A Love that Would Look and Sound like a Movie

Just watched North by Northwest. And, although I thought the title came from Hamlet’s quotation about “"I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw,” it apparently refers to a compass direction that doesn’t even exist (thus enforcing the ‘fantasticality’ of the film, according to Wikipedia). However, like Hamlet, the movie is about assuming a false persona (Hamlet plays mad, Roger Thornhill plays George Kaplan) and I found it thoroughly engaging.

Anyhoo. More importantly, holy sweet jesus, I want to fall in love the way they do in the movies. When Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint are mutually seducing each other in her private train chamber (and how much do I want to travel somewhere in a private train chamber … ) and they’re throwing overt entrendres at each other –
Sample dialogue:

Roger: The moment I meet an attractive woman, I have to start pretending I have no desire to make love to her.
Eve: What makes you think you have to conceal it?
Roger: She might find the idea objectionable.
Eve: Then again, she might not.

I mean, GOLL DARN, that shit is so fucking hot. And then they do the whole almost-excruciatingly-long-buildup-to-finally-kissing thing, when they’re in each other’s faces for what seems like an eternity before they finally kiss?

WHO DOES THAT? Is anyone out there doing that? Do you people do that sort of thing, tease and flirt and banter and then draw out the actual moment of connection, like an elaborate mating ritual in which ‘foreplay’ refers only to what happens before you actually kiss each other?

All of which brings to mind, of course, the song “Clark Gable” by The Postal Service. (I know, I know, but suck it, okay? I think they’re awwwesome and I lurf the lyrics, bitch):

“I was waiting for a cross-town train in the london underground
When it struck me that i've been waiting since birth to find
A love that would look and sound like a movie”

So, it comes down to this: no more of this sex in the city style behavior, oh New York and surrounding burrows (and, yes, that's intentional. i like to think that everyone who isn't in manhattan is in a rabbit den, it's true). fine, surrounding burroughs. Let’s take it back to when everyone dressed up for work and Grand Central Station was a sea of polished perfection. No more of this “casual encounter” craigslist crap, let’s have highballs and witty discourse (of the verbal variety). And please, please, please, let us prolong courtship and behavior and exchange love tokens and other frivolity.

But, then, perhaps I am overly romantic and filled with retrograde nostalgia for that sort of thing. After all, I am apparently unable to tell a jerk from a gentleman, so perhaps hawks and handsaws are way beyond me.

It's a cold war, but it's hot as hell.