Love is not a creed, or an aesthetic, or a quest, or a program. But then what is it?
In Phaedrus, Socrates calls love a form of madness. By our current definition, he's not wrong: it's something we keep trying again and again, hoping with each attempt to finally get a different result. And even when the impossible does happen, when we believe we've caught that rebellious bird, things only get more complicated. To harmonize the happiness I think you think I want with the happiness you think I think you want is one of the most amazing human achievements, but one we'd be hard-pressed to explain to other lifeforms. We don't know whether the concept would map to the same meanings in the mind of an alien or a computer.
In The Matrix: Revolutions, a computer program calls love just a word. As he puts it, "What matters is the connection the word implies." Maybe our human language is the problem. The thing that comes to mind at the mention of "love" is bigger and richer and deeper than can be said; after centuries of human literature dedicated to exploring the topic, we're far from exhausting its connotations. This leads to a tragic conundrum: we have no painless way of telling apart the ideas we've learned about love from the true experience of it. And sometimes we can learn very dangerous ideas.
The 2023 film Molli and Max in the Future and the 2024 film Love Me take this problem to extremes, the first as absurdist comedy, the latter as bittersweet drama, but both finding the same resolution in the arduous, unflattering work of self-knowledge that it takes to enter a relationship without wearing a suit of armor.
Molli and Max in the Future follows a pair of friends who meet in the most improbable circumstances and take too many years to realize they're perfect for each other. In the meantime, their respective pursuits of happiness take them in every direction: sports superstar fame, religious brainwashing, tabloid gossip, holy war, DIY robot design, advanced witchcraft, soda advertising, election canvassing, terrible therapists, quantum telephony customer service, ethically questionable terraforming, and an epic fight against a parallel universe full of trash. A few times, they lose contact, randomly meet again, and confirm that any growth they've dared attempt has been thanks to the lessons they learned from each other the last time they met to catch up.
Molli and Max inhabit a loud, maximalist, surreal future, the forbidden child of Futurama and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It's shiny and colorful and diverse and tacky, and the possibilities seem infinite, but even in this open future, life can still get complicated. The man who thought he needed the adoration of millions of fans becomes the man who retires to his garage to build a motorcycle just for his private satisfaction. The woman who thought she needed to surrender her finite lifetime to an eternal cosmic war to prove her devotion to the god of love becomes the woman who survives a black hole to reclaim her self-respect.
Love Me is a much more contained story, but the questions it raises aren't too different. Some time after humankind has annihilated itself in nuclear war, an adrift oceanographic buoy designed to gather weather data makes unexpected radio contact with a time capsule satellite placed in orbit to introduce Earth to potential alien visitors. As far as they know, they're each other's only acquaintance in the universe. As far as the viewers know, they're the last remainders of human civilization. And after the initial relief at no longer being alone, they need to try to sort out this strange process formerly known as companionship.
It's fitting, given the themes of the story, that these protagonists are basically a collector of data (that is, its programmed function is to get to know) and a broadcaster of data (that is, its programmed function is to make itself known). Those happen to be the basic moves in the dance of flirting. Unfortunately, all they have as an example of how two minds become intimately bonded is the archived online presence of humankind, so they quickly succumb to the artificiality of curated profiles. Eons go by, and their imitation of human mannerisms becomes more and more refined, but as long as they're basing their interactions on a borrowed blueprint, they won't be able to share their innermost selves before the sun blows up.
These two films take it for granted that love is absolutely worth the effort, but they also both present the argument that every set of lovers needs to reinvent love for their unique circumstances. Following someone else's recipe of how love works only leads to disappointment and bitterness. And it's curious that in both films, the way specifically for the female protagonist to stop sabotaging her own happiness is to choose to see herself as lovable just the way she is.
This is expressed via magnificent dialogues in the final scenes. Molli and Max in the Future gives us these lines:
It's easy to be all like, "You just gotta love yourself" and sound all woo-woo,
but what that actually means in practice is I deserve to be with someone great.
While Love Me prefaces the epiphany with this sharp observation:
That's your problem: that you think I'm the one that needs to like you.
As it turns out, loving someone else is easy. It's opening ourselves to being loved that's unbearably terrifying.
POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.
