BLUE MOON: How “I Love You, Just Not That Way” Ruins a Life
“Blue Moon ... you saw me standing alone.” Those are Lorenzo Hart’s lyrics and Lorenzo Hart himself, in Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon. Sure, he longs for love. And, he never gives up wanting it. Elizabeth is his latest hope. But as hard as he tries, love never works out. So, he drowns out his sorrows by downing one shot after another. He can’t stop. Yet it’s not the alcohol that ruins his life. It’s the reasons he has to drink. He sees no other way out of: “I love you, just not that way.
When you can’t escape the devastating feeling: “Nobody ever loved me that much,” you’ll do anything to go numb. That feeling torments you. The longing. The shame. The envy. The hurt. The sadness that you can’t let yourself feel. It’s too much. If you felt it, you’d completely give up hope.
“Nobody Ever Loved Me That Much”
“Nobody ever loved me that much.” “That’s the best line in Casablanca,” a stone-sober Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke) tells Eddie (Bobby Cannavale), the bartender. Larry, as Lorenz is affectionately known, is a well-known lyricist. But these particular words sting him on a deeply personal level, just like his own lyrics from the song Blue Moon, a #1 hit. It would be easier if they didn’t strike so close to home. But can you really write anything that, in some way, doesn’t?
Well, for Linklater’s Lorenz Hart, hopeful fantasy, unrequited love, constant longing, and desperation to feel loved are the driving forces behind his alcoholism, and why he can’t stay sober. Reality (filled with shame, envy, and never feeling good enough for love) is too much to bear.
So, “Who’s ever been loved enough? (Certainly not Larry). Give me a shot, Eddie.” “You told me not to.” Eddie’s trying to help him. Larry’s already lost his partnership with his beloved friend Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott) because he couldn’t stop drinking. Tonight’s the opening night of Oklahoma! Rodger’s new hit with Oscar Hammerstein (Simon Delaney). If that doesn’t make him feel unloved, what else could come close? (Maybe Vivian ... and Elizabeth (Margaret Qualley)?)
But right now, Larry is filled with intolerable envy, which is really the other side of shame. Hammerstein has taken his place, and Oklahoma! is Rodger’s greatest hit of all time. With Hammerstein and not with Hart. How could Dick do that to him? “Another shot, Eddie ... My secret goal for this year is to stop being so scared.” Secret. Because, of course, he has his pride.
Larry’s drowning out the pain of feeling cast aside. Unwanted. Replaced.
AND NOW. Envy charges in.
Filled with Envy (& Fighting His Shame)
Envy will ruin anything good to make you feel better about yourself. That’s Larry tonight. He feels sidelined. The Oklahoma! afterparty is about to begin upstairs. The show is letting out soon. He’s fighting off shame. The shame of being displaced by another lyricist. He can’t stand it. Nobody can be better than he is. Is he disgraced? He’ll demean Oklahoma! instead. “Anything that needs a !,” he sniffs. He was so certain Dick would call him because they’d need to “funny it up. But he didn’t. He was too busy writing hits.” A hit?! Not to Larry: “I saw it. And I knew two things with certainty. It was a 14-carat hit. And, a 14-carat piece of shit.” Oklahoma! That is. Not Lorenz Hart.
He goes on and on: “Rodgers is a genius. There’s no one in his range, inventiveness ... I mean, Rodgers is a coldhearted son of a bitch, but he can get a melody to levitate. And that’s the hallmark of great music. Levitation ... Of course, he’d go with someone tall this time.”
Larry feels lower than low, trying everything to levitate his flattened self-worth. Jokes about himself with Eddie. Brags to the attractive, young piano player, home on leave. Invites him to his party tonight. He’s utterly flamboyant. He can’t stop mocking Oklahoma! “Am I bitter? Fuck, yes...”
Admitting it makes it worse. Rodgers is moving up without him. With Hammerstein, no less. He can’t stop talking about himself. If he stops, he’ll feel his emptiness and crash. He must “levitate.”
For Larry, “levitating” means not being pulled down into facing reality. The serious reality of his self-hate, feelings of smallness and failure, and the destructiveness of his drinking (which is both the problem and his magical solution). He tells Eddie he thinks there’s “nothing more beautiful than a half-erect penis” because it has promise. But unless he’s drunk on alcohol or his own self-aggrandizement, Lorenz Hart feels there’s no promise that anyone really loves him. He doesn’t (he can’t) love himself. So, he feels no hope. And, unfortunately, he looks in the wrong places or spoils what he has (AKA Richard Rodgers’ love for him). Envy and drink will do that, in Blue Moon.
“Levitating:” Alcohol & Singing His Own Praises
But Larry keeps trying, and that’s where the alcohol comes in. Alcohol holds the promise of instantly feeling better than he does, the promise of levitating. Yes, alcohol makes him levitate. Rise way, way above his terrible pain. The sadness he cannot feel. He takes another shot against his own better judgment and that of Eddie the bartender, to get through seeing Richard, who has all the promise. All the audience’s love. A drink is “pleasure in such a small container.” So different from how he feels inside. Larry is small in stature (he hates that) and couldn’t feel smaller now. He must levitate. Make himself bigger. His envy of Rodgers and Hammerstein is insurmountable.
That’s why he sings his own praises. To E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy), or anyone who’ll listen. “I’m telling you, I’m good. I’m really good. That’s what writers do. We wear our vulnerability like a cloak for all the world to witness. I asked her (Elizabeth) if she would like to escape the city's heat and spend the weekend with me on Lake Dunmore in Vermont. And without a moment’s hesitation, she said, ‘I’d love to, Larry.’ I’m sorry, I’m babbling, but how do you express the actual present tense of falling in love? What does she see in me?” EB White says, “I think she recognizes that she’s being adored.” “That’s what the heart wants: to be adored.” That’s what Larry wants.
Yet, he doesn’t feel he is. He doesn’t see how much Dick Rodgers misses him. Doesn’t see the sadness in Dick’s face. Dick owes his success to Larry. He’s Dick’s best friend. The only reason Dick’s moved on to other lyricists, to Hammerstein, is that he can’t count on Larry. Alcohol, Larry’s “pleasure in a small container,” has driven his partner, his own best friend, away, in Blue Moon.
Yes, Larry is consumed with self-hate, and he drinks himself to death because of it. But before he does, he prostrates himself before Dick Rodgers, trying to get back in his good graces. Talking his ear off about his idea for a new musical, Marco Polo, that they can write together. About his fascination with “the ethereal Elizabeth. My heart that has never been captured this way before.”
And when Dick asks the drunk and tearful Larry, “Are you up to it, Larry? Are you? Do you think you are?” he returns to Elizabeth. To her, Larry’s “a big man.”
For her, he’ll do anything for love.
Desperately Doing Anything for Love
Elizabeth. Larry sighs. A Yale student. His mentee. He’s taken her under his wing and fallen desperately in love (even though his preference is usually for men). He’s never met anybody like her. He buys her all these gifts. A book by Somerset Maugham. “You don’t understand the magic of this girl. I’ve been waiting for this my whole life.” She’s 20, and he’s a “young 47,” in Blue Moon.
Yes, he says, “There’s always one who loves and one who lets himself be loved.” Yet, for Larry, it’s the other way around. Elizabeth lets herself be loved... and he is taken up with total adoration. He goes on and on about Elizabeth, who has never asked him one single thing about himself.
But he’ll do anything to get her love. An unreachable love. Not really there. Yet, he won’t let himself see the impossibility. He makes himself Elizabeth’s confidante to get inside a love life that he longs for and isn’t his. He asks questions. Shows interest. Is a voyeur of her sexual exploits with (young) men, wishing it were him. Hoping that if he gives and asks for nothing, he’ll get her love.
Elizabeth thinks he’s the best listener she’s ever known. He says, “That’s because I have no interest in myself.” Not true. She tells him the tale of Cooper on her birthday night, the failure to get the love she’s longed for, for years. Like Larry, thinking she’ll finally get it. They’re two peas in a pod.
Crying, she admits: “But, really, it’s just that he doesn’t love me that much. You know it when the girl loves a guy with all her heart, and he doesn’t love her back. Do you have any idea what that feels like?” Of course, Larry does. He tells her, in Blue Moon, “nobody ever loved me that much.”
Cooper never called Elizabeth again. And she tells Larry she’s so desperate that if he finally does after four months, she’d drop everything and drive 30 hours to see him again. Larry asks, “Why would you do that for someone who treated you so badly?” Yet, Larry’s just as desperate. He cannot see the reality of his unrequited desire, either.
“How do you feel about me, Elizabeth? “
“I Love You, Just Not That Way ...”
“I love you, just not that way ...” The most devastating words that Larry could hear. It happened once before, just like that. He’d asked Vivian to marry him, he tells Soldier Boy, the piano player, earlier that evening. And she’d said, “I love you, darling, just not that way. I love you, darling, just not that way. Not that way. Three little words. Ten little letters that mean game over, schmuck.”
This is what Larry’s gone through. It feels like the constant rejection of his need for love. Constant. It’s turned him bitter. It’s made him drink more and more. It’s made him unable to see or trust a different kind of love. Sure, maybe it’s not romantic love, but it’s still love. From Dick, for example. It’s made him envious. Hostile to the love others have. Disparaging of sentimentality. Of feelings.
BUT. He’ll try again with Elizabeth. A man’s got to have hope. Doesn’t he? Even if desperate hope. “How do you feel about me, Elizabeth? I love you, Larry.” “You do?”
“I do… Just not that way.”
He’s crushed. Absolutely and totally crushed. It’s the last straw for him. “You said that you would drive 30 hours to see Cooper. How many hours would you drive for me?” “I feel something wiser and deeper for you. Respect. No one has ever been more interested in my life than you have. I don’t deserve a friendship like yours. I’m so grateful for you.” He swallows hard. He’s got his pride:
“I’m grateful for you, too. You resurrected me.” Really, she’s just killed him. And, Elizabeth pushes the knife deeper into his fragile heart. She happily goes off with Dick, who has invited her to his celebration party for Oklahoma! Ignoring Larry and the fact that he invited her to his party first.
Blue Moon.
You saw me standing alone.
without a dream in my heart.
without a love of my own.
Not Feeling Loved Can Ruin a Life
Remember the hit song from Oklahoma!? “Oh, what a beautiful morning, and people will say we’re in love ...” Larry’s fighting to believe that Elizabeth will come to her senses and love him that way: “Around 5 AM, a little bit too much Malbec, she’ll show up and ask me, ‘Hey Larry, what are you reading? Hey Larry, when’s your birthday? For the first time in her life, she’s going to be interested in me.”
And, that mouse that Larry liberates every morning, asking, “How does he get up 19 floors?” That’s Larry. That’s what Larry does. That’s how high and hard he tries to climb. Larry feels as small as a little mouse. Small. Easily hurt. But tenacious. Yes. He climbs and climbs, trying to feel like a loved man. Until sadness consumes him and he can’t take it anymore … killing himself with alcohol to drown it out. “Game Over.”
Blue Moon,
You saw me standing alone
without a dream in my heart
without a love of my own.