A Break-Up Letter for Oliver Stone
Dearest Oliver,
No, wait. I shouldn’t say “dearest” anymore; you see, I think it is time we broke up. Now, don’t whine… I should have done this ages ago.
We had a great run. You caught me when I was young and vulnerable, an impressionable girl, excited about the world. You taught me to live with reckless abandon. You taught me not to sit back and merely accept what my elders told me. You taught me to protest, to speak up, to question. Question everything. The government, society, money, war, peace, love. You taught me about love.
Love. Many people have never understood our love. Never understood how a girl like me- silly, Southern, a lover of Jane Austen and ice cream- could learn to love from a man like you- privileged, outspoken, a prodigiously talented rabble-rouser. “It’s easy,” I would say- and point them to the vast array of your work. Your shocking, provocative, full-of-life work. It was- you were- everything I wanted to be and do. My mother would sigh and mutter something about my marrying a doctor as my sister had; she never understood why I would chose film- “Art,” I would interrupt- over stability.
But then you became unstable. Unhinged, in fact. Instead of righteous indignation, you became self-righteous. Preaching to me- at higher and higher octaves- about increasingly uncompelling topics. Empty flag-waving patriotism, incestuous ancient melodrama, Texas buffoonery masquerading as something “important!” Where were the conspiracy theories? Where was the quick, audacious take on societal norms? Where was the heart, the excitement, the joy, the anger, the craziness, the pathology?
Where was the man I fell in love with all those years ago?
I stuck by you much longer than I should have, much longer than any of your other long-time lovers. I stuck by you, defended you. Your forgiving mistress, I followed you around like a loyal poodle, trusting that my faith in you might one day restore you to greatness.
But I was wrong.
This fall you betrayed me for the last time. Your old vim and vigor replaced with product placement and pithy self-plagiarism. At last, I saw you for what you really are, what you’d become: a man desperate to recapture what you once were, regurgitating old glories on screen- but without the bite, the brawl. Without the love.
Without the passion.
What is the opposite of passion? When I left the theater after Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, I felt the opposite of passion. And the feeling haunted me for weeks: what was this odd detachment, this dismissiveness in my heart? And then one day I knew… I had fallen out of love with you. At last.
I’d like to reassure your fragile ego and say, “it’s not you, it’s me.” But that is just not true. It’s you. And it’s over.
Best wishes,
The Buster Chaplin Blog
