“Divorce,” the short video piece by director Kelly Broich (who may also be one of the strangest satirists working today), featuring Fran Valentine and Eli Elliott, is yet another astute critique of one of our social institutions. I don’t know, but after watching this video I fear that by the time the Collapse cult is through with us we’ll be stripped of all our illusions (and clothes) and forced into a nude identity-crisis.  This time the folks at Collapse have chosen to challenge one of our culture’s oldest and most sacred institutions, marriage.

Valentine repeats “Divorce, divorce, divorce” over and over again until the word seems to lose all meaning, though the emotional significance to the viewer is undoubtedly striking. The word divorce is practically a demonic word to many. Nobody likes saying it or hearing it, but hearing it reiterated in this way, combined with the short looped minimalist electronic soundtrack, achieves the effect of reminding us that it’s just a fucking word like any other.

Near the end the video flashes to an artfully done experimental fight montage consisting of quick choppy cuts showing Elliott and Valentine in a kitchen, and ends with the strong yet simple statement, “Get the fuck out of my house!” — definitively bitch-slapping  two-hundred thousand years of patriarchal oppression. On a subjective level,  roughly fifty percent of viewers will relate to being trapped like a caged lunatic in an asylum of marital dysfunction.  

Today over half of all marriages end in divorce.  The rest in death. Divorce is a pandemic sweeping our country like mouth herpes. The chart to the left cites the most common reasons for divorce.

However, not all hope is lost. There exists an effective tool for fixing nearly any relationship, no matter how far gone. I’m talking about the how-to book entitled The Magic of Making Up, which can be purchased for thirty-nine dollars at http://www.magicofmakingup.com.

Other books make ridiculous claims, but none of them really do the trick. The methods found in The Magic of Making Up are based on years of exhaustive, peer-reviewed, focus grouped research in the field of relationship repair. I bought this book last year and it was worth every cent. I have never felt more loved.  

Don’t let divorce rip apart your marriage and drive you to drink or into a second-marriage which will statistically probably end in divorce. Remember life is short—YOU ARE GOING TO DIE—just like most of today’s marriages. I highly recommend watching “Divorce” with your mate to remind them of what can happen.

Brian Burks is a relationship critic at Healing Hearts.

Book Link: The Magic of Making Up – Only $39

Collapse: http://www.facebook.com/fran.valentine?ref=ts#!/collapsetheater