Perfecting the art of projection with ‘I’m Drunk, I Love You’
Stories, both real and fictional, have an inconvenient habit of living on. If it were up to me, I’d be more than happy to let the past be in the past, collecting dust on the top shelf and under the bed. But sometimes I catch myself looking too fondly at the translucent amber casing of distant days; I fossilize the moment and let it stare at me while I sleep.
JP Habac’s 2017 film I’m Drunk, I Love You is one relic I keep within reach. It’s such a spotless encapsulation of the upper-middle-class urban Filipino college experience it may as well have been a memory suspended in time—if not for the chronic Smirnoff drinking then for the falling in love with a best friend for seven years, as the film’s Carson keeps reminding us.
As such, I keep the film behind glass—something I break in case of emergencies. I long for the alternate university life I could have had if classes hadn’t moved online: Emergency! I miss going to gigs with my friends: Emergency! You say you love me so very much, your bestest friend in the world: Emergency!
I’m definitely not alone in my attachment to it; this is a cultural phenomenon, thank you very much. IDILY has not left the arsenal of hopeless romantic Filipino college kids since its lead actor went viral for donning the Sablay. Admittedly, its staying power is thanks largely to its merit as an ethnographic product, affirmed by the deluge of viewers who can relate.
This begs the question of whether relatability is potent enough to evince mastery of craft. I argue for the contrary, that the film simply benefitted from the relentless mythicism of its setting: the La Union beach trips, the illustrious University of the Philippines. We know very little about Carson and her best friend Dio, and without the emotional allure of seeing ourselves in them, the story is flimsy and paper-thin.
“But isn’t relatability a show of skill? Like, it isn’t always a given,” you say, half a contention and half a ploy to get on my nerves. I cower at the ease in which you leave me undone; I feign annoyance—“Don’t you ever get tired of disagreeing with everything I say?”—because I have no counterargument. I entertain the idea that I may be a hypocrite. After all, I never thought IDILY was good until I needed it to be there for me, in the same way that you never considered me a lover until I was all that was left and you had to make do with what you had. Of course I do not say this out loud, and we sit in silence in a cafe that would close two days after it opened.
IDILY’s Carson sits across from a friend of her own, downing beer in place of my overpriced iced coffee. She is recounting the moments she bent over backwards for clueless Dio: agreeing to join this spontaneous beach trip, walking for miles to listen to Dio talk at length about his new girlfriend, and never failing to hope for seven years. “Looks like you don’t plan to stop,” her friend teases. The camera is doggedly stationary, our own seat at their beachfront table. “When I’m done with school, I’ll be done with all this,” Carson half-drunkenly declares, their college graduation a weekend away. “You have to graduate, Carson. Graduate from all this sh*t.”
We hadn’t known each other for seven years. In fact, we were only two months in when you said you felt you’d known me all your life. Maybe that is indeed the case: We live 15 minutes from each other and know the same people. We unknowingly competed in the same writing contests and cried on the same sidewalks—my friends would make fun of us for that last one. Had this happened when I was 17, I would have romanticized it to death, but you have taught me with an almost scholastic earnestness the difference between loving the person and loving telling the stories you have with them. We are big fans of blurring this line, bonding over the poetry (yours: good) and diary entries (mine: bad) we wrote about other people. I flush when you dance me to Ourselves the Elves’ Baby I Love You So, not minding that it plays from a mixtape you made with someone else in mind.
Its flaws, primarily the story’s underdevelopment, become forgivable, in that maybe the film is well aware that we have our own stories to tell, and all it has to do is step back.
The next morning comes the kicker in the form of Pathy. (“With an H?” Carson asks, and audiences have repeated.) At first she’s a foil in their plans, a vegetarian getting in the way of the bagnet-hungry group. Then she lets slip that she’s actually not the foil but the plan, an old love Dio wishes to rekindle, an ulterior motive Carson failed to clock with her rose-tinted glasses.
Carson tells Dio how she feels despite Pathy, or perhaps because of her. Maybe if Dio knew, then Pathy need not be in the picture any longer. Or maybe Pathy doesn’t even exist at this moment. She’s just another one of Dio’s short-term paramours who will fail to outlive Carson’s solo seven-year-itch; her undying, unrequited more-than-friendship. The room is quiet, barely lit. In what is undeniably the film’s strongest scene, the spectacle of an onscreen confession that lovestruck Filipinos have gotten used to is stripped away. The pair’s first kiss, normally a cause for celebration, is resigned. Carson pulls away. She’s exhausted. Come daybreak she cries over her breakfast.
I rewatch the film eager to analyze it. “I am a critic,” I say as if to convince myself, “and I have written about countless relatable movies before.” And yet. Ten minutes in and I’m already drawing parallels between Carson and me, Dio and you, Pathy and—.
I laugh, reminded I am not immune to the film’s relatability—to the hopelessly romantic inklings of urban college kids, of which I am one—no matter my desire to criticize it. I break the glass, still. A quote from one of Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s short stories comes to mind: “All the pain Lucinda now felt was normal. The emptiness was normal. The harsh incinerating boring awful raw barren obsessive numb five-hundred-volt nothingness now completely consuming her was so totally average.”
Perhaps IDILY’s strength lies not necessarily in its relatability but in its irresistibility. It’s specific enough to light up our hippocampi but not too much that we can no longer fill in the blanks. Its flaws, primarily the story’s underdevelopment, become forgivable, in that maybe the film is well aware that we have our own stories to tell, and all it has to do is step back. The perfect blank slate, a vehicle for our personal catharses. Who can resist?
Carson, Dio, and Pathy stand in a sparse concert crowd. Pathy excuses herself and Carson steps back to look at her best friend in his entirety: his gray jacket, clean-cut hair, and inability to see Carson as more than a best friend.
“Pathy, stay away for a bit,” Carson whispers to herself. “Just five minutes.”
People wonder why I remain friends with you. You jokingly ask me which stage of grief I’m at and I admit I’m still in denial, even after so many months. I say that when I squint my eyes a certain way or train my brain to forget certain things, I can pretend nothing’s changed. I prefer the illusion of perpetual fasting over the certainty of famine, as André Aciman said.
“Five more minutes.”
You tease that you should’ve waited a week before ending things so it wouldn’t coincide with my birthday. I agree: You should’ve waited until after my birthday, or, even better, until my semester was over. Or until I’d graduated, or until I’d gotten a job, or until…
Pathy returns, all flower crowns and flowy dresses and wanting to try again with Dio. “Wow, that was quick,” Carson mutters under her breath. I say the same thing when you introduce me to—.
In a last-minute effort to lend credibility to my (very awfully subjective) analysis of the film, I overthink the ending. Carson and Dio attend their graduation, and I persistently write in my notes that Carson’s Sablay is placed on her right shoulder while Dio’s is on his left, symbolizing that Carson has yet to move on, because a Sablay is only on the right when students have yet to officially graduate, etc., etc.—analysis obviously made by a person skilled at extracting meaning out of nothing, at conjuring fate out of coincidences. Besides, this feeble theory is debunked seconds after I formulate it: underneath the surging music, Carson says, “I’ve graduated,” and we know she means it in more ways than one.
So I admit defeat: While there is much to say about IDILY’s indecision between being subdued and heavy-handed, right now all I can think about is that I myself am graduating college tomorrow, from the same university as Carson and Dio, wearing the same Sablay on my right shoulder then to my left. I laugh again, this time at the irony of the coincidence, of life imitating art imitating life.
“I suppose it will be a contradiction to say that I am writing this to forget,” you say in a letter you wrote for someone else. Ever since you showed it to me I would pore over its every syllable, then I’d immediately close the file as if ashamed. “That by remembering, already I am erasing you, replacing you with another image, another person; a construction that fits the narrative that my memories want to put into place.”
“Because no memory is real,” you continue. “What was ‘the present’ then exists only in that very second, and already it’s consumed by the past, doomed to be diluted into bastards of itself.”
By your logic, every poem you committed to paper is a bastardization, and perhaps I’m doing the same. I tell the story and I edit and confuse myself with which one’s real and which I embellished for the piece. I memorialize a moment and weep for it then polish its shine. I tell the story because it’s such a good story to tell and I make it an even better story to tell. What I grieve for is fiction, actually—art imitating art imitating art. I tell the story and I let it go. The song swells and the credits roll.
