The Notebook Has No Excuses

    The thing about film is … the more you think about it, the less sense it makes.

Film tells us, even in a society obsessed with wealth and gain, “Remember, George, no man is a failure who has friends.” Film warns us that the most unnatural evil lies in wait at the Overlook Hotel and peeks out when all the guests leave for the winter–and that the heart of it resides in room 237–knowing we'll trip over ourselves wanting to open that door. Film is what makes us believe that the vessel for the deepest human emotion could be contained in a cartoon clownfish taking his unhatched cartoon son and holding him in his cartoon fin and telling him he will never let anything happen to him. 

Nights of Cabiria (1957)

Even when it tries to plant its feet aggressively in realism, film winds up being an inherently emotional realm. We feel safer to view and express all manners of passions or desires here in the space where the rules of propriety just don’t matter anymore.

So a fair question, I suppose, is whether symbolism and metaphor justify anything and everything. Is all fair game under the pretense of catharsis? Do we just put good sense in the backseat and accept whatever the film presents as good or true?

… Let’s talk about The Notebook.

Based on the 1996 novel by Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook is a romantic-drama directed by Nick Cassavetes and starring Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling. The film follows two lovebirds, Noah and Allie, who have a summer romance as teens. Parents and World War II tear them apart only for them to reunite years later. This story is presented in frame narrative as Noah recounts this story to Allie, now in hospice care and suffering from Alzheimer's. 

    The film grossed an impressive $117 M worldwide on a budget of $29 M. Reviews were mixed, but it was not without its champions. Stephen Holden of The New York Times declared, “Their performances are so spontaneous and combustible that you quickly identify with the reckless sweethearts, who embody an innocence that has all but vanished from American teenage life. And against your better judgment, you root for the pair to beat the odds against them.” And it has found continued support in the time since. Total Film ranked both Noah and Allie’s rain kiss and Noah climbing the ferris wheel to ask out Allie on its lists of most romantic movie moments of all time.  

I take no particular pride in my irritation with The Notebook, even as its inclusion on these lists does sort of cheapen the merits of other, better films in the genre. Though, I’ve also found out that I am not alone in hating The Notebook, or so I am left assuming after reading Sarah Stewart’s CNN piece, “Turn Out I’m Not Alone in Hating The Notebook.”

“If you’re able to watch ‘The Notebook’ with a certain remove, sure, it can function as dramatic entertainment and nothing more. But I’d argue when the result of absorbing decades of misogynist fairy tales is a terrible relationship that does lasting damage to your psyche and/or your body, it’s not just a movie anymore. It’s real life. And the more I talk to people who’ve gotten out of abusive relationships, the more necessary I realize it is to talk openly and often about the messages we’re all being fed through the Hollywood pipeline.”

    I have a complicated relationship with this kind of criticism. This sort of monkey see/monkey do way of explaining media influence has a lot in common with arguments that little girls didn’t start rebelling against their parents until November 1989 when Ariel told her father “I’m sixteen years old! I’m not a child anymore!” Film is a vessel for capturing and studying the psychology of all sorts of phenomenon including teenage rebellion. It all just comes down to how much consideration the author of the film afforded its subject--Ariel is not the reason your 9th grader didn't do her homework.

The exact relationship between onscreen depiction and real-life imitation is complex. But perhaps we can agree that films are not made in a vacuum. The kind of senseless abandon that is so often written off as romantic can also obscure certain non-negotiable realities. Toxic behavior can be written off as just a harmless quirk of hot-blooded romance—and it has. So I don’t think that the author of that CNN piece is off in her assessment that the film’s sentimental imagery allows it to get away with romanticizing behavior that is anything but romantic. McAdams and Gosling are electric in this movie, yes. They are also combative in a way that borders on abusive, something that is not even moderately examined within the movie. The parts of the movie that aren’t completely weightless are just straight-up repulsive.

And I get it. The Notebook is sweeping. It’s deeply emotional. (You know, in a similar way that Dear Evan Hansen is a deeply emotional film … that feels like it’s being censored by a dishonest narrator and refuses to examine the moral implications of its scenario.) I don’t consider it to be some embarrassing character flaw if this is a person’s favorite film. It’s been fifteen years and I still can’t get over that stupid Clash of the Titans remake. Films are weird like that. Just the same, I do want to force The Notebook to reckon with its own failings. Because a film like this doesn’t really have that many outs. Not when there are so many other movies that perform this same basic function without creating such a mess.

 

Young Love

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)

         Of all the fantasies acted out in the cinematic proscenium, the ritual of romance is probably the most central, the most universal. Hence, Hollywood likes to draw from this well as often as it can, even in movies we would not consider “romantic.” It’s easy to see why, and also how that would really boost the standing of a movie like The Notebook, a movie that jumps headfirst into unadulterated romance. Writer Julianna Morgan says,

“The ultimate message of this movie is whether your first love can be your one, true love. The conclusion is yes, if you fight hard enough and believe everything will work out you can end up with whoever you want.”

    And this is where we kind of run into the first major criticism of The Notebook: it’s just unforgivably sappy. Now, it’s true that sentimentality is often unfairly penalized in the discourse as being too base or plebian, even as many of the most profound works of cinema have dealt directly with matters of the human heart. But that kind of emotionality takes careful tempering in order to pull off—same as any other approach—and The Notebook is anything but careful or judicious about when it breaks out the sugar cubes.

         You see this perhaps most in Older Noah’s commentary, which leaves absolutely nothing to imagination. At one point the narration prefaces Noah and Allie’s breakup by saying, “Summer romances begin for all kinds of reasons, but when all is said and done, they have one thing in common. They're shooting stars, a spectacular moment of light in the heavens, fleeting glimpse of eternity, and in a flash they're gone.” To tally, that’s ... shooting stars, heaven, and eternity, all in one single sentence.

        As a point of comparison, Ever After reaches for the same kind of elation with many of the characters speaking in this eternally heightened poetic talk, but it shows much more confidence in its own emotionality. When faced with the prospect of meeting Prince Henry at the ball, Danielle proposes, “A bird may love a fish, signore, but where will they live?” to which da Vinci simply replies, “Then I shall have to make you wings.”

         You can feel the difference between these two attempts at romanticism. The writing in Ever After is sentimental, yes, but it’s not what I’d call indulgent. It knows what point it’s trying to make, and it makes it clearly. It doesn’t try to stuff each expression with every Valentine buzzword so the audience doesn’t forget that this is a luvstory. What’s more, the writing itself is smart. Danielle crafts a poetic vehicle to express her conundrum, and da Vinci matches with an answer that is equally clever, while also being deeply affecting.  (For those confused, yes, Ever After is a historically based Cinderella story in which the real-life Leonardo da Vinci basically serves as the fairy godmother.)

    Something else I want to establish early on is that this fervor over young puppy dog love isn’t exclusively the domain of mainstream Hollywood. “Real movies” can be just as sentimental about these things. Zhang Yimou’s 1999 Chinese film, The Road Home, is a story about love at first sight from a bygone era, much like The Notebook. There are all sorts of sequences in this film that explore how even the tease of just meeting eyes with someone across the field can become this all-consuming thought.

         Like The Road Home, the drive behind Noah and Allie’s love story is some nostalgic veneration of young love, some idyllic version of romance that surely only happens in stories. Both films bolster the romance of their story by leaning heavily on archetype and a luscious visual backdrop. But The Notebook winds up needing to be much more psychological than it wants to be because it insists on digging its heels in on rationalizing the holes of its own relationship. We end up having to interrogate the viability of this landmine of a couple in a way you don’t with other romantic works of high melodrama.

        West Side Story has the same kind of obsession with youthful love at first sight as justifying any and all kinds of craziness. We could potentially go to town talking about whether Tony and Maria would have lasted as a couple, but it’s way less fun to have those conversations for a few reasons. Like Noah and Allie, Tony and Maria come from two different worlds, and that’s part of what gives their romance so much spark. 

But a huge part of the engine with Tony and Maria’s two-day fling is that it emerges out of such a violent, angry world where kids are literally killing each other. The tease that even this flicker of love could overpower this darkness fills you with enough hope that you want these two crazy kids to make it anyway.

    The Notebook wants to climb into that same boat and have you believe that these two are the torchbearers for romantics everywhere, but as Holden couldn’t help but admit in his own review, you are kind of rooting for them against your better judgment. The issue with The Notebook has never been about crossing a certain emotional threshold. It was always way simpler than that.

 

“They Challenged Each Other”

        Because romance in particular is such an inherently emotional territory, it makes sense that we wouldn’t want to tie it down with the real-life strictures we apply to other areas—least of all in the realm of storytelling.

    You see people try to probe something like “love at first sight” as it appears in something like a classical Disney fairy-tale. There’s a tendency to take these things hyper-literally, like four-year-old Samantha is going to watch Phillip and Aurora dancing in the woods and grow up to have a shotgun Vegas wedding with the first guy who finds her picking berries in the woods, but these claims end up putting more into the scenario than what the text of the story is itself offering. (I literally have a three-part series exploring why that's one of the dumbest arguments in Western literature.) That’s not really the case with Noah and Allie where the cracks are on full display.

         Older Noah puts it in best terms when he narrates, “They didn’t agree on much, in fact they rarely agreed on anything. They challenged each other every day. But they had one thing in common: they were crazy about each other.” Those are the exact words from the film, and it doesn’t take much modification at all to reveal the holes in this fabric–and it still wouldn’t even if that narration wasn’t paired with shots of Noah and Allie literally screaming at and slapping each other. 

    The red flags start sprouting basically from the start of Noah and Allie’s interactions. Noah coerces Allie into going out with him while she is on a date with another guy. When asked, she specifically says she does not want to go out with him, but after he pursues her to the top of the ferris wheel and threatens to fall to his death if she does not say yes, she acquiesces. And things don’t get better once they finally get together. They spend the entire summer making out because anytime they come up for air, they inevitably start arguing, sometimes getting physical, sometimes not.

And this is all before the mid-point, by the by. In fairness, Noah and Allie are less actively antagonistic to one another in that second half. But it’s in that second hour where the film gives what is probably the least helpful relationship advice ever put to film. When Allie correctly points out that they can’t be in the same room without getting at each other’s throats, Noah justifies this all, saying,

“Well that's what we do, we ‘fight!’ You tell me when I am being an arrogant son of a bitch and I tell you when you are a pain in the ass. Which you are, 99% of the time. I'm not afraid to hurt your feelings. You have like a 2 second rebound rate, then you're back doing the next pain-in-the-ass thing.” 

The film is buying into the trap that a volatile relationship is the same as a good one. My back hurts writing this but ... while tempestuous relationships seem very exciting, the kind of romance that endures across the decades is based more on commitment than turbulence. At some point, the roller coaster just gives you a stomachache and you start wanting a carrousel.

    To be clear, I don’t think the faults of the film are as straightforward as Noah and Allie being imperfect humans and that creating friction. The honest display of human flaws is kind of the reason why we have storytelling to begin with—I have waved that flag many times in this space alone. And there is also a human element that encompasses some disagreement and squabbling--even healthy couples fight sometimes. That's not the issue here.

    The problem is the false advertising. The movie tries to phrase this facet of their relationship like this is itself somehow proof of their love for each other. But anyone can see based on their argument-to-peacetime ratio that these two people are at best a bad fit--at worst, genuinely abusive. Noah's assertion that he's not afraid to hurt her feelings implies that stepping on her toes like this suggests that he is somehow saving her from making poor decisions. But this claim is unsubstantiated. We never see either of them speaking harsh truth to the other that somehow gets them off a bad trajectory. The only thing Noah convinces Allie to do is leave a perfectly loving fiancé.

    I haven’t read the Nicholas Sparks novel, so I’m basing this entirely on secondhand sources, but the book apparently did not have Noah and Allie being quite so combative or toxic: Noah manipulating Allie going out with him, the two of them having a spat right before she leaves for school, these were apparently added in adaptation for reasons we can only speculate. It's maybe also fair to acknowledge that this movie did not invent this faulty model, but neither did it bother to give the issue due consideration once they were before it.

This point of two imperfect people being good for each other despite their issues is much better argued in something like Silver Linings Playbook. Both parties here carry a lot of baggage, both in the context of their struggles with mental health and as it pertains to their own character flaws.

    One of the best scenes in the film has Pat thoughtlessly shaming Tiffany for having had sex with everyone in her office during one of her depressive episodes. This causes her to lash out at him publicly, which then triggers a psychological attack in Pat. This places him in danger of having another outburst, which would land him in psychiatric confinement or worse. When Tiffany recognizes what is happening to him, she not only jumps to his defense, but she also helps talk him out of his attack.

The scene starts by confessing how, yes, these two powder kegs absolutely have the potential to rile each other up. But as it progresses, the scenario displays how their experiences with mental health actually put them in positions to sympathize with one another and become one another's biggest champions, especially in those moments where it seems like they are beyond retrieval. Tiffany is able to pull Pat out of his tailspin is because he trusts her. Tiffany's own history puts her in a position to empathize with him when no one else can.

Most essentially, after this little episode you see both players making amends and doing better. Not only does Pat stop casting judgment about her sexual and mental history, he actively speaks up on her behalf to his superiors, to total strangers, and even to his own friends. We aren’t just taking the film at its word that these two are good for each other.

    Scarlet and Rhett of Gone with the Wind have a similar combatant style of romance, but that feeds naturally into their individual personalities. It is basically Scarlet’s defining characteristic that she is used to getting what she wants. She’s so used to manipulating others to fall in her line that it’s honestly kind of a breath of fresh air when someone can genuinely frustrate her. The man who can see through her is also a man who can see her. 

    Moreover, both Scarlet and Rhett are people who place such value into appearing a certain way that the tease of them being with a person who truly disarms them sounds just too good to pass up. And during their prolonged relationship, even the periods where they aren’t actually involved romantically, that back-and-forth repartee that makes them so entertaining also covers moments of genuine vulnerability, extending aid to one another, physically or emotionally. We see genuine tenderness between them. 

We can have lots of conversations about the presentation of that relationship as well (and other parts of the movie), but there is a distinction to be drawn. Anyways, there is a ceiling to how much we can say the film romanticizes their combativeness given the state of the relationship at the end of the film. Unlike with Noah and Allie, there are consequences to the actions of Scarlet and Rhett.

    I don’t know. Maybe this film would have been better if Noah and Allie had pushed each other away. People reaping what they sow helps draw the sympathy of the audience because we all know what it’s like to feel subject to our own shortcomings and blind spots. What actually makes The Notebook feel like a ruse is the way this total absence of consequence. This is a messy situation in which absolutely no one gets hurt.

You see this especially in the way that both Noah and Allie are allowed to cheat on their other romantic partners without even making anyone mad. Martha is happy to meet the girl Noah’s been thinking about while they were screwing. Lon is sad for a moment when he finds out his fiancé cheated on him, but then he just wants her to be happy. This perhaps less of a problem for Noah and Martha given that they had a more casual arrangement (or so we are being told by the story’s male narrator …) but there is a measure of appropriate frustration toward Allie for subjecting James Marsden to this.

And the film tries to weave in little signifiers that Allie is out of her element or somehow not being true to herself by choosing Lon. Allie remarks to Lon that she hasn’t been painting much since they started dating, and this is meant to cue that she hasn’t really been herself while they were together. But I honestly forgot that painting was a thing she ever did with Noah, let alone that it was apparently her life’s calling. It feels like the story is just planting evidence for the jury, much like how the film tells us there are apologies hidden somewhere in all this. Always over letter, never in person--but reportedly they're there ...

Jerry Maguire (1996)

    And that’s maybe the most frustrating failure of this as a romantic vehicle. It overlooks how a person is never more endearing than when they are well and truly disarmed. Getting two hot celebrities to take off their clothes in front of the camera is easy. Bringing them to a point where they would wrestle against their own nature and bare their soul, that's real romance.

But Noah and Allie are never really vulnerable with one another. Physically, sure, the film leaves no doubt about that. But never emotionally. There’s never a moment of saying sorry. Never a shoulder to cry on. The only thing they really have to offer, or are willing to offer, is really intense make-out appointments. 

Because relationships are not perfect, the people who act them out in our stories shouldn’t have to be either. We use this imagined space to explore what we as imperfect humans are supposed to do to love perfectly. And people are going to make mistakes. Learning to treat your loved one right takes practice and commitment. But when a relationship becomes more defined by the injuries it inflicts, it’s more than fair to ask what is even driving these two people together. 

What Do They Actually Gain from Each Other?

         I guess the ultimate question driving this conversation is …  what fantasy is The Notebook feeding? Why do we even want Allie and Noah to get together?

Joan Allen plays a much better mother in "Room" ...

    The best argument I’ve heard is something about Allie overcoming her parents’ dominion over her. And the scenario has some juice to it. Allie gets to find out that her mother was intercepting letters from her old boyfriend saying he wants to get back together, finding out that she has effectively been lied to and built an entire life based on falsehoods. I can’t say I would be sunshines and daisies after finding out my mother had actively sabotaged a relationship. But I’m not satisfied to say that this film does a good job at exploring this.

    (And if I’m being honest, I also still sometimes have to sell myself on Allie’s case a little. The film basically has to make the mother seem sorta gargoyle-ish, and also suggest that she is sexually repressed, in order to discredit her for taking the initiative in keeping her daughter safe from her abusive boyfriend.)

  The best way I know how to describe Noah and Allie is that they are essentially a lazy man’s Jack and Rose. Noah, for example, derives a lot of his authority as this street urchin with a heart of gold. Same as Jack. His lack of structure contrasts with Rose’s stilted upbringing. He is the gateway to Rose experiencing a fuller life outside her stifling home environment, much in the way that Noah is for Allie.

    But something we need to lay down is that … Rose wasn’t just being rescued from boredom. Her mother and fiancé were actively suppressing her, such that she was deliberating jumping off the boat when Jack comes into her life. Now, those are high stakes. I’m not saying people should only marry outside their class under threat of death. But I do think it illustrates the difference when your love story is rooted in something other than teenage hormones. 

The story also seriously disadvantages itself by jumping straight into Allie and Noah’s first meeting. The film provides little context for either of these crazy kids before forcing them together. We don’t know what they want for themselves or what they have to offer the other except the tease of romantic union itself.

Compare this to Titanic where we get to audition Jack and Rose as characters before we’re forced to ask whether we think they are good for each other. We know, for example, that Rose is perceptive. She has refined taste in art—which is supremely underappreciated in her circle. She is also socially intelligent and can see through the artifice that pervades her 1st class society. Jack, meanwhile, is a free spirit who doesn’t need much to be happy, but he also possesses an uncommon sensitivity.

    Obviously neither Rose nor Jack know any of these things about when they first catch eyes from across the deck, but the audience has seen these attributes at work, such when the idea is presented that these two instruments might get to blend together, they're ready to hear the music. (This can also work even if you only really get to interview one of the lovebirds ahead of time. Our first meeting of Rhett in Gone with the Wind happens alongside Scarlett's first encounter with him, but we've also gotten to know Scarlett very well by then.)

And something that I think we need to note about Jack’s free-spiritedness is how it manifests in very specific ways. Jack’s idea of a bold leap is running onto a high-class steamer as it’s pulling out of port, not so much manipulating cute girls into going on a date with him by threatening to kill himself if she doesn’t say “yes.” Jack takes risks with his own stock, he puts himself out of his comfort zone. That's what we admire about him. When we do see Jack inserting himself into Rose’s business, it’s when he correctly deduces that her environment is unsafe, and he crawls under the yellow tape to tell her she needs to get out of dodge before it suffocates her.

    For Rose, turning her back on this world isn’t just about picking the cuter guy, it’s also about walking away from a familiar but unsafe environment. Even before we have a clear answer on whether or not Rose and Jack are going to make it, Rose is allowed closure and victory for this long-standing hole in her life. Rose gets articulated moments to break away from both her authoritarian mother and her vindictive fiancé and take ownership of her life, something she is in a position to do after Jack helps her unlock that daring part of herself. That is how you can use romance as a vehicle for a character arc.

Allie might have had a similar moment by reclaiming the letters her mother was hiding for her, but her mother just offers them to her unprompted. This is more a failure of the writing itself than anything else, but it goes to show how the writers were not particularly concerned with giving these kids anything like growth.

    Neither is there any pay-off on Noah’s end. Noah is possibly bruised by what Allie’s mother says about him, and maybe that sets up him figuring out that it’s okay to be trash, but there is no real culminating moment to cap this off. You could argue that Noah fixing up his house out of sheer working-class charm is some sort of victory, but I’m straining to thread this with anything connected to Allie’s mom or any of the things that Allie’s upper-class sphere did or said to him.

  Allie basically spells out they in theory have to offer one another when she’s complaining to her mother. “You don’t look at daddy the way I look at Noah! You don’t touch him or laugh with him or play with him.” But she’s making their relationship sound so much substantial than it really was (and also ignoring a lot of crimson-red flags). This is textbook slumming.

Nicholas Sparks himself described the inspiration for his novel, recounting an experience seeing his wife’s grandparents,

"But though their story was wonderful, what I most remember from that day is the way they were treating each other. The way his eyes shined when he looked at her, the way he held her hand, the way he got her tea and took care of her. I remember watching them together and thinking to myself that after sixty years of marriage, these two people were treating each other exactly the same as my wife and I were treating each other after twelve hours. What a wonderful gift they’d given us, I thought, to show us on our first day of marriage that true love can last forever."

We can infer that this was the motivation behind the framing narrative of Noah reading to Allie even in the thick of her deterioration. The entire thrust of this film is that Noah has apparently been maintaining this ritual for some time now as a demonstration of his commitment to her. I guess this is meant to clarify that he did eventually work on himself, but we are taking things entirely at his word because absolutely nothing about this movie centers on two people learning how to take care of each other.

Honestly, there might have been some muscle to this story if there had been a third chapter five or so years down where Noah and Allie are planted together and face a genuine crossroads in their relationship. We could have had the opportunity maybe to see them do that thing we are promised they are doing offscreen and make the necessary sacrifices to the people they need each other to be.

    But for all the textual evidence we have in the film, it’s honestly not a stretch to imagine that Allie and Noah have not had a happy marriage. He could have invented the whole notebook ritual himself to let himself imagine that their partnership was way better than it was, and neither we nor Allie wouldn’t know any different.

I have to repeat there’s nothing wrong with the film’s base directive or foundation. True love doesn’t always make sense and doesn’t always obey the rules. That’s honestly why cinema is so well equipped to capture this sort of thing. Charles Silver, Curator, Department of Film, gave the following observation about City Lights.

"By the time of City Lights, [Charlie Chaplin] was in his forties, and his hair had turned white in the course of his legal disputes with ex-wife Lita Grey. He also perceived that the world was getting uglier around him. The threat to his career posed by sound films and the fact that he felt lonelier than ever can only have added to his perplexity. Somehow, in spite of or because of this, City Lights brought forth from him a lyrical romanticism far more intense than his earlier work. Like all romanticism, it was dependent on a denial of the present, a retreat from reality."

         But the retreat in City Lights has a different motivation. It’s a retreat from the unkindness that the world doles out so thoughtlessly. Your average Joe would not go to the insane lengths that The Tramp does to get the Flower Girl the means to pay for her operation, but Chaplin imagined a world where someone would, and his portrait was so lovely that it made people want to emulate the kindness they saw onscreen.

The Notebook? It’s a retreat from consequences. 

The Last Page

    An essential question to ask when deciding whether or not a movie is harmful is some variation of, "Who will see themselves in this character, or these characters?" Who will find this situation validating?

    So, let's ask, when Ryan Gosling tells Rachel McAdams that he's only a jerk to her because "I'm not afraid to hurt your feelings!" what kind of person will look at that and say, "See! What did I tell you?" 

    Defenses of this movie will often make some appeal to the idea of "wish fulfillment," of choosing to intake something corrosive under the pretense that it's not so bad so long as you verbally acknowledge its dangerous properties. I think there is a definite limit to how far this can stretch: "Maybe it's fine to drink bleach so long as I tell myself, 'I am drinking bleach.'"

Psycho (1960)

    This is also different than what we talked about in our meditation on Classic Hollywood and watching movies containing material that we'd now call "outdated." You can look at something that emerged from an ecosystem with an immature understanding of multiculturalism and learn something, while also still appreciating the merits of the film being examined.

    But the problem with The Notebook has nothing to do with lacking a strong foundation on which to build or reference. I spent so much of this essay referencing better romances with much stronger emotional pay-offs for a reason.

    I'm not saying no one can glean anything good or true from The Notebook or that anyone who tries must be a doo-doo head. But the longstanding tendency to normalize that which is cringeworthy about this movie has had a lot to do with something about "It's just a silly romance! Stop overthinking it!" As though romance itself were a lesser genre. And so it winds up having a lot in common with something like Mamma Mia, validating stigmas against a genre that disservice entire bodies of work until outsiders are left wondering why anyone in their right mind would enjoy something like this. When we were discussing this movie, someone in my editing circle put it best when she described, "The most annoying thing about The Notebook is how it makes people think that romance movies are so much dumber than they actually are."

Millennium Actress (2001)

    All storytelling involves some form of imagination or metaphor. You can have tremendous emotional resonance with something you have not literally experienced, or indeed could not literally experience. But when the interpretation is true, the distance travelled isn't actually that far from reality.

         Storytelling can make a situation or a relationship feel like something other than what it actually is, but not all distortions are created equal. When there’s no basis in truth, that’s when a film stops being a fantasy and just devolves into a lie, and we ought to aspire for more than that.

        --The Professor