Sad People in Beautiful Places

Tender is the Night. Great book, not a great movie. But still sometimes very pretty.

First of all, you might have seen on Twitter that Katie and I got hitched last weekend. It was just our parents in a backyard, so please nobody feel slighted. A few of you reading this — Hannah, Nick, Alana, Doug, Alice, Rich — will (I hope) be at the proper wedding bash we throw in the summer of ‘25.

So anyway, we put on the rings and drove up to Santa Barbara, which as I’ve written before, is arguably the most beautiful place in America. I mean, really. Like really. Santa Barbara is so beautiful that the Prince of England left his kingdom and moved there.

And it’s the morning after our tiny wedding and we’re walking around and my serotonin receptors are fried from all the excitement. I’m a bit sad. Or not really sad — just like raw; deeply emotional. The whole world feels hollow and shimmering. We stumble into La Arcada Plaza, which is this little strip of foot-avenues that meet around a fountain with about a dozen turtles swimming through the clear water. The fountain is ringed by white stucco buildings, luxury shops, and those weird statues of people-in-motion. The whole vibe is hazy and lush — it’s stagnantly beautiful, wants to wrap you up and yet, we’re both stuck on the turtles.

I should add that these are beautiful turtles, brown things baking in the sun with flecks of red on their necks and I said they were swimming but they’re not really swimming. One or two of them are swimming. The rest are sitting on the rocks.¹

And we’re both lost in a sort of daze; I can feel the edge of sadness. You know how sadness, real teeth-grinding sadness, creeps up and stabs you in the leg so you walk around with a limp for the next few hours? It’s a sadness like that. And sometimes, well, shit, you let it stab you. Because sometimes you want to be sad. But I looked away from the turtles, gazed around the little plaza, at the people drinking espresso outside the coffeeshop and the seascape paintings in the windows of the art galleries and the stunted dewy palm trees and I felt that old irony of sadness-in-a-beautiful-place.

It’s a total vibe. And, I’m not gonna lie, it’s totally my vibe. Not all the time, but plenty of the time. Sad people in beautiful places. That’s the content I want.²

Again, it’s not everything, but a lot of my favorite books — Tender is the Night, The Sun Also Rises, The Stranger, Play it as it Lays, Breakfast at Tiffany’s — are really just about sad/broken people in beautiful places. And the same is true for a lot of my favorite movies. Sure, The Talented Mr. Ripley and Saltburn are centered around murderous sociopaths. But those sociopaths are also sad in beautiful places. Really it’s a trick of juxtaposition. And I fall for it every time. A lot of us do. There’s a massive market for this. Sad people in beautiful places is kind of Lana Del Rey’s whole thing. And she’s fucking huge.

Of course, in order for the sadness-in-a-beautiful-place content to hit me in the feels, it has to be more than skin-deep. And, at least in a narrative capacity, it can never really resolve. Otherwise I’d love all the Hallmark movies. But those are too clean. Life is never as clean as a Castle for Christmas. ³

I was thinking about this whole sad-people-in-beautiful-places a lot this week. And I was thinking about it on Tuesday when we went to the set of Shrinking. No spoilers, but they were filming this boat scene set on a pond. You’ll see it in the next season. The pond, I can already tell you, is smaller than it looks on television.

There were about sixty people at this set. A small army of people just to shoot a single scene around a few actors and — probably it’s because I’ve been reading a lot of Jung’s essays on the unconscious — I couldn’t get over how much is built around this theme of the sad, or in this case, broken-people-in-beautiful-places. Because Shrinking is my favorite show and yeah, again, like Grace and Frankie it’s about broken people in beautiful places.

I began to wonder how much of this is manifested — how much of this is designed? I thought back to the turtles, to the plaza with the high stucco buildings. I have a friend who, whenever she felt that she had to cry, would go to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and weep like a baby. It was a cathartic thing. But it was also a thing she conditioned. We feel this capability; there’s something inside us that feels this capability to be sad in a beautiful place. It’s as natural as whistling a song as you’re walking through a dark forest. The only difference is that it can be expanded, maybe it can’t define your whole life (and it probably shouldn’t) but it can color a week or even a month, and afterwards, you can look back dreamily on that sadness in a beautiful place.

1. This whole vibe — the turtles — made me thing about that Zhuangzi story about the happy turtle in the mud.

2. While we were there, I also wrote out a whole idea for a screenplay, this thing about a sad, lonely art thief in Santa Barbara who falls in love with one of his marks. Very Netflixy but I’ve already got way too much writing on my plate, so it’ll go in the can for a few years.

3. I know this whole thing is only possible through the lense of absurd privilege. I know that most (like probably 70%) of the world population has real, awful problems to deal with. Like, come on, you’re sad because there’s been too much excitement lately; meanwhile there are people starving to death in Rafah. But we play the hand we’re dealt at the table we’re given.