Sensitive, narcissistic, somewhat nihilistic. Perhaps Isaac's ex-wife knows him best, even more than Isaac himself. Although he is an intellectual, most of the time, knowledge is not what he depends on for survival. Instead, he simply indulges in a state of intimacy. I use the word intimacy because I don't think Isaac has any real love. More than that, he longs for a relationship. Maybe he had a so-called love affair with his ex-wife, but that should be outside the movie. What can be seen in the film is that after Isaac divorced his ex-wife, he established a cohabitation relationship with another underage girl, Tracy. But at this time, he still felt that the whole thing was not good. Tracy was still young and Isaac felt it was unfair to Tracy for them to maintain such a relationship. He even persuaded Tracy repeatedly to cut off this relationship with her:
Until the appearance of good friend and lover Mary. She is humorous, and compared to Tracy, Isaac seems to have a better conversation with her. Plus Isaac is subject to the moral issues that arise from being with Tracy. Isaac quickly broke up with Tracy and entered into a relationship with Mary. As a result, Mary regretted it after a while and returned to her lover. The cheating of his ex-wife and the betrayal of Mary made Isaac's inner world completely collapsed. So in desperation he lay on the sofa and asked himself a question: Well, I think there is something that makes us worth living" "Like what? ""For me" "I'd say Groucho Marx, say; Willie Mays, the second movement of the Jupiter Symphony" "And, uh... Louis Armstrong" "Of course, also There are Swedish films; Flaubert's "Emotional Education", Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra" "Those painted by Cézanne.... Incredible apples and pears; "The Crab at Sanhe Restaurant" "Tracy's face" "The most important part of the whole story is what happened after Mary left. The above line also confirms his ex-wife's description of him in the book: "In his most private moments, he will talk about the fear of death" He prepared many answers to this question, but it seems that those answers can not really Satisfy him until he says Tracy's face, whether he loves Tracy or not, but he knows that Tracy loves him, and after the second betrayal, he is now eager to throw in another in an intimate relationship. It is at this moment that his moral sense is completely replaced by his narcissism, or by the fear of nothingness. Because as a nihilist, he knows all too well what it means to lose this last hope. Ex-wife says he's narcissistic, and that's true. But his narcissism is not Narcissian, nor is he narcissistic because he feels better than others. His narcissism is more of a desire to survive, a desperate desire to escape from nihilism. So he chose Tracy, not because he loved her, but simply because her presence would rescue him from his sense of meaninglessness. Hence the following statement that contradicts himself when his moral sense still prevails:
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Tracy: It's not that everyone has no principles, you should have some confidence in people.
So in the final analysis, Manhattan is not a love story in the traditional sense, he is more like a nihilist self-redemption.
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