Insert Love Scene Here

One of the first things a screenwriter will tell you about writing a movie with romance in it is that the brief time when you show a couple falling in love (just before you throw all sorts of obstacles at them) should last no longer than five minutes – just enough time for a quick montage, a few lines of dialogue and – if it’s one of those types of love stories – a quick slow motion tumble and a few ‘landscape’ shots of the naked bodies. In typical cinematic short-hand, the couple is now considered ‘in love.’ And we accept this because to show the long process of the early part of a relationship would just take too long. Much worse than trying to adapt a five-hundred page novel into a one-hundred and twenty-page screenplay.

We accept a lot of other conventions about the romantic movie as well – the greatest of which is that the couple will come together in the end (as in When Harry Met Sally) or will be tragically separated despite being destined for each other (as in Shakespeare In Love). But the convention we don’t quite think through is the convention of opposites. This is where the zany madcap dilettante and the button-down, orderly professor type (Bringing Up Baby) come together in the end. This isn’t about real life opposites attracting – it’s about mutually opposed archetypes reconciling. It’s about dueling forces of nature, not real people. It has more to do with Taoism and the balancing act of the universe than it does with romantic love.

But no one will have any of that. In a way, many people are perverse Taoists when it comes to love – there is the ‘one’ (a crude bastardization of the Taoist ‘Way’), and you can’t plan for it, you have to simply go with the flow and love will find you. But, just like generations of Chinese believers, we hedge our bets with our Confucian side – the side that tells us we have to understand love in terms of calculation and politics and rivalries and power. Just look at the bookstore self-help sections. There’s all sorts of advice about the how and when to date, how and when to marry, how and when (and where) to have sex, how and when to break up – even picture books for modern Kama Sutras that I swear I just read for the articles and religious significance.

Add to this Helen Fisher’s book Why We Love where science enters the game and she explains to us how connections are formed chemically – chemistry not being as mysterious as we like to pretend it is. And then there are all the TV shows that give us the ‘we are animals’ version of love and sex, with plenty of heat-sensing camera shots of couples going at it and plenty of mini-cameras going through openings and seeing things that perhaps we shouldn’t picture just when we’re trying to seduce someone. Are we purely physical beings with no mystical connections at all?

Or you might have noticed Laura Kipnis’ book from a few years back, Against Love. In it she describes romantic and married love as a kind of tyranny and infidelity as a radical kind of sexual politics that is overthrowing the social order. She states at the outset that she’s being polemical, but some of her arguments still ring true: “Scratch the romantic veneer, and we’re hard-nosed realists armed with pocket calculators, calipers, and magnifying glasses.” We love with an eye for appearances and advantage, judging what our appearance and social standing can attain for us. And in our consumer society, love “conforms to the role of a cheap commodity, spit out at the end of the assembly line in cookie-cutter forms, marketed to bored and alienated producer-consumers as an all-purpose salve to emptiness.” Hence, the romantic movies.

As a culture, we have divided feelings and ideas about the nature of love. Is it destiny, divine intervention, animal attraction, practicality, or happenstance? Right now I’m sure some of you are saying it’s all of these.

But one thing I do believe is that it love definitely isn’t romance. I don’t think you can even talk about love until a couple has been together for at least ten or maybe even twenty years and has a store of shared experiences. And to all those people out there who argue that violent movies pervert our sense of how justice is served in a civil society, I would argue that romantic movies – with their narrow, simplistic version of love – do far more harm to us as a culture. There are far fewer people dying from movie-induced gunshot wounds than there are people dying from what they only believe is love.