Pushkin Happy Valentine's Day. As promised, I have a lovely little treat for you on this most romantic of days. In the last episode of The Happiness Lab, I chatted with relationship experts Eli Finkel and Paul Eastwick to explore what rom coms get right and wrong about romance. But Eli and Paul have their own fabulous podcast. It's called Love Factually, and it just so happens that I recently joined them as a guest. So here's me and Eli and Paul talking about the science of one of my
favorite ever rom coms, the movie Say Anything. I hope you enjoy our conversation, and if you do, be sure to check out Love Factually wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome to Love Factually, podcast that analyzes rom coms and romantic films using the science of close relationships. We're your hosts, Paul Eastwick and Eli Finkel. Welcoming in guest hosts of the Happiness Lab podcast, Doctor Laurie Santos, thank you for joining us today.
Thank you so much for having me on the show.
So Laurie, tell us what are we talking about today?
So today we're talking about Say Anything. Cameron Crow's nineteen eighty nine rom com starting Hi John Cusack and Iomi Sky, which Entertainment Weekly ranked in two thousand and two as the number one romance movie of the past twenty five years. Some of the themes we'll explore are how attachment bonds transfer from appearent to a romantic partner, the benefits of optimism, and what exactly counts as stalking.
And fair warning, we'll be spoiling this movie today, So if you don't know how many songs one woman can write about Joe and they're all about pain, then go ahead and wats this movie and come back, okay? Eli tell us who are the key characters and couples in this movie.
The movie explores the love triangle involving Diane, her father Jim, and her boyfriend Lloyd. The story takes place during the summer after the young lovers graduate from high school. Diane, played by Ione Sky, is the unassuming valedictorian who will be leaving for a prestigious fellowship abroad at the end of the summer. Her peers view her as pretty and kind, but she's always been so busy that nobody really knows her. Jim,
played by John Mulaney is Diane's father. He and Diane's mother divorced five years earlier, after which Diane chose to live with him. His devotion to his daughter is boundless, but the methods underlying that devotion are sometimes dubious. Lloyd, played by cy John Cusack, is a principled slacker and a devoted brother and uncle. His best friends are Corey and DC, both girls, and his primary passions are kickboxing
and Diane. So, Paul, those are the chess pieces? Are you ready to give us one minute on how the film moves them across the board?
Red dye? Count me down. Here we go.
On your mark, Get set and go superachiever.
Diane Court delivers a graduation speech as Lloyd Dobbler plots how to ask her out on a bona fide date. He wins her over by asking her to go with him to a graduation party and promising to give her all his English tips because she's moving to England in the fall for school. At the party, they orbit each other as Diane meets all the people she never got to know in high school, while Lloyd acts as key master. They become friends with potential and plan to hang out
as much as they can. Over the next sixteen weeks, Lloyd survives a family dinner at Diane's house. He visits the retirement home run by her father. He teaches her how to drive stick They have sex in the backseat, listening to Peter Gabriel. Diane's father becomes more and more disapproving of her relationship with Lloyd, and Diane ultimately relents. She breaks it off with Lloyd, leading to eight unreturned phone messages in a boom box Peter Gabriel serenade outside
her bedroom window. All this time, Diane's father has been lying to her about evating taxes, but the i RS closes in and she discovers her father's piles of cash. Dan confronts her father, she makes up with Lloyd, Her father goes to prison, and Diane Lloyd fly to England together. As you promised here that everything will be okay once the smoking sign goes down. Ah, you did it, amazing.
I was never going to pull that off. I was going to get so stuck on my new details of this film. Yes, amazing job pop.
It very challenging. Okay, Well, Laurie, why don't you kick it up by telling us, what is your relationship to this movie?
So I saw this movie back in the nineteen eighties when I was a kid myself, and interestingly, I just rewatched this movie with a friend from grad school and his now two thirteen year old kids, and it was fascinating to kind of rewatch the film because probably I probably watched it around the time I was thirteen, if it kind of came out around nineteen eighty eight, So
it was like a very strange full circle. But I kind of both identified with Lloyd as being this sort of like kind but clueless, don't really I know where you're going type person, and also Diane in the sense that she was like smart, not the pretty part. So I was kind of the like, kind of unfortunate, not very cool, but also smart person. So I like really wanted this couple to get together. And then I think, like all women who watch this film back of the day,
I just absolutely fell in love with Lloyd Dobbler. Everyone wants their own Lloyd Dobbler, everyone wants the know, and this, you know, Peter Gabriel serenade just the whole thing. So for me, when I think of like eighties rom coms that make me smile and honestly that still hold up today.
This is really one of them that's really cool. I do think that it felt like a permission structure to be a sensitive dude and that it but that you could also kind of be admired for it at the same time. And I also really liked too how he seems to really be taken with Diane for many different reasons, but also in part that she's like a badass and killing it out there, right. I mean, she's, you know, very smart and successful, and it's very clear that from the beginning he's like, Wow.
Yeah, I mean Lloyd Dobbler was like the og like husband that's going to support the women's career, right like in the eighties when that wasn't so much of a thing. So I mean he's going to give up, you know, his permanent kickboxing kind of teaching ship to fly to England with her to help her out in her studies. Right, So yeah, aspirational.
Yeah, it's cool. Well, Eli, what about you?
I had you know, I connected a lot of different ways, So this one of them is is when I mentioned on this podcast a couple of times that I acted in high school, and there's something in Evanston called the Piven piv E n known like Jerry Pivens parents, Jeremy Pinen's parents Theater Workshop. So I took that when I was sixteen and even then, so this was nineteen ninety one, and you know famous alumni John and Joan Cusack, Jeremy Piven himself, like a whole bunch of stuff like that.
And when I took it, I took it with you know, Martin Scorsese's daughter. And then I sort of had my first you know, serious sort of girlfriend situation there.
And was it Martin Scorsese's daughter.
You could say, no, oh no, no, I did not do. That would have been quite the story. It was not. But but what's interesting is just proving that I never did grow up. I currently live one block from where that that theater workshop is held.
Oh look, kidding. Yeah, Well, let's transition to talking about what this movie gets right about the nature of close relationships but also, you know, about the nature of happiness and optimism more generally. So, Laurie, do you want to kick it off for us.
Yeah. So one of the reasons I love this film is I think it really does a nice job of showing the power of optimism, right, So Lloyd is this like underachiever, like Diane, core has no idea who he is, but he tells his friends, like his two girlfriends, Hey, I'm just gonna like ask her out. And so Corey and DC are just like, no, like, are you crazy? It's beautiful?
What is it?
She's the brain with the body of a game show host and she doesn't know it right, and so they're like, she's just going to destroy you. Lloyd, like, don't do this. But Lloyd is just like, I'm gonna go for it. I'm just going to ask her how And as we see in the film, ultimately this works. And so this raises this interesting question about like, is kind of believing you can succeed at something that seems incredibly unlikely good for you? Like does it make it more likely that
you're going to succeed at the thing. And it turns out that there's some interesting psychology on this. There's this famous effect in psychology called the Roger Banister effect, which for you runners out there, you might know that Roger Banister is a famous British runner who originally it was the first guy to run the four minute mile back in the day and they deal with the four minute mile. I mean, I can't even barely run like a ten twenty minute forty minute miles.
Yeah.
Yeah, So like nobody had run the four minute mile before Roger Banister, but but importantly, no one thought anyone could was actually believed to be beyond like human capacity, right, And so Roger's like, I'm going to run the four minute mile, and everyone's like that seems crazy. But then there's one thing, it's raised in nineteen fifty four, he
ran it. But instantly what happened after that is people say, like, oh, it is humanly possible, we can run it, and like, just like over a month later, somebody else ran the four minute mile, and now subsequently a four minute mile is like not even anything for somebody who's a real runner to like super brag about, because so many people have kind of done this at this point. And so what does this mean. This means that Roger believing that it was possible to run the four minute while when
everyone else thought it was impossible. The idea is that his mental model of this made it easier for him to actually physically achieve this, Like it allowed him to engage in whatever behavior is he needed to do this, like you know, practicing or sort of pushing himself or whatever. Believing he could do it meant it made it easier
for him to do it. And I think this is true for Lloyd too, right to believe he had to do it, he had to call her up and you know, just be his normal kind of jovial, kind funny, self like little self effacing, but like he just went for it and ultimately it worked.
That's great. I mean what I love about the Roger Banister idea of Visa VI this movie is that we also see the inspiration for other people. And so there's this point at the at the party where where Lloyd goes up to one of his friends, Mike Cameron, and he's talking to him, and Mike Cameron says.
I wanted to ask you, how did you get Diane Court to go out with you?
I called her up?
But how come it worked? I mean, like, what are you?
I'm like dobblers?
This is great? Excuse me, Hope?
Thanks all right?
So yeah, right that quote and Mike is basically every other runner, like in the late nineteen fifties who were like, oh well, if your Roger Banister can do it, you know, then the rest of us can do it too.
Eli, what do you got?
Oh my god, Laurie, I'm so psyched you mentioned this movie. I had forgotten just how much is in here, and watching it from the perspective of relationship science was deeply enlightening. I'm going to start by talking about something that's a little obscure in the movie, and it points to this idea that I put a lot of stock in that in a sense, social reality is reality, right, that basically
things exist within our social consensus. And the line Diane says this to her dad, she says, it always feels good to tell you the truth, because if I can't share it with you, it's almost like it didn't happen. It's such a great line. And going back into the sixties, these sociologists Peter Berger and Hansfried Kellner had this paper where they talked about the microsociology of knowledge, and really what they're talking about is this idea that the reality
of the world is sustained in conversations with significant others. Now, this is one with her dad, but more recently Maya Rassen, yach Malone and Tory Higgins have done research on this shared reality idea, and they talked about partners as making sense of the world together, and they have this line in one of their papers that I love, which is that humans are truth cartographers, searching for epistemic companions with
whom to map out the bounds of reality. And the movie, again, it focuses on a lot of things, but I think one of the lesser noticed aspects of what they're doing is they're playing in this space that that yes, you can have these experiences, but until you've shared them with someone, they are not fully real. And I love that about this film.
Oh gay Eli, But that raises an interesting question that's like shown in the title of the film, this idea of say anything, like should we share all our realities
with people? I have to say again, rewatching this film with thirteen year olds, the scene where Diane is telling her dad about having sex because she's like she comes home lay after the whole like sex in the car thing, and then she's like, Okay, I just feel so sad I can't share this with you, so I'm just going to go through it dad, And she's just like, I
attacked him. It was so great, you know. It's sex and Eilbu and the dad's face, and even these thirteen year olds were like something major has been violated there. This is a new This is a new, very much more sharing generation. I think that the generation like Diane came from. And so what does this science say there? Is that right? Should we really be able to share anything? Is honesty and shared reality about every truth important for relation? Sure?
Yeah, look so I think there's two ways of engaging with that, Laurie, I love this question. The first one is about the shared reality aspect. And yes, I do think there's something realer about her having sex with Lloyd because she shared it with her dad. So in that sense, I think this classic shared reality literature is correct. This question of discretion. Are there circumstances under which we shouldn't
be sharing everything with everybody, even our close partners. I don't think the field has gotten into this enough, but I am persuaded that there are certain sorts of discretion, certain sorts of things that are probably best not shared in certain relationships. And it's true that Diane and her dad had a very close and special bond, but in general, like details about one's sex life, sharing those with one's parents, might be a little dubious on average, that would be my guess.
Yeah, I mean, and even in the movie, right, I mean, there is this moment of like, oh my gosh, she's telling her dad that she just had sex, but I think it was in the context of her just saying, look, I'm willing to share everything with you, even the tough things. And I feel like that is actually an interesting message that like with if we can't share our tough things with close others, or controversial things or you know, sensitive things, like, couldn't we share them with so So, Paul.
I'm gonna throw it to you in a seconcause I know you also must have identified a million things. But Laurie, on this idea of say anything and share everything, I think part of the title of the movie is really about her dad's lie. We haven't talked too much about it, but the whole conceit of their relationship is say anything. But meanwhile, he's been involved in this embezzlement fraud and you know, his motives are probably good. Maybe we'll touch
on that, but she's deeply shaken by it. And on this idea of like social relationship partners as truth cartographers, I find it interesting what happens to her when she finds out she's deeply shaken and what she says. She goes to Lloyd at that point, and she says, my father's guilty. He lied to me, He lied to everybody. I just left home. I need you. And I think really what she needs is her reality. Her sense of reality is kind of shaken, and she's looking to him
to find some sort of stability about the world. And I do think part of why she went back to him is this epistemic the world isn't making sense, Please help motivation.
I think that actually leads into one of the other things that I think this movie gets pretty correct, and it is the attachment transfer that takes place as people age, as people grow up. Typically for most adolescents, they will tell you that the people that they have the strongest attachment fonds with are their parents, and that includes various behaviors like who do you want to be around? We call it proximity seeking, right, but it's like who do you want to be around? Who do you go to?
You for support when you're feeling down, we call that safe haven? And then who do you go to for advice or to celebrate and that we call the secure base, and usually the transfer kind of goes in that order as people move from having parents be their closest confidants
to having romantic partners be their closest confidants. So first you want to spend all this time with a romantic party, but you might still go to the parent for advice or for support, and then the support transfers, and finally it's that advice component that moves over to the romantic partner.
And I kind of see we I think we witness her go through that process, and any lie that scene you were just describing, I think is is the moment, the final moment where she has the transfer is complete, although.
In her case I worry that like the she kind of does that transfer, but it really is like the only person that she ever talked to because she kind of have friends in high school was the dead and now it seems like the only person that she's talking to now is Lloyd, which bracket it might be a great prison talk to because Lloyd is kind and consider it and the best significant other they're out there, ever, but it's still it's risky, is still not really good,
and I think even Lloyd Woyd recognizes this at one point in the film. He asks this question when she comes back to him. He says, do you need me or do you just need somebody else? Right? And I think there's kind of a open He doesn't actually even let her answer. He's like, never mind, I don't care, and he just kisses her.
And this is really good.
Reunion is perfect, but I think it raises this question of like, is this healthy that Diane is kind of transferring this attachment but maybe not seeking out kind of help support, safe haven's all these other things from just like other humans in her life.
Yeah.
I mean, generally speaking, having a thin rather than a more developed social network is not great for people. You want to feel like your little diad is embedded in a set of other people who are all invested in helping your relationship to work, and so you know, people going off on their own. It's very romantic, but it's it's a little risky in.
The grand and it's an interesting contrast with like how Lloyd Dobbler does it right. He's got Corey and DJ his like close female friends to go to. He's got this close relationship with his sister who's his actual sister in real life, Joan Cusack right, and her son. He's just like has this. He even has his like bevy of dude friends at the sip and Go that he goes to to talk to and get like relationship advice from.
But I think there's there's a sense in which, like, Lloyd is healthier in part just because he has these other support systems to go to.
Yeah. Cool, Well, Laurie, what else do you have about this movie? The other things this movie gets right?
So so another thing I think this movie gets right, or at least I really hope the relationship science fears out and I hope it gets right right is this question of like, who do you find attractive?
Right?
You know, Lloyd is this kind of like you know, underachiever. He just likes his kickboxing. He's kind of unremarkable, so unremarkable that when and he first calls Diane, she she pulls out her yearbook and starts flipping through to try to look at him and like look at his sort of just he's just not known to her, right, It's really funny he's but he's kind She sees that kindness later, even on that short phone call when he's asking her out.
He kind of makes her laugh and she's into that, and it kind of raises us question, like, do we pick people based on, you know, just their looks, just their success criteria, what they're going to achieve in life, whether they're going to get some huge fellowship and be valedictorian, or do we pick people based just on how they make us feel? Right, They're kind to us, they make us laugh, they make us feel positive. And so my sense is that this movie is winning out according to
the relationship science. But you two are the experts. What is a science all?
You might have a thought or two on this one.
I'm glad you brought that up, Laurie. In fact, your your hopes for the way attraction works are indeed true. That is very close to how people actually experience initial attraction, which is what I think is happening in that scene that you're described. So there's this classic study by Elaine Walster than Wallster now Elaine Hatfield, connected in the nineteen sixties,
and it's affectionately called the computer Dance Study. The idea was that these researchers, they brought a number of college freshmen together, set them up with each other, looked to see who like whom. The lore of this study is that, ah, only attractiveness mattered, nothing else really mattered. The reality is they didn't like have great measures of the other stuff, and even the measures they did have, it like kind of worked. It's just I think everybody was surprised that
physical attractiveness was so potent. So when you look at contemporary speed dating data sets, yes, the appeal of attractiveness is very much present. It's very powerful, But so is confidence. That's also a huge effect size, right, and then that's Lloyd in a nutshell. So is being funny, so is being nice and responsive. These are all positive, meaningful predictors.
It is not the case that only attractiveness matters. All of those other features end up being important to So I think you're spot on there.
And I love how the movie just develops Lloyd's moral character over time. One of my favorite you mentioned it in your quick summary. I was surprised they got in their polity especially effective stro a summary was one of the first things that Diane learns about Lloyd is, at least at this party, he's the so called key master. For those of you who may not remember eighties parties is the person that gets to hold everybody's car keys
and so that they don't necessarily drive home drunk. So Lloyd is sort of the evaluator of whether or not somebody is ready to drive home. And we see in the movie that this kind of comes to a head with one of the friends who comes up to it is screaming at him, and Lloyd is just like, you must Joe, Joe can't you know, he doesn't give him the keys, right. But I think that's a moment for Diane to realize, like, oh, this person is responsible. It
can be responsible outside of your academic pursuits. But this person is also kind of compassionate and kind Like she's seeing all these like great strengths that he has not in the context of her relationship, but just kind of generally right. And I think that that must be a huge I mean, it's a huge factor in why every teenage girl who watched this movie in the eighties fell in love with Lloyd Dobbler. Yeah, so must be good for Diane too.
Yeah.
So on this like does the movie get the attraction right? It does so many different ways. So it also plays with some false myths that you know, she might be out of his league. She's the brains with the body of what did you say, the body of the game show hostess. Yeah, so she's also brains. Stay with brains. So one is this idea of the other is like, no, some like likes attract like like what would she want
with you? You sort of burn out, you know, kickboxer, And the movie basically puts the lie to all those sorts of things. Of course, they're compatible because he's got these other qualities and they're attentive to each other and he makes her laugh. But one of the things that's interesting is is we talk a lot about attraction on this show, especially with regard to similarity. Right, So there's this conventional view widespread that we're attracted to people who
are similar to us. Turns out if you study that, we're attracted to people whom we think are similar to us. And you see this here a little bit because you see one of the reasons why this might emerge because there's this scene where she works at an old person's home retirement home, I'm not sure what they call it at that time, and she says to Lloyd, do you
want to come by? And he's like, eh, And she says, like, you seem to have something against old people, and then he sort of says, well, no, I don't, but I kind of do, because you know, I used to work at a Shmorgos board and the old people would flock there and they love to eat, and they just jam their mouths, you know, they with their mouths open. And she says, I think that's agism, and that's being prejudiced against people because they're old. Maybe their mouths don't work
as well as yours. And he says, really, I, well, you're really turning me around here. I was looking at it the wrong way, I think. And there is research on this concept called attitude alignment in close relationships, and this has work than my advisor, Carol Ruspolt, was doing in collaboration with a student who was there with me named Jody Davis when I was in graduate school in the late nineties. But what they find in that space is that alignment is stronger to the extent that the
issue is central to the other person. And clearly Lloyd's happy to recognize that Diane cares more about this than he does, and it's stronger to the degree that the relationship is important, and so what we see here is this will masquerade as look how much they have in common they both love old people, but only because he basically tuned to her over time into it feels like they have these things in common, but in reality they developed them together over time.
Yeah, I love that idea. It's also connected to one of the things that I really appreciated about this movie, which again sort of this nice guy manifesto idea for how it can work. And I think it highlights the importance of having fe female platonic friends if you are a heterosexual man. And this is everywhere in the literature. So if you look, for example, at correlations between like hostile sexism and if you're a man having female friends,
that's a meaningful negative correlation there. The more female friends you have, the less likely you are to endorse hostile sexism. These ideas like oh, women are out to get men, women are out to take advantage of men. Right, things like this, and it's a simple inner group contact story. We spend more time with people just getting to know them as people, and we have less of those really pernicious beliefs. Furthermore, having a bigger other gender network and
this is true for both men and women. Heterosexual men and women, they're more likely to form relationships over a few year period. This is also done on high school students. So I think we're really seeing that here that these are good ways to be in the world. If you are a heterosexual man, so you're interested in women and you want to actually get to know women and ultimately date somebody that you're really into, this movie is pointing out the one of the more effective ways to do that.
Plus, the female friends are sometimes incredible songstressing. That's right, we'll get to that later.
Honestly, those songs were stuck in my head all day. Joes. They're so catchy. Why no idea?
Yeah, she should have went on to write commercial jingos. I hope that she did well in life. When you get that definition, it kind of sounds a little bit like the kinds of things that Lloyd's kind of male friends he seeks out right after Diane breaks up with him. Some of the views they expressed about women, I think the most succinct one was the youngest member of the Sip and Go crew, which is just this little kid who was like.
You, O, my god, oh my god. But another reason that I totally I love that scene because again, it's all bearing down on exposing the lie of the of keeping the genders separate. And it's when Lloyd asked them, I got.
A question, if you guys know so much about women, how come you here at like a gass and sip on Saturday night, completely lone drinking beers.
No women anywhere, and they really have choice? Yeah? Right, uh huh. So anyway, there it points out.
I mean, I wish Lloyd Dobbler could like walk around and like go to Embury and sell Reddit like thread and just walk in and ask the same Loyd Dobbler question to kind of break.
This up seriously. All right, so tell us about some things that this movie gets wrong about the nature of close relationships. Either of you, what do you? What do you have?
I just said some of the movie gets wrong generally, which is that kickboxing does not seem to be the sports It was close, but a little bit that's not really relationships. That's not really relationships. One of the things I wanted to look at was this question of stocking, because I think this movie portrays a kind of strange
version of it. It was definitely a version that you know, I think based on all the memes that still exist now, like like thirty years later, like the holding up the boom box, which I was able to look up and is in fact a sharp GF seventy six thousand.
Boom bombs, just like old schools.
Like holding that up, and that is the purely romantic boombox. I think you like, it's really hard to find them now. I mean in part because it's like not the eighties anymore. But I think people have bought them for the specific act of sort of copying White Dollar. That's a move that like is iconic. It's on T shirts and memes, but it's also like border Light Stocker. And so Paul, what is the movie kind of saying about Stocker?
And so I felt that the movie kind of gives a pass to certain stalking behaviors. It treats it kind of romantically, kind of I don't want to say how to manual, but there's there's there's a couple of things happening. One and I'll start with this, even though this really seems benign. Are the eight phone messages right, eight left messages. So there are studies that look at different forms of stalking and Leaving messages or unwanted phone calls are some
of the most common ones. Those show the biggest discrepancy between what the person who is being left feels is likely to be unpleasant, and what the person who is being stalked feels. People who are being stocked hate the phone messages, they really want them to stop, and the people leaving the messages or like, oh whatever, I'm sure it didn't really bother them. They're really really unpleasant, and
so is showing up at somebody's house uninvited. Also not the kind of thing that most people look upon very favorably if they've broken up with somebody. I think that I think that whole meme, the whole idea, Like rewatching it, I was like, oh, this is not what I remembered. I remembered something inspiring, not like triumphant, but like like let's go like let's defy your father. That is not what that scene is it at all.
Yeah, all the adults that I watched this film with remember the boombox scene as ending with Diane kind of rushing out and that's when they made up, and like it kind of worked, And I was like, first it didn't work. He's just like creepily showing up with spoo box in the middle of the night.
Yeah, it would have been It would have been better if they had the scene where he got back into his car and drove home. That scene never made it into.
The Yes, right, So he thought really carefully and was like, maybe that was a little too much, like I should.
Really respect And so I want to actually want to give the movie credit for that, that it actually didn't show that working right, and that it and that a number of other things have to transpire before she changes her mind. So it's more I think that I'm critiquing the way the movie lodged itself in our collective memories. Contained some things that I think the movie didn't intend but aren't a very good idea.
Laurie, you're gonna regret that you ever chose to be on our show. But I have a question for you about this. So what does it mean to seduce someone?
Like?
What does seduction mean if we stipulate that it isn't stuff like this, right, if it isn't stuff like well, she wasn't sure, So I tried to be more charming. I did something innovative. I left a funny phone message or ate, and I agree that, like, I don't think
we really want these behaviors. Again, the movie gets away with it in a way a lot of these old movies get away with it because she actually did want it, right, That's the thing that he can't know, And certainly she's not giving him reason to believe that she really wants it, but she did, and so it's sort of okay from
our perspective, from the viewer's perspective. But Laurie, do you have an opinion, like what would it mean to be interested in somebody, be unsure whether that person is interested in you, and to try to persuade them that, you know, give me a try, like it'll be fun? And is it if it isn't this, if it isn't what Lloyd Dobbler did in this movie, Like what does it look like?
Yeah, well, I think it is kind of what Lloyd Dobbler does, not with the boombox part, but with the other parts. Right, it's really thinking from the other person's perspective about how to help them and what they need. Right. One of the scenes in the beginning that Diane Court actually comments on to her dad later when she's like, well, you is why I fell in love with Dloyd was that they're just kind of walking around and Lloyd notices some broken glass on the ground and you know, it's
post parties, so she's kind of walking around barefoot. He's like, no, no, let me just move that out of the way for you. Like he's thinking about it from her perspective. He's kind of perspective taking in that case, hopefully accurately about what
she really needs. And I think that's the spot where it kind of seduction works best, like when we're kind of perspective taking about what would help another person, but then looking for signs of consent, right, And that's the spot where I think the boom Box is kind of on the borderline. But even Lloyd, again, I'm kind of defending him because he's just Sizemoy Lloyd Dobbler, and you know, how can I, like, you know, regret all the things
I watched in the eighties and those things. But even then he has this sign where people are trying to convince him to call her some more. I think it was his girlfriends or trying to convince him to call him some more, and he says, I draw the line at eight. You know, answer messages, and to be fair bracketed, I do think that, like maybe it was okay to do a little more in the eighties just because like sometimes if you were running for the.
Phone, like you didn't know that's a good point. And the cell phone.
Goes to the message they don't want to talk to you, But the answer machine sometimes is like the chords really far away. They don't have any pocket, you know. So, but but but Lloyd is saying, I'm setting a boundary, right, I'm giving her a chance, but I'm drawing the line a home.
Yeah, he's persuaded to do that one last one, and then we see right that she almost picks it up. So he gets an out from our perspective because we know what's going on a little bit behind the scenes.
I hope you're enjoying my appearance on the new podcast Love. Factually, it's time for a quick break, but Paul Eli and I will be back soon to explain what other things say anything gets wrong about relationship science?
So anything else about what this movie gets wrong about? Close relationships? Eli?
What do you have? Look? It mostly gets stuff right, but you know it makes some errors, like every movie, and one of them is you know, a very forgivable error. But generally it's risky to make forever promises in the first weeks and months of a new relationship. And so the letter that he writes to her, Lloyd writes this letter to Diane after they have sex and he's really into her, and the letter in its entirety is Dear Diane, I'll always be there for you all the love in
my heart Lloyd. Now I don't have a problem with dear Diane or all the love in my heart or Lloyd, but I think the part when he says I'll always be there for.
You it's always, is probably.
A bold commitment that he's actually he's making a vow that he really is probably not in a position to make. And we do this. We do this a lot, and it's desirable and we like it, and we want to feel this way. We stand up at our wedding vows and say I will love you forever. These seem like high risk choices for somebody who takes seriously what the
definition of a vow is. But I do think this is one of the cases where I just felt a little sheepish about suggesting that the really romantic thing to do is to tell somebody something that you really cannot you probably cannot promise you're gonna be able to deliver overtime.
Yeah, you forget when you see the movie because it seems like it's built over this whole, you know, to our period. It's a little ROBYO or Juliet, right. You know, they've only really kind of hung out with each other for like a couple of days really, you know.
Right, and you and even you know, it's over sixteen weeks and now they are going to a foreign country together to presumably to live together. And that is pretty fast to jump into that level of commitment. And the movie clearly wants us to feel that we are witnessing a success story. I mean, you know, the ending, I love it, and I love the contrast with the graduate right that it's you know, here are these two people
embarking on this adventure and this one. We're supposed to be rooting for them and feeling like they've got it. But the reality is sixteen weeks. That is quite a leap of faith to think that they've got it figured out at this point.
You know, Paul, It's interesting because I actually think this is the other thing that maybe the movie doesn't get right and this depends on interpretation, but like, what is the point of the ding on the airport, Like this is literally the last thing that happens in the entire movie. It's obvious that this is supposed to be really significant.
Good though it's good.
Reading, there is a reading where you're basically like, the early parts of a relationship are turbulent. So again just a reminder for people who haven't seen the movie. This early Diana is scared of flying and Lloyd is with her on this flight, literally the last scene of the movie. They're going to England for this fellowship that she has, and he says, like, if anything goes wrong, it's going to be within the first five minutes, So you just have to make it to the ding the airport, the
take off your seat belt ding. I think it was the no smoking ding in.
The no smoking ding speaking because everybody else on the plane is like holding their parettes, wait till they get light what up?
I think right, the ding is light up.
It is basically like but either way it could have been the seatbuilting. And so one reading is that now they're through the turbulent time and we're witnessing like the ding is like and now it's smooth sailing. And if that is what Cameron Crow intended, I think he's really guilty of the and they all lived happily ever after
sort of things. Yeah, I think that is My other concern about the movie is that if he was implying something like that in the closing scene, that strikes me as wildly incorrect about what the next sixty years of that relationship might look.
Like, or the next like, you know, four months and she starts studying and there's no kickboxing and all of London.
And right, and what exactly is he going to do with himself? I think that's right. I think compared to some movies where they get together at the end and then we don't see anything about them encountering challenges, I think those versions are worse because we do see them overcoming some stuff here. But I hear you. As much as I love the way that whole ending is done, I get it that you know that there are trials to come.
Can I just can I just like, can I try out a like a more empirically sane version. Yes, what if that whole plane flight where there's a lot of turbulence, like an unusual amount of turbulence for like a plane
taking off before the seatbeltding goes off. What if that is kind of a metaphor for like, we're gonna go on this, you know, trip together, the long version of our life together is gonna have a lot of turbulence, but by holding each other's hand, we'll get through it, and you know, we'll kind of wait for the day.
You know it's fair.
I don't know.
You know what's funny about that, LORI, is that that reminds me of the point you made earlier about the
social network. Because his friends, he's got these two really close women friends, girl friends, I guess, and they have also packed some stuff for this for them, right, They've packed some things to make sure, like I think they know that she's nervous about flying and they're having this adventure together as a couple for the first time, and so those friends who are really invested in the relationship have packed for them some nice things for the trip.
And that is I think hearkens back to Wow, they seem to have a pretty good foundation for a lot of what they might be going through next.
That's cool. It's like a wedding thing, right, It's like, you know, you get everybody together to sort of give you, you know, well, wishes on your way. I object, So are we okay with this? Anything in this movie raised moral quandaries or other concern to other things? Age badly? What does it everybody have here?
Well?
I could say. What was interesting was that, as I mentioned, I watched it with twenty twenty four thirteen year old and they genuinely really liked the film. They had two things that were kind of funny, and maybe this is that they were a little young. One was that, well, first of all, we were watching with their dad, and so they really did and like the sexy's like, oh god, they're kissing, why are they under the blanket?
Why is he shaky?
Like they just literally couldn't handle that. But the second thing was that they were really confused when Diane broke up with BOYD, where they're like, but she doesn't think that?
Why is she saying that she doesn't think that? And they kind of just like couldn't get it, Like they kind of couldn't handle her kind of confusion based on what was going on with her dad of sort of stepping away and they're like, but she doesn't think that right, they're going to get back together, right, like they kind of were seeing And so maybe this is the current generation having a hard time with like, you know, tough
emotions or complicated conflict in the film. But they had a really tough time.
That's really interesting.
You know.
One of the things that was really eye opening about watching it again and here, Laurie, thank you again for recommending this one. It was just a delight. Is it's not just a move for kids that was that was something that I think you're describing here, like the thirteen year olds didn't get it, but also as somebody who is now a dad, I'm actually a dad of a teen girl, and I just thought a whole lot more
about the dad daughter or dynamic. And the truth is I at the top called this like a love triangle.
I don't think that's the standard way people think about this movie, but I do think that's what's happening, is that these are two men who are deeply in love with obviously there's nothing sexual with her dad, of course, but deeply in love with her that she is going to be somewhat or to a significant degree, the center of their lives, and she's trying to balance that, and she feels awkward about this time that she's spending with Lloyd, given that she's going away, and she feels like maybe
she should be with her dad. And so I think there is like a sophistication, an adultness of this teen romance that you almost never get in a teen romance.
And I think that's why. Part of the reason why I think the thirteen year olds didn't get it is she feels this strong sense of obligation to her dad and doesn't know how to fit Lloyd into that schema, and therefore ends up playing around for a while with breaking up with him in a way that doesn't make sense for her feelings for Lloyd, but isn't crazy from the perspective of the various emotional forces that are buffeting her.
One of the things that I flagged as being a little bit that sort of age badly or aged strangely about this movie is in this same category. And I'll pose this in the form of a question, did did some gen xers think this was a parenting manual that the way to parent is to really push your kid as much as possible, cut them off from socialization when they are when they are in high school. Again, I think this is sometimes a stereotype of Gen X contemporary
parenting rather than the reality. But I do think there is much more pressure today to achieve, achieve, achieve for people in high school that people like Diane Court are very common these days. Right, you know, she was the one person in her high school and now like this is a thing, and so how many people saw this movie thought like that's how I'm going to treat my dad and tax fraud.
But I mean, apart apart from the text r No, I mean, Paul, I think you're really oddto something, right, Like, if we look at the current generation of teenagers, right the thirteen year olds I were watching as with, this is the loneliest generation in history since we've been measuring loneliness and teenagers. They're also the most academically busy, like the most academically stribe. If we just like look at just sheer amounts of homework, those things have gone up
since the making of this film. And beyond that, we see like the seeds of the fact that they're kind of like Diane, like shifting away from these sort of dating relationships, right Like the fact that, like, modern teenagers are having less sex than teenagers have ever had back in the day, and so you might be kind of onto something where the sort of Diane Court school of child bearing was like kind of coming up a little bit.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Another thing that the kiddo has picked up on is that, you know, Lloyd does this lovely thing where he's the key master and he's taken everyone's keys, but then when his job is over, he's like, hand me a beer, and he then goat proceeds to drive home away to beer. And even the thirteen year olds were like, wait a minute, Like I thought we were drinking and driving.
Good point. Yeah, that's great relationship quotes. We've hit a few good ones already. But do either of you have any other quotes that we should clip in here and talk about.
So mine is kind of a funny one, and it gets back to this idea that like, these are teenagers who are acting in the film that were trying to identify with, but the film is actually written by adults, and in a few points, I think you hear the adult voice kicking. And so this was a quote that happened just after Lloyd has sex with Diane and he's meeting up with his friends and they're trying to suss out, Oh, did you have sex or did you have sex?
Look at his face, he did the deed. You're an inflation lady should go on the seven hundred club or some saying, all right, calmed downright, calm down, nothing's different, Lloyd.
Listen to me. Everything has changed. You've had sex. No matter what you might think, nothing will ever be the same between you two. You might be sixty, you might be walking down the street and you'll talk to her about something whatever, But what you'll really be thinking is we had sex.
And that struck me as like interestingly, like it struck me as the kind of case that you couldn't know that unless you were, like, you know, in your forties or fifties, like like, I just didn't think any nineteen year old will be thinking back.
Yeah, that's that.
Yeah.
Sometimes sometimes Corey in particular has a wisdom beyond her years, beyond her years.
There was somewhere between the fifty third and the fifty fourth songs she wrote for Joe that she just developed life's wisdom.
I think I wonder if that tape is like on the internet somewhere else if we can buy like if somebody has like cobbled together all of those clips and somehow created something.
And then we can ultimately play on a sharp GF.
So I love it all right? Any other any other quotes?
Yeah, there's one other thing I love. He left those seven voicemails, and then on the eighth and final voicemail, he says, I've been thinking maybe I didn't know you, maybe your mirage. Maybe the world is a blur of food and sex and spectacle and everyone was just hurtling towards the Kropos. So which case is not your fault? You know, maybe it's a good side all this.
I don't know.
I've been thinking about this thing. The reason I love that is because it ties back a little bit to this like truth cartographers. He's like really thrown at the dissolution of the relationship, and he doesn't really make he's not really able to make sense of things. Maybe you were just a mirage. It's all sort of confusing. And this is a pretty common reaction in the wake of a breakup, is we lose a little bit of our sense of order, our sense of structure, our sense of
who we are. And I think this quote, this last eighth and final voicemail he leaves for her, I think really captures the essence of this idea that it can be bewildering, it can be confusing to end a meaningful relationship, and he's just struggling to make sense of it.
Yeah.
That is one of the hardest things that people have to do to get over a breakup is to make sense of it and develop that narrative. So what do we wish we knew about close relationships or any other psychological phenomenon, you know, questions that this movie poses that we don't have great answers to.
Yet, How should we act when we are suspicious of a loved one? So at first, Diana is convinced that there's no way her father did anything wrong. She goes to the irs and says, stop it, you've got the wrong guy, and he's like, no, we don't. He's guilty as sin, and then gives her enough reason to believe like, uh oh, maybe he did this. So what does she do?
She snoops, she looks through his drawers. She eventually unlocks something private and then eventually discovers uh, oh, there's a bunch of like one hundred dollars bills here that shouldn't be here. And I just don't have a sense of how people generally when they become a little suspicious. I don't know, is he getting text messages from that girl? I sort of think maybe is that an excuse? Is that something that people use to say, Okay, well I'm going to break into his email or his texts and
try to find out what's going on. When do people do that? When do they start acting like private detectives? Under what circumstances is it ethical to do those things? I just don't think we know that much about that.
Well, this is as well where I, at least in twenty twenty four, I feel like people crowdsource this a lot. I'm not sure if you all are fans of am I overreacting on Reddit? Good, but I think this would be like a classic am I overreacting on Reddit where it's like my dad, you know, the IRIS is investigating my dad or you know, nursing home text fraud and you know I saw some money like in his private chamber.
Am I erecting? But I think that is something we can do, right, I mean, I think not necessarily on Reddit but we can go to our close others and ask the question, like can you give me some advice here? Like does this make sense? And again this gets back to the kind of thing you were talking about earlier, Eli, right where we're looking for truth seeking. Right, we're trying to figure out is my like if you have that reality just privately? It's hard to kind of know, but
we're getting some other folks's opinions on things. All of a sudden we can know, am I just being paranoid? Or is this kind of a real situation that we need to pay attention to?
And more to Youtao, I feel like one thing we talk about a lot on this show is the like motivated reasoning and close relationships, and we have all these biases about our close others. We just want to believe what we want to believe, and it is also important to realize that sometimes those beliefs cannot be sustained in light of reality. Reality is still a thing and at some point you have to confront that. And so going to other relationships, I mean that kind of social proof
is a good way to do that. For me. The thing that this movie pointed out that I loved but also thought like, Oh, I wish we studied attraction like this more. And it is the nature of their first date, right that they go to this I'm not talking about that. Whatever the thing was them, all of those who count right that doesn't go when they go to the party and they're like kind of interacting, but they're also watching
each other interact with other people, right that. This is in many ways what dating kind of used to be. It was about social networks. You're getting to know each other, but other people are floating in and out of the conversations at the same time. And this is how we
see if there's a connection with somebody else. And I wonder if we've really lost something as we transition to the resume version of dating, where you sit down across from somebody and I talk and you talk, and I talk and you talk and we exchange statistics and we hope that something clicks. And I think we really miss something by not having these kinds of dates. There was something really special about this idea that they are on a date and they're only interacting for a fraction of
the time. Like, what a cool idea this is, And you know, I I wish this wasn't so much a bygone era totally.
Okay, here's one that I got interested in. But it might just be how the Lloyd Dobbler relationship situation maps on to my own love life right now.
Oh it's good.
And so there's this open question about whether or not Lloyd and Diane got together at the right time. Right. Clearly they went to high school for three years together. Yeah, they had this weird three year.
High school where they had this oh yeah, yeah.
Yeah, so that was another thing of thirteen years liked went to school for thirty years, was like, oh yeah, it's a big mind blowing for them. But clearly died and Lloyd overlapped for three whole years. Clearly there was lots of parties who could have invited her to it's after graduation. She's only got like a couple of weeks left before she skidaddles off to the UK for her fellowship. Was that the right time to kind of get together?
You know?
Should he have done it sooner? Is there something special about a relationship that begins when it doesn't have much time? And the reason I like this question is that my husband and I got together right after I found doubt that I was getting a job at Yale, and I was about to move there in a couple of weeks time. We had almost exactly the sixteen weeks the diet and Lloyd had and.
We found I've always wanted to be a New Haven.
I think he super didn't think that.
Maybe yeah, yeah, he didn't think that. He didn't like that, but you know, I think that in some ways it was. In some ways at the time it felt like, oh, there's no pressure to this. We just kind of get to know each other and enjoy it, because it would be silly to think that the end of this has to result in, you know, him hopping on a plane to New Haven until you know the turbulence caused a ding or I guess a car version of that or whatever. And I've wondered, like, is there data on that. Was
that a good thing? It was a good thing for me. It seems like it was a good thing for Lloyd and Diana, though as we've talked about, we don't know what happened afterwards. Is the preciousness of the little time and the fact that we can't think of this as a long term thing as there's some other constraint. Does that help things or hurt things.
It's fascinating. You know, we don't study this all that well. You're right, this is phenomenon of on again, off again relationships, and the general idea is that some relationships have more of this turbulence, this turnover than other relationships do, and they generally tend to have a number of other features that are less than optimal. But I don't think there's good work looking at the situational forces that might set people up well when they start a relationship or set
people up poorly. Other than some of the social network stuff, there really isn't that much out there. But it'd be really interesting to look at something as simple as how much time will we be in the same place and to see what kind of effect that has.
Yeah, you know, there's not much in terms of the situations that set you up well. But it occurs to me there's another way of thinking about this question, which is, are there circumstances that will supercharge the pace of a romantic connection regardless of the long term future. And Paul, you and I talk sometimes about our errand's fast friends procedure. Yeah, you're asking crazy intimate questions, or you look into each
other's eyes, for three consecutive minutes. Right, there's there's these procedures. My guess, Lorie, is that the what I think of is like the summer camp romance thing, this idea that there's an end date. My guess is that that is in some ways a disinhibitor, and I wish the field knew more. My guess is that there is probably like a hypology or a category of disinhibitors, things that make
us willing to get vulnerable and intimate quickly. And so yes, my guess is that is that knowing that we've only got X number of weeks or X numbers of months will do that. And then the interesting question is, okay, well, if you have supercharged the intimacy, under what circumstances does that intimacy last for a long time, possibly even forever? And that is something that I'm I'm pretty sure we know nothing about.
That's really cool. So it's like, well, this relationship has a certain amount of intimacy potential. And if you give us, you know, four days, we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna get it off, we're gonna fast it all. Yeah, that's really cool.
And you all have talked about cases like this, like before Sunrise and before Sunset, these other movies where you have these kind of short periods of supercharging relationships. I wonder, if these factors.
Play right, that the ticking clock could in fact be an accelerant in some cases. And I think we see it in those movies, And yeah, you're right, I think we see it here too in some ways, in a more realistic way, sixteen weeks would be a more common hypercharged romance than those movies where it's happening in a matter of hours. Yeah. So we rate movies on this podcast from one to five stars. So let's all go through and talk about how many stars we give this movie. Laurie,
I will throw to you first. How many stars do you give?
Say anything, one hundred million? Stuff Like I chose this one because it's a favorite Lloyd Dobbler swoon, Swood. Wait, what's my top stars?
For five?
Five?
You can go as I as five stars?
Yeah, yeah, so I love this movie Lloyd Doubler's swoon. It's got to be five stars for me?
Okay, and Eli, how many stars for saying it five?
And only because I can't take all the five hundred million or whatever it was I. I knew that I liked this movie, I didn't really remember just how great it was.
We're gonna make this a hat trick. Five stars for me as well. What a man to have as a role model, John Cusack, Thank you, right? I mean, we talk about the bad messages from eighties movies, and this was the antidote came along in nineteen eighty nine and cleaned the slate. We also rate movies on Russbolts now. The russ Bold is named after Eli's advisor, the late great Carol Rusbold, pioneer of close relationships research, with five stars indicating a near perfect depiction of the nature of
close relationships. I'll go first on this one. This movie gets four rouss bolts from me. I think it got a lot of things right, a lot of the things that we covered here today. A few things that I thought were the reason it doesn't go all the way to five russ bolts for me, is really just that stalking component. I think it somehow lodged in our memories as endorsing or maybe excusing some things that we'd call stocking today. But overall, four ross bolts from me, Eli, What about you?
I have this at five Roussbolts too. I mean I had a list of I think eleven different things that I thought the movie got right. We talked about some of the bigger ones, but I was floored by the level of insight that Cameron Crow had when writing this, and also by the delivery from these particular actors. I thought it was just great and illustrated exactly. I think a lot of how relationships work.
Yeah, and Laurie, what about you? What do you think?
Yeah, I gotta go with like four and a half bustle. It's like, Paul, I share your I share your intuition that the stocking stuff just had me a little bit more skewed out when I rewatched it. That was probably because one of the thirteen year olds I watched with the boy, Dave max uh just at the end of the film, took his iPhone on speaker phone and played Peter Gabriel's in your Eyes like standing there looking for Lord, and I was like, no, that wasn't it was.
It was a desperate, desperate moment.
So I'm gonna knock it down point five. But yeah, I mean, I share Eli's intuition too, that like this movie that a whole lot of stuff right for the eighties.
It really did well. This is all the time we have for today. This has been the Love Actually Podcast and we have been delighted to have as our special guest doctor Lorie Sandris, host of this Happiness Lab podcast. So, Laurie, thank you so much for joining us today.
Anytime, I'm ready to come back.
Whenever you need, we are likely to take it.
Whenever you need an expert on bad eighties movies, I am here.
Let's do it. Let's do it. Were good ones for that matter. All right, Well, that is all we have for you today and I look forward to doing this with both of you at some time in the future.
The Love Factually podcast is produced and edited by Paul Eustwick and Eli Finkel, featuring music from Andrew frakerin Size