Watching The Notebook at 35

I watched the Notebook for the first time in a while, and it’s funny how time changes ones perception of these things. The Notebook would have been released when I was 18. Of course, I had seen A Walk to Remember and read the book. I periodically watch The Notebook, but each time I become less enthralled. I think the combination of not being pummeled by the emotional roller coaster, maturity, and being a in a long term relationship makes it less and less appealing.

Brief Synopsis

The Notebook is a movie based on a book by the same name written by Nicholas Sparks. Its pretty much a quintessential Nicholas Sparks story. Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams fall in love over the summer. Shes rich, hes poor, her parents intervene, and they break up. She goes away, he goes to WWI they both move on. In the end they work it all out. The narrator is a man reading a woman with the dementia the story of their love. The whole story is devastating.

What Is Like to Watch at 35?

Only a few minutes into the movie my friend says “Their relationship, I guess gets ok, but the way is starts is…” I tried to remember but I was drawing a blank. Though when Noah meets Alli, walking to close and demanding that she dance even though she does not want to. She gets on a Ferris wheel with someone else and Ryan Gosling, climbs up and sits between them, then dangles demanding that he gets a date. Oh yeah, this moment when a disinterested girl is cornered into accepting a romantic exchange with someone shes not totally interested in.

For a while everything was standard. They are having fun, cutesy little couple moments. The only thing that really stands out is that Rachel McAdams is so much shorter than Ryan Gosling. She is always leaping onto him like a toddler being left at daycare. In terms of cinematography I guess it helps with the angles, but its weird and sort of infantilizing. It just doesnt seem like a necessary gesture if you ask me.

The movie includes a montage of the two of them arguing. As though that is romantic. It is a common trope. A couple that argues because they are just rife with sexual tension. I used to have some nominal buy in, but they accurately show Alli slapping Noah, and in real life that kind of fighting has some real toxicity behind it. These couples are painted as sort of quirky and supportive in the appropriate circumstances, but they are just toxic.

The next part of the movie that really troubles me, is what happens when he finishes their story. So, James Garner is reading this story to his wife the whole movie, and she has not idea who he is. Then he finishes and she comes back, and they have dinner and dance, and she forgets him. So, then this elderly dementia patient is in a room with a strange man and naturally freaks out. I was sitting there thinking about this, and wonder, how many times he has done this, and why the staff in the nursing facility continue to allow him to do this. They must sedate her, and she is so terrified, and ends up in a locked ward. The whole scene is sort of horrifying.

I think that the superficial appeal of the Notebook is that devotion Noah has for Alli. The real til’ death do us part situations, it makes me at least feel hopeful. There is a scene in when she says she thinks she is a bird, and the agree wo both be birds. So, spoiler alert…. When they die at the same time, it cuts to a clip of birds flying.

The last weirdness of this movie was the sex scenes. Going to some dilapidated house to lose your virginity on the dirty floor decidedly not romantic. Alli then doesn’t remember what part of the house they were in when they had sex, not likely. Finally Noah carries her up all those stairs, to get to a bed and they still end up on the floor.

Maybe it’s that I haven’t chosen those relationships, or my age, or my lack of romanticism, but at 35, I don’t think I would want the relationship that makes you fight all the time, and is quite honestly co-dependent. I guess its nice to think of those toxic patterns would resolve and their love would be what was left. I cant think of many relationships that start like theirs that dont eat the people in them alive.