July 23, 2000
Last of the Mohicans
I'm a little irked at myself today. I'd meant to go to church this morning, and I completely forgot in my desire to sleep in. This might sound odd, but I took a religion quiz online, where it asks what you believe, then tells you which religion best fits your beliefs. Not terribly surprising, I came up as a Unitarian Universalist. It's a religion I've looked at before, and after taking the quiz I looked into it further. I'm interested in learning more. I just need to get my butt out of bed on Sunday mornings and go to the church here in town.
Aside from sleeping in, I did some writing earlier and then watched Last of the Mohicans. I think I only saw it once in the theatres, but I remembered liking it very much. My thought while watching it was that it was a movie with something for everyone: Daniel Day Lewis in wet buckskin, Madeline Stowe in wet linen, lots of violence... what else do you want?
Seriously though, I don't think I cried at any point while watching it the first time, but I do remember leaving the theatre feeling as if I'd been walloped between the eyebrows. There's one scene that always gives me chills. The heroes, hiding in a cave behind a waterfall, learn that they're about to be discovered. Hoping to avoid a fight, Hawkeye is forced to leave Cora behind. With the sound of roaring water all around, she tells him to go, that even if she dies, part of her will live on through him. He grabs her by the shoulders, and shouts over the sound of the water, "You be strong, you survive... You stay alive, no matter what occurs! I will find you. No matter how long it takes, no matter how far, I will find you." The sheer intensity behind those words just absolutely melts my poor little romantic heart.
The Last of the Mohicans does a lot of communicating without dialogue. Lewis and Stowe spend a lot of time gazing at each other, all aching dark eyes and floating long dark hair (for that matter, the characters Uncas and Alice do the same thing). That sort of thing always kills me. Anyway, after he says those lines, Cora doesn't nod, she just... looks at him. Utter trust. No matter how far away the Huron take her, no matter what they do to her, she believes Hawkeye when he says he'll find her. So he leaps dramatically through the waterfall and Cora gets captured.
I realized while watching that today... I don't trust like that. If I had been in Cora's place, I would have begged for an even stronger reassurance, and even then I would have been somehow certain that Hawkeye would forget me, or would fail. Part of me doesn't trust the people I love. Not completely. If someone says they'll call, I fret over whether or not they will, until they do. If for some reason they don't, I'm never surprised.
I can't make sense of it. I trust people with my heart, with every single emotion I have, but I don't trust them to ultimately do what they say they'll do. I can't figure out if it's because of my own esteem issues or something else entirely. Part of it goes back to being married, I think. I honestly couldn't trust Gary to do what he told me he'd do. Anything from getting a job to cleaning up the kitchen, I knew that if I didn't remind him, it wouldn't get done. Hollingsworth had some of the same problems. He'd tell me he'd do something, usually something minor, and then wouldn't do it. Little things. Always little things. And they added up.
So if my life were in jeopardy, and the man I loved told me he'd find me, he'd rescue me... part of me would be very doubtful. I'd make a terrible movie heroine.
Posted by Lisa at July 23, 2000 08:44 PM
