Moonrise Kingdom (2012) is the seventh film by the eccentric Wes Anderson known for films like The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), The Darjeeling Limited (2007) and The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). The film is co-written by Roman Coppola, Wes Anderson’s frequent collaborator. If Wes Anderson’s original style has not conquered you yet, here’s the plot. Two young loners, Sam (Jared Gilman) and Suzy (Kara Hayward), fall in love and decide to flee together from the island where they are. A search team is organized by Police Captain Sharp (Bruce Willis). It includes the parents of Suzy, Laura (Frances McDormand) and Walt (Bill Murray), and the group of Scouts of which Sam is part, led by the Scout Master Ward (Edward Norton).
Moonrise Kingdom and Sartre
The narrative focuses primarily on the love affair of the two main characters, teenagers Sam and Suzy. Both are presented to us as intelligent and sensitive people, but troubled. Sam is orphan and has difficulty making friends, while Suzy does not feel accepted at home and has fits of rage. Partly thanks to an identification of character, they seem to find some kind of safe harbor in each other and quickly develop a relationship of trust and honesty. As the narrative progresses, the relationship built by Sam and Suzy seems special to us, which is expressed by Wes Anderson's aesthetics, who once again puts his peculiar touch on every image, movement and montage. With its colorful color palette, fluid transitions, and a joyful montage (filled with animated maps and split screens), the world of Moonrise Kingdom seems light and easygoing, as if it was out of a children’s book. In addition, the settings and even some traits of the characters are caricatured, which confers certain childishness to the story. In this case the term “caricature”, far from having a negative connotation, manifests something extremely positive. We understand the characters and problems with great ease, precisely due to the simplicity of the way they are shown (and as I hope to show, “simplicity” is the key-word in this movie).
But after all, what kind of love does Wes Anderson seem to manifest through Sam and Suzy’s relationship? I believe that the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 - 1980) - who is himself also a caricature of the intellectual of the 1960s (see below) - can help us answer this question. You already know: time to make some popcorn and take a sneak peek at Sartre’s philosophy. In what concerns the question of love, the great problem for Sartre is to know to what extent it is possible to love without losing freedom, both of ourselves and of the person we love. Sartre’s great criticism is that we have become accustomed to thinking that loving means “tying” the other to our feelings, which leads to a total loss of freedom. We want to merge with the other, so that this other needs us above all else. We see the characters in the movies that say “I cannot live without you” and we think “aww, this is love!”. The problem is that seen in this way, love seems like something we suffer and not that we choose. We seek the other by necessity, by an inexplicable and uncontrollable desire, which is precisely what leads some to see phrases like “we were destined to each other” as expressions of love. But according to this perspective, love would then be a manifestation of mere dependence. If this is the case, if this is love, then there is, in fact, no possible reconciliation between love and liberty. Love is just a random determination.
Love, freedom and determinism
For Sartre love cannot be reduced to this pure necessity, but it is also not as simple as we would wish. In a text of his great work, Being and Nothing, he explains the paradoxical situation in which love places us, between freedom and what he calls “determinism”. On the one hand, for Sartre that passionate love, the one we see in romantic comedies, is rather an uncontrollable hormonal disorder than an expression of what we should call love. We cannot define love as a simple passionate need of which we are slaves because a part of love depends on a choice. We want the other to love us freely and not due to a mere hormonal need, just as we ourselves choose to engage in a loving relationship because we consent to build something with that person. As Sartre says “On the other hand, the man who wants to be loved does not desire the enslavement of the beloved. He is not bent on becoming the object of passion which flows forth mechanically. He does not want to possess an automaton and if we want to humiliate him, we need only try to persuade him that the beloved's passion is the result of a psychological determinism. The lover will then feel that both his love and his being are cheapened” (Being and Nothingness, “First attitude towards others: Love, language, masochism”). If love was pure necessity, it would not be love then, but a simple obligation, just as eating or drinking. Of course, even when love is a deliberated choice, part of our liberty is still lost anyway, because choosing to be with someone requires sacrificing certain things to accommodate the existence of the other in our lives. For example, we sacrifice part of the time at bars with friends, we accept to watch series we don't like on Netflix, we make concessions about the disposition of the furniture in the house, etc . But even in these cases, these renunciations are made consciously and we lose part of our freedom by choice. Put it poetically “the Other's freedom consents to lose itself”. No one compels us to make such sacrifices (which sometimes are small, like the choice of the film to watch, but sometimes are big, like choosing to have kids or not) and we can at any time simply end the relationship. It is by the way for this precise reason that so many relationships do not work, the weight of the responsibility of these choices becomes sometimes too heavy. However, on the other hand, love cannot be the result of a simple voluntary decision because it depends on several aspects that are beyond our control, which escape our freedom and our rationality. We do not want to be loved by simple choice, as if it was a simple contract, there must be a real wish: “On the other hand, the lover cannot be satisfied with that superior form of freedom which is a free and voluntary engagement. Who would be content with a love given as pure loyalty to a sworn oath. Who would be satisfied with the words, "I love you because I have freely engaged myself to love you and because I do not wish to go back on my word”” (Being and Nothingness, “First attitude towards others: Love, language, masochism”). Thus, for the pessimistic Sartre, love becomes in its essence an impossibility, for it implies both the determinism of passion, which we cannot control, and the freedom of reason, which we can choose. As the two parts of this equation are constantly in conflict, love becomes a struggle. An example of this struggle happens when, in the name of passion, we choose to become what we believe the other desires, which leads to a lost of our identity and transforms us into simple "objects" for the one we love (we lose our subjectivity). What is paradoxical is that we want to be loved so much that we change ourselves to satisfy the other, making the other fall in love with someone who in fact is not who we are.
It seems to me that it is precisely this conflict between determinism and freedom of which Sartre speaks that is at stake in Moonrise Kingdom. If on the one hand there is an instantaneous desire between the Sam and Suzy from the moment they first see each other, on the other hand, they effectively choose to be together, despite the difficulties of this choice. This demands something more than simple passion, but organization, effort, sacrifice. If for Sartre loving relationships are faded to doom because love is a paradox, Sam and Suzy prove that it is in fact possible to establish a balance between the determinism of the feeling they have for each other and the freedom of the way in which they engage themselves in this relationship. The desire does not prevent them, for example, from being themselves, sharing their own anxieties and personalities. Sam and Suzy do not abdicate of who they are to be together. For example, Suzy is not ashamed to reveal her aggressive side to Sam and Sam shares his troubled past in the foster homes with Suzy. There is something liberating about their relationship because for the first time in their respective lives they seem to be able to act eccentrically, just as they are, and be accepted like this. The scene in which they dance half-naked on the beach portrays such free delivery on the part of both of them. Sam and Suzy's relationship is therefore not a relation of necessity; actually both could have fled from their respective lives without the assistance of the other (Sam through his abilities and Suzy through her smartness). They flee together not for needing each other, but for acquiring the courage to leave thanks to the other. It is rather a relation of complicity, where each one's life is enriched by the presence of the other. The love that is established between Sam and Suzy portrays, in this way, a love that we could call “Sartrian”, since reason and passion balance each other in a kind of paradox: an harmonious conflict. While for Sartre the authentic love is an impossibility, in Moonrise Kingdom it manifests itself in all its simplicity.
The rational love of Laura and Walt
In opposition to this incipient and innocent relationship, Wes Anderson presents us the marriage of Suzy’s parents, who live an unstable phase. If Sam and Suzy’s feelings seem simple and genuine, Laura and Walt’s relationship seems complex and worn out, something that allows us to understand the affair between Laura and Captain Sharp. Laura and Walt sleep in separate beds and do not have much dialogue, different of Sam and Suzy who touch each other without much shyness and openly talk about their feelings. If Sam and Suzy’s relationship offers us a Sartrian love, we find in the relationship between Laura and Walt some kind of "careful" love, since they act as if desire was not a component of the relationship. The choice is, in their case, limited to the rational scope: for the sake of the family they have created and the history they have built, it is more logical to persist in the relationship. They act according to the idea of a "duty" that forces them to stay together, despite the fact that they are unhappy and do not seem to feel attracted to each other. It is interesting to note that, in this context, the relationship of Walt and Laura shows us the complete opposite of the purely passionate relationships that Sartre criticizes. Either way, in both cases the problem is the same: we find an absolutism of one of the sides of the equation, either the excessive passion or the calculated reason.
According to this perspective, the disharmony in the marriage of Walt and Laura can be understood in great measure by the fact that their relation is based strictly on the deliberative dimension of the love, since they completely neglect the passionate scope. Just as passionate relationships tend to ignore all rationality. Opposed to all these extreme positions, for Sartre true love is the result of a complex interaction between these two dimensions. It depends on a freedom of choice, but this choice depends, in its turn, on a feeling that “falls” upon us. In other words, to love someone is something we choose, because we always have the possibility to decide whether to act on what we feel or not. But even this freedom is determined in the first place by a feeling imposed on us by our passions and desires, something which we cannot normally explain or rationalize. So for Sartre love becomes some sort of game between a freedom that is determined and a determination that is free. A game which, given its complexity, can never seem to be beaten. Because when we love we desire to "have" the other, but we want this desire to be freely accepted by the other as well. The liberty of choice of the other implies, however, that at any given moment he can choose not to love us anymore. This is precisely the reason why we choose to believe that love is a pure necessity, we try to convince ourselves that "we are made for each other", guaranteeing that it is not the mere contingency of choice that which keeps us together. While we bang our heads trying to solve the paradox of love, Suzy and Sam beat the game without much difficulty, simply taking on the choice of being together.
In Moonrise Kingdom Wes Anderson presents us the portrait of a young love and the colorful and caricatured aesthetics appears then as a perfect expression of the tone of ingenuity and simplicity which characterize a first love. The presentation of a couple of pre-teens through this entertaining and benevolent visual manifests a conception of love as something simple, in which it does not have to equate neither to a pure necessity nor to a mere choice. This happens because the youth, with their innocent look, do not feel the need to ravel the relationship. Instead, they simply live whatever comes to them, dealing with the complex conflict between passion and reason without realizing. This youthful way of loving might seem naive to us, almost silly. And yet it manages to perfectly administrate a paradox that is part of every loving relationship, but which most of us are not able to manipulate. In the case of Sam and Suzy, since everything is seen more simply and naturally, the adjustment between these two dimensions happens spontaneously. We adults, on the contrary, with our personal frustrations and emotional baggage, tend to adopt extreme positions. There are those who simply abdicate this form of human contact, for the recurring deceptions make them skeptical. The word becomes only a name for a human experience that is too complex to be lived. Others radicalize its meaning, equating it to a rapturous passion that will never be lived (who never thought “this only happens in movies”) or reducing it to a rational decision that seems more like an imprisonment. The relationship of Walt and Laura represents precisely this second tendency. Perhaps the problem is that we adults feel the need to constantly reinforce the paradoxical aspect of love, failing in balancing the freedom of our choice and the determinism of our feelings. Sam and Suzy's relationship works so well precisely for the simplicity with which they deal with both sides of this equation. There is no need either to rationalize the desire, or to diminish the importance of the choice. The innocence of their gaze shows us that when the feeling is necessary (ineluctable), the responsibility of our choices is easily accepted. For this reason the relationship between Sam and Suzy becomes a relief, making us believe that it is possible to live the paradox of Sartrian love. Maybe the lesson that Suzy and Sam leave us is that love should be the place where we could allow ourselves to still be naive children, loving freely, passionately but, above all, simply. After all, if love is a game, nothing better than a bit of “childishness” to make us good players.
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