No Strings Attached: A Relationship You Can’t Choose, A Relationship You Can
February 20, 2011 at 5:42 pm, by Jonah Rank
I know I generally have a policy against both rules, but 1) this blogpost contains SPOILERS, and 2) it’s a long blogpost. (Sorry, it’s one of those romantic comedies whose moral lies in the ending, and, anyway, this is a pretty touchy subject. Drum-hit!)
But, seriously folks:
After having seen it, I’m still not sure what to make of No Strings Attached—other than that it was a cute (but vulgar) movie that made me think. I admit that last night I chose to see this movie over Black Swan, but Natalie Portman would probably be happy to know that I chose to see the one that she Executive-Produced. I intend to see Black Swan (Timna’s post [JONAH SHOULD BE PUNCHED IF THIS ISN’T LINKED UP] BTW really made me want to see it). That being said, I wanted to see No Strings Attached because of how I feel about what audiences get out of comedies, and my curiosity about Western trends in different kinds of romantic and/or sexual relationships.
First off, I’ll recap my theory about good comedies (though I wrote about it in this post about a recent article in The Onion): some of the best comedic material that is “funny because it’s true” is funny because we realize how silly or ridiculous some of life can be. Good comedy depicts the situations that we see in our own lives, but we get to laugh at these things that are so familiar when the inner hilarity of these situations is revealed—whether it’s on the stage, on the silver screen, on a canvas, in a book, or wherever else.
So, onto Western trends in different relationships: most people I know are monogamous.
But not everybody’s so exclusive about whom they’ll date or with whom they’ll engage in different activities. Plenty of people in my generation follow (or talk about their friends who follow) trends along the lines of friends-with-privileges and other relationships where two (or more) people are friends who are allowed to be pretty physical with each other, but not romantically involved. I frequently wonder how this plays out for people who, in addition to having friends-with-privileges, choose to date other people and get romantically involved with them. I imagine things start to get complicated at that point, and drama could easily arise in all of these relationships.
So, I wanted to see Hollywood’s spin on friends-with-privileges. Does it work? Can friends-with-privileges then date other people while still keeping up their privileges? Hollywood certainly isn’t an omniscient force in the universe that knows all answers. That being said, I can rely on a Hollywood blockbuster comedy to tell me something about what I—along with thousands of other Americans (or at least whoever was in the theater with me last night)—believe about these complicated relationships.
One of the first scenes of the film begins with a Jewish graveside funeral of the father of Emma Kurtzman (played by Natalie Portman). Although the funeral is a bit of a gag (you’d have to see the film to see why—I don’t want to spoil too much), it seems that the funeral really marks the death of a traditional marriage, or what we thought was a traditional marriage. We know nothing of the Kurtzman family at this point of the film, but we will later see that Emma is shocked to discover that her mother is sleeping with a man who is good at sleeping with Emma’s mother and not necessarily anything else. And later on in the film, when Emma’s sister gets married (very much off-camera), unlike the kippah-filled funeral we had seen at the beginning of the film, it is entirely unclear if any tradition serves as the grounds for the wedding. In a sense, the movie starts with a certain sense of grounded-ness in tradition that gets lost as the story goes on. But, how did this happen?
Adam Franklin (played by Ashton Kutcher) finds himself in a rut when he discovers that his ex-girlfriend Vanessa (Ophelia Lovibond) is now dating Adam’s father, Alvin (the fantastic Kevin Kline). Unsure of what to do next, Adam seeks intimacy from pretty much every girl whose number is in his phone. It’s not entirely clear how it happens, but Adam ends up in Emma’s apartment in what turns out to be a sexless night, followed by a sudden fling with her in the morning. Adam quite fancies Emma, and she enjoys his body but wants nothing to do with romance. Emma wants them to be friends, lays down the rule of no lying to each other, and demands zero moments of romantic gazing into each other’s eyes.
If it weren’t for the fact that they were sleeping together, the rules Emma sets are pretty standard Friends Protocol, and in that sense, she is traditional. And in another sense, Emma has to create her own set of rules so that she can happily live in a functional, sexual, non-romantic, non-exclusive friendship. This proves challenging for both Adam and Emma: Adam wants romance, and Emma does too, but she’s overwhelmed by the thought of being so emotional.
In the Mishnah, our earliest Rabbinic writings, a woman whose marriage to a man is valid is considered mekuddeshet, which literally means “sanctified” (Kiddushin 2:1). But the word “mekuddeshet” does not only mean “sanctified,” it is related to Judaism’s idea of kedushah (“sanctity”), which always refers to things that are “holy,” “different,” “distinguished,” and “separated.” In the Mishnah, a woman may be mekuddeshet for only one man at a time because she can be distinctly set aside for devoting herself to only one man at a time.
(The Mishnah’s system itself isn’t egalitarian since men, who could marry multiple women, were not “set aside” for only one woman. On top of that conflict with modern mores, the Mishnah assumes we’re all heterosexual. But, for the sake of argument—although it’s not the Mishnah’s system—I like to think of a marital relationship’s kedushah as mutually exclusive at both ends, as well as also gender-blind, allowing either two females or two males.)
Something else curious to me about early Rabbinic marriages is that the Mishnah states that there are three different ways for getting married:
- kesef (“money,” as in giving a certain amount of money—or something worth that amount of money—that seals the deal of the marriage),
- shetar (“a document,” as in writing up some sort of agreement that the marriage is a done deal), or
- bi’ah (“sex,” as in you have sex with the intention of consecrating the marriage and it’s a success) (Kiddushin 1:1).
Most contemporary Jewish weddings happen through kesef: there’s usually a part of the ceremony where one or both people getting married gives the other a cloth, a ring, or something else of value so that the crowd can tell the marriage is good to go. Shetar is pretty uncommon, and bi’ah is awkward in public.
But let’s point out one more curious thing in the Mishnah (and I promise I’ll stop being so curious about the Mishnah right after this): these rabbis don’t have a single word that really translates directly into “marriage.” They talk about kiddushin, which literally means “sanctifications,” but figuratively means “being set aside” or “being exclusive.”
Fastforward about 2 millennia: statistics say that Americans are getting married at older ages now than has ever been the case, and most Americans also aren’t waiting until marriage for sex. All this makes me wonder if a committed relationship that is marked by sex exclusive to two partners is all that different from the early Rabbinic idea of kiddushin happening through bi’ah.
Now, this is where No Strings Attached comes in. Emma and Adam don’t begin their relationship understanding it as an exclusive sort of thing. When Adam suspects Emma of falling for her co-worker, she reminds him that she’s not breaking any rules, and she and Adam are still allowed to sleep together. That’s not what Adam wants to hear, but he goes along anyway.
As time passes by and nothing ever comes of Emma’s feelings for the other guy, she and Adam toy with the idea of dating. Suffice it to say, Adam loves it, and Emma is revolted by the whole thing. She calls off, not only their dating, but their privileged friendship. We find Adam utterly single again and haunted by Alvin still creepily together with Adam’s ex, Vanessa.
After several weeks of Adam and Emma being apart from each other, the movie comes full circle when Adam receives a call from Vanessa to say that his father is in the hospital. Adam rushes to the hospital and has a talk with his dad about (guess what?) their love lives (you guessed correctly!). When Alvin realizes that Adam’s situation with Emma, whom he still loves, is over, Alvin very explicitly states the moral of the movie: we don’t choose the people we fall in love with, and things don’t work out the way they should. After Adam’s crazy old man has said his words of wisdom, the plot nears its end as Emma confesses her love for Adam, agrees to date him, and blah blah blah. (I’m not trying to be irreverent, but it’s a long blogpost. “Blah blah blah” is a faster way of saying these things.)
So, what did Hollywood tell me about friends with privileges? Not a great idea. Even without Adam or Emma dating on the side of their privileged friendship, their relationship was complicated and (though I didn’t get into all the highs and lows of it here) very dramatic. And, as we do at Oholiav, I happened to look at this romantic comedy through a Jewish lens. And what I found was that it was complicated and very dramatic.
For most of the movie, Emma and Adam are not in a relationship of kiddushin, and that appears to be their greatest problem. It’s not kiddushin in that traditional sense of marriage, it’s not kiddushin in the liberal sense of exclusivity, and—probably most unholy of all—it’s not kiddushin because the sex is not deemed sacred. Emma intends for all of her intimacy with Adam to be absolutely devoid of any internal or external emotions. According to Emma’s rules, there may be no spiritual or romantic connection made by their physical bonding. The opposite of kedushah is chol, the rote, and that’s what Emma wants of this privileged friendship.
The kiddushin of bi’ah did not work out in No Strings Attached. But, interestingly enough, Adam plays with the idea of a kesef transaction when, after their first time together, Adam buys Emma a “Congrats!” balloon, which she barely accepts. And then, though there is no physical document, Emma repeats the rules over and over about their privileged friendship—as if the two of them had actually signed a shetar, even if Adam doesn’t like the conditions it lays out.
It fascinates me how many times Emma and Adam get so close to establishing a relationship of kiddushin. It’s only at the end of the film when Emma allows herself to get emotionally invested that consent and honest, open dialogue finally enter the relationship. Only then can something resembling kiddushin actually happen.
So, what do I make of No Strings Attached? Physicality without emotions is pretty tricky and almost guaranteed to lack kedushah. That being said, trying to justify friends with privileges through a Jewish lens was a pretty good mental exercise for me last night—even if I have to conclude that that, at least for Emma and Adam, there was nothing sacred about it. Alvin is right that we don’t always choose whom we love. But, just as the Mishnah offers three different ways for enacting kiddushin, there are all sorts of ways in which people can make something truly special out of a relationship.
In an era when people marry late in life, when people have sex without having had a public wedding ceremony, and when it is socially acceptable for ads asking “Can sex friends stay best friends?” to appear on New York City public transportation (okay, I admit, New York is a weird place)—No Strings Attached is just one of many wakeup calls for religious cultures (such as Judaism?) that discourage pre-marital and non-marital sex to wonder if its sexual values are truly in touch with a social reality. About 2000 years ago, Judaism offered 3 ways for enacting kiddushin. Maybe there are more ways, or maybe Jews might want to reconsider the definition of kiddushin.
Maybe a privileged friendship can be sacred in some ways for another couple (or non-couple), but No Strings Attached is a particularly well-made film that realistically depicts the emotional drama and hilarity that can come out of a physical relationship that tries to chase away romance. For better or worse, No Strings Attached is a romantic comedy precisely because it reminds us of that organic and sacred link between physical and emotional love. We don’t always choose the people we love, but we should not forget that we can choose how we bring about kedushah in our relationships.