Everyone who has been through a break up knows that it’s pure shit. It’s shit², shit MAX, iShit.
For the weeks, months, and maybe years after your break up you’ll become a fully paid up resident of heartbreak hotel, where instead of a continental breakfast and mint on your pillow you get an all you can eat buffet of self-loathing and despair, and a mint on your pillow (it is 4* after all).
Even if you end the relationship on your terms knowing it’s ‘the best thing for everyone’ (i.e. you), doubt will still creep in over time. On those long winter nights you’ll lie there in your cold single bed, staring up at your cheap light fittings thinking, ‘what if I can never get it back? What if I can never trick/persuade/force anyone to love/kiss/fuck me, EVER AGAIN?’ I’m not going to lie to you, you are going to suffer - you’ll be more miserable than a member of the XX at a funeral - but you need not suffer alone. There are people to help you through this.
No, not your friends. Those fair-weather jerks stopped hanging out with you when you kept saying you were ‘too sad to face leaving the house’ and then stopped washing your clothes (and then your body). I’m talking about real companions who will be there for you no matter what and who are never more than the press of a remote away. I’m talking about Vince Vaughn, Woody Allen, and Ellen Page - your silver screen buddies. They know what you need, they don’t judge, and they’re hear to help you through this tough time.
But it’s more complicated than all that. You can’t just watch any film, you need some expert direction. So, equipped with a fully stocked pharmacy of class-A films I have put together a course of medicated viewing designed to ease and eventually cure your heartache. And if you think I’m getting a bit ahead of myself by calling myself and ‘expert’ and throwing in all these medical metaphors then hang on because there is actual psychological method to this whole thing. Observe.
In 1969 the Swiss-born psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross published a book titled, On Death and Dying. In this work she laid out her eponymous Kübler-Ross model, now more commonly known as the five stages of grief; a sort of psychological road map to loss, created to describe and understand the emotional state of people dealing with grief. Using this framework I have constructed a list of suggested viewing, designed to match and sooth your emotional state; helping you to cope better with the fact that you’re all alone and the only person in this world who loves you is your mum, and that’s not the same.
Now, without further ado, the doctor is in and treatment can begin.
1. Denial
“This can’t be happening, not to me.”
The first reaction to loss is to look the situation up and down, take it all in, and then completely deny anything bad is happening. Aren’t we humans great! Our brain cushions the blow of the emotional trauma by flicking an imaginary switch from ‘reality’ to ‘make believe’, helping us deal with the pain by creating a convenient emotional blind spot. It’s absurd but also completely normal and you’ll have gone through this too if you’ve lost someone you loved.
‘It’ll be ok if I give her some space’. ‘He’ll come back to me, he just needs time to think.’ ‘But we’re better than this, we’ll pull through’ - so goes the mantra of denial. So what is my film prescription for this malady?
Well in this state I think the best thing to do is play along with the delusion, not try and shatter it before you are ready. Denial is part of the process, so embrace it.
With this in mind, I am suggesting a soppy love story set in a mythical realm, where happy endings are the norm and true love is the answer to every question. I’m talking more specifically about Rob Reiner’s 1987 classic The Princess Bride.
Anyone with a heart, broken or otherwise, will love this film, and if you’re not into ‘kissing movies’ then watch it for Andre The Giant, Peter Cook, and one of the best lines in cinema; ‘Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die’.
Alternative Medicine - Any Hayao Miyazaki animation would do a similar job. Go for Howls Moving Castle or Laputa Castle In The Sky.
Click next page to see the next stage - anger.
