Should give you at least one full play…

Hopefully.

I have the feeling I've just enjoyed The Brothers Bloom more than most people did. Even as the Faces played (reminding me of a second song, boxed above) and Rachel Weisz has the smile for a winter night, Bloom had issues. Too many cons, too many con expectations, too little truth to care, too little caring for truth. The pay-offs lacked shading and then power. But I got to confirm I was once, very long ago, right and wrong.

In college, my working skepticism on love was that it was a con. I had bought into sets, characters, circumstances, plot, and dramatic friction. Dorms, apartments, city streets, campus fields, the girl, the boy (me), the friends alongside, the cameo bodies of distraction with the eyes or the shoulders, homework, jobs, the quarter system and the summers, meeting on day three, a pair a month later, the break-ups years later, repeated with new ages and distances for, as I said, dramatic friction. Considered in whole, or even in parts, it was all a little hard to believe.

The girl coped early with the intensity by saying, repeatedly, it couldn't be real. We had conversations about this possibility. She also admitted some of our early meetings weren't as accidental as they seemed. Well done. But that didn't help my suspicion. It wasn't like I ever confronted the mailman or, at the Osco, asked the world's greatest salesman how he pulled it off. The con was more of a framework. If you or I desired to abuse our English, we could have called the con a working framework. We would forget it existed, but when we looked round, it was there for explanation, which kept everyone happy. The con brought progress. It occurred to us we were happy regardless, but we couldn't be too sure.

What began to disprove the con was my running out of answers. She ran out of answers just the same, but she did better at subsistency. Me, I looked in the larder, found all the cabinet doors open from the last time I checked, swore, and left the room to think. At the start of the previous paragraph, I used the word skepticism, and maybe that word was strong. Buying into the con or forgetting it for long stretches of time was credulity, whether I could admit as much to myself or not. What was the framework without consistency? So, when I ran out of answers, the framework disappeared too. Which made me unhappy. Her too. The floodlights clanked. Hands above one's head, drop that bag of money, alone in a couple empty lots with a crowd descending.

The next time I fell in love, the framework was reality. The people and places were real, and accepting as much was a step forward. Don't get me wrong, I was overwhelmed and fearful, but any move outside the con was forward, in a way. These steps eventually grew into a stride, on occasion. Perhaps you've noticed the appositions in this paragraph. Welcome, appositions! Love was happy, once again, and real. Please abide my abridging of years here to stay on topic. Terrific love. But, on occasion, my stride took me heels-over-head down a staircase. What was weird in this new framework was how I ran out of answers again.

I didn't expect that to happen. If the happiness that first time was the con, and the happiness the second time was real, how did I end in the empty lot with the bag of money, big dollar sign on the side, at my feet again? Why me? Was it because I'd left the gang? Had the con pulled me back in and stuck me with the evidence? If true, the operation was more pervasive and dastardly than I'd thought. I was still the sucker.

Watching the film tonight, I was glad to find a case for what's become my working framework since, lessons from the two tries: that the con only works well in reality, that reality only works well with the con, that great conspirators are hard to find, and that I most definitely want in.

Bloom has a quote that isn't a bad goal. "The perfect con is one where everyone involved gets just what they wanted." This effort continues. Life has other pieces, sure. And happiness, I emphasize, still comes in truckfuls. But appositives and metaphors, for instance, remain trouble.

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