The strangest thing happened a few weeks back: I went to a preview screening of
Drive and spent the whole time (in between flinching and laughing uproariously at people's heads exploding, that is) gazing proudly at the screen.
Proudly?
Yes,
proudly, as though my great friend Ryan Gosling had made a terrific film (which he has) and I was totally stoked for him.
I later learned I'm not alone in this: catching up with a friend in Sydney who'd just seen
Crazy, Stupid, Love, she revealed that she was suffering the same affliction, having giggled all the way through the film "as if he were my actual boyfriend".
(We may or may not have later allowed the conversation to degenerate, over cocktails, into such witty repartee as "Imagine what it would be like to touch his face" and "What do you think he smells like?" and "Ryan..." followed by long pauses and punctuated by sighs.)
I watched this video of him and Justin Timberlake in their
Mickey Mouse Club days with great affection, as though I was watching my own old family movies:
And then,
my boyfriend insisted on doing his "Ryan Gosling in the
Drive trailer impression" (not having seen the film yet), which pretty much involved drumming his fingers on the steering wheel as if he were wearing driving gloves, and then drifting into a wistful reverie about how he was going to make friends with Gosling and they'd hang out and Ryan would yell "Hey, do your me impression!" at parties.
WHAT IS IT ABOUT THIS GUY?
At the risk of this turning into a submission for
Dolly Poetry, I should make sure to note at the outset that my obsession with Gosling is primarily because he's a really, really good actor.
(It's purely incidental that I think he's so handsome it could be a government plot.)
When I watched
Lars And The Real Girl I started crying about five minutes in and didn't stop until five minutes after the credits had finished rolling.
Blue Valentine slayed me.
And, you know, herp derp
The Notebook.
But there's something else about him, isn't there? Something that recalls the best/worst days of teenage (or even tweenage) crushes, where infatuation is not obsessive or explosive but instead rational and matter-of-fact, as though you're perfectly certain you'll meet your hero/heroine soon enough and, of course, will become best friends/faithful lovers (delete as appropriate).
He turns everybody into Judy Garland in
The Broadway Melody Of 1938:
The last time I felt like this was in 1995, when I was convinced that Jonathan Brandis and I would be best mates, if, you know, fate would only intervene and introduce us; we'd hang out all day with Darwin the dolphin, and do
Ocean Girl-type shit (hey, it was a big year for sea-bound sci-fi/fantasy).
There's something bracing about a big-screen crush, though. It reminds you what it's like to be alive, or at least, what it was like to be alive when you were a teenager.
I'm sure there's some science behind exactly what it is that leads people the world over to fall, lemming-like, for particular stars - perhaps something about the space between the eyes, or a particular shade of blonde, or god knows what - but for now I'm perfectly happy to hang out in a darkened cinema, watching my best mate Ryan kick goals onscreen.
And then after the movie we all go out to a bar and my boyfriend does his Ryan Gosling impression and we all hoot with laughter and life is good.
This is my story, by Clem Bastow,
13 29.