PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE: THE STORY OF RIGHT HAND, LEFT HAND
"i have a love in my life. it makes me stronger than anything you can imagine."
Barry Egan has a catchphrase: “I don’t know.” It’s not quite as cool as a catchphrase should be. It’s more like a defense mechanism. Why are you wearing that blue suit? I don’t know. Are you gay? I don’t know. Why do you have all those cups of pudding? I don’t know.
Barry does know the answers to these questions. He wants to look good, he’s not gay, and he’s trying to win a sweepstakes. These are perfectly reasonable things. But when the core of his person is under scrutiny at all times, those perfectly reasonable answers feel wildly unreasonable, and the only way he can claw his way back to feeling normal is to disown his decisions entirely. Lonely and dejected, Barry stumbles across an ad for a phone sex hotline in the newspaper. He calls it. They ask for his name, address, and social security number. He gives it to them.
These days, Paul Thomas Anderson is mostly known for epic, operatic films like There Will Be Blood (2007) and The Master (2012). Or at least that’s what I mostly know him for, and that’s all we really have to go off here. I love both those films, so Punch-Drunk Love, a romantic comedy starring Adam Sandler no less, always stood out as a big question mark in his filmography for me. When I saw the Criterion Channel had added a Paul Thomas Anderson collection a few weeks ago with Punch-Drunk Love as the first film, I gave it a shot. I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.
Punch-Drunk Love is thunderously earnest. Its setting isn’t as grand as the riverboats and estates of The Master or the oil fields of There Will Be Blood, but the barren stretch of California Highway that hosts Barry’s life is treated with just as much pomp and dreaminess. Grey condominum hallways spill infinitely into themselves like a hall of mirrors, the empty car dealerships light the streets aglow at night, and a confrontation in the back of a furniture store is framed as a heroic entry. The film’s score slowly reveals itself to be semi-diagetic, playing in Barry’s head as the soundtrack for his own life. Barry Egan lives on a smaller scale than other Anderson protags, but it’s still a life, and that deserves its own grandeur.
Red or blue? Left or right? Punch-Drunk Love plays with two of the clearest binaries there are. Barry wears a blue suit throughout the movie, a color that represents loneliness and repressed feelings. Lena (Emily Watson), a friend of Barry’s sister and his love interest, almost exclusively wears red, the color of warmth (the pudding cups Barry buys to game a frequent flyer miles sweepstakes are also marked with a red logo). It’s not the most sophisticated symbolism ever, but its simplicity is part of the film’s playful, fairytale charm.
Then there’s left and right. Let me just push up my glasses here so I seem extra smart. In Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing (1989), a character named Radio Raheem wears rings on each hand that spell “LOVE” and “HATE” out on his knuckles: “LOVE” on the right hand, “HATE” on the left. He puts his fists up to the camera and begins a monologue: “Let me tell you the story of right hand, left hand.” It’s the story of good and evil. With the left hand, Cain iced his brother Abel. But the five fingers of the right hand go straight to the soul of man—the hand of love. The two hands are locked in conflict, and just when the right hand seems like it’s losing, love prevails. It’s an iconic scene in one of the greatest films of all time.
It’s also taken directly from The Night of the Hunter (1955), where a serial killer with “LOVE” and “HATE” tattooed across his knuckles gives a nearly identical speech. This is also where I let my glasses fall off my face, because I haven’t actually seen The Night of the Hunter. But I do know that the character who gives the speech is coniving and sinister. In his version, HATE wins out, even when it looks like love has conquered it. When Radio Raheem says it, he means it earnestly: LOVE will prevail.
So what’s Punch-Drunk Love’s take?
I'm not a big Adam Sandler fan, which is something you should never say around the white people in your life unless you love getting asked why you didn’t like Happy Gilmore. The incredible, hair-pulling Uncut Gems convinced me that there was Something More Going On There, but it was still a hurdle when I put on Punch-Drunk Love. I wasn’t sure if I would be able to unsee basketball shorts Sandler and fully lock in to the movie.
But he crushes it. Barry Egan is a beautiful, fully realized character with a rich inner life that is delicately revealed across his journey to self-actualization. There has perhaps never been a more “he’s so me” character in all of film. If you haven’t ruminated on an awkward goodbye and called yourself a stupid motherfucker, I’m not sure if I understand you.
Even at his most cringeworthy in the movie’s first act, Anderson doesn’t gawk at Barry—when he calls the phone sex line, the camera pivots to follow him pacing across his apartment, but turns away to look at the wall when he starts to masturbate. It’s an easy setup for a laugh, but Anderson opts to give Barry a moment of privacy at his loneliest moment. Isn’t that what we all deserve?
At one of his lowest points, Barry punches the wall of his office in another fit of rage. As he sobs over the harmonium standing on his desk, his hands run over the keys, and we see that the punch left a wound that spells LOVE out over the knuckles of his right hand. Nothing is spelled out on the left.
Barry’s inner conflict is between love and hate. He’s kind, but doesn’t know how to express himself other than through anger, breaking a glass door after being bullied at a family dinner and trashing a restaurant bathroom on a date. Dean Trumbell (the eternal Philip Seymour Hoffman), the man behind the phone-sex scam, is Barry’s dark mirror, screaming on the phone and telling his wife to shut up. Like sweating out a fever, Barry learns to temper his rage and replace it with something gentler: love for himself and another.
Barry and Lena end up together in the end, but their arc is about more than “getting the girl.” Lena is the first person to accept Barry for who he is, which gives him the first step he needs to learn to love and respect himself. Whether Barry and Lena will stay together is an open question, but when she wraps her arms around him in the film’s final shot, we feel reassured that, no matter the destination, their journey together will help each other grow into fuller versions of themselves. That exciting unease comes out in Lena’s closing line of the film:
“So here we go.”
Can't believe you don't like Happy Gilmore :/