That kind of paternalism really was not unusual fifty or sixty years ago.
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