Love as a Harmonium: The Comedy of Romantic Isolation in Punch-Drunk Love

A terrible crash disrupts the silence of an empty morning. A car flips multiple times down the road, while another vehicle pauses briefly in front of a warehouse. A faceless passenger places a small, wooden Harmonium on the side of the road, and the vehicle speeds off. Later, a worker at the warehouse slowly approaches the Harmonium, staring at it as if in a trance. Suddenly, a large truck roars down the road, nearly grazing the instrument. The worker scoops up his newfound treasure and runs back into the warehouse. Enclosed within the glass walls of his cage-like office, the worker covers a tear in the Harmonium’s bellows with duct tape. Together, within the confines of his gloomy solitude, they make beautiful music. These are the early moments of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2002 film Punch-Drunk Love, in which the worker, Barry Egan (Adam Sandler), forges an identical relationship with a human Harmonium named Lena (Emily Watson). This film is an exhilarating example of the contemporary romantic comedy, in which the frailties of human relationships are observed through romance. Such an argument can be validated about Punch-Drunk Love by analyzing its use of character archetypes, its exploration of various human relationships, and its relation to other films in its subgenre. Ultimately, this will answer the question, “why is this film truly a comedy of romance?”

In contrast to Anderson’s last film, the three-hour-plus, sprawling ensemble drama Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love runs only half as long, and centers its subversive romantic comedy on three distinct characters. Each of them is an intriguing variation on genre archetypes. Nearly every scene in the film focuses intently on Barry Egan, the painfully introverted owner of a useless novelty business. His crooked smile and pleasant grumbling masks a monstrous inner-rage fueled by his seven sisters, who shift between pathological bouts of doting and taunting. Anderson has confessed in interviews that Barry was based on the classic comic persona (particularly embodied by Buster Keaton) of “a guy in the center and everything circling around him.” [YouTube 4] In this sense, Barry displays traits of the “outsider protagonist,” by deliberately holding himself away from the norm (such as when he wears a glaring blue suit to work). Yet unlike the outsider protagonists of the 60’s, whose lives were made to look somewhat desirable, Barry’s life is anything but. After his first encounter with Lena, Barry races back into the dark warehouse, seeking the self-controlled isolation that gives him comfort. At first, the audience seems to be examining Barry as one would the “self-exploratory male,” from the perspective of a detached observer. Yet Anderson stealthily draws the audience into Barry’s psyche, through some brilliantly subtle mis-en-scene that will be explored later in the paper.

Thus, Barry is closest to the “self-loathing” male archetype, since his anger caused by the sisters who have beaten him into submission has transformed into an inner-disgust at the person he’s become. After leaving Lena’s room with the awkward utterance, “And bye-bye,” the camera rests on Barry as he verbally berates himself while walking down a hallway filled with “exit” signs. Barry has indeed buried himself into in a hole devoid of human connection, yet unlike Charles Grodin in The Heartbreak Kid, he’s growing increasingly uncomfortable in his self-made cage, and at times lashes out against it in fits of spontaneous violence (such as when he kicks in his sister’s glass patio windows). As Shelley Duvall sings the gloriously offbeat song “He Needs Me” (from Robert Altman’s Popeye) in the background, it becomes apparent Barry is in desperate need of human contact, just as a woman arrives as unexpectedly as the Harmonium.

Lena Leonard is perhaps the film’s greatest enigma. Even Emily Watson was initially baffled about how to approach playing her. “In a way, she’s someone’s dream, she’s not a real person,” said Watson in an interview with BBC Films, “The film is about how you see the world when you’re in love. You don’t necessarily see somebody’s psychological baggage, you see the person walking out of the light.” [Bbc.co.uk] Indeed, in Hawaii, Barry sees Lena running toward him out of the sunlight, like an idealized dream-girl. Although her single-minded pursuit of the hesitant Barry reeks of “kook”-like behavior, Lena is actually closer to the “new screwball heroine” introduced in films like Melvin and Howard, one of Anderson’s self-professed favorite movies. [Hard Eight] Lena’s supposed “Gamine-like” innocence conceals needs that set her apart from any objectified romantic soul mate. Like other characters in her progressive female archetype, Lena aggressively draws out Barry through vulnerabilities instead of perfections. Her own neurotic need for connection fuels her infatuated desire for Barry, which stalls only when he abandons her at a hospital. Lena’s needs are real and palpable, and Barry must fulfill them in order for the relationship to continue.

The film’s final major character threatens the central love story, if only by his mere existence. Dean “Mattress Man” Trumbell (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a hot-headed furniture store owner who also manages a phone sex line that targets Barry as one of its victims. “It’s a dream movie,” Hoffman said, “and I’m the subconscious nightmare.” [YouTube 2] Yet Dean’s bark is worse than his bite, considering he sends out four blond brothers to do his dirty work. He shouts a death threat at Barry over the phone, yet when Dean stares his protective punch-drunk victim in the face, he impotently backs off. He mirrors the antagonist archetype embodied by Fred MacMurray in The Apartment, whose formidable exterior hides an internal nature that is weak and cowardly at best. And as Anderson based Barry off a real-life individual who found a loophole in a frequent-flier-miles promotion, Dean is loosely based on Vinnie “Furniture Guy” Testeroni. In a deleted scene, Hoffman re-enacts Testeroni’s disastrous commercial in which a macho stunt sends him plummeting off a pile of mattresses onto the ground. [YouTube 1]

Though the plot of Punch-Drunk Love may initially seem like a simple romance, there are several complex relationships subtly being explored within its small-scale framework. Anderson based Barry’s nightmarish encounters with his sisters on the awkward relationship he has with his own siblings. Elizabeth (Mary Lynn Rajskub) is the sister with the most screen time, and she has a telling moment while on the phone with Lena. After apologizing to Lena for Barry being a freak, Lena affectionately admits, “Yeah, he did seem a little strange.” This prompts Elizabeth to shift into a defensive mode, while spouting, “Well, he’s not that strange. Don’t say that. I think he’s weird, but that’s me.” This blatant contradiction exposes Elizabeth and the other sisters as righteously destructive forces, verbally attacking their brother (out of “sisterly concern”) without ever talking the blame for the detrimental effect it has on Barry, or those they speak to about him. The sisters move blissfully in their own bubble, disrupting Barry at work and lecturing him on his weaknesses, while never taking his feelings into account.

Apart from family relationships, the film also studies the battle between a picked-on innocent (Barry) and a schoolyard bully (Dean). When Dean’s men injure Lena, a furious Barry phones Dean, only to be drowned out by the Mattress Man’s repeated exclamations of, “SHUT UP!” Yet when Barry drives all the way from California to Utah in order to stare down his predator, Dean silently regards Barry’s determination with paralyzed awe. When Barry goes to leave, Dean once again raises his voice, causing Barry to menacingly jerk around. Dean quickly recoils and disappears into the back of his store. In these highly amusing scenes, Anderson illustrates how a confident victim usually has the upper-hand when dealing with a bully.

Yet Punch-Drunk Love is still chiefly about the romantic relationship that develops between Barry and Lena. It’s Lena who makes the first move, by inviting Barry on a date in which he tears up a restroom (and his hand in the process) after she mentions an embarrassing childhood story that Elizabeth informed her about. The violence raging within Barry seems to potentially doom the relationship, until Lena matches his perversity during a lovemaking scene in which they passionately discuss their desire to lovingly mutilate each other’s face. After living in an alienating cocoon his entire life, Barry has found his ideal partner in Lena, who seems curiously turned on by his strangeness. When Barry pursues Lena in Hawaii, he has made the first step toward sprouting his wings and living a life uncontrolled by his demons. At the film’s end, Barry and Lena are ready to escape their mundane lives together.

Punch-Drunk Love is such a beautifully unique work of art that it almost feels sacrilegious to place it within the confines of a particular subgenre. Nevertheless, the film does fit inside the new genre of “disaffection,” joining works by other writer/directors such as David Gordon Green, Steven Soderbergh, and Todd Solondz. This genre is dedicated to exploring the impossibility of human connection in the face of dehumanizing technological advancement (and sociological devolvement). Anger and frustration are usually bubbling beneath the benign surfaces of its characters, as they become awash in emotional confusion. Like Barry, the central people in these films often choose to live in solitude, in an attempt to distance themselves from the outside world. When attempts are made to connect with others, they are often ill-fated, especially when technology is involved.

Consider these two similar sequences. In Punch-Drunk Love, Barry calls a phone sex line and chats about his life, while the woman on the line impatiently waits to get down to business. In Solondz’s Storytelling (2001), a lonely documentary filmmaker named Toby (Paul Giamatti) calls up an old high school friend, in an attempt to reconnect with her. She instead gives him a cold reception and impatiently waits to hang up. Both scenes intensify the excruciating nature of these phone conversations by keeping the camera focused unbearably on the male speaker, as he desperately tries to connect with the detached female voice. While Toby stays seated on his bed, Barry paces through his claustrophobic apartment, as the camera never allows him out of its sight. Both men resemble trapped animals, as the audience is forced to feel their intense unease and frustration in their failed attempt to connect.

The films of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman have all dealt with mankind’s struggle to connect, as its male leads struggle to escape their isolation. In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Joel (Jim Carrey) forcibly separates himself from human connection by erasing all memories of his ex-girlfriend Clementine (Kate Winslet) from his mind. Yet as their moments together become gradually deleted, Joel remembers why he loved Clementine in the first place, and attempts to mentally fight against her impending annihilation. This is a refreshing variation of the subgenre’s conventions, taking Barry’s forced isolation and his fight against it to fanciful, yet equally emotionally resonant heights. Clementine also mirrors Lena, in that she’s a complex woman who initially seems like an idealized dream-girl for the antisocial protagonist. Kaufman even admits, “She’s not literally somebody I know, but she’s somebody that I think about and who I’m attracted to.” [Kaufman 135] Yet like Anderson, Kaufman makes his female lead three-dimensional, though the future of Joel and Clementine’s relationship remains uncertain.

So, why exactly is Punch-Drunk Love a comedy of romance? The key to this answer lies within Anderson’s astonishingly visceral mis-en-scene. His filmmaking techniques allow the viewer to experience the frailties of Barry’s relationships first-hand, thus strengthening the comedy of his romantic plight. According to playwright and filmmaker Cubie King, Anderson utilizes three particular colors to create striking visual symbolism throughout the film. Not only is blue the color of Barry’s suit, it characterizes the nature of his psyche, shrouding him in drab, awkward color that conspicuously separates him from everyone in a given frame. The only person wearing equally striking clothing is Lena, who is nearly always seen wearing a bright red dress. Yet throughout the film, red also becomes a signpost that directs Barry toward his happiness. As Barry leaves his warehouse for Hawaii, a red truck passes by. As he walks toward the plane that will send him to Lena, two stewardesses clad in red stand waiting. When Barry and Lena finally embrace, their colors compliment each other beautifully. White acts as Barry’s oppressor, flooding him in harshly blinding light whenever he steps outside. White walls surround Barry as he flees the four blond brothers, while Dean sports a white shirt as he screams over the phone at Barry. Yet when Barry achieves the upper hand late in the film, Anderson flares the camera with blue light, thus visualizing the character’s newfound dominance, as well as his pure love for Lena. This use of color externalizes the character’s psyches and relationships in a style that is almost cartoon-like. [Senses of Cinema]

Most importantly, Anderson allows the audience to experience the world from Barry’s psyche. Jon Brion’s percussive score unleashes a jarring rhythm that allows the viewer to feel Barry’s jumpiness. Robert Elswitt’s cinematography often confines Barry within the frame, conveying his inner-claustrophobia. From the unpredictable sound effects (emphasizing neurosis) to the sudden explosions of onscreen color (conveying romantic bliss), Anderson uses the pure components of cinema to express his lead character’s inner feelings. No wonder Anderson has likened Punch-Drunk Love to silent films and musicals. [YouTube 2&3]

In essence, Punch-Drunk Love is truly a comedy of romance, which can be seen within its central archetypes, character relationships, relation to other films in its subgenre, and especially its mis-en-scene. A final, memorable example of this takes place when Barry plays the Harmonium for the first time. A warm (subtly red) glow appears on his face, which is only seen again as he blissfully faces Lena late in the film. This lovely early moment is interrupted by the warehouse doors bursting open, attacking Barry with a hellish white light, frightening Barry along with the viewer. Rarely have human frailties been seen so effectively through romance.

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