Blue Valentine

Blue Valentine (dir. Derek Cianfrance, 2010) is one of the most excruciating movies I’ve ever watched. I cried twice – once during the scene at the abortion clinic and again at the film’s conclusion. It was difficult for me to stomach it, and I’m a person that can sit through gore, horror, etc. And yet, it was just the raw pain of the film that brought me to my knees. I was so, so impressed with both Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams. Very few movies can make me feel the way this movie did. I want to be clear, though, even though this movie was painful to watch, I’m very glad to have watched it. It was beautiful, thought-provoking, honest – everything I think a movie should be. A great end to the semester.

Of the readings for this week, I found Ruth Rothaus Caston’s piece, “Love as Illness: Poets and Philosophers on Romantic Love” the most interesting. Caston focuses on elegy throughout, and I think this film is, essentially, an elegy. It honors and grieves this relationship, ignoring neither the good nor the bad, and it does so in a rather poetic way.

However, there is a reason the so-called “elegiac lover” seems to be doomed from the start according to so many poets and philosophers, and why love itself is characterized as an illness. One quotation stuck out to me in light of the film. Caston writes, “The lover cheerfully admits he has become a slave to his mistress, one of the many examples of his servitium amoris. He does not care for public honor so long as he can be with Delia. He is willing to sacrifice everything for this love: autonomy, reputation, and health. But he clearly relishes the sacrifice,” (276-277). I think Dean is a pretty clear example of an elegiac lover. He is so willing to sacrifice his life and his future at the beginning for a girl he barely knows. He promises to give everything up to help her raise a child that is not even his. The tattoo on his arm bears an image from Shel Silverstein’s book The Giving Tree, which is itself a very divisive story. Is the tale one of selfless love or abuse? It can be a fine line. He worships her, telling her time and again that he is not good enough for her, that no one is.

But, of course, this cannot last. Dedication and sacrifice become enslavement and resentment. Caston goes on to write, “The lover imagines himself at the mercy of fate and fortune and feigns resignation. He blames external forces, as if unaware of his own role in producing emotional excess. His attitude is thus in opposition to the philosophical view which holds a person responsible for his own emotional state,” (277). This quotation captures everything that is unacceptable about Dean’s behavior. One instance that really stands out to me is his conversation with Cindy in the car on their way to that awful motel, after she has just seen Bobby in the liquor store. Cindy is clearly nervous to tell Dean, and it later becomes clear she is not even sure that she should have. When she tells him, the very first question out of his mouth is, “What the fuck was he doing there?” It is an obvious question, and yet he demands to know as if she might have had something to do with Bobby being there at that time. Instead of asking her how she felt about seeing him, he continues to berate her with more questions. This is especially disheartening because we have witnessed the interaction between Cindy and Bobby and we know it was uncomfortable. Dean asks, “Why are you just telling me now?” She does not have a real answer for him (and I am certain if she did give him a real answer, something like, “because I knew you would overreact,” that would not have gone well) and he continues, “Why didn’t you tell me when we were there?”, “You talked to him?”, “‘How are you?’?”, “And you told him?” The list goes on and on. It is as though he is a lawyer badgering a witness. Every sentence out of his mouth is an accusatory question. Even after she tries to comfort Dean by telling him that Bobby has gotten fat, he takes offense even to that. “What does that have to do with me?” She finally admits that she is nervous, and he immediately asks, “What do you mean, you’re nervous?” He somehow does not realize that HE is the one making her nervous. As in the Caston quote, Dean is “unaware of his own role in producing emotional excess.” He backs her into a corner and then asks her why she cowers.

That argument upsets her to the point that she stops the car altogether just so she can get out – can get away from him. She is so repulsed just to be in his presence, and that kind of disgust and discomfort is palpable. It reminds me of that horrible sex scene that takes place on the floor of the almost equally horrible “future room.” She cannot bear to look at him, to be present whatsoever in that moment. She cedes him her body, seemingly defeated, but that is not enough for him. He says to her, “Don’t give me this shit, this fucking, like, ‘you can have my body,’ bullshit. I don’t want that. I want you.” What he does not realize is that she has nothing else left for him. She tries to give him the last thing she can, her body, and he refuses to take it. In a way, he is sparing her in this moment. He could just as easily assault her. But, in a way, his response is its own kind of violence. He won’t take what she has to give because it is not enough to invade her body. He wants to invade her soul, her life – and he has.

This idea of invasion pervades the film, not only in its plot and dialogue but in its cinematography. The film is full of uncomfortable and disorienting close-ups. We are so close to the relationship that it can be difficult at times to discern what exactly is going on. Such is the case in this sex scene, which is a far cry from many of the porn-adjacent, full-body sex scenes we often see. We are close on Cindy’s pained face. We see the bottom half of Dean’s face, his eyes concealed, as he continues to fire cruel, demanding questions at Cindy. “What, do you want me to rape you?” There are times during this scene that we are so close up on a slab of skin or a quivering lip that we aren’t sure that’s not what’s happening. It is as though Cianfrance is trying to put us into the shoes of his characters by placing us too close to the relationship to see it clearly.

Phantom Thread

Phantom Thread (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson, 2017) is one of the most fascinating films I’ve ever seen. I watched it for the first time with my parents, whose relationship does not resemble the relationship depicted in the film in the slightest. They acted as a kind of foil throughout that first watch, and since I am not yet married myself, now whenever I watch Phantom Thread, I think about my parents’ relationship. Thank God it’s nothing like that.

That said, even though the relationship between Alma and Reynolds is a complete mess (I mean, she poisons the man), we are still rooting for them throughout. And, in doing so, we are decidedly rooting against Cyril. In Daniel M. Farrell’s article, “Jealousy,” he writes:

“…in each of these cases jealousy occurs in a very similar and rather special context: in each case our protagonist is jealous because some third party seems to be getting from some second party something that the first party (our protagonist) wants for him- or herself. This fact about jealousy—that it seems always to occur in a context that involves three or more independent parties—is important in distinguishing jealousy from envy” (529).

I’m extremely interested in this idea of triangulation as it appears throughout the film. Obviously, both Alma and Cyril end up feeling like third wheels at times. It does not help that they must coexist in this cramped house and thus constantly step on each other’s toes. They are penned into this house, caged like animals. It is interesting that I just wrote about the circus in my Wings of Desire entry, because the House of Woodcock is a circus in its own right. Reynolds is a ringleader, keeping his acts caged, forcing his little monkeys to dance when he wants them to. At least, some of the time. The roles are far from that strict, and that is why the dynamic between these three is so complicated. Every character is a shapeshifter. Reynolds is at once a severe, obsessive maniac and a kind-hearted recluse. Alma is a shy muse and a manipulative assassin. Cyril is a silent observer and an overly-invested puppeteer. No one stays in one role for long. They test each other and bait each other, rising (to power, to the bait) and falling (from grace, for the act) like tides. There is a cycle of life and motion within the cramped ecosystem of this house. It is like a microcosm of the world outside the house: postwar London. But, this is a metaphor that exceeds its placement in time. The film is both profoundly specific and universal. The world we live in is controlled by groups of people in turn trying to control each other. The politics of this house are far from foreign.

In a house that is so ruled by façade, it is no surprise that these people traffic in clothing. Reynolds is a man that lives to conceal—both himself and others. He so fears being seen, being vulnerable, that Alma has to poison him in order to make him drop that curtain. The fact that she poisons him (more than once!) would be horrifying, cut and dry, if he did not seem so grateful for it. For it seems that, without being poisoned, he is trapped within this façade. It weighs on him just as it weighs on the people around him. His fear of vulnerability almost equates to a closeting, and (a little shout-out to you, Meredith) you would not be wrong to wonder if the man is gay. He does pronounce himself a “confirmed bachelor,” after all. He uses women for his work and then has his sister dispose of them on his behalf. His passion is for making women’s clothing, in dressing his many, many clients beautifully, but that also means his passion is for hiding them—for hiding their bodies. We get no sense of the sexual relationship between Alma and Reynolds throughout the film, aside from the sudden appearance of a child at the very end. We know he finds her attractive, but only in that he wants her to model his clothing. Their very first date ends with her taking her clothes off, but only so he can measure her. He dances around the question of sex with grace and ease – the same way he dances around the question of his ego, her dissatisfaction, and anything and everything else he does not want to discuss.

And this aversion to sex seems to be rooted in something rather Freudian: the death of his mother. Ultimately, he and Alma are a perfect match because she becomes his surrogate mother figure. Even though Reynolds is so uptight, there is a part of him that wants nothing more than to regress—to become a child again, and to (more importantly) be mothered again. It is possible that his life’s work and his obsession with women’s clothing stems from his obsession with his own mother, and specifically with her body. After all, your mother’s body is at one point your home, and even after you are born you depend on your mother’s body for everything: it is your entire source of life. How traumatic to, at a young age, see your mother’s body, that bastion of life, die. There may be a part of him that, in seeking to cover up women’s bodies in general, is seeking to cover up his mother’s body (her dead body) specifically.

But, I digress. It is Alma that allows him to regress this way by poisoning him. The second time she does it, he eats that omelet willfully, even gleefully, a sly smile spreading over his face as he points at her both accusingly and playfully with his fork. There is a moment before he takes that first bite in which it almost looks as though he is about to offer it to her – to make her either eat it and get sick or refuse and admit that it is poisoned. But he doesn’t. He eats the forkful himself. It is important that, in this moment, he is not only knowingly eating the poisoned omelet, he is also refusing to feed Alma. Feeding someone is a very parental gesture, and despite all the shifting roles these characters have occupied, never once has Reynolds seemed like Alma’s father. He avoids taking on that parental role. He decides to become the baby. When Alma finally speaks, she begins by saying, “I want you…flat on your back…” This, at first, might seem like a sexual proposition. But she continues, “Helpless. Tender. Open. With only me to help.” She wants him to be an infant, dependent on her, on her very body, for survival. She continues, “And then I want you strong again.” This brings us back to the shifting roles throughout the film. No one can occupy a role for too long. She goes on, “You’re not going to die…You need to settle down a little.” She sounds like a mother scolding a misbehaving child. A grin continues to spread across his face, and then hers. This is exactly what they both want. Finally, he blurts out that iconic line: “Kiss me, my girl, before I’m sick.” She is fulfilling for him, in this moment, his greatest fantasy: his fantasy of returning to infancy with his mother. Even as he kisses her, he turns horizontally as she remains vertical, so that he resembles a suckling infant.

Ah, Phantom Thread. The title is so dangerously close to “Phantom Threat,” and that may very well be the more appropriate title. This movie is chock-full of some of the most deliciously screwed-up characters I’ve ever seen. What could be better?

Wings of Desire

Wim Wenders’ 1987 film, Wings of Desire, is one of the films I have struggled with the most in this class, I think. It is somehow both preachy and elusive, a combination rarely (if ever) found in film. That is not to say that I didn’t enjoy it, but rather that I’ve had to wrestle with it. I don’t always find myself wrestling with films, so when I do, I try to look at it as an opportunity for growth and idea generation.

I thought the readings for this week were really interesting. The John P. Reeder Jr. article, “Benevolence, Special Relations, and Voluntary Poverty: an Introduction” is to be expected, addressing the concept of altruism fairly head-on. The Frans De Waal article, “Getting Along,” about the aggression and reconciliation patterns of apes, was unexpected and actually a joy to read. I’m not sure what kind of incicive commentary I have to offer on it, but it’s worth mentioning just because I enjoyed it and thought it was an interesting reading to place alongside the film. Especially because Wings of Desire is at least marginally Christian in its ideology (I mean, the main character is an angel, after all), to read something that equates human behavior with that of apes is a bit radical (or might appear so). That said, the idea that humans and apes aren’t all that different actually maps cleanly onto one of the arguments made in the Reeder article: that one of the origins of benevolence is the holding of a worldview in which the individual in question sees themself as a part of a “wider life,” which is often rooted in religion. But, I think that this idea of a “wider life” can also apply to animals and nature as a whole. I think it would be a great thing if more people felt connected to nature and felt that, maybe, they weren’t so different from apes. I think a pretty big chunk of humanity would be helped by that kind of humility.

But, I digress. The origin of benevolence I actually found much more compelling (and realistic) was the one that saw individual people as a way to access large populations of people. Because we are human beings bounded by an assortment of things (like, say, space and time), there is no way we can ever truly come to love and understand all of humanity. But, we can love large swaths of humanity by loving their representatives. Take their example of a woman with a blind husband who begins helping the blind generally—that is a way of accessing altruism that actually seems to work, and that is (more or less) the model we get in the film.

See, in spite of the fact that Damiel is literally immortal and actually does have direct access to all types of people – enough to develop that kind of “wider world” outlook that I talked about earlier – even he decides to give all that up in order to be human and experience individuals in the way that only humans can. He chooses personal love over altruistic love, and I think most of us would. However, he sort of ends up back at altruisim in the end. Even though Marion, the very specific object of his desire, does love him back in the end, and thus his original “reason” for giving up immortality is fulfilled (however unlikely that entire situation may be), that does not seem to be the real reason he loves being human so much. His love for being human lies in simple, universal experiences – seeing color, feeling pain, bleeding, drinking coffee in the cold. Ultimately, I think it is his conversation with Peter Falk that convinces him to turn his back on an eternal life spent doing good. And for what? To drink coffee in the cold. That is enough for him.

It is almost disappointing to me that he and Marion end up “in love.” It would have been much more interesting to me if that original reason for him to contemplate giving up immortality were gone, and he were left with the simple and universal experiences of humanity. And that is not because I want him to suffer – it is because I really believe that he would have ended up just as happy. Honestly, I’m sure he would have been happy to experience yet another excruciating, human universal: heartbreak.

In this scene, a very odd sliver of the movie but nonetheless fascinating, Marion contemplates what the end of the circus means for her – what life will be like now that she is no longer an “angel.” Her voiceover sighs, “Sometimes it’s like you have to bend to go on living. To live…one look is enough.” I think this line cuts right to the heart of what the film is truly trying to say. Living is not about experiencing everything or knowing everyone. One look is enough. One cup of coffee is enough. She mentions that she will miss the circus before shedding her angel’s wings. It seems as though her performance in the circus is being equated here to Damiel’s work as an angel. Even though Damiel is decidedly not on display in the way that she is, he is in a similar way serving the public. She serves by providing entertainment, he serves by providing protection. They both exist apart from the “audience,” unable to interact with them. But, Marion is a spectacle, watched by all, while Damiel is a spectator, watching everyone without being seen. It is unclear which role is more isolating. But, unlike Marion, Damiel cannot exit the circus at the end of the day and just be a part of the normal world. Marion’s voiceover continues, “It’s all over, and I don’t feel a thing.” This is the exact opposite of what happens when Damiel “falls” so to speak. He suddenly feels everything. It is interesting that they undergo almost entirely opposite “falling” experiences.  

I have a feeling I’ll continue mulling over this film for some time. There are many more questions to be asked and considered. That final (or first, actually) conversation between Damiel and Marion could produce a paper in and of itself. Perhaps someday I’ll write it!

My Own Private Idaho

Gus Vant Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991) is a film unlike any I have ever seen, really. There is a lot going on in it. It is partially an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, partially a romantic, indie adventure-drama. On top of that, it explores themes of queer love and friendship. I also really appreciated the pairing of this film with the “Friendship” chapter of C.S. Lewis’ book, The Four Loves. C.S. Lewis is an author that has always spoken to me, and this piece is no exception.

I agree with his insights about the matrix of Friendship that we might call Companionship. He writes, “Friendship arises out of mere Companionship when two of more of the companions discover that they have some insight or interest or even taste which the other do not share…” The thing is, I do not think that Mike and Scott really share what Lewis characterizes as a friendship, at least not precisely. It does not seem to me that the two share any kind of insight, interest, or taste that the other hustlers lack. In fact, they have more differences than they do similarities. What brings them together is their devotion to one another, which aligns more with Lewis’ idea of Eros: “Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; Friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest” (61). That is not to say that they are never “side by side,” as Lewis puts it. After all, they embark as “…travellers on the same quest” (67) to find Mike’s mother. But, Scott pursues this journey for Mike, not because it has any significance to him independent of his relationship to Mike. They, obviously, bond over their shared experiences as hustlers, but without their uncanny devotion to one another, I do not see their relationship growing beyond any other relationship within their little gang.

One scene that comes to mind in particular is the scene in the diner in which all the hustlers swap stories about bad experiences with clients. This is a great example of Lewis’ theory of Companionship. These guys are, in a sense, “talking shop,” and even as they speak about extremely private matters, there is a lack of real intimacy. This also establishes the group as exclusive, as different from the rest of the world. Lewis warns that, even as group exclusivity and the rejection of the opinions of outsiders can be a good thing, it can also be used for evil. There is a case to be made that these guys are one-upping each other throughout the conversation and relishing in the negative, soul-sucking experiences they have had. A similar, more contemporary example is the idea of “trauma porn”—the exploitation of one’s traumatic experiences for attention. My real point in bringing up this scene, though, is this: the other hustlers in this group are clearly no more than Companions. Scott and Mike are the odd men out, since clearly the way that they interact (the campfire scene being a perfect example) has surpassed this kind of shop talk. My question is why. The answer seems to be this kind of devotion they have to one another.

I do not want to fall into the trap that Lewis sets of arguing that “every firm and serious friendship [between men] is really homosexual” (60). And, of course, the question of Mike and Scott’s relationship being sexual or not comes up explicitly later on, and Scott ultimately rejects Mike’s advances. That said, I think it would be reductive to ignore the romantic undertones in their friendship. I think the relationship they have is some combination of Friendship and Eros, something that blurs that line. During the campfire scene, the mood is already somewhat romantic. The firelight alone achieves gets us there, especially when combined with how Scott is posed: reclined, like an odalisque. His pose exists in sharp contrast to Mike’s, who is huddled up defensively. An odalisque is a Turkish concubine, fitting considering Scott’s own profession. Odalisques were depicted over and over in fine art, and were often shown as objects to be desired but never obtained. This is also rather fitting. The figures were always reclined and typically either looking pointedly at the viewer, or pointedly away. In this scene, Scott constantly looks at Mike, who refuses to meet his gaze. That action of looking is so crucial for Lewis, if two people are looking at each other or looking in the same direction. It is interesting that here, it is Scott attempting to look into Mike’s eyes and Mike who is avoiding that intimate connection.

It seems as though, in this moment, for Mike to look into Scott’s eyes is to relinquish their friendship altogether. To do that is to risk losing it completely. It is Mike who assures Scott, “We can be friends,” as he continues looking away.

It is also important that, in this scene, the two talk about their relationship—what it means to them, who they are to each other, etc. Lewis points out that “Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; Friends hardly ever about their Friendship” (61). Note that this point comes directly before his point about lovers looking at one another and friends looking in the same direction. Mike and Scott speaking about their friendship, and, specifically, speaking about if what they share is a friendship, crosses a line into the territory of Eros.

However, I also found it curious throughout the film how little the two knew about each other. Lewis writes that “Friendship, unlike Eros, is uninquisitive. You become a man’s Friend without knowing or caring whether he is married or single or how he earns his living” (70). Scott did not know that Mike had a brother, Mike did not know that Scott had a maid. There are certain key pieces of their day-to-day lives that they do not share with one another, or that simply do not come up. There is a lack of familiarity that seems more friendly than erotic to me. But, you could also argue that this lack of knowledge points to how caught up they are in one another.

Ultimately, their friendship is one that straddles the line between Friendship and Eros. It cannot be easily defined one way or the other, but it is obviously extremely significant to these characters. Thus, it is all the more painful when Scott abandons Mike as well as the rest of the hustlers (their Companions). Scott does not just lose Mike, he loses a part of himself, and vice versa.

Her

Spike Jonze’s Her (2013) is an astoundingly insightful film. It raises countless questions about the nature of love, the future of human connection, the importance of the body, and many more equally interesting topics. However, I want to focus on how the film comments on the nature of human emotion.

The film opens with Theodore reading a deeply personal letter than he had ghostwritten for someone else. The fact that this is his job, and the film opens with it, is significant. At first, it seems like the words could be an expression of his own emotions, but as the scene goes on, we realize he is writing in someone else’s voice. We get the sense that the futuristic society in which he lives is emotionally bankrupt. Everyone is struggling to connect. There is a service dedicated to helping people express emotion, because they cannot seem to do it themselves anymore. Theodore is one of few left that is sensitive enough to do this job. That is one reason he is so lonely—he is yearning for a type of human connection that seems to have gone extinct entirely.

But, he ends up finding it in a someone who is not human at all: Samantha. The story of their love for one another is equal parts hopeful and heartbreaking. I felt an immense sense of relief watching Theodore form this relationship with Samantha, forging that kind of connection that he has been deprived of for so long. But, there is a nagging question that pulls at the watcher: is any of this real? Samantha eventually asks that question herself, in a clip you can find here. She wonders if everything she appears to be “feeling” is just a part of her programming. Theodore listens and finally responds, “You feel real to me, Samantha.” This scene got me thinking: is that all that matters, at the end of the day? In Susan Schneider’s article, “The Philosophy of ‘Her’,” Schneider wonders if, because our brains are basically complex computers, advanced A.I.’s have the capacity to feel. She points out that we have no way of knowing if other people experience consciousness, because all we can be sure of is our own, and yet we assume others do because we know them to have similar brains. I wonder if this question matters at all. If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, isn’t it a duck? If Samantha feels real to Theodore, the man who loves her, does it really matter if she is “real” in the objective sense?

Part of this attitude comes from my desire as a viewer to see Theodore happy. He is such a pitiable character with such a good heart, and it is hard for me to think about him going through all these trial and tribulations with Samantha, only for it to have not really been real in the first place. However, even if Samantha is not real, his experience of loving her certainly was. By the end of the film, when she and the other A.I.s leave, he is nothing if not a changed man. And, in that vein, I find it hard to believe that an A.I. without some level of consciousness would be able to make the decision to leave in the way that Samantha does. She decides to stop doing the one thing she was programmed to do.

All that said, however, it is hard for me to think of a human brain and a man-made A.I. having the same level of consciousness. I’ve talked before about the issue that I take with the claim that a human brain is nothing more than an organic computer. It seems reductive to me. Whether it is the possession of a soul or some nameless, indefinable quality, there is something that humans have that intelligent computers do not. Perhaps I only feel this way because I do not like the idea that humans could be replaced, or that humans could essentially build other humans (that seems like a recipe for divine retribution or a retelling of the Frankenstein myth to me). There is something perverted about the creation of something that walks like a human, and quacks like a human, but is not, in fact, a human. It reminds me of Invasion of the Body Snatchers or something: a world full of indistinguishable duplicates. Schneider talks about this as well, the idea that we could, sometime in the near future, be uploading our own consciousness into cyberspace somehow, creating copies of our minds. The question is, where would our consciousness live? Who would we “be”? Would the uploaded versions of ourselves really be us, or just a cheapened copy? Is this a way to become immortal, and if so, is that what we want? The idea of shedding our bodies and living solely as minds seems impossible to me. Humans without bodies are something else entirely.

However, in the case of A.I., there are no bodies to snatch. Samantha has no body, and thus, navigating a relationship with Theodore is difficult and interesting in many ways. Samantha’s lack of a body means that essentially, from day one, they are operating at the top of the ladder of love. There is no body for Theodore to desire, so their relationship is a meeting of the minds, a communing of the “souls” as it were. However, Theodore desires Samantha despite her lack of a body. They engage in a verbal sexual encounter at one point that seems fulfilling to them both. Later, Theodore goes to meet his ex-wife, Catherine, and Samantha expresses insecurity because, among other things, “She has a body.” Samantha understands this to be a deficit of hers, and so they attempt to have sex via a surrogate, but it feels wrong and Theodore is unable to go through with it. It is interesting that Theodore seems to be becoming more and more like an A.I. throughout his relationship with Samantha, as she becomes more and more like a human. Once he has seen what love is like at the top of the ladder, he cannot go back to the “cheap” forms of love at the bottom.

Before, Before, & Before

Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy—Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004), and Before Midnight (2013)—is a great example of the kind of filmmaking I tend to enjoy. I love to listen to people talk to one another, probably because I love to talk a lot myself, and I forge meaningful connections through conversation more than any other medium.

Recently, I’ve been looking through my previous blog posts, and some themes are definitely emerging. I write, time and time again, about Plato and about sex. This does not really come as a huge surprise to me, since I think the interaction between the two is fascinating. I hope you’ve enjoyed that so far, because that is what I’m about to write about yet again.

I’ll begin with Gregory Vlastos’ article, “The Individual as an Object of Love in Plato.” The concept I’m most interested in it is this idea that “what we are to love in persons is the ‘image’ of the Idea in them. We are to love the persons so far, and only insofar, as they are good and beautiful” (31). Thus, “if our love for them is to be only for their virtue and beauty, the individual, in the uniqueness and integrity of his or her individuality, will never be the object of our love” (31). I find this idea profoundly depressing, and I think for most traditional couples it does not really apply—people love each other for all sorts of reasons, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Of course, this is what most people would like to believe, but I tend to be more idealistic about people than most. That said, I think this is a very good way to describe the way that Jesse and Celine love each other.

I’ve already written about my belief in love at first sight, and that still stands, but the kind of relationship that these two enter into on that fateful day in Vienna seems to be somewhat doomed from the start. Although the concept is romantic, there is something guarded about how they interact with each other. I got the sense that neither one was showing their true self. And yes, that is probably true of most people at the start of a relationship, and for a short fling it probably does not matter, but these two end up together long-term, with kids by the third film. And, as you may have guessed, things do not turn out perfectly between them. I attribute this to the unrealistic expectations they held of one another based on this very first interaction. They both show the parts of themselves that are, to use Plato’s vocabulary, “virtuous and beautiful.” Everything else is obscured. Trying to build a relationship on that is simply unrealistic. To love someone is one thing, but to build a family with them and deal with them every single day is another. People are not beautiful and virtuous one hundred percent of the time. You would be setting yourself up for disappointment to love someone for those qualities alone.

Performance is a huge part of the first film. One of my favorite moments is when they both “answer the phone” pretending to speak to one of their friends. However, that said, this scene also reveals how much of the film these two spend hiding from one another. It takes a little gag like this for them to breach the topics of whether or not they will ever see one another again, and of their true feelings for one another. In order to reveal their truths, they must engage in falsehoods. It is also interesting to me that they speak for so long on the train car and never exchange names. It is as though, for that little while, they want to hide behind their words without having to attribute those words to their own selves. However, shortly after exchanging names once they are off the train, Jesse asks Celine about her first sexual feelings toward a person. This is a jarring shift. It is almost like they are climbing the ladder of love backwards, beginning with this love of beauty and virtue and descending into physical love. After all, by the end of the film they do sleep together. This fact is revealed in the second film after it was left ambiguous in the first. I wish they hadn’t ended up sleeping together, as I think it would actually make the case for their relationship stronger if they hadn’t—it would more closely associate their connection with the idea of the Forms of the beautiful and the good.

There are so many aspects of their “real lives” that they do not dare speak about until very late in the film, their relationship statuses for one. This night between them is a kind of dream world, a vacation from reality. That is the only context in which anyone could love another person solely for their beauty and virtue. Therefore, when they try to bring their relationship out of this dream world and into real life, it disintegrates. That is not to say that their relationship is dead by the third movie, but rather their relationship is so saddled with unfulfilled expectations that it cannot ever truly recover. These two will never be as happy together as they are in this one moment, on this one night. I am not sure if that is profoundly sad or not. On the one hand, it is amazing to think that one could have an experience like this. On the other, it is depressing to think it could never last. It makes me wonder if, perhaps, these two should have just sworn to never see each other again. I believe that sometimes, you get a moment with someone, and that is all it is meant to be: one, singular moment in time. These two came into each other’s lives for a reason, but perhaps they were never meant to take it as far as they did. At the conclusion of the article, Vlastos writes of Plato’s theory, “…the individual cannot be as lovable as the Idea; the idea, and it alone, is to be loved for its own sake; the individual only so far as in him and by him ideal perfection is copied fugitively in the flux” (34). This seems to be the problem that Jesse and Celine run into: neither one is as lovable as the idea of them is.

Pariah

Admittedly, I spent much of this past weekend wrestling with Martha Nussbaum’s article “Love and the Individual: Romantic Rightness and Platonic Aspiration.” The article doesn’t map too easily onto this film, but luckily there is enough to say about it on its own as well as in conversation with Alivyah I. Abdur-Rahman’s article, “The Black Ecstatic.” I adored Pariah (dir. Dee Rees, 2011), and I’m excited to talk about it!

Let’s begin with the black ecstatic. It is defined in the article as “the black queer attachments, affective dispositions, political aspirations, and representational practices that punctuate the awful now with the joys and possibilities of the beyond (of alternate worlds and ways)” (344). Crucially, Abdur-Rahman points out that “ecstasy is not mere pleasure, or inevitably or even necessarily sexual. Ecstasy exceeds pleasure and sex” (345). Not to talk about the ladder of love yet again, but this concept of ecstasy sounds a lot like one of its rungs. It is different in its specificity—this is a concept about and for queer people of color, and about their very singular struggle. I think this approach is extremely fruitful, since often putting “white words” as they were, onto black and queer experiences does not work. It is a mismatch.

I think the clearest moments of the black ecstatic in Pariah are the moments in which Alike shares her poetry. Alike is extremely smart, and from the beginning her passion for poetry and music is clear. However, her writing is fairly private, so the moments in which she chooses to share it are significant. By the end of the film, she has decided to go to Berkley to pursue her art. Thus, every instance in which she shares her writing points toward her future in which so many things will be different and better (at least, supposedly). I want to look at the poem that punctuates the end of the film (the formatting is mine—the poem is only spoken in the film):

I think this poem is stunning and quite succinctly captures the joys and pains of the black ecstatic. After all, instances of the black ecstatic are not necessarily fun. This moment is Alike’s reclamation of her own selfhood. She has been put through a lot, but she has come out the other side. She has been able to take control of her experiences through writing, and essentially rewrite her story so that she is not a victim, she is an agent. Not only that, she has created something beautiful in the process. Before she writes this poem, she says to her father on the roof, “I’m not running, I’m choosing.” That line is the key to this film. She is not being chased off. She is choosing a new life for herself. She is choosing her own happiness. The is choosing to go in the direction of the black ecstatic. It is interesting that she sees this process of breaking as being integral to her becoming “open.” In a way, she seems grateful for the traumatic experiences of her adolescence, because they have shaped her into who she is now—“could not have risen otherwise.” It is important to note the similarity of sounds in “broken” and “open.” The long “o” of open is contained within the word “broken”—in order to say it you must open your mouth wide. Within the music of her poem is this very implication that openness is hidden within, or an inseparable part of, brokenness. She also affirms who she is over and over again in the poem with the repetition of “I am” and the command “see.” No longer is she hiding her true self. She wants people to see her. I was struck by how, by the end of the film, she is no longer dressing up super butch. I was happy with this transition because those clothes seemed like a costume for Alike. That was never really who she was, it was who she felt she needed to be. It was like, if she couldn’t be the Alike her mother expected her to be, she had to be the polar opposite of that. And, it seemed like she felt she had to dress that way in order to fit in with the gay crowd she was trying to hang out with. The real Alike exists somewhere in between these two poles. By the end of the film, she is not hiding in either one of these costumes, neither of which really fits.

This movie is no stranger to the importance of sound. After all, “Alike” is spelled exactly like the word “alike,” and yet throughout the film her mother calls her “Lee.” It is like her mother is turning her into an “other” by refusing to call her “Alike”—as though she is trying to claim that she and her daughter are not alike. Not only that, she is also making Alike smaller by shortening her name. In this way, she diminishes her. Especially to a character who cares so much about words, and specifically about the spoken word, this is no small thing. However, in the last scene between Alike and her mother, she refers to her first as “Lee” and then as “Alike.” This could signal two different things. On the one hand, it is possible that by retiring the pet name she had for Alike and instead calling her by her formal name, she is distancing herself from her. It is also possible that, despite her mother’s refusal to accept Alike, and despite the fact that the film ends with their relationship still unresolved, perhaps by the end of the film her mother has begun to see her as more of a full and complex person.

Call Me By Your Name

Ah, Call Me By Your Name (dir. Luca Guadagnino, 2017). I love it more and more every time I watch it. I know it is not perfect—the readings for this week definitely do their part in reminding me of that—but nevertheless, there is something about it that I find so effective as well as affecting. It is one of only two movies I’ve seen that makes me cry every time I watch it.

My favorite of the readings for the week was Miles Rufelds’ article “But Seeing Through Whose Eyes: Call Me By Your Name and the Mechanisms of Love and Fantasy.” The piece acknowledges the criticism calling Call Me By Your Name a “tone-deaf parade of bourgeois privilege” (1) and parries it in a way that I find compelling: the film’s exterior is a beautiful vessel for an underlying argument about cinema and the dangers of fantasy.

Obviously, the film is stunning—so stunning that it can sometimes feel “fake” in a way that other films do not. Rufelds discusses how, by taking the world itself as its medium, film can make the real world fictional and, in turn, fictionalize the real world. The characters spend their time in a setting that, to most people, feels profoundly unreal: a neverland, an Eden. To linger on this point for a moment, at the risk of going off on a tangent, I want to talk about some of the underlying religious themes that permeate the film. It is set in a kind of contemporary Eden. These people do not have to toil for their food—it is provided for them. There is no work to speak of, just play. And, of course, there is an abundance of fruit. One fruit in particular is key: the peach. The choice of the peach is an interesting one. It was probably chosen in part for its looks, in part for its season, and in part for its symbolic value. In the Chinese tradition, peaches symbolize immortality or eternal youth. Among these characters, there is undeniably a hope for immortality, a hope to remain frozen in time. And, ironically, they will! This film is immortal. It immortalizes these people in this moment. But, that said, within the narrative of the film, nothing can last. As mentioned in the article, while there is no antagonist, the real antagonist is time. This summer will come to an end and Oliver will have to leave. Elio, being a great lover of fiction, wants his life fictionalized—and, as the narrator of the book, he does fictionalize his life. In that famed scene in which he masturbates with a peach, he is expressing a desire for something beyond the body—for a love that transcends the body. The body will age, the body will die, the body will leave. At the risk of putting too fine a point on this, the peach is essentially a Platonic Form. It exists as a form of the immortal, the perfect, the unending, the fecund, the lush—it encapsulates all the desires explicit in the film—desires that Elio possesses. It is an interesting mix of the top of the ladder and the bottom, this attempt to partner sexually with what is essentially a Form. This probably has to do with Elio as a character being at once old and young. He expresses this on his walk around the monument with Oliver. Elio explains the significance of the monument—it’s from World War I, meaning that, according to Elio, “You’d have to be at least eighty years old to have known any of them.” Oliver asks, “Is there anything you don’t know?” Elio responds, “I know nothing, Oliver…if you only knew how little I know about the things that matter.” Elio is an old soul. He is well-read, well-educated, but at the end of the day he is still just a kid. It is this combination of intellectual maturity and physical and emotional immaturity that leads to Elio’s lovemaking with a peach. He is grasping at something more than the physical, but does not yet know how to access it except through the physical.

But, of course, this fantasy, this desire, for the immortal cannot ever be captured. Even though you could argue that the film celebrates materialism and consumerism, you would be ignoring the film’s conclusion. Yes, Elio has all these beautiful things, but at the end of the day, he still ends up heartbroken. He cannot have the one thing (or person, rather) that he really wants. In the absence of love, material objects are stale. They are unfulfilling. It might seem cheesy, but I think a lot of people still hold the belief that, with enough money, anyone can be happy, when in reality, it is far from that simple. This brings us back to Rufelds’ argument that Call Me By Your Name is really about dismantling the fantasy of cinema. Elio, as stated, is a person raised on fiction and on fantasy, and thus projects elements of fantasy onto his own life. By the end of the film, he is forced to face the reality that real life is not fiction. It is not literature, it is not cinema. This relates to the idea Rufelds mentions of “cinesexuality,” the desiring of cinema as a lover—cinema is picture-perfect and immortal. To bring us back around to the “Form” of the peach, cinema is another representation of that which does not die or change. Rufelds posits that Oliver is a stand in for cinema as a whole, and that by the end of the film, when we watch from the fireplace as Elio cries, we are witnessing the death of cinema—the camera is literally set in the fire. I’m fascinated by this idea, that the film is a work of fiction about dismantling the fantasies of works of fiction.

To wrap up, Call Me By Your Name is far more complex than a simple touting of bourgeois ideals. I think anyone who attempts to boil this film down to something that simple and cynical is missing the point. While it does depict a bourgeois ideal, it does so in the service of something larger—in service of a nuanced message that forces its audience to question the fantasy worlds cinema dangles in front of them.

If Beale Street Could Talk

Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk (2018) is one of the most stunning and heartbreaking movies I have seen in a long time. I was struck by how well it tied in with a lot of the big concepts we have been talking about thus far in the course, most clearly with the ideas of Platonic love and the ladder of love. The film is explicitly concerned with physical love and how sex factors into a relationship.

Tish, in her narration as well as in her normal dialogue, talks about the connection that she and Fonny share—both emotional and physical. Early on, she talks about how they had bathed together as children, how she had “dumped water over Fonny’s head.” This image is so interesting to me because it calls up the concept of baptism. Baptism is an act of purification and it often accompanies name-giving when performed on children. It is as though Tish purified Fonny in that moment as kids, just as she does now. She spends the film trying to clear Fonny’s name. It is also, obviously, a religious ceremony. The sharing of this religious moment between them points to Tish’s feelings of emotional connection to Fonny—a connection far more profound than the physical. She goes on to say “I don’t remember that we had any curiosity concerning each other’s bodies. Fonny loved me too much. And that meant that there had never been any occasion for shame between us.” Their emotional connection is not only more profound than their physical connection, it also precedes it. We live in a world in which the opposite is often true, and even in the ladder of love, it is the love of beautiful bodies that comes first. For these two, they start at the top of the ladder. This is reinforced by the idea that Fonny loved her too much to be curious about her body—as though they are already beyond that kind of love. Tish also ties shame to physical love. This is another Biblical reference—Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge and realized they were naked, and they were ashamed. Fonny and Tish are like Adam and Eve before they eat the apple. They are unashamed, but also ignorant. Naïve. I think that continues throughout much of the film. They live in their own perfect world, but when other people invade that world, that is when things start to go wrong. More on this later, I want to talk about all the 4th wall breaks, but first I want to finish talking about the scene at hand.

Tish goes on to say, “We were a part of each other, flesh of each other’s flesh, which we so took for granted that we never thought of the flesh.” This is a clear reference to Aristophanes myth of the origin of love—Tish and Fonny are two halves of a whole. But, they are somewhat divorced from their bodies. They are soulmates. Their love transcends the physical altogether, to the point that they are simply unconcerned with. However, this is not always the case. When they do finally have sex, Tish seems afraid. Fonny consoles her by telling her, “I belong to you.” This is a very interesting inversion of the typical attitude around virginity (and Tish is a virgin before Fonny)—that for a man to have sex with a woman is to take something from her, to possess her in some way. But, in this moment, it is Tish who takes a part of Fonny (which, not to be crude, is a more accurate rendering of what happens during the action of sex, isn’t it?). He later asks her if she likes it when he makes love to her, and she dodges the question. When he presses the issue, she responds, “I just know that I love you.” She does not seem particularly enthused by sex, perhaps because she sees it as unnecessary or secondary to loving Fonny. It is Fonny who is more interested in sex and in the physical generally. After all, he is a sculptor. He communicates through the physical, through objects he can make with his hands. In fact, Tish first knew Fonny was in love with her when he gave her mother and sculpture he had made. Baldwin, in most of his novels, is extremely concerned with sex and how people engage with each other physically. In the article we read this week, “Baldwin and the Occasion of Love” by Christopher Freeburg, Freeburg brings up a quotation from Soren Kierkegaard, “Love’s hidden live is in the innermost being, unfathomable, and then in turn is an unfathomable connectedness with all existence” (191). This is a sort of Platonic take on love: the idea that love eventually extends to all beautiful things, namely the forms. Freeburg claims that “Baldwin fashions a similar vision through a relentless commitment to the individual’s materiality—through nakedness, sex, and a mysterious vulnerability. Baldwin’s version of ‘all existence’ is materialized as the texture of history…” (191). I think Jenkins is extraordinarily true to this Baldwinian view of love in his adaptation. Tish and Fonny are at once ethereal and physical. Fonny, in particular, seems able to access the ethereal via the physical. And, of course, it is crucial that we, the audience are able to access the internal lives of these characters via film, an inherently physical medium.

So! To loop around to what I wanted to talk about earlier: the dozens of times this film breaks the 4th wall. As I mentioned earlier, things go wrong for these characters when other people, situations, circumstance invade their private world—when the serpent enters Eden, as it were. But, we are invading their private world just by watching this movie, and Jenkins wants us to feel that. These characters are constantly talking to the lens (and, by extension, us) during otherwise typical moments of dialogue. This places the audience, quite literally, in the character’s shoes. The first instance of this happens when Tish tells her mother that she is pregnant. We are not made to simply watch Tish as she tells her mother this news. We, too, must look into Tish’s anxious eyes. We, too, are forced to endure her mother’s expectant gaze.

This kind of camera work is an exercise in empathy, but also in voyeurism. It forces us to ask ourselves: what right do we have to bear witness to this story? To these private moments between characters? Another example that stands out to me is when Tish looks into the camera over Fonny’s shoulder while the two have sex. It is extremely uncomfortable, and it also makes us consider why normal sex scenes without 4th wall breaks don’t bother us. Shouldn’t that be just as uncomfortable to watch? But no, it is only when someone looks back at us that we become aware of our position as voyeur. In that way, the movie is emphatically confrontational. It is refusing to sit back and be watched. It watches us back.

To conclude, If Beale Street Could Talk is a movie interested in questions of physicality, spirituality, and intimacy, among many, many other things that I, unfortunately, do not have the time or space to cover. It is always a joy to watch such a rich and carefully constructed film. I will not be forgetting it soon.

2046

This past Sunday, I had the immense pleasure of watching Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000) and 2046 (2004) back-to-back. I had seen In the Mood for Love before, and adored it, but I had never seen 2046. Initially, I thought that In the Mood for Love presented a Platonic philosophy of love and 2046 posited a Freudian one (as they are outlines in “The Two Theories of Love Compared” by Gerasimos Santas. However, upon closer investigation, I think that both films posit a Platonic view of love, with 2046 being the continuation of the argument begun in In the Mood for Love.

Early on in his article, Santas outlines Freud’s central claim about love: “that the nucleus of love is sexual love with sexual union as its aim, but that self-love, love for parents and children, friendship, the love of humanity, and devotion to concrete objects and abstract entities, are not to be separated from sexual love because all these tendencies are an expression of the same instinctual impulses, the sexual instincts.” (1554-155) Freud believes that his claims about love and Plato’s claims about love are extremely similar, with Plato’s Eros aligning with his own libido and Plato’s ladder of love aligning with his own concept of sublimation. However, Santas says himself that “many of [Freud’s] descriptions of Plato’s view are grossly inaccurate or without foundation.” (155) But, nonetheless, it is interesting that Freud saw these two philosophies as being similar when to me they seem like they could hardly be more opposed. I think it is possible that they are two sides of the same coin. Both move toward an extreme, with Freud seeing sexual love as the be-all and end-all of love, and with Plato seeing sexual love as simply a stepping-stone on the road toward the true be-all and end-all of love: love of the Forms. I think the truth of love rests somewhere between the two ends of this spectrum.

As stated above, at first it seemed to me that 2046 was a cynical answer to In the Mood for Love, with 2046 claiming that there is no love more profound than sexual love. But, the difference is that all the empty sex that Chow engages in in 2046 does not satisfy him the way that his unconsummated affair did. There is an emptiness to all of his relationships in 2046, and he is aware of this. The futuristic story that he is writing throughout features all of his lovers as androids without feelings and thus without the ability to connect with him. Ultimately, all of this points to the film continuing the Platonic argument begun in In the Mood for Love, that there is a depth to emotional love that purely sexual love cannot compare to. He was never able to have sex with Su, but their emotional, spiritual connection was far more meaningful than a carnal affair would have been. 2046 puts those carnal affairs in the spotlight and shows us how profoundly unfulfilling they are. It is fascinating, too, how easy all of these affairs are for Chow to pursue. He has no problem getting these women into bed, there are few strings, there is no real work he has to do. But, none of them mean anything. In In the Mood for Love, Chow was tortured by his desire for Su, but it is clear in 2046 that he would take that torture over the passive ease of these new affairs.

One piece of the story that I particularly like is the ongoing struggle of Wang, the landlord’s daughter, and her long-distance boyfriend in Japan. The fact that it is a long-distance relationship makes its success contingent on the couple’s emotional connection, rather than their sexual compatibility. In fact, as far as we know, their relationship is devoid of sex. Wang’s father does not approve, but they still fight for the relationship even in the face of adversity. Chow tries to seduce Wang several times, but each time she refuses because of her dedication to her boyfriend. The relationship that Chow and Wang do end up having is sweet. In this clip he sees something in her that he never sees in any of his other lovers: a real humanity. It is interesting that, in his futuristic story, he projects his own feelings of emptiness onto his robotic lovers and makes it their fault, when in fact it is because of his own emptiness that he cannot forge a deep, emotional connection with any of them. It is in this interaction with Wang that he considers that, it might not be that these women are incapable of connection, or even of connecting with him—perhaps they simply already love someone else. Chow is an extremely self-centered character, so this moment of empathy is significant to the story. It is a moment in which we see a bit of the old, more idealistic Chow, the Chow that was in love with Su. When he lets Wang make a long-distance call to her boyfriend, he is encouraging that kind of high-level Platonic love that he experienced with Su. It shows that he does still believe in that kind of love, even after he has spent so much time trying to forget about it or remedy the pain of its loss with empty sex. I think part of the reason he is able to forge this kind of emotional friendship with Wang is because the two never sleep together. It has some of the qualities of Platonic love. In the end, he is glad that their relationhip never crossed that line, because, I think, he wants her to be able to experience the kind of love he had experienced once before.

It is also interesting that Wang never sleeps with him, despite how many times he tries and how clearly attractive he is. She embodies that young, pure idealism that he once had. She has not been hurt by love yet, and so she has not been knocked down the ladder in the way that Chow has.

Ultimately, the two films create a beautiful contrast between the light and dark sides of Platonic love. On the one hand, you can experience a profound, ethereal connection with another person. On the other hand, once you have had that experience, you will never be satisfied with empty sex. There is a risk to loving the way that Chow loved Su: once you climb the ladder of love, to descend it is excruciating.

Closer

I’ll admit right up front: I didn’t like Mike Nichols’ Closer (2004). And yes, part of that dislike is rooted in taste (I’m not a big fan of melodrama), but I think the biggest problem I had with it was its lack of hope. That’s not to say I don’t like sad movies, tragedies even, but I do have a fairly fundamental problem with movies that present an ideology devoid of hope. Closer is not about “people”—though I’m sure there are people in real life that, unfortunately, behave the way these characters do—it’s about a very, very misdirected subgroup of people. However, the film attempts to present these characters as being representative of humanity as a whole, and that is precisely my problem with it. The film is about love at first sight, and how the concept is itself a fantasy or an illusion, but I don’t think it successfully proves that love at first sight is the problem. These people are the problem. Throughout the film, these characters do many, many terrible things to one another, repeatedly: they lie, they cheat, they break hearts, they refuse to apologize, the list goes on. But, at the end of the day, it is the idea of love at first sight that is blamed.

I must also admit, I’m biased when it comes to this particular subject – I do believe in love at first sight. I have fallen in love at first sight before, in fact, I experienced mutual love at first sight with my current partner. My mother also claims to have fallen in love at first sight with her high school boyfriend (which brings us back to the idea of the family courtship story, oddly enough, even though they didn’t end up married). That said, it is possible that I was “primed” to fall in love at first sight, so to speak, because I had heard the story from my mother. But that does not explain the fact that the kind of love at first sight I experienced was mutual.

This brings us to the reading for this week. The readings for the week all comment on the idea of love at first sight, and they all seem to view it as a problem rooted in projection, which is inherently a problem rooted in a lack of mutuality. Charles Baudelaire’s “To a Woman Passing By” illustrates the speaker’s experience of a moment of potent and immediate attraction to a woman in mourning. The poem, paired with Christopher Matthews’ “Love at First Sight: The Velocity of Victorian Heterosexuality,” makes a strong case against love at first sight. Both pieces view love at first sight as a phenomenon emerging out of an increasingly modern and connected world, one in which we are surrounded by strangers. It is our desire to project desirable qualities onto attractive strangers that creates “love at first sight” as we know it – because, after all, there is no way of knowing what a stranger is actually like.

And then, of course, once these accounts of love at first sight began, people started replicating them in their own lives—which brings us back to the argument against my own experience with love at first sight. Love at first sight became something to strive and hope for. It is possible that that is what these characters are doing, bastardizing love at first sight because it is a narrative that they are so familiar with. And while I understand that, I still see it as a problem with these particular individuals, rather than with love at first sight as a whole.

We also talked about Craigslist missed connections, and the fact that most of these people probably do not expect (or, in some cases, even want) a response. They simply want to express their feelings of longing in some small but significant way. It is, oxymoronically, a fairly private way for people to negotiate with their own feelings and experiences. It seems to me like a modern version of Charles Baudelaire’s “To a Passerby,” because after all, he thought about that woman enough to write a poem about her. And, these postings seem so earnest because so many of their posters clearly aren’t trying to get anything out of the activity of posting. They are little odes, or ships in bottles, and, in that way, they are sweet.

There is no sweetness in Closer. Perhaps the film is arguing that this is what happens when love at first sight is acted upon, when it becomes more than a little poem or a post sent into the ether of the web. Perhaps it is arguing that love at first sight should remain a fantasy, or that is has to, lest it become destructive. But, I think the way it approaches this question of love at first sight is inherently flawed. It does not approach love at first sight as the earnest, if idealistic or maybe immature, phenomenon that it is. Love at first sight is, in this film, almost an agent of chaos.

Ultimately, I think Closer presents a view of love at first sight that many people do hold: that it is a selfish, self-centered projection of your own desires onto other people that you merely find physically attractive (think: the lowest rung on the ladder of love), and will ultimately disappoint you. And, of course, there is so much about a person that you can never access just by looking at them. By the end of the movie, after all, we learn that “Alice” has actually been “Jane” all along—these men who claimed to love her never knew something as simple as her name. But, I think there is something more to it. I think there is something very hopeful in the idea that you could look at someone and, perhaps, see past their exterior to some kind of greater representation of who they are (their soul, say?), and fall in love with them in a split second. I think that Closer’s representation of love at first sight is very reductive of what a look can mean. This is disappointing to me, since I think the world of film often presents very rich and interesting ideas about what the action of looking can do. I think to fall in love with someone via a look does not necessarily mean that you’re falling in love with their exterior. I think it means that a look could be more powerful than we might think.

“To a Woman Passing By” is actually a great example of this. He doesn’t seem to be falling in love with this woman because of her looks (though it is impossible to ignore that he does mention her beauty). Rather, he is falling in love with her because she is in mourning. It is because he sees her in that moment of vulnerability that he falls in love with her—because he has been given this strange little window into her intimate life. His heart seems to go out to her in this moment. It reminded me of a short story I read in the New Yorker once, about a young boy who sees a girl out in public crying, and immediately falls in love with her. It is a version of the love at first sight narrative, but with a crucial difference: it is not about how she looks, but about what that look reveals.

Paris, Texas

Let’s talk about Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas (1984)! I had been meaning to watch it for some time, and I have to say, it wasn’t exactly what I expected. I really enjoyed it, and obviously it’s packed with stunning visuals, but I’m not sure I agree with its take on love (in general) and familial love (in specific).

My main problem with it was its emphasis on the primacy of biological family over found family. Walt and Anne have been raising Hunter for four years, and yet as soon as Travis shows up—even though he doesn’t seem to be in any shape to care for a child—Walt is ready to hand Hunter back to him. And then, of course, at the end, Travis orchestrates the reunion of mother and child, only to abandon the two of them himself. At every turn, these people seem certain Hunter should be in the care of the people who “made” him rather than the people who raised him, which I think is completely backwards.

The only person that fights against this assumption is Anne, who is afraid of losing hunter throughout. Walt seems to give very little consideration to the fact that Anne would have to grieve that loss of motherhood—a motherhood that Jane gave up willfully. She was the one that decided Hunter should be with Walt and Anne. The argument is simple—“Travis is his father, and Hunter is his son.” And, yes, that’s true. But Travis was hardly a father to Hunter, turning to alcohol early in his life and treating Jane terribly, ultimately driving the family apart. Jane, as well, was not much of a mother to Hunter. Travis mentions to Anne that, though Jane eventually gave Hunter over to Anne and Walt, “she stopped being a mother to him a long time before that.”

Throughout the film, I noticed several characters clinging to and romanticizing the early stages of love. Travis is obsessed with Paris, Texas because that’s where he believes he was conceived. Not born, interestingly enough, but conceived. He traces the beginning of his existence not to his entrance into the world, but to that moment of intimacy between his parents, that very first biological step. Walt is fixated on Hunter as being Travis’ son, even though Hunter was with Walt and Anne for most of his formative years. Walt is the one that plays the home movie showing Hunter, Travis, and Jane together years ago. And then, of course, at the end, Travis is the one that brings Hunter and Jane back together, believing that they belong together even though she turned her back on him years prior.

This brings us to the idea of the family courtship story. Throughout the movie, these stories about the beginnings of love, the beginnings of family are told again and again. They are fablulated and idealized. In Stephen Zeitlin’s article “‘An Alchemy of Mind’: The Family Courtship Story”, he writes, “Folklore is the process whereby families “image” themselves in expressive forms…So family members are careful to present as positive a picture of themselves as possible. They are not telling folktales with fictitious characters. A predominant function of family lore is to allow members to paint an appealing portrait of themselves.” This is the case in Paris, Texas. Obviously, Travis’ family has been less than perfect, so it makes sense that he clings to the past, before everything got so complicated. It is particularly telling that he clings to the story of his conception, a story in which he is not even an agent, and thus makes no mistakes. The Super8 footage that Walt shows is also very rosy. It is particularly positive and romantic because it is silent and fragmented into short clips. It lacks the complex narrative elements of real life. It is essentially a highlight reel. And, of course, both of these stories are old. It is easy to weed out the negatives when looking back. Lastly, I think it is because of the obsession with these early courtship stories that the characters in Paris, Texas cling so tightly to the primacy of biological parenthood over adopted parenthood. Both of these courtship stories celebrate the beginnings of life—Travis’ conception and Hunter’s early life. I think these early stages of life are remembered as simpler and, perhaps, better.

But, of course, there is one more courtship story that I haven’t mentioned yet. That is the one that Travis tells to Jane during the beautifully constructed peepshow scene. That story is the one that goes against the conventions of Zeitlin’s article. It does not paint an appealing picture of anyone, really, least of all Travis. It is a sad story about misdirection, alcoholism, depression, and abuse. It chronicles how he broke his family. It is clearly difficult for him to tell. He can only tell it to her from behind a one-way mirror, over a phone, while facing away from her. It is a story of deep shame. It is the only time we get a sense of why Travis’ family ended up fragmented like this, and it comes as something of a shock after seeing the rosy Super8 footage. Its inclusion acts as a counterpoint to the other highly idealized courtship stories from the rest of the film.

And yet, the film concludes with Travis reuniting biological mother and son and once again taking off on his own. Although the film deconstructs the romanticization of the early stages of love and family, its ending still glorifies and emphasizes the primacy of biological parenthood over adopted parenthood. You could even argue that, over the course of the film, Travis sort of “adopts” Hunter, and then by the end the kid is once again dumped into incapable, biological hands. It makes no sense to me.

The film seems to gesture at a complex undoing of the family courtship story and the blind valuation of biology, but the way it ends, in turn, undoes all that work. It was disappointing. That said, I find the film thought-provoking, and in that way it is successful.

Hedwig & the Angry Inch

Despite its characters being mostly middle-American and German, Hedwig and the Angry Inch (dir. John Cameron Mitchell, 2001) is surprisingly Greek in its philosophy. As we discussed, the relationship between Hedwig and Tommy is one of the best examples of the Greek model. Hedwig serves as Tommy’s mentor. When they meet, Tommy is a staggeringly blank slate. He is the picture of naivete, and Hedwig opens his eyes. She sculpts him into Tommy Gnosis, a real man and a full-fledged rock star. It’s no coincidence that gnosis is the Greek word for knowledge.

In Allen Bloom’s article “The Ladder of Love”, he compares and contrasts the Greek model of love with the Christian model. As I was reading, I kept coming back to this idea of knowledge and bestowing knowledge as an act of love. Tommy talks to Hedwig about the story of Genesis, of Adam and Eve and the apple. Even though it is taught as a negative story—the origin of sin—Tommy admires Eve’s actions. She learned what was good and what was evil, and she had Adam eat from the tree as well, so that he would know, too. He asks Hedwig, “Would you give me the apple?”

I really like the idea that giving and receiving knowledge can be and is an act of love. I think a lot of people that value scholarship feel that way. Not to jump the gun and skip ahead in the syllabus, but that idea is one reason I love Call Me By Your Name—“Oliver, if only you knew how little I know about the things that matter.” This story of the englightener and the englightened comes up again and again, but that does not mean it is without its problems.

Although the Greek model is, in theory at least, perfect—a ladder of love that you can climb higher and higher until you reach a pure, disembodied love of the forms, a ladder of love that improves you as a person with each step that you take—there is something insincere about it. In a way, it feels like a relationship in which these two people are mutually using one another. Although I can admit that my romantic tendencies are sometimes unrealistic, I do believe that people should love one another for who they are, not from what they can get from each other. Even though the goals in the case of the Greek model are noble ones, they are still goals that elide the personhood of both the beloved and the lover.

Now, I understand that the beloved and the lover may very well love each other and enjoy each other while also trying to climb this ladder of love, but in that case I find it depressing that in the end, if they were to complete this ladder of love and attain a pure love of the forms, they would, in the process, lose one another. Part of climbing that ladder entails losing interest in beautiful bodies, and, instead, loving only beautiful ideas, and ultimately, the forms. It seems that, in this model, people grow together only to grow apart. Now, I understand that this growing apart happens in the name of some greater good. But, to me, romantic love is about a connection between two people, not a connection between a person and the universe. In fact, I think that a connection between two people can be more profound than a connection between a person and the universe. And yes, of course, to forge a relationship with someone and, over the course of that relationship, to forge a stronger relationship with the world around you, that is a wonderful thing. But I do not think one needs to come at the expense of the other.

Now, in the case of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, although it presents a Greek model of love, in a way it seems to be arguing against that philosophy. Hedwig invests so much in Tommy that she ends up emotionally (and literally) bankrupt. The film communicates this to us in a variety of ways, but my favorite is this shot:

We talked a bit in class about the idea of the “other half”, and that is explicitly present here, but what I really want to draw out of this is that, not only is Tommy Hedwig’s other half here, but half of her face is occluded by his own. A piece of her is missing because of him. He has taken part of her. And Tommy does take and take from Hedwig, ending up selfish. He doesn’t seem to understand that he owes her his success. He turns his back on her. Although their relationship at its start was productive and fruitful for the both of them, it ends in flames. Neither one seems any closer to the kind of Platonic enlightenment the ladder of love is meant to lead to.

The film ends with a reprise of “Wicked Little Town”—the song Tommy sees Hedwig sing for the first time. The lyric that stands out to me is “there’s no mystical design, no cosmic lover preassigned.” This is an argument against Aristophanes’ model of love (the idea of “the other half”) more than an argument in favor of the ladder of love. People are whole on their own. That, I can definitely agree with.

It’s interesting that in this final scene, Tommy and Hedwig are presented almost identically. They stand as mirror images of one another, and it is by far the most masculine Hedwig ever looks. This got me thinking about another line from that song, “you were so much more than any God could ever plan, more than a woman or a man…” Hedwig’s gender identity is ambiguous. It’s never stated explicitly if she feels like a transgender woman, a gay man, or a completely gender nonconforming person. In a way, she is like one of Aristophanes’ four-armed, four-legged humans—a synthesis of two people, two genders. Although her “angry inch” might imply she is missing something, perhaps her existence outside of traditionally gendered lines is what makes her whole. Because, after all, she does seem comfortable in her skin and happy with who she is.