Sabrina and the Loneliness of Illusions

I recently rewatched the 1995 film adaptation of Sabrina with Julia Ormond and Harrison Ford (an improvement, I venture to say, on the 1954 Audrey Hepburn original). In this movie, Sabrina Fairchild rescues the hardened Linus Larrabee from his workaholic, corporate existence, teaching him to love life’s gifts with Parisian flair. A bit like a Hallmark plot.

But it is what he teaches her that may otherwise elude the audience. Earlier in the story, a younger Sabrina Fairchild, daughter of the Larrabee family chauffeur, spends her days fixated on the charming David Larrabee, Linus’ younger brother, watching his coming and goings from the top of a tree. This treetop—the land of her fantasy—is higher than the world on the ground. Up there, she can dream of things that seem impossible on earth. But her home in the treetops leaves her reclusive, largely unseen by others (and certainly invisible to David). Her dad, sure there is more to her than this obsession, sends her to Paris.

There, Sabrina talks often about David with her employer and friend, Irene. The exchange they have one day at a café is striking:

Irene: “This David you talk about. He sounds, perhaps, like an Illusion.”

Sabrina: “He keeps me company.”

Irene: “You think? Illusions are dangerous people. They have no flaws […] You seem embarrassed by loneliness, by being alone. It’s only a place to start.”

Sabrina is quick to say that her fantasization of David has its use. “He keeps me company.” Irene spots this error from experience. Illusions are not just innocent inventions. They are dangerous. She says they are dangerous because they have no flaws. Illusions are instituted by one’s desires and only exist as a rejection of the given world. Further, the company of an illusion tricks one into thinking that they are satisfied with their fantasy.

Recently, I saw a meme on Pinterest that humorously confirmed the modern appeal of an imaginary companion.

This image of a contented housewife is happy to have her imaginary man who, likely, doesn’t intrude on her individuality or her calendar and tells her exactly what she would like to hear.

Beyond the new normal of virtual human relationships, more and more human interaction today is automated—checking out at stores, ordering at restaurants, and filling out forms at the doctor’s office. By automating, we can filter out the inconveniences of human personality and human error. But is that all we filter out?

Sabrina’s friend Irene won’t dismiss this trendy preference for human replacements lightheartedly, and neither should we. The stakes are high. In our radical autonomy, we want to be rid of relational interference and stationed in statuses that will not bind us. Commitments across the spheres of jobs, community, religion, and romantic relationships are crashing. As Ross Douthat points out, even the post-Christian gods of our age with whom we dabble—self-help spirituality, astrology, witchcraft—are impersonal forces that can be manipulated into our liking and are devoid of specific dictates. In the place of tangible relational binders, we’re left with mere fantasies—AI Sex Dolls, pornography, and textationships (yes, a new term to describe the phenomenon of connecting with someone only over text). This doesn’t return void. These disembodied replacements render us passive, reclusive beings weak in the human-loving muscle. It’s worth observing that the fantasies themselves grow darker over time. This shouldn’t surprise us, as our ability to discern our real needs (and the goods to meet those needs) decreases the longer we spend in our metaphorical treetops.

Although studies reflect increasing loneliness, few might see their state as abnormal or the trace the cause, especially when there is something so like social interaction at our fingertips. In the craving for real connection, it is far easier to make friends with our fantasies. Meanwhile, our fantasies only drive us further from what is real. If we are most familiar with our ideal companions, an enfleshed human will be harder to tolerate, harder to be forthright with, and harder to forgive. Yet, it is in the forbearance, the honesty, and the grace that we experience the work of God. If we are to experience the divine, we must become incarnate.

Sabrina must first live in the truth that she is, strictly speaking, alone. Irene urges her that being alone is a place to start—not something to be embarrassed by. Sabrina can never know her own humanity if she cannot accept her own condition. By reserving herself for an imaginary other, she renders herself in a fixed state of aloneness. Only once she comes to peace with what she has been given, including her own given self—by journaling, reflecting, and learning rhythms that feed her soul—does her personality and mental strength emerge. Physically, Sabrina returns from Paris transformed in a satisfying coming-of-age fashion. This physical transformation reflects a newfound confidence, poise, and ability to know her own mind. All these elements (to her delight) make her an irresistible draw to her long-sought David.

Secondly, Sabrina must learn what it means to love a real man, not the illusions of her youth. While she is initially enamored with her elusive catch in David, an accident of sitting on champagne glasses renders him in groggy, medicated state. The circumstances of his injury and following state can only be seen as poetic justice as he is physically in the childish condition in which he has always metaphorically dwelled. He, as his brother says, still “believes in the tooth fairy.” He doesn’t know what day of the week it is, he spends money he doesn’t earn, and he never commits to a woman. Because at this point David is engaged to be married to the daughter of a billionaire, David’s family takes his sedated state as an opportunity: they are dead set on removing Sabrina from the romantic equation.

Then enters Harrison Ford. Linus is gruff, callous, and ever responsible and serious. He does not possess the endearing short fallings or sympathetic self-denigration of David. The staff, when learning Sabrina has been spending time with him, exclaim, “Sabrina with Linus Larrabee? That’s too weird!” When Linus asks Sabrina what people say about him, she tells it to him straight: “That you’re the world’s only living heart donor.”

Linus prides himself on doing “real work in the real world.” He isn’t easily tricked, and he thinks he knows what motivates others. But he can’t understand what animates Sabrina, with her easy laugh and perceptive questions. “Where do you live, Linus?” she asks. He thinks he lives in the real world, but it’s the real living—with the nourishment, the mirth, and aspiration—that he lacks. Linus may know how to work, but he does not to what end he is working.

However, over trips to Martha’s Vineyard, biking about to sight-see, donning a baseball cap, and sitting on the floor of a restaurant eating rice with his hands, Linus reveals his deeper dimensions, and Sabrina is forced to encounter a real man. In conversation, he discloses his own loneliness and the life he feels he has missed. She, like the audience, initially believes this vulnerability to be an act to lure her away from his brother. He, too, mostly believes this. In actuality, this man she is discovering—one who would go to Paris, who wants to donate his building to be used as a halfway house—is discovering his truest self. He acknowledges this development when she says at the end of the movie, “I thought it was all a lie.” He answers, “So did I. But something happened. It was a lie, and then it was a dream.” He is newly expressing what is more real about himself (real in a divine-design, Chestertonesque, fairytale way) than the business man who hid behind transactions. He is broken inside and wants to be more fully human.

And Sabrina has undergone her own transformation. She is no longer just the self-assured individual that we saw return from Paris. Part of the old Sabrina from the beginning of the movie, the one who yearned to love and belong to another, is back. This time she has observations, joy, and a steady mind to offer Linus, and she is able to really know him because she first understood her own humanity.

She also done with illusions. When David tries to woo her back, describing the evening they could share together, she asks pointedly: “And after that?” She is beginning to see that relational investments have real returns, and she doesn’t want to live in the dream world anymore.  

The theme song for the movie, Michael Dees’ “How Can I Remember?,” provides a haunting backdrop:

“How can I remember things that never happened? Arms that never held me, Lips I’ve never kissed.”

The song asks a rhetorical question that, in one sense, gets at the power of our mind and its ability to fantasize. How can things that never happened feel so real that they function as memories?

Sabrina’s illusion of belonging to another is rightfully shattered, but she does not become a cynical realist. Her illusion is replaced with a new dream—one in which she chooses to see all of life through “rose-colored glasses” (the meaning of another of the movie’s well-chosen songs, “La Vie En Rose”). She does not give up on believing that the world could be better than it is, but she weds her aspirations to the world she is given. By wearing rose-colored glasses to see the life in front of her, she dwells in that world and chooses to see its potential glory. This contrasts from a dream of fantasy, in which one tries to grasp at a world that is not given.

Dees’ song continues: “I feel suspended in mid-air, somewhere between a dream and a memory […] Long before I met you, don’t ask me how I knew ever since I can remember. I remember you.”

This song explains the unexplainable of finding one’s love and companion—finding someone somewhere between a dream and a memory. What does it feel like to fall in love? It is like finding the glory of a vision matched by the familiarity of a memory.

In Sabrina, the realism of Linus Larrabee does not simply become sacrificed for fantasy; nor does Sabrina’s dream world simply succumb to the cold, corporate existence. Dream and memory—the divine and incarnate—meet.

Sabrina had been belonging to another in her mind—an existence that forced her to live in the abstract, away from the life she had been given. In this, she was also robbing real people of her full presence. By the end, she has offered herself to a hardened man of the world. No doubt Sabrina Fairchild affects Linus—she is responsible for bringing a gleam into his eye and moving him to leave his lucrative career for Paris. However, by the end of the movie, he has also affected her. By being truly himself with her—all his fears, sentimentalities, and regrets laid bare—he is allowing her to love a real man.

Madeleine L’Engle wrote a beautiful poem that challenges our tendency to retreat from real humanity and reveals what we lose as a result:

Because you are not what I would have you be
I blind myself to who, in truth, you are.
Seeking mirage where desert blooms, I mar
Your you. Aaah, I would like to see
Past all delusion to reality:
Then would I see God’s image in your face,
His hand in yours, and in your eyes His grace.
Because I am not what I would have me be,
I idolized Two who are not any place,
Not you, not me, and so we never touch.
Reality would burn. I do not like it much.
And yet in you, in me, I find a trace
Of love which struggles to break through
The hidden lovely truth of me, of you.

Loneliness can only be met by what is real and true and given. And, as L’Engle so artfully puts it, delusions must give way to reality if we are to ever see divine grace at work in another person. One can never truly know or be known by a phantom. Because, after all, it is only a real person who can love our real selves.

Sabrina invites us to trade in our illusory companions—eagerly, as one removes one’s hand from the flame—for the real transformative nature of love. There is no more malnourished person than the one who grazes upon “food porn” (a growing term for visuals of aesthetically-pleasing food) expecting it to fill them, and there is no lonelier person than one who lives with an illusion. Such a person has given themselves away and gained nothing they can give to others. Sabrina Fairchild and Linus Larrabee jointly show us that love, like God, is both immanent and transcendent. We must accept the truth of ourselves and others if we are to experience something beyond our reality. Something like a dream.

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