Modern Loneliness is a Crisis of the Soul
Don Giovanni and Wild Strawberries reveal the timeless patterns of chosen isolation
DON GIOVANNI
Metropolitan Opera House
November 15, 2025, 1:00 PM
Balcony Row C, Seats 13, 15
Music: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Libretto: Lorenzo Da Ponte
Director: Ivo van Hove
Conductor: Daniele Rustioni
Cast: Kyle Ketelsen (Don Giovanni), Tommaso Barea (Leporello), Guanqun Yu (Donna Anna), Anita Hartig (Donna Elvira), Andrea Carroll (Zerlina), Paul Appleby (Don Ottavio), Brandon Cedel (Masetto), Soloman Howard (Il Commendatore)
The writer
recently described young men as “monks in the casino”—risk-averse socially, risk-chasing financially, living in rooms full of screens.Preferring the discomfort of losing a bet to the anxiety of being rejected on a date, Thompson profiles extreme cases: a 28-year-old whose bedroom features 27 pornographic videos playing simultaneously, a 26-year-old who gambled away his salary and now bets on Malaysian soccer at 3 a.m.
“Guys sitting alone in their rooms being viciously abused by their computers,” he writes, “sinking deeper into the despair that compelled them to seek out that abuse.”
My nephew happens to be in his mid-twenties, just moved into his own place, working his first real job. He’s not even close to one of Thompson’s extreme cases, but he certainly knows people with these challenges. His college experience got cut by Covid, and he believes his generation never really recovered. He told me about one person he knew who emptied their bank account and stole from their parents to feed an OnlyFans addiction.
Grim stuff.
argues in her brilliant Substack piece “The Loneliness Crisis is a Revealed Choice” that many people are choosing isolation because it’s “the path of least resistance.” Empty nightclubs where nobody dances despite nothing stopping them. People relieved when friends cancel plans they never wanted to attend. The real barrier today isn’t money but that “going to a nightclub and meeting new people is work...there are inherent risks, like embarrassment or awkwardness.”I asked my nephew if he wanted to see Don Giovanni at the Met—I had no idea if he’d be interested. We’ve seen Japanese cinema together, caught Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest, but opera felt different. To his credit, he’s been increasingly open to culture, so he agreed - despite having very few ideas about what to expect.
Over lunch at PJ Clarke’s before the performance, we talked about his thoughts on some of these issues. He confirmed—the anxiety is at real heights, the general alienation, the algorithmic world promising connection while delivering isolation, is leaving people empty. He described it with the weary clarity of someone who understands the systems his generation relies on are creating their alienation.
My Backpages
Three shots of vodka in a Bloody Mary have a way of playing with memory. Listening to him, I found myself transported back twenty years to a not-so-different Upper West Side.
I was just out of law school, working temp legal jobs, barely hanging onto a $400-a-month sublet on Rivington Street. Many college friends were married or engaged, with careers and six-figure salaries. I had the type of financial situation where a bodega bacon egg and cheese felt like debit card roulette.
But despite being broke, it was never a question of whether it was possible to get dates. The city was full of poor students, artists, and strivers getting by on charm. Which is what I relied on to find a girlfriend with a great ground-level apartment fifteen blocks from Lincoln Center.
Reader, with twenty years of hindsight: I was a terrible boyfriend.
She paid for a lot, I smoked much of her weed, I stayed at her much nicer apartment as much as possible. When it ended, I couldn’t believe how unfair she was TO me. The nerve.
It felt like one of the worst times. But it was entirely necessary. It prompted me to give up my sublet and focus on finding a permanent job.
Five months later I met my now wife, passed the bar on the second try and found the job that set up my career. Five years later I was married, a father and a homeowner.
Things turn quick.
I told my nephew this walking to the Met. Not to do the insufferable “back in my day” routine (ok maybe a little bit), but because I remember that feeling of alienation and loneliness I read about in his generation.
All of this was swirling through my mind as we ascended the red staircase, and the chandeliers began to rise.
THE HEAT
Don Giovanni is obviously one of the greatest operas ever written. Its propulsive, thunderous score and mix of high and low comedy gives us the model for so many anti-heroes to come. Rich, rapacious assholes have always existed—claiming “freedom” from moral law to worship their own material appetites. Mozart and librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte understood this. They built each moment to advance Giovanni’s appetite toward an all-consuming conclusion.
The structure is merciless. It begins with Giovanni killing the Commendatore after attempting to violate his daughter. No escape, no redemption. Just cause and effect. The dead man’s memorial statue will return to condemn Giovanni to hell in the stunning finale.
Director Ivo van Hove—who staged that devastating Salome I saw last year—treats the Met’s massive stage as a film set, using space and movement to create immediate psychological states. His Don Giovanni is urgent, physical, dangerous.
Andrea Carroll’s Zerlina stole the afternoon. Every entrance changed the temperature in the house. Her voice carried real sexuality—not polite “sensuality” but the kind that makes you sit forward in your seat. When Don Giovanni seduced her away from her wedding to Masetto, you felt temptation in her performance. Not naïveté but appetite for what life might offer beyond the safe, predictable choice.
Kyle Ketelsen’s Giovanni radiated charisma while committing atrocities. His voice rich and fluid, effortlessly seductive in “Là ci darem la mano”—showing you exactly why women fall for this man despite knowing what he is.
Giovanni’s passion reads as freedom, as life itself. But it blazes into an inferno of avarice and cruelty, consuming everything it touches until damnation arrives.
Tommaso Barea’s Leporello provided real comic heart, his catalogue aria—reciting Giovanni’s conquests to the abandoned Donna Elvira—had the audience laughing at the audacity while grasping the horror underneath. “In Italy, 640. In Germany, 231. In France, 100. In Turkey, 91. But in Spain, already 1,003!” He played Leporello as Giovanni’s doppelgänger and enabler, the faithful servant mirroring his damned master.
When Soloman Howard’s Commendatore ghost arrives for judgment, Van Hove uses the Met’s massive stage to make Hell physical. Walls closing, orchestra unleashing torrents of sound. Howard’s voice as judgment itself, offering Giovanni one last chance at redemption, to accept God.
Even with Hell opening beneath him, Giovanni refused. “No! No! No!” he sang, defying a moral universe even as demons dragged him to eternal damnation. Mozart’s score ferocious—all that elegance from the overture weaponized for supernatural reckoning, Classical form barely containing Romantic intensity.
My nephew’s assessment: “Sensory overload, in the best way.”
THE COLD
I’m working through the Criterion Bergman Box Set as part of a Film at Lincoln Center Discord Channel watch-along, and Bergman’s 1957 masterpiece Wild Strawberries happened to be scheduled for this week.1 It was nothing more than pure serendipity that after an afternoon watching Giovanni’s damnation and hellfire, I’d spend the evening with Professor Isak Borg’s cold isolation.
Professor Isak Borg is a retired physician traveling to southern Sweden to receive an honorary degree. He lives with his housekeeper Miss Agda, who maintains sardonic affection for him, and his daughter-in-law Marianne, who moved in temporarily after separating from his son Evald.
The film opens with a nightmare. Borg walks empty Stockholm streets, encountering a clock face without hands—time itself broken. A funeral procession appears with no mourners. The corpse in the casket reaches out and grabs him. He’s witnessing his own death, alone, unmourned, time having stopped long before his heart did.
This is where temperature inverts. Don Giovanni and Wild Strawberries ask similar questions about a life without moral limits, but at opposite ends of the thermostat.
Borg’s dream forces a decision. Instead of flying to Lund, Borg chooses to drive—a journey that becomes psychological excavation. Marianne joins him, her contempt barely concealed. She sees what his coldness has done to Evald, what it’s doing to their marriage.
Bergman structures the journey like Freudian archaeology.
Borg returns to his family’s summer house—the place where wild strawberries grow. The flashback shows his uncle’s birthday celebration, the whole family gathered in sunlight and warmth. Not pure trauma but happiness mixed with loss—showing what connection looked like before Borg froze himself against it.
Then comes the crushing moment. Young Sara picks wild strawberries—the film’s titular image. She’s secretly engaged to Isak, but we watch as his brother Sigfrid seduces her with warmth Isak never offered. She chooses heat over cold, passion over propriety. Borg lost her through his own emotional withdrawal, his inability to offer what she needed, even as happiness surrounded them.
Then hitchhikers appear. Three young people—a girl named Sara and two competing suitors—traveling to Italy. Borg is stunned. This Sara, played by Bibi Andersson, looks exactly like the Sara from his memories. The woman he lost to his brother’s warmth now sits in his car, still choosing between competing versions of masculinity, vital and alive while Borg remains frozen.
Bergman’s doubling isn’t metaphor. It’s showing how patterns repeat, how the past never stops being present, how psychological wounds replay endlessly until confronted. The woman sitting in his car IS the woman from his memory, time collapsing into a single accusatory presence.
They stop at a gas station. The attendant recognizes Borg and refuses payment because of all the work he’s done for their community. The gratitude is real. Borg was a great physician, worthy of his university’s highest honors. But at home, he was frozen.
A near-death car accident brings another couple into the journey—middle-aged, bitter and vicious with each other. Not playful arguments but toxic residue of decades of mutual contempt. Marianne watches them, visibly distressed—she’s seeing her own future with Evald if the pattern continues.
That night comes the film’s most devastating dream sequence. Borg witnesses his wife with her lover, forced to confront the infidelity he spent his marriage accepting without judgment. The memory isn’t softened by time but remains raw, unprocessed. Seventy years later, the wound stays fresh because he never confronted it, never felt it, never let himself experience the actual human messiness of betrayal and anger.
He passes this coldness to his son Evald like an inheritance. Not just emotionally but through cruel acts that demonstrate his frozen heart. Demanding debt repayment from his own son. Treating family bonds as financial transactions. The coldness became institutional, systematic, a way of organizing life that eliminated all warmth.
In one of the film’s most devastating moments, we learn that Marianne left Evald because she’s pregnant and he “refuses to bring another wretch” into this cold world. Evald learned from his father that marriage is burden, that family is obligation, that love is something to freeze yourself against.
The young hitchhikers—warm, vital, arguing about God and poetry—expose Borg’s isolation through their sheer aliveness. When Professor Borg recounts “The friend” from Viktor Rydberg’s poem, he’s reminding himself as well as “the children” about divine presence in human connection. The grace Borg lost by freezing himself against pain.
TEMPERATURE AND TIME
Don Giovanni moves forward into hellfire, refusing God until the end.
Borg moves backward through dreams, embracing the excavation despite its pain. Bergman makes you feel Borg’s redemption the way Mozart makes you feel Giovanni’s damnation—not as concept but as embodied experience.
In one of cinema’s most beautiful scenes, Borg finds his “friend”—the divine presence in human connection from Rydberg’s poem. A man who lived badly for seventy years finally sees the harm he caused. In seeing it, he breaks the cycle. His son declares of his wife “I cannot live without her.” His unborn grandchild might know warmth.
Late, but not too late.
Giovanni consumes everything he touches until damnation arrives. Borg withdraws from everything that might touch him until dreams force recognition. One burning, one frozen—both immersed in human cruelty and misery.
Both works demonstrate that time is an illusion when it comes to these matters. We can be imprisoned by the past or find it a source of memory and reconciliation. Borg’s journey walks the moral path—confronting what he did, accepting the pain, choosing change.
Things turn quick.
When thinking of “the modern loneliness crisis” in light of these works, there’s really nothing modern about it at all.
Giovanni’s burning consumption and Borg’s frozen isolation demonstrate the same truth: when you deny human connection in favor of appetite or withdrawal, the effect is damnation.
The form changes but the pattern holds.
Don Giovanni consumes until damnation arrives. Professor Borg withdraws until his dreams force recognition. But these men demonstrate the same lesson: we’re making choices, moment by moment, that add up to either connection or isolation.
Things turn quick. But only through the accumulation of those small choices—to leave your room, to sit in discomfort, to risk feeling something real.
I’m actually missing a field trip at the Paris Theater on Saturday to see this film in 35mm.