A love that’s worth some risk

To be clear, Apple TV’s The Gorge—starring Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy—is a dumb movie, in the best possible 1980s-esque way (more below). But it’s also a movie where both main characters relinquish all of their modern tech—laptops, iPhones, and so forth—within the first ten minutes and then end up falling in love via Empire State Building-type viewfinders from across a gorge.

Regarding the tech they use to fall in love: She (a Lithuanian sniper) has a record player and a large note-pad on which she writes messages. He (an American sniper) appears to have nothing but a dry-erase marker (for his own message-writing) and a coffee machine. They are both unspeakably lonely, due to living in cool-looking but sparsely appointed 1950s-era surveillance towers on either side of a gorge—which gorge contains all kinds of scary and dumb-looking monsters, which monsters are the product of a “perfect-soldier” type genetics experiment gone awry. Their job is to monitor a bunch of machine-gun stanchions intended to keep the monsters in the gorge and out of the non-gorge world.

Also, the gorge itself looks exactly like the set of Stranger Things what with its preponderance of evil-looking ooze and filth and low-light, and monsters that do a lot of what I’ll call “chittering” but there’s probably a better word for it. The Bicycle Thief, this isn’t. But it is a fun two hours.

He whiles away the pre-love hours reading poetry (subtext: he has a sensitive side) while she listens to good records and drinks potato vodka (subtext: she’d be a fun hang). The movie is ostensibly about protecting the world from the monsters but is actually about how people meet and fall in love, especially in rather implausible circumstances and without the benefits (or strictures) of modern technology.

First, because they’re alone in their respective mid-century towers for an entire year, the characters don’t presuppose that “maybe there’s somebody better out there.” They literally only have each other to communicate with, and the communication itself takes effort and intentionality. But the movie is good at illustrating how real, heartfelt communication is still pretty magical.

Second, because of the lack of intel they have on one another going in—i.e. no social media or dating profiles to stalk—their only data points about one another are what they can see or observe through the viewfinders. As a result, their messages are substantial, and one gets the impression that they need each other to navigate a world that is increasingly dark and challenging.

Third, despite both of them being super lethal military snipers, they embody pretty traditional gender roles. When he finally grappling-hooks his way across the gorge (at great risk to his person), she insists that he shower and look nice for dinner, and then cooks him a nice meal. She doesn’t pooh-pooh the idea of him taking the lead and (quite literally) taking bullets for her as the story reaches its apex. The film fails to offer nuanced and complex takes on gender politics and in doing so, perhaps, fails to be a film but really succeeds at being a movie—meaning a thing that you want to watch for two hours on a Friday night. The kind of movie where the heroes face risks and defeat bad guys, but in which it really wasn’t about defeating bad guys at all, but rather about walking through a complicated world in unity with another.

Now this is in no way meant to suggest that the way to fall in love is to find a lethal gorge with a woman on the other side. But I think it’s safe to say it suggests that not all risk is bad, not all anxiety is debilitating, and that sometimes there’s something (or someone) really good on the other side of it.

I encounter male students every semester who live in an endless vortex of SnapChats that aren’t going anywhere, and who live in the kind of fear that keeps them trapped in stasis. It’s the kind of stasis that says, “If I take a risk and fail, and ‘everyone’ sees it, then I’ll hurt and feel shame … so I won’t take any kind of risk at all.” They desire a relationship (in theory) but remain alone, year after year.

Courage is a muscle that has to be trained. And I think, in general, my generation of Christian parents has done a pretty terrible job of allowing our kids to experience risk and potential failure. We give them epics to read about courage, about which they can write endless and boring response papers, but then we never let them practice true courage. We got the keys to the “control” Ferrari and we encouraged our kids to kiss dating goodbye, and then left it sitting in the garage for two decades, where it’s safe.

Sometimes a dumb movie can teach a smart thing: When we put down our tech and start living our lives, something magical might happen.