“For my angel.”
Starman is the best movie of the 1980s in my eyes. It has been for a long time. With every passing year and every major life experience, it has gone up my list of all time favourite films, cementing its place as one of the works of art that is most definitive to my life. It has my favourite actor in Jeff Bridges giving the best performance of his career, a performance that hits me even more than his work in my favourite film of all time Tron Legacy or his indescribable emotion in Peter Weir’s Fearless, and is my pick for the best film that John Carpenter ever made. To consider it a masterpiece would be an understatement, on its weakest day, it is cemented in my top 20 films and on its best, it’s right in the middle of the top 10. I love this movie more than I really have the words to say. Now, I have to try. I rewatched it without thinking tonight, just wanted to see it again since I missed the presence of Bridges and wanted to embrace my favourite performance of his. I didn’t really think it through. Even with all the emotional experiences I’ve had with this film, I somehow didn’t realise that it would immediately fucking destroy me harder than it ever had as soon as I started it. It has become not only an embodiment of what I want to see from art, but what I need from it.
Recently, I’ve opened up more about my girlfriend being hospitalised again. It’s not something I like talking about, particularly not in detail, and there’s many aspects that I want to keep private for her sake and mine. But to go through the basics, she’s been sick since the start of April 2020, she’s been in and out of hospital and care facilities ever since, and recently I’ve not been able to directly contact her since October due to COVID restrictions not allowing her control of her own phone. Every day is a waiting game to see if I will hear good news from her cousin or her directly, or if I will receive the worst news of my life and find out that she’s no longer with us. Sometimes there is good news, that she is alive, that she’s coming home soon, but even in spite of those pieces of information, she is still there and I have no idea how long this will last. I have been caught in this state of limbo for the majority of the last year, but it has become overwhelming in the last five months, to the point where some nights I find it difficult to breathe entirely. It’s so hard to hope over and over again when the world is cruel and this virus even more so, but I’ve kept texting every day, kept expressing the love from within my heart and even momentarily praying to anything out there for the possibility of good news. But the reality is that I will not know if my life and relationship is destined for happiness or tragedy until the moment when my life changes forever. For these weeks and months of limbo, they will either be the worst moments of my life or the last times I could cling onto the idea that my love was still alive. I don’t have anything to do but hope that the former is true, that this is the worst it’ll ever get for the both of us, that everything else we’ll be able to handle together in each other’s arms. She is the best person I’ve ever met, the love of my life, the person that makes me believe that I’m worth something. If she dies, I won’t even be able to kiss her on the forehead or touch her hand to say goodbye, I’ll be stuck staring at a ceremony through a computer screen. I have tried to stay strong for her sake and my own, but some nights the toll of being the person on the other side is exhausting. I know she’s going through so much more than I am, it shatters me to pieces whenever I think about the emotions and exhaustion that she must be experiencing, and all I want is to be able to hold her and bring her soup and make her smile in any way that I can. I would do anything to be able to hear her voice in real time right now, anything in the conceivable universe to be able to hold her against my chest and feel her entire weight on me.
I’ve been caught in a circle of grief for the last year, not grieving the dead but grieving the absence of the person I love the most. There’s no real solace in searching the forums for advice about dealing with a partner’s hospitalisation since COVID has changed the coping mechanisms and it’s difficult to open up to friends when the pain is so significant and specific that it’s hard for them to give advice or consolation. It’s the kind of situation that makes people hurt just by hearing about it, let alone actually having to be one of the two people living through it, so being intimate about my pain has been difficult. Even with my friends, I’ve felt more alone this year than I’ve ever felt in my life. The one major coping mechanism I’ve found is listening to the voice notes that she’s sent me over the course of our relationship. In previous hospitalisations, she had her phone and was able to send me them whenever she was awake or able to access it directly, so I have documents of her voice from the beginning of our romance to the last day we actively spent together in October. I have a couple of videos she sent me when we started dating and a few dozen selfies in my favourites folder on my iPhone. I have most of our texts, with the most personal exchanges copied into my notes app so I can read them through whenever I need to feel her authorial voice directly. Mostly, I have the memories of us together, talking for 10 hours straight on the phone, falling in love within a few days of really interacting with each other, booking ludicrous wrestling cards on the phone, getting into fake arguments because we’re both so stubborn and want to make each other laugh, talking about our traumas and our potential future together. I have the memories of getting to be the person that this gorgeous, remarkable, fucking perfect woman chose to love, before the world fell apart and during some of the worst moments of both of our lives. I have clung onto every document of her that I have, memorising so many of the voice notes off by heart due to hearing them so many times, and continuing to hope that we’ll get thousands and thousands of more memories together. That’s all I can really do, keep loving her, keep showing that I love her and hope that at the end of all of this, that we’ll get the rest of our lives together.
The first scene of Starman opens with Jenny (Karen Allen) fixating on the images of her late husband. She sees the videotape of her husband Scott (Jeff Bridges) while drinking a glass of wine, she’s crying at the images of idyllic happiness, knowing that these beautiful moments have been eternally re-contextualised by the cruelty of grief. Within minutes, she’s bore witness to a nightmarish transformation, watching this alien creature shift and contort its way into becoming a facsimile of her late husband Scott. The hair, the eyes, the bone structure, all the exact same as the video. Her reaction is shock, she can’t properly process it, she knows that her husband is dead, that this creature is not him, but all she can see is the same face she fell in love with all those years ago. She panics and eventually collapses, leaving to the alien trying to figure out how to adapt to this new body. One of my favourite acting moments ever is watching Bridges try to mimic his own facial expressions. He analyses the video of Scott as his alien replica and fails to convey the same naturalism of Bridges’ goofy smile, it makes you as the audience believe for a moment that you are watching two different people. Bridges is masterful when it comes to portraying two different characters in the same film as he also pulls off this trick in Tron Legacy, even after dozens of watches, it still feels jarring to me that the same man is pulling off both CLU and Kevin Flynn simultaneously. While Bridges has never been the flashiest or most complicated actor in the world, he is my favourite because of how naturally he enters a character’s worldview. You believe in every action, every expression because it seems like a real person is engaging in front of you. He’s not interested in complicated method acting or 10 page monologues, Bridges makes you believe that you’re watching someone learn how to love with a few glances and a perfectly timed smile. He can build a performance off of charmed vulnerability and then derail an entire audience with the moment that he breaks down. He can convey the look of a father seeing his son for the first time in 25 years without having to cry or explain it through pages of dialogue, you just see the emotion in his eyes and you know how much it means. Bridges is the perfect actor to inhabit a role like this because he is all emotion, all expression, there’s vulnerability and soulfulness built into the fabrics of his DNA as an actor. There’s no need for big outbursts in Starman, there’s not a second where he stops being calm and obtuse and asynchronistic. But he makes you believe that he doesn’t know what the word goodbye means, and rips your heart out when he has to eventually say it. Jeff Bridges is the face of my childhood memories and one of the actors who most made me realise the strength of an otherworldly performance, but as I grow older, the more I connect to how much he conveys with a sad smile. In Starman, he plays against his usual skillset, he limits his natural charisma and talent for embedding it with melancholy and strips his performance down to the bare minimum. He doesn’t smile in Starman often, usually only when mimicking Scott, and he never looks truly comfortable in a human body because he hasn’t developed that skill yet. But when you see him star into Karen Allen’s eyes or tell the alien specialist about the beauty he’s seen in humanity, you truly believe that you’re watching one of the most beautiful film performances ever. He does so much by going against any major impulses to play it over the top or try and act completely like his character Scott would have. It is my favourite performance in any movie, it has been for a long time. As an autistic person who often struggles to know how to properly engage with other people, Bridges’ performance has given me hope that I can find the person that helps me communicate and blossom into my best self, not by trying to be something or someone else, but embracing who and what I am. I am so thankful that I know what it feels like to have that while rewatching the film now.
As good as Bridges is, Karen Allen is also giving one of my favourite performances in film history. She has the much more emotional role as the grieving widow and human representative and delivers an utterly spellbinding performance from start to finish. While Bridges’ arc is focused on slowly understanding human culture and emotion, Allen’s is all about opening herself back up to humanity. Both go through a journey of realising how important interaction and random moments of beauty are to the spirit, whether you’re a human or an alien, and they make each other more complete beings by spending this time together. The central plot is built around the alien needing Jenny to take him to Arizona within a few days before his ship leaves for his home planet, and watching as both of them develop as lovers and as people before the imminent departure. We know from the start that the alien has to go home, he will die if he stays, Jenny will have to watch another man with the face of the love of her life never come home. While at first, this isn’t a bad thing for Jenny since she’s resistant to the journey and the incorporation of her husband Scott’s image, she quickly starts to engage with him as much more than just an outsider or a facade. She loves him not just because of the face he wears, but because of the spirit that lies beneath the body. The face allows herself to open back up to the prospect of love, the soul is what leads her to finding it again, even in just a few days. Their sex scene together is remarkably intimate, with no focus placed on anything but the tenderness of their bodies in sync, how comfortable they feel against the other. It is a beautiful sequence made even better by the idea of him creating a baby for her to have forever, the son with the face of Scott that couldn’t happen during his lifetime, a child that also has a part of her new lover too.
The film is only particularly dramatic a few times, with cuts back to the government trying to find Bridges acting as almost a red herring of conflict, establishing the global drama that the situation has caused without ever forcing the film into a more generic final act. The two leads are only separated once, for a few minutes after a near death experience and miraculous act from our alien, and manage to engage with the more humanistic member of government to grant him a safe return to home. The melodrama is not bogged down in unnecessary conflicts which take away from the central relationship, it is all focused on these two beings and the inherent emotion that comes from their dynamic being on borrowed time. Carpenter realises that the last few moments with the two of them can’t be defined by empty suits or agonised drama. It’s all about them, what they say to each other, what their last words have to be. There is enough there to mesmerise. Carpenter’s true masterstroke is establishing the greater consequences to make the audience feel the complexities of the alien’s arrival, before slowly pivoting away from them as the climax draws closer. The ending is one of the most beautiful moments in cinematic history as it is fully centred on him using the language and culture of humans to give Jenny a perfect moment to remember for the rest of her life. He says goodbye exactly how she wants him to, with a kiss, with an “I love you” and a final image that she’ll never be able to forget. It is still a goodbye but the one that she never got to have with Scott. Karen Allen’s final facial expression mixed with Carpenter’s best ever composition is perhaps my favourite final shot in a film, watching it now reduced me to an uncontrollable fit of tears, yet a sense of true happiness. It is so beautiful to witness her get a final few moments with a face that she thought would only exist in videotape and memory. As she stares into space, there is not sadness in her eyes but sheer awe and gratitude, like she can’t even believe what’s just happened to her. That’s the face of someone in love, that constant staggering sensation of disbelief, the feeling of true luck that you got to have a perfect moment with a perfect person. It’s the face of someone who knows they’ll never forget and never be forgotten, at least while the other’s heart beats. Starman made me believe in love when I’d never truly felt it, and makes me feel it so deeply in my chest now that I know what it’s like to call it my own.
I have thought to myself many times about what I’d have done if I’d known at the start of our relationship about what would happen to her only a few months into our love. Would I have chosen to embrace us in spite of the knowledge that I might lose her sooner than either of us could have predicted? Would I have signed on for a year of certain pain and loneliness knowing what comes from choosing to be in love? And in my heart, I’ve never been more certain of anything than saying yes. I know that I would have. Because to me, the possibility of pain and sadness is worth finding a few perfect moments of connection with the most beautiful girl in the world. As much as it’s hurt, love strengthens me, it keeps me going, it brings me hope and spirituality and strength unlike anything I’ve ever felt. I know in my soul that this year without my love would have hurt even worse if she had not been in my life at all. She gives me a reason to keep believing in the world, she’s the person I see in my dreams, the human being that I can call my own. I don’t know who I’d be without her, and if I have to watch her go, it will be pain that’s impossible to even comprehend, but I will be so grateful that I was the person that was lucky enough to love her. That’s what Starman represents to me, choosing to love in spite of the knowledge that there will be heartbreak, right now, at the end of the tunnel, wherever it might come. It’s not a happy movie but it’s a healing one, as we witness Jenny get to open herself back up to love and get a new goodbye from the image of her husband, a goodbye that’s not so sudden and endlessly black. Even as they face their end together and say their final words, there is pure unadulterated catharsis. Because when love is right, you get those perfect moments together, those moments that shift your entire consciousness, that reshape the way you look at the stars. I know that no matter what happens, I’ll never think of a rose the same way as I used to before her. And even if the waiting turns out to be pointless, every single night, I still believe it’ll be the time when she finally comes back to me. That after all the long months, I’ll see a message where she calls me her bunny and it’ll be like no time ever passed, it’ll just be the two of us floating amongst the cosmos together. Hopefully one day it will be.