carpe diem

The Tapestry of Friendships

        It was, in many ways, a slight movie. Nothing actually happened. There was ano big-budget chase scene, no bloody shoot-out. The story ended without any cosmic conclusions.

        Yet she found Claudia Weil's film Girlfriends gentle and affecting. Slowly it panned across the tapestry of friendship-- showing its fragility, its resiliency, its role as the connecting tissue between the lives of two women.

        When it was over, she thought about the movie she'd seen this year-- Julia, The Turning Point and now Gilrfriends. It seemed that the peculiar eye, the social lens of the cinema, had drastically shifted its focus. Suddenly the Male Buddy movies had been replaced by the Female Friendship flicks.
        
        This wasn't just another binge of trendiness, but a kind of cinema vertie. For once the movies were reflecting a shift, not just from men to women but from one definition of friendship to another.

        Across millions of miles of celluloid, the ideal of friendship had always been male-- a world of sidekicks and 'pardners' of Butch Cassidys and Sundance Kids. There had been something almost atavistic about these visions of attachments-- as if producers culled their plots from some pop anthropology book on male bonding. Movies portrayed the idea that only men, those direct descendants of hunters and Hemingways, inherited a primal capacity for friendship. In contrast, they portrayed women picking on each other, the way they once picked berries.
        
        Well, that duality must have been mortally wounded in some shootout at the You're OK, I'm OK Corral. Now, on the screen, they were at least aware of the subtle distinction between men and women as buddies and friends.

        About 150 years ago, Coleridge had written, "A woman 's friendship borders more closely on love than man's. Men affect each other in the reflection of noble or friendly acts, whilst women ask fewer proofs and more signs and expressions of attachment.

        Well, she thought, on the whole, men had buddies, while women had friends. Buddies boned, but friends loved. Buddies faced adversity together, but friends faced each other. There was something palpably different in the way they spent their time. Buddies seemed to "do " things together; friends simply "were " together.

        Buddies came linked, like accessories, to one activity or another. People have golf buddies, college buddies and club buddie. Men often keep their buddies in these categories, while women keep special category for friends.

        A man once told her that men weren't real buddies until they'd been "through the wars" together-- corperate or athletic or military. They had to soldier together, he said. Women, on the other hand, didn't count themselves as friends until they'd shared three laothsome confidences.

        Buddies hang tough together; friends hang onto each other.

        It probably had something to do with pride. You dont't show off to a friend; you show need. Buddies try to keep the worst from each other; friends confess it.

        A friend of hers once telephoned her lover, just to find out if he were home. She hung up without a hellow when he picked up he phone. Later, wretched with embarrassment, the friend moaned, "Can you believe me? A thirty-five year-old- lawyer, making a chicken call?" Together, they laughed and made it better.

        Buddies seek approval. But friends seek acceptance.

        She knew so many men who had been trained in restraint, afraid of each other's judgement or awkward with each other's affection. She wasn't sure which. Like buddies in the movies, they would die for each other, but never hug each other.

        She'd reread Babbitt recently, that extraordinary catalogue of male grievances. The only relationship that gave meaning to the claustrophobic life of George Babbitt had been with Paul Riesling. But not once in the tragedy of their lives had one been able to say to the other; You make a difference.

        Even now men shocked her at times with their description of friendship. Does this one have a best friend? "Why, of course, we see each other every February." Does that one call his most intimate pal long distance? "Why, certainly, whenever there's a real reason.'' Do those two old chums ever have dinner together? "You mean alone? Without our wives?"

        Yet, things were changing. The ideal of intimacy wasn't this parallel playmate, this teammate, this trenchmate. Not even in Hollywood. In the double standard of friendship, for once the female version was becoming accepted as the general ideal.

        After all, a buddy is a fine life-companion. But one's friends, as Santayana wrote, "are that part of the race with which one can be human."

by Ellen Goodman,
from Rey's Freshman English, Autum, 1999