The Postmodern Promise in Away We Go

Breaking the high art cinema wake of his films Revolutionary Road and American Beauty, Sam Mendes (better known in some gossip circles as Kate Winslet’s husband), gracefully plods his way through the sacred beauty and tragedy of real life in Away We Go.

Burt and Verona are joyous and honest people.  They revel in each other, in the hurts and frustrations of a surprise preganancy that happens at the same time as a sudden loss of home.  Burt’s parents live nearby but decide to move to Belgium a month before their grandchild is due.  Verona’s parents have passed.  Without parents to center their own home around, the young couple, fearful of what their arrested development may mean for the child they welcome into the world, go on cross country trip to figure out what kind of parents they want to be and where they want to live.

To not reveal anything more about the movie let me just say this: Verona refuses to marry Burt, though she is deeply in love with Burt and having his child.  This is reminiscent of the character Neil (played by Ben Affleck) in He’s Just Not That Into You.  Increasingly in our postmodern culture marriage is seen as unnecessary to truly love someone, as Neil and Verona argue.  This stance is usually met with conservative scorn, yet I think that such derision of the crumbling of our culture by cohabitation is misguided.  Surely there are many instances of bad cohabitation scenarios just as there are bad marriages.  The point is, movies resonate with our culture, and I think the increasing tie of togetherness to love (and not to material things) is a big turn in how my generation, and other postmoderns tend to view things: when everything else around us has collapsed, we can only rely on each other as our centers (and hopefully not ourselves).  

We first must be attentive to the fact that these movies offer a lens to a thoughtfully engaged postmodern culture that is not Christian.  It would be ridiculous to see their characters vouching for Christian marriage.  The writers behind Away We Go and He’s Just Not That Into You are writing from within a postmodern culture, one that for some has seen a revision of stories that has become a new conservative approach to family, one not rooted in the Church or Tradition but in the moral center of the couple.  This is evident in the Apatow comedies 40 Year Old Virgin (virginity is okay if it’s okay for the couple) and Knocked Up (you can do the right thing and have a child out of wedlock even if everyone else, including your family, thinks you’re insane) or Juno (you can do the right thing and give a child up for adoption…).  These culturally relevant yet thoughtful movies have a very conservative stance on social or family issues without taking a Christian approach, and I think this is because at the center of this postmodern "conservative" turn is the postmodern value of the promise.

For those of us who are living within faith communities we are blessed by a spiritual center.  This does not exist for those like Burt and Verona, who suddenly find themselves spiritually and literally homeless.  The institutions of marriage and traditional family structures have become irreversibly damaged for many in my generation, and the response in the culture vacuum has been either perpetual homelessness, never finding a center and floating aimlessly through life or to reimagine the old center of Church or Tradition within the individual couple.  Burt and Verona will never marry, but they make siginificant, vow-like promises to each other similar to marriage vows.  A similar approach is taken between Neil and Beth in He’s Just Not That Into You, but Neil ends up going through the ceremony he vowed (ironic?) never to go through for love’s sake.  The promise replaces the marriage ceremony as the center of the relationship in both instances nonetheless.

The promise is important to our understanding of the postmodern generations as detached from a narrative of understanding one’s life as the ceremony that grounds a postmodern family together when marriage, whether Christian or cultural, no longer does.  The promise is short hand for the marriage ceremony for my generation, much like saying your vows before God out in the fields and not in church (until later) was common in Shakespeare’s day.  The couple becomes the only moral center in a world where a narrative understanding of our role in the Story has eroded and decayed.

As Burt and Verona are sitting on a trampoline, confused and scarred by the coldness and cruel absurdity of life, they promise each other a love that lasts forever, a postmodern promise that is the centering force, the sustaining element of their joy and struggles together, enabling them to grow together and mend their past hurts as they await the joy of a little baby.  We must never forget that we walk amist people struggling like them, to find their center, to find their story beyond themselves.