by Gabriel Tupinambá

Multiple stories of Multiple Stories.

Akira Kurosawa’s Rashômon (1950), in which a hideous crime is recalled by different characters’ points of view, is probably one of the first films to be structured around different simultaneous stories. The development of this form was, of course, the same and only possible one when establishing any film form: it first started as an obscure formalist choice by an european/asian film maker, then it was brought to Hollywood, where it is made into a genre or a repeatable form, and then it became object of antagonism by new generations of non-Hollywood film makers.

This is also the very process of establishment of the film industry itself, since it was first a format for Germany's ambitious film productions, which was then imported together with their blockbuster film makers (Fritz Lang, Murneau, etc) and now we see how german and european film makers in general can only but relate themselves positive or negatively to what is arguably the only film School in the world.

Rashômon was composed of different versions of the same story, shown in slightly different ways, tainted by the position of each character through which it was filtered. This splitting into different perspectives of the same event would then lead to the more complex structure of films which narrate different stories revolving around one event or common background. To speak of current film productions, we could say that Iñarratu’s Babel (2006) is probably the greatest example of this, though Robert Altman was a master of the multiple-story structure, and many other films work in similar ways. Michael Haneke’s Code Inconnu (2000) is very much an answer to this same structure.

Though normally films structured in the ‘various perspectives’ format use it to argue for or against the place of contingency in society (Babel: we are all connected but we don’t know it; Magnolia and Altman’s Short Cuts: one strange moment can change all of our lives; Code Inconnu: social life as a whole cannot be accounted for;) in Valentine’s Day (2010) it serves the much more direct function of playing out possible different contend for the same form. Its almost the obverse of Rashômon: it is not that the different point of views show the same content, but distorted. Here the content is different (different people, different ages, etc) but the outcome is always the same (finding true love).

But the film that can help us understand this particular presentation of the multiple-lines structure is actually David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) which also - but not only -switches between fragments of story when one sequence finds some sort of deadlock, moving on to the following, apparently disconnected one.

This seems to be the key to read Valentine’s Day beyond its apparently diverse portrayal of relationships.

Love as Event, Love as Fidelity.

Most Hollywoodian films about love could be divided into two (badiouian) categories:

- Films about Love as Event: films in which the narrative revolves around the encounter of two lovers and the difficulties leading to that encounter.

- Films about Love as Fidelity: films in which the narrative is based on the conflicts and problems of maintaining a relationship.

The examples of both are abundant - as well as of films which try to break with this division, only to use one of the two modes to undo the other. For example, the recent rom-com, (500) Days of Summer (2009) shows a couple falling in love and staying together for some time, but the way they break up shows us that the Event was never an event in the first place, it wasn’t “meant to be”. Another example is Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind (2004), in which a disastrous relationship is re-done all over again to justify how special it was that they found each other.

But why can’t both elements fit into the same narrative? Valentine’s Day helps us to understand this problem.

Lynch as a critic of ideology

Firstly, let us quickly sketch the intertwined stories the film narrates:

1. Morley leaves Reed because she doesn’t want to commit to marriage, he then falls in love with his best friend, Julia.
2. Julia breaks up with her cheating boyfriend Copeland, and falls in love with Reed.
3. Kara hates Valentine’s, like Kelvin, both single, and this brings them together.
4. Jason is dating Liz, but he finds out she has secrets. They re-state their desire to be together accepting each other’s faults.
5. Edgar finds out that Estelle cheated on him many years ago. But he forgives her.
6. Holden goes back to his boyfriend Sean, who just declared on tv to be gay.
7. Captain Kate comes back from duty to visit her son Edison.
8. Edison thinks he loves his teacher, Julia, but he falls in love for his classmate, Rani.
9. Grace wants to have sex with Alex to save their relationship, but they decide to wait.

We also have a couple of stories which are just mentioned in the film - like Alphonso’s successful marriage, that serves as a background for the Reed-Julia encounter (Alphonso tells Reed that he “married his best friend” and so Reed ‘understands’ that he actually loves Julia), or Felicia and her boyfriend Willy, who serve as the teenage lust comparison for Grace and Alex’s difficulties in keeping their relationship together.

Most stories intrude one another, but not in a narrative sense, they don’t influence each other, just share characters, which play secondary roles in one while being the main reference in another. The sketch above doesn’t describe all the different connections and, what is even more important, it doesn’t show at all when we change from one story to another.

In his book on David Lynch, The Ridiculous Sublime, Žižek talks about Lynch’s mastery of juxtaposing two opposing fantasies in the same story line and then working out the passage from one to the other. Žižek also mentions how the tension of this juxtaposition forces the film into a fragmentation of the content when a sequence gets too close to the impossibility of its own fantasy - that’s when we need to break out of it. The greatest examples of this are surely the main shifts, around the middle of the films, that happen both in Mulholland Drive (2001) and Lost Highway (1997), in which the very identity of the main characters are changed by the abrupt cut from one scenario to the other.

If we apply the two categories of love fantasies in Hollywood to Valentine’s Day we get an almost even split between the two: 1+2+3+8 are love stories based on the encounter and 4+5+6+9 are fidelity love stories (we will leave Julia Roberts’ 7 out, since we only counted it as a story in the first place because Julia Roberts is in it.). So we basically get two fantasies which never actually mix, being shot in the same film. We could say that, in a way, Valentine’s Day is practically structured like a lynchian film. But what is the difference? Why does Lynch’s film create anguish and this romantic comedy create warm, fuzzy feelings?

We can easily find an answer to this when we have Lynch in mind while watching the rom-com: While Lynch’s work revolves around going too far within a certain fantasy - and breaking up with it out of the impossibility of holding on to a certain reality (just remember the beautiful scene at Winky’s, in Mulholland Drive : isn’t it the definition of going too far?) - Valentine’s Day avoids staying too long with any story, so that we never see where its impossibility lies. But what could be this impossibility?

The ‘divide and conquer’ structure.

Here, let us just quote a brilliant passage of Žižek’s text on Avatar (2010), in which he questions how far the fantasy of the film could extend itself:

“This is why it is interesting to imagine a sequel to Avatar in which, after a couple of years (or, rather, months) of bliss, the hero starts to feel a weird discontent and to miss the corrupted human universe. The source of this discontent is not only that every reality, no matter how perfect it is, sooner or later disappoints us. Such a perfect fantasy disappoints us precisely because of its perfection: what this perfection signals is that it holds no place for us, the subjects who imagine it.” (Žižek, Return of the Natives)

This is the very precise point we needed to make: If the film went further with the development of each story, we would necessarily have to encounter a place where the very narrative would break down. The re-inscription of the first encounter - which always ‘feels so right’ and is so natural - would by definition have to undermine the very aspects that made it an encounter in the first place. Predicates like ‘natural’ and ‘right’ cannot hold through the day after. Something else would have to be the basis of the encounter.

Love as pure Event (which is also the structure of Avatar) relies on fidelity being a necessity so that the very fact that the encounter happened will automatically sustain it for good. The characters in Avatar will be together forever - why? Because they met each other.

And the same goes for the other way around. In Love as pure Fidelity, the event is almost a transcendental guarantee of its consequences: will the couple in Date Night (2010) survive their marital conflicts? Yes, because they have each other.

So, in Valentine’s Day, the different stories are organized so that we do not get a chance to see the place where each one of the two main fantasies fails. Every time one of the sequences could raise any sort of issue with its own formula - when the question of fidelity could be raised in relation to the encounter, or vice versa - we get a cut, and a new scene, which deals with the impossibility, but from the perspective of the other fantasy, where the first point is not an issue at all.

Its like cutting from Avatar to Couple’s Retreat (2009) to develop the consequences of the film’s recently created couple. Something is lost in this transition! We should also ask ourselves why it is that this same double-structure of Event and Fidelity can work differently in, for example, end-of-the-world scenarios - There doesn’t seem to be an impossibility of getting together Armageddon (1998) and The Day After Tomorrow (2004).

Maybe the problem is with themes which rely on the subject and cannot be called ‘natural disasters’ - like Love, Politics, Science and Art, for example...

One...Three...Two?

What if Hollywood produced a romantic comedy which moved beyond this dualism, this logic which is always based on the ‘other’ pole becoming either a natural or a transcendental certainty?

We already know the traumatic point is somewhere in between they met and they have each other, in the way we go from the first to the second, or that we present the second so that the first can still be a cause and not an excuse. It is as if Hollywood could count to ‘three’ only by skipping ‘two’.

In the Love as pure Encounter movies we have the journey into becoming One.

(We could add another badiouian twist here, which proves our point even further, by pointing out that most romantic comedies of this kind also include what Badiou calls the ‘missed encounter’, the first - necessarily failed - attempt of the Event. This is a formal part of the rom-com structure: Every time the main character decides to finally declare his/her love, something happens and - normally by accident - she/he thinks the other is not interested anymore. This is always the final test before the couple can be created.)

The journey of the characters is always of recognizing one in the other and finding common ground to be together. From the “you complete me” slogan all the way to the pseudo-buddhist endings of total union through acceptance, the main force is unity - and the will of finding the other with whom s/he can make One with.

This of course relies on the disavowal of the disjunctions of sexuation - simplifying it extremely: man needs to overcome his neurotic obsessive symptoms or the woman has to move beyond her hysteric symptoms, or the other way around. We can exemplify this perfectly with As Good as It Gets (1997), in which facing the anguish of his symptoms is the very condition for Jack Nicholson’s character to find love. The sexual difference needs to be made unproblematic, so it can be inscribed into the whole of the couple.

In the Love as pure Fidelity version we get the journey of Two... plus One: the passed Event which now guarantees the validity of the couple. The memory of the event hangs like a shadow above the lovers, guaranteeing in their place that they should be together. Many films with this triangular structure actually work around the formation of a love triangle, so that the event can be tested in the flesh of a third figure - normally the strongest link of the Three.

But what about the Two? Why does Hollywood need to elevate either the event or the fidelity into an Absolute in-itself? Surely people fall in love in Hollywood as well, so what is the problem when turning it into a film, why can’t love happen without some sort of transcendental support inscribed into it, distorting its very notion?

In the freudian theory of repression, the representations that cannot appear in consciousness do not simply vanish, but appear as a mere ‘something else’, rather than the invested set of signifiers they actually are - otherwise, the void left in their place would simply make even more apparent their importance.

And if we look for Love as Two in Hollywood we do find it, as one of two situations: either as the relationship between the main character and someone else, normally at the beginning of rom-coms (the boring guy she will leave for the real love of her life) which is portrayed in such a way that being together ‘for no reason’ is the very reason to leave the relationship for something new. Normally the justification for the break-up is that ‘something is not right’ - but... when you have no guarantee of completion (One), or of a third, guaranteeing agency (Three)... isn’t this just a way of stating that it could be love?

Love as Two has also been appearing with more constancy in films which are worried with showing man and woman’s independence from each other. In order to accomplish this, a relationship should be the juxtaposition of two Ones (thus doubling the fantasy of ‘being complete’). A great recent example of this is The Back-up Plan (2010), in which the title already says pretty much it all.

In a way, we can get the structure of love as event and fidelity to the event only if there is no love, no truth. We could probably guess that the ‘democratic materialism’ of the cinema discourse will invest more and more in these film productions, which are the best example of its own premisses: it is “humane”, it has no “false expectations”, and it states clearly that there are only bodies (of the event) and languages (of fidelity), but no truth (to raise both parts of the structure into a transformative subjective position).

This version of Love as Two is the very definition of Love as Betrayal. All the elements of Love as Two can be included in the narrative, provided that one either turns away from it, or betrays its very structure. You can either turn Two into One+One (two complete individuals who don’t need each other) or into Three minus One (minus One = the boring boyfriend!).

This betrayal, showing Hollywood’s perverse ‘I know very well, but...’ points towards the thesis that it is Truth, as the definite dimension of Love, which needs to be forcluded (excluded in its inclusion).

Dongria Kondh

And at this precise moment we should pause and go back to Žižek’s critique of Avatar:

“At the same time as Avatar is making money all around the world (it generated $1bn after less than three weeks of release), something that strangely resembles its plot is taking place. The southern hills of the Indian state of Orissa, inhabited by the Dongria Kondh people, were sold to mining companies that plan to exploit their immense reserves of bauxite (the deposits are considered to be worth at least $4trn). In reaction to this project, a Maoist (Naxalite) armed rebellion exploded.
(...)
The Indian prime minister characterized this rebellion as the "single largest internal security threat"; the big media, which present it as extremist resistance to progress, are full of stories about "red terrorism", replacing stories about "Islamist terrorism". No wonder the Indian state is responding with a big military operation against "Maoist strongholds" in the jungles of central India. And it is true that both sides are resorting to great violence in this brutal war, that the "people's justice" of the Maoists is harsh. However, no matter how unpalatable this violence is to our liberal taste, we have no right to condemn it. Why? Because their situation is precisely that of Hegel's rabble: the Naxalite rebels in India are starving tribal people, to whom the minimum of a dignified life is denied.

So where is Cameron's film here? Nowhere: in Orissa, there are no noble princesses waiting for white heroes to seduce them and help their people, just the Maoists organising the starving farmers.” (Žižek, Return of the Natives)

Avatar can make the problem clearer to us, because it develops at the same time the love encounter as well as the political event. Žižek’s argument in the first extract we quoted was that the film had to end where it did so that the love encounter could remain beyond its own decadence (which would surely come a week later, when the guy found out there was no tv there), and now the philosopher reminds us that this same beyond of the love encounter, created by the non-development of its aftermath, is also the force behind the political commitment of the main character. When he compares “Pandora” with Orissa, we see that something other than ‘it feels right’ and ‘it is natural’ would have to take place in order to support a true political stance.

What we get both in the political and amorous discourse in Hollywood is that the price to pay for their appearance is that it is reduced just to that. Love without lovers - a attentive glance at any of the characters in rom-coms and it becomes clear that so little is at stake, so little risk, that there are lovers because the film is about love, not the other way around. And Politics without committed subjects - after all, how can someone be committed to an Idea if the Idea doesn’t need one’s commitment, but actually pushing the subject towards a political engagement? It’s inverted, again.

So, couldn’t we say that the very structure which could not be narrated in Valentine’s Day is homologous to that of true political commitment - or any other commitment which comes from Nothing and exists solely through the fidelity of its subjects to its cause? Because for true love, as well as for true political commitment, no natural or transcendental cause or effect can have the role of guarantee. We can only truly love from the position of the Dongria Kondh.

In granting us with the depiction of Love as Two, Hollywood would be helping to disseminate the very tools that would lead to its demise.