Unfaithful

In the movie Unfaithful, Diane Lane and Richard Gere play a happily married couple who live an idyllic suburban life. One violently windy day, after shopping for their only son’s eighth-year birthday party, Diane Lane crashes into a young man with whom she has a torrid, almost acrobatically challenging affair.

Externally, Diane Lane seems happy–comfortably ensconced in a good life–but when that young Frenchman bursts out of the supernatural windstorm and seduces her out of her white-picket-fence life, something dormant awakens that completely overtakes her. Suddenly, it seems, she is consumed by this powerful force that manifests as a most intense sexual hunger; a longing so fierce it obliterates everything she knows of herself. On one level she is reduced to a pure concentrate of physical sensation. On another, she is completely out-of-body.

One of the most powerful scenes for me (and I hope I’m not ruining the movie for you) is her train ride back home from their very first tryst. She sits alone huddled into herself, biting her fingers, crying from a deeply felt pain but blushing from the pleasure of recent memory; torn between the realization of what she has begun to do to herself and her family and the undeniable physical and emotional rapture that has become her strongest addiction (and to a certain extent, at least to her, a kind of twisted salvation). Her eyes reflect joy sullied by visible grains of torment. Her body tingles in exquisite remembrance but folds to parry the blows of its internal agony. So begins her inevitable fragmentation. So begins her fall.

The movie ended on a disturbingly disastrous note, but what haunted me most was the thought of how easily we can let this kind of dissonant danger into our lives simply by living unconsciously; by allowing ourselves to be led so far off the path because we see things mostly as one-dimensional. I think the fundamental issue has to do with our image of ourselves as human beings. Are we simply matter? Or are we soul and spirit made manifest on the physical plane to fulfill certain tasks? And what does that mean?

That question alone changes the way one would live. This intense sexual hunger that seems to come from nowhere in Diane Lane’s character would take on a different significance. Could this sudden powerful longing be much more than just physical and sexual desire? And is it really coming from nowhere? In all probability, it isn’t just a longing of the physical body but also one of the soul; perhaps a calling of the spirit to a more powerful task; a call that has been, over the years, suppressed or ignored so that it had to manifest as an overpowering current that was too great to push aside.

If we are embedded on one plane and see ourselves as nothing more than organs, bones, flesh and live on the premise that our existence is but a confluence of chaos–a bittersweet soup of random events, each one separate from the other–external forces will take charge, grab the reins and transport us time and again to deeper places of faithlessness and destruction.

Richard Gere’s character as the faithful, near-perfect husband, went into crisis when the full weight of his wife’s unfaithfulness descended on him. In that one moment, he lost hold of himself, came to face-to-face with his double and acted from a warped space inside him I’m certain was completely alien to him. I think it might be because he didn’t have a sense of himself beyond his body and the physical parameters of his life. There was nothing inside him to prop him up when that world became ugly, damaged and distorted. It was painful to watch this family unravel but it brought home the importance of individual consciousness and heeding the greater call of the spirit.

Being aware of what is truly required in the spiritual realm is probably the most difficult thing to do, especially when crisis hits. It’s like swimming upstream when the current keeps pulling you down and all kinds of things are tumbling your way, blocking your vision, gashing your flesh and generally making it extremely difficult to be anything but what you can see and touch. But I’ve been told that the stronger the current, the greater the spiritual task and the deeper the preparation required.

In the movie, Diane Lane is trying to get home when she bumps into her would-be lover. They both try to get her a cab, which is impossible in New York but in the middle of a windstorm, is an exercise in virtual futility. They give up. He asks her up to his flat. She hesitates. Then falters. The minute she gives in, a cab passes. Too late. Or is it? I wonder if it isn’t as simple as getting off the stoop and into the cab–to run after it in the middle of hail and storm if need be–if only to give yourself pause and acknowledge that a deeper battle is about to take place inside you.

Until we awaken to our spiritual task, perhaps it is enough that we do what we can. When we can. If that’s what it takes to be true to our human striving, we do it. Get into the cab. Walk away. Smile and say goodbye. Still your heart no matter how deafening the pounding. Put distance between you and the thing that seems to offer your salvation on a pleasure platter because you know, human that you are, that nothing truly worthwhile is ever that simple.

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