Can You Be My Friend For a Second?
Before Midnight and what it says about how we fight.
I miss the intimacy of college kickbacks. Sitting in a beanbag, the crunch of microbeads shifting underneath me. That combination of slightly wine-drunk plus the general intoxication of being around people on the same wavelength as we talk over each other, laughing and quipping and restarting sentences. I miss looking across the room and seeing two of my friends who didn’t know each other well before start to click, their leaning inwards charged with the electricity of another loop closing.
Watching Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy gives me a similar feeling. These are dialogue-driven movies, which you may or may not be into. My sister didn’t like the first one (Before Sunrise) because she thought the characters were pretentious, and I’ll give her that. Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) quote poems, talk with rapid-fire banter, and dredge up things they “saw in a documentary” or “read in an article” as they debate gender politics or muse on mortality—but that’s exactly why I love them. They’re all wry cynicism and Big Ideas, which feels true to the fresh-out-of-college students they’re playing. That’s being 23: old enough to feel like you’ve got some grasp of how the world works and all the ways it falls short, and yet young enough that you think you can make it bend your way anyways. When Celine gives that whole speech about how the only kind of God is in the space between two people, I lean in. I can’t help it. I don’t care that the words are slightly hokey; part of me believes them, especially as I move through the series.
Linklater filmed with a gap of nine years between each installment, so we get to see Hawke and Delpy age alongside their characters. The wrinkles by Jesse and Celine’s eyes deepen. They go to Vienna, Paris, Pylos, but these locations are just fancy backdrops—the world we’re supposed to be most compelled by is the one conjured in conversation between the two of them. And like its own planet, that world rotates through its phases: Before Sunrise is the bottled lightning of a genuine first connection, Before Sunset is about middle age and settling and wondering if you’ve missed your one shot at true love. And Before Midnight—well, Before Midnight is about realizing that your true love is just as neurotic and annoying as everyone else is.
It’s a neuroticism that builds toward a thirty-minute long argument. The fact that Linklater pulls this off is utterly ridiculous to me. Thirty minutes of screentime in so many other movies would have at least one scene change and one major plot twist shoved into them. Not to bring my love-hate relationship with the Marvel Cinematic Universe into this, but the Avengers Endgame final battle was literally over in twenty-five minutes. Tony Stark died. Meanwhile, Before Midnight had me watching two people just negotiate their relationship for half an hour, and I was glued to my seat with about the same level of emotional investment.
Because here’s the thing: that argument told me everything about how and why the relationship between Jesse and Celine works. Watching the scene felt like watching a well-choreographed dance. The conversation has an ebb and flow that Jesse and Celine mimic with their movements—when they’re most at odds and farthest away emotionally from each other, they create distance within their hotel room, too, speaking from doorways and thresholds. When Jesse tries to get Celine on his side, he moves to sit next to her on the couch. That moment between the two of them is one of my favorites. Jesse wants to move to Chicago to be closer with his son from a previous marriage, while Celine is reluctant to uproot the life they’ve cultivated for their two young daughters in Paris. Mid-spat, Jesse goes, “Can you just be my friend for a second?”
It’s said so quickly you might miss it, and yet that singular line dug its tenterhooks into my brain. Hunter Harris from Vulture has a series of articles titled, “This One Line from ______ Plays on a Loop in My Head”—this one’s mine. It’s important to me that Jesse delineates the role he needs Celine to fill; it makes the whole thing more manageable for both of them. There’s an Atlantic article about how we expect too much from our significant others. We want them to be everything, and in those expectations, we set ourselves up for disappointment and set our partners up to fail. Jesse’s comment drives a wedge between these identities. It allows for separation, distance. It’s a tacit plea for Celine to discard all the other hats she might be wearing at the moment. Don’t be my lover, my cheerleader, my life coach. Just be this one thing. Just be my friend.
Because that’s so often how you resolve an argument: by inhabiting a different role. The empathetic ideal is that old maxim of “put yourself in the other person’s shoes,” but I think that’s a hard ask in heated moments. In those situations, maybe the next best thing is shifting into a different gear of yourself. I can’t always agree with my mom when I’m arguing with her from the position of being her daughter, and I can’t fully imagine all the nuances of her perspective as a parent, but sometimes I can come around and see one of her points more clearly if I try to be her friend.
The other thing I love about the way Jesse and Celine fight is that it doesn’t disrupt their other activities. Jesse stands up to pee while still debating Celine. Celine walks outside to get some space before returning to deliver her counterpoints. This setup integrates their bickering into just one facet of their life, instead of it becoming the be-all end-all. So often, movie fights suck all the air out of the room; the point is to get the characters in each other’s faces and at each other’s throats until the split is inevitable. Romantic dramas stoke the flames of The Big Fight or The Big Betrayal so high in order to milk an extra twenty minutes of yearning from the leads before reuniting them in the finale. But in real life with the people we love, we don’t go into any fight knowing that script. Our interactions with each other are instead a series of smaller escalations and de-escalations. We choose our battles. We know each other’s minefields. It’s never as simple as one truth against the other, take it or leave it; we make concessions, we backtrack, we dredge up the past and talk about the future. Instead of compressing this process into an easy five or ten minutes for pacing, Linklater lets it sprawl in all its messy glory.
And while I wasn’t sure if Jesse and Celine would make it to the end as Jesse-and-Celine while I was watching, I never doubted that both their arguments came from a place of deep care. To be clear, they accuse each other plenty. They exchange some pretty pointed barbs. But they also strive toward solutions together. It’s vulnerability and playfulness and irritation with moments of attack, but never pure vitriol. I couldn’t help comparing it to Marriage Story. The first time I watched that infamous fight scene and got to the part where Adam Driver yells, “Every day I wake up and wish you were dead,” I flinched. When angry, I’ve said things I don’t mean, too, but the level of pent-up resentment those words spoke to—I don’t know how you come back from that.
What Before Midnight taps into for me is this idea of love and forgiveness. More specifically, I believe there’s forgiveness in love, but it doesn’t exonerate us from how we act at our worst. Anyone can tell you that relationships take work; it’s a harder task to know when that work has asked too much of you and taken more than you can give. I’ve struggled all my life with setting boundaries and then questioning them. What if I call it quits and cut someone loose too early and regret it for the rest of my life? Conversely, what if I spend my whole life trying to fix something that won’t be fixed? Before Midnight provides one map; it shows what love looks like when it’s hard but both parties are still responsible to each other. It shows how we fight healthily and with care.
Of course it’s just a movie. Of course these lines are scripted, these actors deftly handling their emotions and negotiations better than I ever will, selling me on a graceful resolution. But that’s exactly why the film matters to me—because it acts as a model for how I could aspire to handle conflict. If movies like Marriage Story are about when it’s time to call it quits, Before Midnight is about when it’s still worth fighting for. As Jesse says at the end: It’s not perfect, but it’s real.