Makes No Difference

Written by Miranda Vidak

1/9/20134 min read

Have you ever felt that a movie, TV show, or book you’re about to watch/read will be important to you in some way—something you'll discover within it—despite already knowing the story? There's a hidden gem in it, and you need to see, hear, or read it at the specific time in your life when that message is meant for you.

Not sooner. Or later. Just THEN. When you need it.

I was supposed to watch Anna Karenina six or seven times in four different cities around the globe, and every time I was about to watch it, something would happen to prevent me from it. Time, circumstance, you name it. I figured I wasn’t ready.

There’s a specific emotion you need to be in to see certain things at a particular time, to realize something. Isn't life grand, how that happens? And isn't it scary how, sometimes—or more often than not—life feels pretty damn predetermined, with a whole scenario brewing for you to receive later on, while you dwell on mundane things in the present that won’t even matter in the grand scheme of things.

How unimportant are we all, in the grand scheme of things? And so damn important all at the same time? Everything is already there, the hurt, beauty, happiness, pain, love, lust, disappointments, challenges—we only have to live it.

Aside from the fact that this movie visually gave me more orgasms than real, living person—from the theater stages evolving into movements, to those movements metamorphosing back into the theater stage; from choreographed office scenes to the subliminal costumes you’d want to take and wear in the present day without caring about the laughs—they all came together with the pain and frustrations that Keira Knightley so realistically and painfully brought to life for me. And then, there’s the story.

We all know the story. It’s been told and adapted for the screen dozens of times. And that’s exactly what fascinates me about it—how universal it is. How something written in the 1870s can evoke emotions that are relatable to every human being, regardless of time or place on this planet.

Fidelity, jealousy, passion, lust. I wondered what Joe Wright thought he could bring to this adaptation, which has been done a gazillion times before, but Joe delivers. He delivers with stages, choreography, and an unexpected yet phenomenal cast.

This Karenina can not be explained with words. It has to be experienced.

The story. The one we read, watched, and lived (minus the train part, bless).

And we all did.

We all experienced lust and passion beyond reason when you know you can’t, but you absolutely have to. It demands of you. It militates you. Because it’s lust. And lust is the most powerful of them all. It’s not love. It’s not sex. Love is calm, sweet, rewarding, fulfilling in a very unaggressive way. Sex is physical; it doesn’t demand anything of us, nothing we don’t want to give, and even if we don’t, but we do, it’s all done in a blink. We get up, get dressed, and we’re not altered.

Not if we don’t want to be; we have a choice.

But lust?

Lust can’t be controlled. Passion can’t be controlled. And it can’t be ignored. It screws with you because it’s not simple or one-sided. It’s layered. It has love and sex mixed in it. It’s physical, mental, emotional, and consuming all at the same time.

Lust is absorbing.

Lust is difficult to deal with when there’s nothing else you have to deal with. But when there’s fidelity thrown in? When there’s fidelity, society, and self mixed in?

The parallels of human conduct are what made Anna Karenina "the greatest novel ever written." It contrasted something so overwhelming with restraint. It juxtaposed an arid marriage with the inevitability of passion. Tolstoy searched the self and existence—the place of the self in existence—so monumentally that it still gives shivers.

And what made it tragic is not the ending with the train; it’s just that - the SELF. How we feed our SELF with what it needs, knowing it will be the same matter that will eventually destroy our SELF.

THE INEVITABLENESS.

And god, the dialog is monumental.

Anna: “This is wrong.

Vronsky: “Makes no difference.”

Anna: “You have no right.”

Vronsky: “Makes no difference.”

Anna: “Because I’m so happy. Not to think. Only to live, only to feel.”

Anna: “If you have any thought for me you will give me back my peace!”

Vronsky: “There can be no peace for us, only misery and greatest happiness.”

Were you ever with someone you weren’t supposed to be with but you simply had to? It’s literally only misery and the greatest happiness.

My favorite scene in the movie is when Anna returns home from being with Count Vronsky, trying to sneak into the house where her husband is still awake, waiting. She’s completely absorbed in her emotions and passions, flying through the air, like we all do when we’re consumed by love and lust. But her husband stops her. He wants to talk. He asks her where she’s been. And instead of lying or pretending, she’s annoyed that he’s even asking her questions, and instead, she wants to relish in her bliss—almost like a teenage love that can’t even be bothered with something as substantial as one's husband.

She turns towards him, tells him where she’s been, and claims that she’s tired and needs to go to her room. Completely oblivious to what’s right and wrong, so absorbed in her passion and in her SELF, powerless to both.

The powerlessness. Explained best in one of my favorite quotes of all times, in the words of Marquis De Sade: Lust’s passion will be served; it demands, it militates, it tyrannizes.”

And that it does. Every single one. Every single time.