Just a Door: Before Sunrise and “Object Lesson”
The emotional turning point of Before Sunrise occurs halfway through the film; as the sun sets, Jesse hints that he’d like to kiss Celine while on a Ferris wheel. She laughs at his sheepishness and moves in closer. They kiss, silhouetted against the Viennese skyline. We’re right there with them, as their connection reaches new depths. After this scene, the characters continue to stroll around the streets of Vienna, falling in love as they passionately bare their souls to one another. During the film’s emotional climax, the characters are forced to part, but they vow to reunite in six months, desperate to preserve the connection they formed over the course of their night together.
Rather than end the film on this touching, if slightly ambiguous note, Director Richard Linklater appends an oblique coda to Before Sunrise’s ending. In a montage, the film revisits every space the couple has inhabited in the past twenty-four hours as the sun rises overhead. But something’s different. The viewer immediately feels distanced from these locations due to the absence of the protagonists who occupied them mere hours ago (minutes ago in terms of the runtime). And Linklater widens the emotional gap between the viewer and the images onscreen even further. One of the locations we return to in this montage is the aforementioned Ferris wheel. But this time we aren’t inside the Ferris wheel with Jesse and Celine. We’re outside the amusement park, looking from a distance.
When I first saw Before Sunrise at the age of fifteen, I thought the camera’s apathy in the closing montage was forcing us to adopt the gaze of an apathetic passerby, oblivious to what happened in these spaces the night before. The montage played as an acknowledgment that although these locations ostensibly appeared mundane and insignificant, they’d remain significant to the couple that left pieces of themselves there. I hoped that if Celine and Jesse ever revisited these locations, they’d feel a sense of communion with their former selves. And I was certain that even if the couple didn’t reunite six months later, their memory of that night would forever retain its luster.
We interact with spaces and objects out of necessity, and only in hindsight do we realize that they contain a piece of us. But when we do realize it, a feeling of comfort sets in. No matter how much we change, whether through improvement or regression, these locations will remain as reminders of who we were while we inhabited them.
This, at least, was my hope as I shut the door to Room 317 for the last time. Never in my life had I had more faith in love than I did when I laid beside Liz in that room, listening to her recount stories from her childhood late into the night. I’d gone to a summer program not knowing a soul, met a girl, and within a matter of weeks we’d fallen for each other. I now had the romance I’d always dreamed of having.
Just as I hoped that a piece of Celine and Jesse would remain by the riverbank in Vienna. I hoped a piece of myself would remain in that room, as I shut the door for the last time. I hoped that if I ever revisited that room I’d be able to see my former self, hopelessly romantic and naive, preserved in amber.
Inanimate ephemera and personal experiences can be linked so inextricably that one can’t glance at an object or space from their past without feeling the presence of their former self. Something more profound than remembrance happens during these moments. But how? In his essay “Object Lesson”, Teju Cole investigates how objects acquire this power: “objects are reservoirs of specific personal experience, filled with the hours of some person’s life. They have been touched, or worn through use. They have frayed, or been placed just so.”
Cole asserts that due to this phenomenon, objects are powerful vehicles for empathy. He believes that photos of a victim’s objects, like those taken by Samuel Abell and Sergei Ilnitsky, evoke more empathy in viewers than conventional conflict photos, which prioritize shock over specifics and emotion do. These photos force us to consider that just as we’ve spent hours “touching” and “fraying” our objects, so too have the owners of the objects in these photos. But on a deeper level, we know that their essence is in their objects just as our essence is in our objects. Cole evidences this anecdotally when he details how the inscription on a kidnapped girl’s blouse shown in an “object photo” moves him because he instinctively relates this detail to his memory of inscribing his own name on his school uniform when he was young.
A photo of an object allowed him to forge a bond with an unknown victim who suffered millions of miles away from him. This is what objects are capable of. Because we’re connected so deeply to objects we’ve owned, we can intuit a connection between a random object and its owner’s experiences without much context. A lifeless entity’s ability to evoke these kinds of responses seems almost supernatural.
“But, if an object could create a bond between you and someone you never met, why was it so hard for me to create a bond between me and someone I’d been?”, I wondered, standing before the door to my old room over two years after I’d left it. I wasn’t standing in front of a “reservoir of specific personal experience”. I was standing in front of a door.
Had I read the ending of Before Sunrise all wrong? Could it be that those distanced shots of empty spaces weren’t suggesting the perspective of oblivious passers-by, but rather presaging how Celine and Jesse’s relationship to those spaces would change over time? As years went by, would Celine and Jesse look at those spaces with the same apathy that a passerby would? Would they, like me, return and find that no traces of their former selves remained there?
Of course, I could find traces of the hopeful romantic I’d left in that room years before, but only because I looked for them. In order to feel the presence of my former self, I had to actively call to mind memories from my time in that room. It took the same amount of effort it took me to connect to the unknown owners of the objects in Abell or Ilnitsky photographs.
As Cole said, an object can bridge a gap, but that door created a gulf. Could it be that because objects are static, unchanging reminders of who we used to be, they also reveal to us the ways in which we are not who we used to be? In that room, Liz and I would talk each other’s ears off for hours on end. A year and a half later, we’d run out of things to say to each other. And standing before that door, I knew that there was a whole part of me that had vanished.
Would Celine and Jesse return to Vienna, having never crossed paths again, and laugh at their youthful naivete? Would they, like me, realize how immature and idealistic their romantic projections were? Would they too feel a gulf if they visited that ferris wheel?
It’s disheartening to think that I’ve lost touch with that romantic, if naive, sixteen-year-old, but could that gulf signify something like growth? Could it be that I feel this gulf, not because I’ve lost something, but because I’ve gained something? Wisdom? Or perspective, perhaps? Maybe I’ve realized that the adolescent infatuation I felt in that room with Liz wasn’t meant to last. And I’m now ready for a more mature, stable kind of love.
Now, my wish for Celine and Jesse is that if they did return to Vienna, they’d understand that that gulf represents growth, as much as it does loss. And perhaps that would grant them what I felt as I walked away from that door, and what Cole knew objects could grant us -- “to however modest a degree, some kind of solace”
