“No answer is also an answer.”
Notes on the assumed effect of Judaism on certain movies: Cafe Society” and “Between Both Temples” and how we can use it in our own lives as well.
I watched Cafe Society over the weekend.
The movie stars Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, Steve Carell, Blake Lively, and Corey Stoll.
And while it’s an okay movie, what I want to talk about is its ending.
At the end of the movie, Vonny (played by Kristen Stewart) and Bobby Dorfman (played by Jesse Eisenberg) are at different New Year parties, and they are captured staring off wistfully into the distance during the celebrations, and that scene cuts to the closing credits.
The story here is that Vonny and Bobby were/are in love with each other, but due to certain circumstances couldn’t be together. When Vonny had to choose between Bobby and Bobby’s uncle, Phil Stern, a big-time Hollywood agent living and operating out of Los Angeles, Vonny chose Phil (played by Steve Carell).
Later on, Bobby went on to marry Veronica (played by Blake Lively) and had a fairly satisfactory family life.
But then Vonny visited New York with Phil, where Bobby had a nightclub, and they both had a very short-lived affair. Afterward, they choose not to see each other again, but during the final scenes, we see them staring off wistfully in what can be interpreted to mean mutual desire.
But they are in two different worlds, and there is no hint that they will get what they want.
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The reason this closing scene stands out to me is that I noticed it is a trend in movies where Judaism is a big theme.
Another movie where I saw it happen was in Between The Temples, where a grieving widower, Ben Gottlieb, played by Jason Schwartzman, falls in love with his music teacher, Carla, who also happened to be his Bat Mitzvah student (long story, no foul play). He professes his feelings of love to her, and her response is to run away.
The next day after his confession, he conducts Carla’s Bat Mitzvah in her backyard, and that’s that. They don’t talk about his confession, they don’t talk about how he suffered a head injury while running after her.
They simply wake up and go about their day.
In Cafe Society, Bobby’s mom says something that made me think Judaism has a role to play in these endings. This was after she was told that her son, Benjamin, a convicted murderer who was sentenced to die in the electric chair, wanted to convert to Christianity before his execution because Christianity had an afterlife, while Judaism didn’t.
She commented quietly after protesting loudly, saying, “No answer is also an answer. Too bad the Jewish religion doesn’t have an afterlife, they’d get a lot more customers.”
To her, the lack of an attractive conclusion made Judaism, when compared to other religions in the world, less sexy. And it looks like this lack of an attractive conclusion had an effect on the making of these 2 movies. Which made it easy for the directors to end them with an ellipsis rather than a full stop.
I want to believe that the absence of an afterlife, an ending that doesn’t seem conclusive, would force us to learn satisfaction, urgency, and the art of bouncing back.
Because when there is no definite conclusion, you can always pick up where you left off, no failure is so fatal that it can’t be fixed, nothing except death is so conclusive that you can’t always go back to revise it. Nothing is so negatively earth-shattering that you can’t move on from it.
I believe this is beautiful and needed since our need to control the outcome even after death has made us so incredibly selfish that we risk everything for nothing. Being able to live with no answer being an answer will allow us more liberty to explore different opportunities, and allow our imagination to roam wide and wild without feeling the need to constrain ourselves to definite outcomes.
What do you think?
