Why It Often Rains in the Movies
Because so much consequential thinking happens in the rain. A steady mist to recall departures, a bitter downpour for betrayal. As if the first thing a man wants to do when he learns his wife is sleeping with his best friend, and has been for years, the very first thing is not to make a drink, and drink it, and make another, but to walk outside into bad weather. It's true that the way we look doesn't always reveal our feelings. Which is a problem for the movies. And why somebody has to smash a mirror, for example, to show he's angry and full of self-hate, whereas actual people rarely do this. And rarely sit on benches in the pouring rain to weep. Is he wondering why he didn't see it long ago? Is he wondering if in fact he did, and lied to himself? And perhaps she also saw the many ways he'd allowed himself to be deceived. In this city it will rain all night. So the three of them return to their houses, and the wife and her lover go upstairs to bed while the husband takes a small black pistol from a drawer, turns it over in his hands, then puts it back. Thus demonstrating his inability to respond to passion with passion. But we don't want him to shoot his wife, or his friend, or himself. And we've begun to suspect that none of this is going to work out, that we'll leave the theater feeling vaguely cheated, just as the movie, turning away from the husband's sorrow, leaves him to be a man who must continue, day after day, to walk outside into the rain, outside and back again, since now there can be nowhere in this world for him to rest.
From Visible Signs by Lawrence Raab. Copyright © 2003 by Lawrence Raab. Reprinted by permission of Penguin. All rights reserved.