Chapter 19
The Pressure Cooker Effect
The pressure cooker effect can speed up the process of people bonding and falling in love. The more intensity, danger, stress, and fear, the more likely it is that two people thrown together, or trapped in a dangerous situation, will make a human connection. Some examples:
Danger
Speed launched Sandra Bullock’s career and gave Keanu Reeves a new lease on his. It made canny use of the element of being trapped in a dangerous situation. The bus our girl Annie (Bullock) is taking to work has a bomb planted on it that will blow everyone up if the bus goes slower than 50 miles per hour. Before you know it, our man/cop Keanu has jumped aboard and Sandra has to take the wheel. While working together to try to save the passengers, pressure cooker chemistry happens and, thinking this may be the last hour of their lives, they fall for each other. When they finally escape clinging to each other as they fly out of the bus on an improvised sled, it’s not even a surprise that they are kissing before the thing comes to a stop. We understand this and even expect it. More importantly we believe it. Not because it’s a movie, but because this is a natural human response to being near death. Our fundamental value systems, worldwide and historically, are number one survival, number two human connection. Love.
Actually, if any of us thought we had only a few minutes to live, I hope we would be wise enough to reach out and embrace whatever human beings were within reach. And if it’s a hot guy or girl, so much the better.
Siege
In the terrific war thriller Enemy at the Gates (2001, written by Jean-Jacques Annaud and Alain Godard), Jude Law plays real-life Russian sharpshooter Vassili Zaitsev who, during the siege of Stalingrad, expertly picks off German officers, but not enlisted men. Rachel Weisz plays a young soldier who falls in love with Vassili. Yes, I know this film was made when Jude Law was in his prime in terms of beauty, but what makes this young woman risk humiliation and reprimand by creeping into his arms, surrounded by dozens of sleeping, exhausted soldiers? It’s this effect.
The city is crumbling, being pounded and bombed out of existence daily. These soldiers are outmanned and outgunned and the chances are high every morning when they wake up and crawl back into battle, that today they will die. These young people probably will not have the chance to court, wed, make families, and grow old. It’s only natural that they try to make the most of the minutes and hours they do have, slipping into each other’s arms in the crowded dark.
Is this kind of love any less real and heartfelt than the slower, more calm and casual variety? Not a bit. These lovers would lay down their lives for each other, something most of us are never called on to even consider.
Hostages
In Bel Canto, my favorite of Ann Patchett’s novels, a disparate group of people are held hostage by guerillas in the home of the Vice President of a South American country. In this unexpected imprisonment, a Japanese businessman can fall in love with the world famous American opera singer he has long revered. Their romantic relationship blossoms and deepens even though they don’t speak a word of each other’s language.
In the British series Endeavor (2016 “Coda” episode, written by Russell Lewis and Colin Dexter), the young police officer Morse is a hostage in a bank robbery with his boss’s daughter. He knows her and likes her, but this event, where they both fear they may be killed or see the other one killed, forges a new bond between them. Sitting on the floor of that bank building with guns to their heads, they fall in love.
The Iceberg Effect
In the movie Titanic (1997, written and directed by James Cameron), the two young lovers have obstacles to overcome. They are from different worlds. Rose (Kate Winslet) is wealthy, privileged, and engaged to a powerful man. Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a poor boy who could only afford passage in steerage by winning a poker game. And Rose’s fiancé has his valet stalking them with a gun, ready to kill Jack for seducing Rose. But the real engine that powers this ship is that we know an iceberg is out there in the dark water directly and inevitably in their path. The ship is heading straight for it and most of these people, rich or poor, are going to die. The audience’s awareness of the coming iceberg creates the heightened effect.
Boxed In
Sometimes this effect is achieved by confining your would-be lovers literally in a small space. Creating a physical pressure cooker for them to be trapped together in.
This was the fuel for the fire of the love story of 13-year-old Anne Frank hiding in an attic in Holland for two years waiting for the Nazis to break in at any moment. Peter, 16, from the other family hiding with them, is the only boy in sight, and maybe under other circumstances they might not have fallen in love. But there in that tiny attic, love blooms and it is true and strong and heartbreaking.
This confinement device was used to good effect in the George Clooney/Jennifer Lopez romantic comedy Out of Sight (1998, Scott Frank adapting Elmore Leonard’s novel). Jack Foley (Clooney) is a convict escaping from prison who is caught in the act by Karen Sisco (Lopez), a federal marshal who happens to be an extremely attractive and sexy woman. And he happens to be a man who hasn’t been close to an actual woman in years.
They immediately end up in the trunk of the getaway car, pressed together, at least one of them in danger either way, and both of them if Ving Rames, Jack’s partner in crime, can’t keep the car on the road. In any case, in this pressure cooker of a trunk, chemistry occurs. George Clooney once said on a talk show that this was one of the most pleasant days of filming in his career thus far. Later in the movie when Lopez has the opportunity to take him down, she hesitates, because, well, she’s fallen for the big palooka. Naturally.
This heightened pressure technique can sometimes have the reverse effect. When two people are trapped together, it intensifies whatever they might already feel, or come to feel. It could be love, or it could be the opposite.
In You’ve Got Mail, Tom Hanks’s Joe Fox is trapped in an elevator with his fiancée Patricia Eden, played by the always game (and always good) Parker Posey. By the time they are rescued, their engagement is history. This is what pressure cookers do: they speed up the process. Nature would have split these two up eventually. The stuck elevator just helped them get there faster.
Doom
When the end is near, no hope in sight, people reach out and cling to one another. Skeletons found in Pompeii are curled around each other, holding each other close as they suffocate from volcanic ash. We have seen the images of people holding hands as they leap from burning buildings.
In the film Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (2012, written and directed by Lorene Scafaria), Dodge’s (Steve Carell’s) wife has left him and he has just discovered, as has the rest of humankind, that the world will be destroyed in three weeks when an asteroid will collide with earth. And even though Dodge and Penny (Keira Knightley) seem at rather opposite ends of the casting couch in terms of chemistry, with the end fast approaching, we believe that they end up in each other’s arms, loving each other with passion and desperation born from despair.
The Day After Tomorrow (2004, written by Roland Emmerich and Jeffrey Nachmanoff) is a combination of Boxed In (in the New York City library) and Doom (as a sudden ice age sweeps the planet). So of course Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) falls for Laura (Emmy Rossum), just as his divorced parents (Dennis Quaid and Sela Ward) fall back in love with each other.
Adam and Eve
When two people are stranded on a desert island or in the Garden of Eden and are essentially the last man and woman on earth, they are going to, by necessity, couple up. At least we hope they will. The Blue Lagoon (1980, Douglas Day Stewart adapting Henry De Vere Stacpoole’s novel) is one of these stories.
In Cast Away (2000, screenplay by William Broyles, Jr.), Tom Hanks is also stranded on a deserted island with no human companionship and the outcome is one of the more original love stories, between Tom and a volleyball named Wilson with a handprint for a face.
In Enemy Mine (1985, Ed Khmara adapting Barry Longyear’s story), the two castaways are left behind after some inter-galactic battle and they are of two different species. Dennis Quaid, the American astronaut, and Louis Gosset, Jr. as the alien of indeterminate gender. But the love that evolves is no less compelling and heartbreaking.
Whatever form of pressure cooker you may use to cook your feast of love, understanding the physics of thermodynamics will help you to create the hot, passionate love story you are hoping for.