Solipsistic Meanderings

May 12, 2003

More movies

I watched "The Recruit" yesterday starring Al Pacino and Colin Farrel. Al Pacino is great as always but Colin Farrel seemed to keep right up with him. The story was about a guy who is recruited by a CIA trainer (Pacino) and is put through a rigorous training where he is always told that "everything is a test" and that you shouldn’t trust anything. He meets a girl during training whom he seems to be attracted to and a series of incidents seem to bring them even closer together culminating in him washing out of the academy because he breaks down under torture when his torturers hint that the girl had been tortured too. The movie goes on with the story but what interested me was the whole trust and love issue.

As you probably know, I’m a sucker for a love story. This wasn’t exactly a love story but I was intrigued by how the relationship developed under the conditions of mistrust that they go through. Neither of them can trust the other because they’ve been conditioned not to (and later on in the story, they each bug the other one – each with valid motives of their own of course …) and the problem is that distrust seems to have a sort of a feedback cycle where a tiny doubt can feed upon itself and grow into bigger and bigger suspicions till you are totally sure that the other person is who you *think* they are or that they are doing what you *think* they are. This probably is (to me) one of the toughest tests for love – if you could survive that and come out feeling confident about the person you love, then you are probably sure in your love. Of course, you may say that it would be even better not to distrust at all since trust is the basis for a relationship but unfortunately, we are dealing with humanity here and I am not sure that anybody totally trusts anybody else.

Of course, that starts off an interesting train of thought. Is that true? I said that *I* think that nobody totally trusts anybody else and I realized that that was my opinion. Is that the case with everybody? In my case, I implicitly trust everybody I meet *but* with a reservation – I keep on the lookout to see if they lie to me and if they do, then I don’t trust them from then onwards. Does that negate my earlier statement? I don’t think so because if I trusted the people I meet totally, then I wouldn’t have to be on the lookout for lies – ergo, I don’t trust people completely. But then again, the problem has been that I’ve never met anybody till now that I could trust totally in certain situations. Everybody that I thought that I could trust turned out to be not so trustworthy in the long run. Yes, there is still hope though – I still have hope that there will be people in my life to whom I can totally open up to because that is as important to me as love but only time will tell if this can be so … Rome wasn’t built in a day and trust certainly takes more than a day :p