Editor’s Note: This story was originally published in May 2020.
0:06
The movie’s theme song, performed by the 1954 MGM Studio Orchestra, is already at a full-throated crescendo, blaring out of her laptop speakers, the violins and horns bouncing around as free as a boy of the American West, the drums and cymbals anchoring that freedom with the seriousness of a man of the American West, and our virile protagonist, Adam Pontipee, played by Howard Keel, is riding through the Oregonian frontier on a sunny day in 1850, and I’m sitting on her couch, sipping wine, our legs touching slightly underneath the blanket, and I can feel the back of my neck tingling and my jaw tightening, an ASMR-like sensation, the presence of which I know means I have a simple choice: kiss her or cry.
Twenty minutes ago, at the bar, as we finished the first drinks of our first date, I caught myself imagining what our children would look like and felt the words I love you lurking behind my uvula. It was unclear to me whether my love was a result of her loveliness and lovability or of my being a little buzzed combined with feeling well-rested from eight hours’ sleep last night. Either way, I told her that instead of drinking more at the bar, I’d like to watch a movie with her. She asked me if “watch a movie” was euphemistic for “have sex” or if I really wanted to watch a movie. I told her I really wanted to watch a movie.
On the walk back to her place I revealed that I don’t often watch movies. She asked me what that means. I told her I just never really watch them. She asked when was the last time I watched a movie. I estimated that it had been almost a decade. She stopped in her tracks and executed the face people sometimes make to signal shock, theatrically letting her mouth drop open and craning her neck forward. Then, as if suddenly remembering that she was on a first date with a stranger from the internet and that strangers, especially those from the internet, are sometimes strange, she rearranged her expression and executed the face people sometimes make to signal skepticism, theatrically squinting and looking me up and down as if searching for subtle red flags that she might have missed, like a weird choice of shoe or an unusually long fingernail. I was wearing black Converse and have been a nail-biter since second grade, and I like being inspected and I like theatricality, so I fell a little more in love with her.
As we climbed the stairs of her apartment building, she asked me why I don’t watch movies. I told her that I didn’t know, but a therapist once concluded my career as a child actor left me emotionally maimed, and now, as an adult, I was unable to enjoy the products of the industry that did the maiming. She asked if I had been molested by a predatory director. I told her that there were no traumatic events, that I saw that particular therapist for only two sessions because I was pretty sure if I had spent my youth, say, playing baseball instead of acting, things would have turned out exactly the same, and I’d feel exactly the same, and maybe be in exactly the same place, on this first date, climbing these stairs, explaining why I haven’t gone to a baseball game in 10 years, why the sound of a bat hitting a ball gives me a mild case of existential seasickness.
Pausing on the fourth-floor landing of her fifth-floor walk-up, she disagreed. She said that my logic put too much weight in nature and not enough in nurture, that the trajectory of a life is not set at birth. She said that although she knew nothing about the acting world or my experience in it, she imagined that being in those kinds of environments as a child, surrounded by adults who were, subtly or overtly, applying pressure on me to perform and perform well, must have been hard and scary. She said that although everyone has issues, including her, including people who grew up playing baseball, acting professionally as a child might be uniquely full of potential developmental pitfalls.We arrived at her door. While she fumbled with her keys, I told her that it might be somehow poetic for me to overcome my decade-long, unofficial battle with cinephobia by watching Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. She said she’d never heard of it. I told her that I’d seen it hundreds of times as a child. I told her that it was loosely based on the Roman legend of the rape of the Sabine women, and is likely very dated and very offensive, as the basic plot is that seven brothers kidnap seven women, holding them hostage until, spoiler alert, they fall in love with their aw-shucks captors. I said that the movie probably has some redeeming underlying sweetness, that the dance scenes are incredible, but in retrospect, it should really be called Stockholm Syndrome: A Musical.
As she went to her bedroom to get her computer, I pulled up the Wikipedia page for Stockholm syndrome on my phone and found that it’s named for a 1973 Swedish bank robbery in which the hostages were held for six days and when released refused to testify against the robber and even raised money for his legal defense. I wanted to tell her about this, to amaze her with my Wikipedia finding and also posit that Stockholm syndrome might not be such a bad thing because someone who shows signs of it could just be an empathic, good person capable of recognizing the humanity of someone who has acted inhumanely. I didn’t say this, though, as I feared she might see the opinion as naive or as an opinion I don’t get to have considering I’ve never been held hostage. So when she got back to the couch with an Amazon Prime rental of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers already queued up and ready to go, I just told her that my favorite character in the movie, the youngest of the brothers, has the same name as me. I told her to keep an eye out for him.
She pressed play, and now we’re kissing. Her lips are soft, and every so often I use a little tongue or she uses a little tongue or we both use a little tongue and as the kiss gets wilder, full of the sort of urgency that is usually a by-product of passion, I can feel my urge to cry finally going back to wherever it is it came from.
5:51
We’re only halfway through the first musical number, “Bless Yore Beautiful Hide,” and it’s already quite clear how Adam feels about women. His very first line is a list of items he wants from the local provisions outpost: “I’ll trade you for a new plow, two tubs of lard, a barrel of molasses, 25 pounds of chewing tobacco, and you wouldn’t have a wife under the counter there? I’m looking for a wife.” Adam is chastised by the shopkeepers for his attitude, but just like every moment of this movie that acknowledges sexist, misogynistic or chauvinistic behavior, it feels like it should be followed by a wink to the camera. He leaves the shop and begins his stroll around town, a big, swinging dick searching for a wife in the form of lyrical song, and suddenly I remember what I even as a child knew, that Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is essentially a one-joke movie: Boys will be boys.
Underneath my jeans, I’m still a little hard from the kiss of a few minutes ago, but not so hard that she can tell. I like being hard. My favorite moment of any sexual encounter is when a woman realizes I’m hard. I have never had much trouble getting an erection, but I still feel vaguely proud every time it happens, in the way children are sometimes proud of something definitively unimpressive, like, say, a cast on their newly broken arm.
7:20
Adam has just spotted Milly, played by actress Jane Powell, and after observing her from a distance and seeing that she’s both attractive and hardworking, he decides she’s the wife for him. Now Milly is serving food at the town inn to a group of frontiersmen and upon seeing Adam for the first time is so taken with him, so intrigued by him, so turned on by him, that she forgets what she’s doing and accidentally pours stew all over a patron’s crotch. This look on Milly’s face, as if Adam’s handsomeness alone has momentarily transported her into another metaphysical plane, is a look that, like the fuck-me eyes Nala gives Simba in The Lion King when they’re play-fighting as adults, I have consciously and unconsciously craved my entire life. I think if I somehow neurologically mapped my sexual psyche, it would reveal that these two looks—one conjured by the living, breathing Jane Powell and one hand-drawn by the animators at Disney—are why I played so much doctor with girls on the playground of my elementary school and why I’m sitting on this couch right now with a woman I met on the internet and maybe why I’ve sat on every couch I’ve ever sat on.
19:36
Shortly after arriving at the Pontipee cabin, Milly realizes she’s been duped. She accepted Adam’s marriage proposal back in town because she imagined a quiet life up in the mountains. On the ride up with Adam, she said, “Always back at the inn…I’d think how wonderful it would be to cook and care for one man, just one man. Now that it’s happened, I can’t hardly believe it’s true.” Before Adam can interject and explain that she’s actually about to enter into indentured servitude to not one but seven men, Milly breaks out into a jubilant song that my sister and I used to fast-forward through because we found it boring. Adam’s lie by omission is a classic sitcom gimmick. The audience is in on his lie, and this makes the buildup to Milly’s dreams being crushed full of tension; she isn’t just going to be disappointed or betrayed—she’s been made a fool. I hated Adam for this when I was a kid. I hate Adam for it now.
I feel her scoot toward me on the couch and rest her head on my shoulder, and I’m wondering if this display of affection is deliberate and calculated. I’m wondering if she wants comfort because Milly looks so sad or if she’s offering me comfort because Milly looks so sad. I’m wondering if she’s telling me that she likes me. I’m wondering if she’s telling me that we won’t be having sex later because she likes me. I’m wondering if she’s the sort of woman capable of resting her head on a man’s shoulder without thinking much about it.
20:20
Milly swallows her disappointment at the state of affairs—the house is disgusting, the men are feral, Adam is a liar—and literally rolls up her sleeves and gets to work putting the farm in order.
Suddenly, she reaches for the laptop, presses pause and turns to me on the couch. She says that this, right here, is the darkest scene of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers so far. I say that I agree, not because I agree but because I think she’s about to say something I will agree with. She says that the movie presents Milly’s big turnaround in attitude as a result of her fortitude to make the best of a bad situation, her courage to get back up after she’s been knocked down. She says that it frames Milly’s resolution to roll up her sleeves as a decision, a choice, when the truth is she’s been stripped of her agency entirely. Milly has been conned into marrying and leaving a home she cannot return to, which makes rolling up her sleeves not an act of bravery to be celebrated but an act of survival that is nothing short of tragic. Adam has won because the game is rigged.
I nod my head and shrug my shoulders to express disbelief at just how deeply problematic this movie is, but she seems to want something more from me, so I make a lot of eye contact, as if considering her, as if maybe I’ve entered into a trance similar to the one Milly did when she first saw Adam, and before she can break our eye contact, I kiss her again. It’s a short but firm kiss, no tongue this time, and when I pull my lips away from hers, she smiles a smile at me that I imagine is the sort of smile I could end up seeing on her face some evening decades from now, just after she has signed our divorce papers, right when she is holding them out for me to sign and, sensing my hesitation, tries to give me the reassurance I need in order to finish the job.
She presses the space bar and the brothers sit down to eat Milly’s cooking, and she puts her head back on my shoulder.
22:08
Laughing, I point out that all the brothers’ faces are literally covered in dirt, as if they’ve been sweeping chimneys. It’s cartoonish. I wonder out loud if this movie is, in a way, a live-action cartoon. She doesn’t acknowledge the observation, and I consider asking if she wants to watch something else, but she seems engrossed, so I don’t.25:10
Milly, leveraging the only point of leverage she has left, tells Adam she won’t share his bed. This is a problem for Adam, partially because he wants to consummate his marriage but mostly because his six younger brothers are downstairs twiddling their thumbs, waiting to have their idealized image of the man of the family, the great Pontipee firstborn, upheld and enlarged by Milly’s impending coital moans. So in order to save face, Adam climbs out his bedroom window and settles down for the night in a tree, sulking. This strategy proves effective, as Milly starts to feel guilty for making a bridegroom spend his wedding night in a tree, and then sings Adam a song about the nature of love that is, in a way, her great softening, a capitulation, an apology for being silly enough to have had expectations at all.
The ballad is slow and meandering, and in the middle of it she turns the volume on the laptop down a few notches, probably because Jane Powell’s voice is a little shrill. I ask her how many times she has been in love. She says two and a half times. I ask what the half was, knowing that she didn’t simply say two times or three times but two and a half times because she wanted me to ask about the half time. She says she had a college boyfriend with whom she was deeply in love, but these days she feels unsure it was really love because he was somewhat emotionally abusive. She says she doesn’t consider her present opinion more valid than her past opinion, though, so she gives both her present self and past self an equal vote, and if her present self votes no—a value of zero love—and her past self votes yes—a value of one love—that averages out to half a love.
I’m calculating my own number, but before she has the chance to turn the question to me, Adam, at Milly’s invitation, climbs back through the window, slips and lands on the bed, breaking the frame and sending the four posters crashing to the floor in a ruckus that is nothing short of music to the ears of the brothers below, especially the youngest, who grins the grin of someone whose suspicion that all is right in the world has just been warmly confirmed.
29:30
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers briefly becomes a bizarro version of My Fair Lady as Milly begins working to civilize the six younger brothers, cleaning them up and teaching them manners. In the process, they grow to adore their new sister-in-law, and she in turn grows to adore them. They are, in a way, still just boys—sweet, dumb, naive and incapable of the kind of adultish deceit that Adam exercised to lure Milly into her new life.On the couch, she’s giggling at Milly’s attempts to coach the clueless men on how to court a woman, and while part of me feels relieved that she’s giggling, enjoying herself, another part of me feels uneasy, worried she may have forgotten that, although Seven Brides for Seven Brothers has no clear villain, Adam is guilty of villainy, and we cannot, like Milly, excuse his behavior just because an American man is a fixed thing, a known quantity, an unstoppable force that requires everyone else to become a moveable object, to forgive. But then I giggle too, laughing at myself and my self-righteousness more than I am laughing at the movie.
39:05
As the barn-raising scene gets under way, I tell her that my father used to say that this was one of the best sequences in the history of cinema. I tell her about the time my sister and I were imitating the choreography of the men performing various feats of strength to try to win the affection of the on-hand eligible bachelorettes, and I slipped and knocked our father’s priceless acoustic guitar off its stand. My father, who always slept nude, heard the crash, came running out of the bedroom without grabbing his robe and stopped in his tracks when he saw the guitar, its neck cracked in two. Naked, he stood silently and assessed the damage—fatal—before turning around and slowly walking back to the bedroom without looking at me or my sister, without saying a word.
She asks me if I was scared at that moment. I tell her that I wasn’t because my father is a good and gentle man. She asks me if I see any symbolism in this memory, this image of my naked father discovering and accepting that his children just snapped the phallic end of his prized instrument. I say that I see a little symbolism. I ask her if she’s ever seen her parents naked. She says of course she has and turns back to the laptop, where the brothers are masterfully incorporating hammers and axes into world-class ballet and modern dance.
57:35
It’s the worst part of winter on the Pontipee farm, that stretch of time that occurs just after the stretch of time everyone assumed would be the worst part of winter, and the brothers are sad and lonely and horny. While at the barn-raising, all six of them fell in love with a different girl from town, and now they’re back on the farm, pining for their crushes, singing sorrowful lyrics like “Can’t make no vows, to a herd of cows” and “A man can’t sleep, when he sleeps with sheep” and “Can’t shoot the breeze, with a bunch of trees.”Shaking her head, she says that if she were still in college, she probably would have paused the movie by now and scribbled down a hundred rage-fueled pages about the insidiousness of heteronormativity in a patriarchal society. I say that I probably would have done the same but also probably forced some Marxist rhetoric into my analysis. She says she misses that version of herself, misses the goosebumps she used to get as her brain climbed out of equilibrium and into a state of rage. I say that there’s still a lot to be angry about. She says, no, there’s more.
1:03:02
Like a coach rallying his defeated team at halftime, Adam tells his brothers about the legend of the Sabine women, pronouncing it “sobbin’,” encouraging them to quit moping and go get their girls, to take what they want by force. For the first time, it occurs to me that bringing up the story that Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is based on within the script itself is a pretty bold filmic device. It’s not just an indirect breaking of the fourth wall, but an unusual way to drive the plot forward, as the brothers are so inspired by the legend that they decide to re-create it, fulfilling the structure of the movie’s narrative because they’ve just been told exactly how to do so.
Near the end of the scene, Adam sings, “They acted angry and annoyed,” and his youngest brother gleefully finishes the sentence for him—“but secretly they was overjoyed”—and I rub my tired eyes, and she lets out a tired yawn, and now all seven of the brothers hop onto the horse and carriage, hooting and hollering on their way into town, ready to kidnap their future wives.
1:11:57
With their six sobbin’ women in tow, the brothers fire guns into the air in order to create an avalanche that will block the pass, preventing the fathers and other townsmen chasing them from reaching the Pontipee cabin until spring. When the avalanche starts, the music grows dark and ominous, and for a moment it’s as if Seven Brides for Seven Brothers sobers up, as if it suddenly realizes that it has gotten a little carried away with the fun and games and only now sees the seriousness of things. When the roar quiets and the snow settles, there is a very pregnant pause as everyone takes in what just happened. I decide that, if she asks, I’m going to tell her that this pause is my favorite moment of the movie because even though I’m well aware that this pause will soon be broken by the cries of the frightened women and the laughter of their callous kidnappers, it contains the movie’s only trace of doubt. If she asks me to elaborate, I’ll just say that doubt is delicious.
1:21:45
Milly punishes the six brothers for their despicable misdeed by making them sleep in the barn while their six women sleep in their bedroom. The women eventually get cabin fever and start fighting and it devolves into what is essentially a pillow fight between a bunch of very beautiful, very skinny, very white women in their undergarments. Milly hears the commotion and comes running in to break up the conflict but is able to calm things down only by blurting out that she is pregnant.
Under the blanket, her hand is on my leg now. She’s moving up and down my thigh, alternating between massaging it and using her fingertips to tickle me slightly. I sneak a glance at her, but she’s looking straight ahead, so I turn back to the movie and watch the women celebrate Milly’s big news.
1:27:10
Spring springs and the women fall in love with their captors and Milly gives birth to a baby girl. When the youngest brother hears the newborn’s cries, he faints out of a combination of shock and joy, and when the rest of the brothers go upstairs to greet their niece, she moves her hand to my crotch and unbuttons my jeans. The sound of my zipper unzipping makes me go from semi-erect to fully erect, and I think this time she notices that I’m erect because she doesn’t tease me at all and instead reaches directly into my underwear and wraps her fingers around me. I let out a deep breath to calm myself down and to make sure she knows that I’m so turned on I need to calm myself down.
She begins stroking. I squirm in my seat and then realize that I should kiss her, should put my hand in her pants too, but she’s still facing the screen, totally engaged, very much still watching the movie. I wonder if this is a kink of hers, if she gets off on pleasuring a man while she’s doing an activity unrelated to the man. I imagine her answering e-mails while I penetrate her from behind, and then I realize I’m imagining Milly answering e-mails while I penetrate her from behind, so I try to bring myself back into the present by focusing on what her hand is doing and focusing on the fact that she must have licked her palm a few seconds ago like Brittany Murphy does in the famous sex scene from 8 Mile because suddenly my heart is beating quickly and I can’t really think and I’m leaning back into the couch and my eyes are closed.
1:40:12
The snow has thawed. The pass is open. The pass is open. The pass is open. The fathers gather a posse and grab their guns and start riding out toward the Pontipee farm. As they approach, ready to ambush the brothers, they hear a baby crying in the distance and they all fear that it is their daughter who has been impregnated out of wedlock, their daughter who has been sullied. When they finally corner the Pontipees and the women in the barn, one of the fathers, a minister, quiets everyone down so that, before they hang the six brothers for their crimes, they can find out whose baby it is so they know which of the brothers, now a father, must be spared. The women don’t answer at first. He implores them: “Whose is it? Don’t be afraid to tell.” The question hangs in the air, and then all six of the women exchange a conspiratorial smile before turning to the minister with the unison of a synchronized swimming team and declaring, “Mine!”
She’s stroking me faster now and I can feel a periodic jolt in my stomach that means an orgasm isn’t far off, so I ask her if she would like to have sex and tell her that I have a condom in my wallet and that I take safe sex very seriously. Still watching the movie, she stops stroking and instead clenches her fist, squeezing me tight. She says that she would love to have sex with me. She says she wants to see how the movie ends. Then we can have sex.
Her hand squeezes me even tighter now, and I figure that she must have had a past boyfriend who asked to be squeezed, who liked having the circulation of his erection challenged. I consider telling her I prefer the stroking motion but the jolts in my stomach are building now, so I nod and turn back to the laptop where all the fathers have decided that their respective daughter must marry their respective Pontipee, just in case the baby is, in fact, hers. An impromptu wedding is held. The women say, “We do.” The men say, “We do.” Everyone is pronounced husband and wife and starts kissing, including Adam and Milly.
The 1954 MGM Studio Orchestra comes roaring back with the Seven Brides for Seven Brothers theme song, and she squeezes me even tighter, and now it hurts a little, but I can feel my whole body beginning to tense up, so I try to pull her hand off of me so that I can save my orgasm for the impending session of intercourse, but her grip is strong, so I stand up in order to free myself, and she lets go, and by the time I realize what has happened, she’s walking back from the kitchen with a roll of paper towels, and begins carefully wiping down her keyboard, asking me if I think she should turn off the laptop in order to save it from further damage, as she’s heard that’s what you’re supposed to do in cases like this one.