Punch Drunk Love Is Really About Loving Yourself

I never considered myself a huge fan of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love, though it has numerous huge fans. The fidgety, blue-suited central character Barry Egan, played by an unforgettably vulnerable Adam Sandler, obviously has a lot of people identifying with and rooting for self-loathing loners, and I can only encourage that behavior. I think for me the most problematic aspects of the film were that it came across as one of those “love will solve all your emotional problems” romantic comedies, combined with the fact that Barry is a character that seems like he has some fairly serious psychological problems—to the point where he impulsively inflicts property damage in a fit of rage a few times– that the film treats a bit lightly and sometimes even humorously. 

That being said, I think even on a first viewing it’s apparent that this movie is not meant to be literal and real, but rather heightened and stylized. Plot elements like the mysterious phone sex line operators tracking down and harassing the hapless Barry seem a little…surreal? Pynchon-esque? Not to mention the way the movie opens––with a random car crash and a perfectly good harmonium left out on the street.

Here was my eventual insight into Punch Drunk Love: I feel like it’s more about Barry’s feelings and self-actualization than it is about anything else, including even romantic love. If you look at it that way, the fantastic elements in the movie represent different forces Barry must contend with in his life to embrace his own identity. The sinister presence behind the phone sex line Barry calls in a moment of desperate loneliness represents Barry’s inner negative inner voices, compulsion, and disconnection. Alternately, Emily Watson’s soft, ethereal Lena represents unconditional love. She loved Barry seeing him in a photo before she knew him, and she continues to love him no matter what odd or even disturbing things he does (like smashing up a bathroom) or says (appearing breathless at her door confessing that he called the phone sex line, but he’s going to make it up to her by redeeming his pudding coupons for free mileage). 

Barry may still be a bumbling, awkward presence at the end of the film, but he’s taken a journey of growth. He’s told off and stood up to his controlling sisters. By flying to Hawaii to visit Lena, not only did Barry decide to go spontaneously, but he didn’t even let the fact that he couldn’t rely on his obsessive plan to redeem pudding coupons for mileage stop him. Lena also tells Barry, as they sit on the beach in the twilight, that she’s so happy he got her out of her room. The metaphor is fairly obvious in that these are two lonely people trapped in their hermetically sealed universes who desperately want some force to give them an excuse to break out. Still, they move shyly and tentatively throughout their encounters, with some fear of what happens next. I recently heard someone describe this movie as being about the tension between wanting to be loved and not wanting to be seen by other people, which I thought was quite lovely and highly accurate.

I love that the movie doesn’t just let Barry and Lena have a happy ending, either. Those malicious impulses Barry set into force earlier have come to chase him down, literally, crashing into his car and hurting Lena. Barry’s demons don’t want him to get away with his happiness, which reinforces my feeling that these villains actually represent Barry’s darkest intrusive thoughts about himself, his self-loathing, and his shame about his past. These relentless pursuers are part of Barry’s quest as he must not only vanquish the henchmen but also go after their overlord—who is hilariously played by the indefatigable Phillip Seymour Hoffman and mysteriously based out of a mattress store in Provo, Utah. It is only after Barry asserts to the enemies of his peace and well-being that he is going to let this love in into his life and let it give him strength that he ends up getting the girl, which quells some of my earlier concerns that Barry had a lot of therapeutic work to do before embarking on a relationship. 

When I watched this film in the past, I was skeptical of Lena’s romantic interest in Barry. Given that Barry acts like an emotionally stunted child a good deal of the time, I felt that perhaps Lena’s interest came from a place of feeling sorry for him or having a savior complex rather than from a place of having any genuine interest in and connection with him. What I had forgotten is that Lena is fairly awkward herself, from her first fumbling scenes in the film’s opening to her not being able to summon the courage to kiss Barry. I’m not even sure if Lena is real. Some fans of the film have hypothesized that Lena is an alien, due to the sudden and unexplained crash preceding her arrival in the beginning, the lens flares and light often surrounding her, and the fact that she has no family and is always in the air. What Lena definitely represents is unconditional love, which many people argue also does not exist. Lena is a benevolent embodiment of unconditional love in its purest, most distilled form—of the ability to accept ourselves, forgive ourselves, love ourselves, and think we are worthy of love and letting love into our lives. 

I’ve always known that this movie was really a fantasy, and not just in the improbable way that most romantic comedies are. It’s a fantasy almost in the way hero’s journeys are, with their knights, dragons, and princesses—the dragons just happen to be aggressive phone sex line operators. It’s a fantasy in the lush colors of its cinematography, the dramatic play between high tension and indulgent romantic symphony in the quirky score, the dreamlike elements that are broken up by color-banded interstitials across the screen, like the signal is being lost and then found again. What never occurred to me was I feel like it’s just as much (or more of) a love story about self-actualization than it is about romantic love.