I watched a film called In Your Eyes tonight. Sunday night is, occasionally, my night to check out ‘hidden gems’ on Netflix, and In Your Eyes came out on a few separate lists so I figured I’d give it a go.
I didn’t realise until it started that it was written by Joss Whedon, but it’s largely shorn of his typical pop-culture charm. What it does retain is the emotional wrangling that made various moments in Buffy The Vampire Slayer feel like they’d literally reached directly into your chest just so they could make your heart feel like its protective layer had been ripped away.
The major theme of the film, in my interpretation at least, is of being connected to someone (that one someone); and whether that connection is to the right person or the wrong person. We typically end up partnering with people through the major circumstances of our lives–such as work, location, and so on–but what if entirely unexpected chance brought you together with the right person; a person you might otherwise never have met?
The film also caused me to ponder the way that we seek connections all the time. Not just to one person, but to anyone. Some of us can live large parts of our lives alone, but we will always want to touch base with other people: whether it’s chatting to that random person in the supermarket, or reaching out through social media, or even just by taking a walk in the park. We are, by nature, resistant to being alone. We need other people to remind us that we are there; that we matter; that we have substance.
But, mostly the film made me–as it was probably intended to–ponder about being connected to that one person. There’s (bizarrely) a useful explanation relating to headphone cables that comes into play here. Headphone cables are always tangled. You can stow them away nice and neatly, but they will almost always come out again tangled. This is because there is basically just one arrangement in which the headphone cable is not tangled. Conversely, there are millions of ways in which the cable can be tangled.
Similarly, there are millions of people out there who are not the right person. There are millions of ways of meeting those people. There are a select few who are the one. The chances of meeting them are tenuous, fleeting, and almost impossible. The odds are stacked against us. If you get that chance, take it.