Chinese director Wong Kar-Wai makes films that measure the distance between people. There is a scene at the end of Fallen Angels (1995) in which a man and a woman who live in the same apartment building ride home together on the back of a motorbike. He is a mute delinquent; she is a deceased assassin’s former partner.
They know each other only as “that man” and “that woman,” and, as he puts it, have rubbed elbows without starting a single spark too many times in the past to ever become friends or confidantes. The ride home is short. Yet now there is a spark, and as the woman rests her head against the man’s back, she feels “such warmth.”
I always get choked up over this scene because I am a big crybaby, and also because, like all Wong’s films, it shows that the names and otherwise meaningless bits of information through which we think we know each other are not necessary to real intimacy.
It rings with the truth that we are both alone and not alone all at once—that we move through life untethered to one another, yet recognize ourselves in perfect strangers. Two people rubbing noncommittal elbows on the streets of Hong Kong can, if only for an instant, go the distance between worlds.
Now that I am a junior, and my time to limit the distance separating me from my classmates is growing short, I think a lot about Fallen Angels.
I also think about Facebook.
I think about how Facebook has made films like Wong Kar-Wai’s and Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset (1995)—films about intimacy without promise—require greater suspension of disbelief.
I can’t remember whether I heard this from my dad or a writer somewhere, but it is hard to imagine Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke exposing their inner selves with the same urgency if they could add each other on Facebook the next day.
I think about the fact that when I first arrived at high school, I viewed Facebook as a tool to overcome the distance separating me from my classmates. Every friend request confirmed was proof that we were closer by the day. I knew their favorite bands, favorite movies, favorite YouTube videos, and for a while, I thought that meant I knew them, too.
These days, I wonder if Facebook, or rather the promise of Facebook, has actually kept me at arm’s length from people.
When I say “the promise of Facebook,” I do not mean its instant messaging capabilities. As proud as I am to go to a school where we so value face-to-face interaction, I’ve made some of my best friends online and am fairly convinced that interaction from behind a computer screen is not without value.
When I say “the promise of Facebook,” I mean the promise that, even if I were to move across the country tomorrow, I could keep in touch through pictures and status updates alone. It is that promise that has made me complacent.
I am not, for example, in touch with the people from the school I went to before I moved to Brookline. When my mom asks if I’m keeping in touch with so-and-so, I usually say, “I guess we’re friends on Facebook,” and my mom—who has maybe 16 friends on Facebook—follows up with, “Well, would you like to see her again?”
Lately, I realize I have no answer to that question because, while I might know what so-and-so ate for dinner last night, I don’t actually know her. Sure, I could send her a message, and maybe we could have a conversation, but after four years of radio silence, wouldn’t that be a little weird?
I feel the same distance from people offline. I’m friendly with lots of people, my mom says, but not exactly friends. I don’t want to go through life pretending social media gives me infinite time to get to know a person. I don’t want to arrive at a future where I hesitate to contact old friends having never closed the distance between us when I had the chance.
There are several lessons you could take from this (most of them clichés). But for me, here’s the bottom line: Wong gets it. It’s not enough to rub elbows without the intention of setting off sparks.
Being friends on Facebook isn’t intimacy, and lending you my pencil in class isn’t intimacy. But while we share the same physical space, the opportunity to reach out to one another is uniquely ours. The knowledge that, 10 years from now, we will likely be relative strangers should drive us closer together rather than further apart. Even if the ride home is short, let us, if only for an instant, lean against each other’s shoulders and feel that curious warmth.
