SENTIMENTAL LOVE
A student of mine recently asked me a challenging question. He looked me in the eyes and asked, “what is the so-called Romantic Comedy, as a genre, predicated on?”
After a long pause I responded as follows:
Hollywood’s romantic comedy, presuming he meant Hollywood, which he did, is predicated on sentimental love. As Erich Fromm so astutely has described it in his The Art of Loving, the essence of sentimental love is experienced only in fantasy and not really in the present, what he calls the “here and now.” In other words sentimental love is sort of a vicarious experience. The average audience of a given romantic comedy, I will call him Bob, knows the outcome of the narrative before even entering the theatre and suspending his disbelief. What’s at stake for Bob is the degree of sentimental love he shall experience as a result of viewing the fictional love story unfolding in the theatre or his living room. He is, in fact, the consumer of prepackaged sentimental love. If he is alienated from his spouse, which, sadly, is the case in far too many modern and postmodern marriages, then he must be harboring many unfulfilled desires for love, union, and organic intimacy. Chances are, that is the case for Bob’s wife too.
So he looks for a satisfying experience in viewing of a romantic comedy. This cathartic experience is not quite satisfying, however. And that is exactly the space where the producers of such generic sentimental love stories want their consumer to be; satisfied but only temporarily. Hollywood wants and conditions return customers, hence the success of the genre cinema. If Bob is incapable of intersubjectivity with his spouse, then he will allow himself to be emotionally manipulated by sentimental love, even if only for two hours at a time, and participate in the happy or sad love story of the likes of Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks on the silver screen—or the flat LCD screen!
The interesting and perhaps alarming fact is that for many couples watching a romantic comedy is the closest experience of love they can have. This experience of sentimental love of two other fictional characters is a virtual experience of an idealized love, to be sure. This begs the question, what if the same couple (e.g., Bob and his wife) tried to experience organic love in their relationship? Has the consumer society socialized Bob and his wife to the point of disability in experiencing a concrete love in their relationship? Real love is indeed different than the sentimental stuff one sees as released by the dream factory. Real love requires being in the here and now and dealing with the complexities of intersubjectivity.
DIALOGUE & TRANSFORMATION
I had been thinking about the 1960s. History gives us a picture of the left challenging the establishment with fervor. Although it is opaque, the same history reveals that after the violent response by the powerful establishment (e.g., killing of students in Kent State) in the Anglo American world, the left started to look at new ways of confronting the right and causing social transformation. Without the approval of thinkers such as Marcuse, some well-intentioned psychologists decided that in order for a society to transform, first its individual citizens must transform and become what Maslow called “self actualized” persons. Borrowing from the Romantics, the so-called human potential movement prescribed a new theory of individuation; express your inner feelings and you shall transform and be free. The logic of this process of transformation promised a social transformation that would naturally generate as a result of its citizens becoming free. This was of course a nice and safe approach for the privileged members of the Anglo American world, but what about the underprivileged classes? Could they afford to take time to individuate? Could they operate as separate individuals, and only after their personal transformation rejoin the other members and unite to transform their society? The answer to that question has been a huge NO! Capitalism has very quickly co-opted the human potential movement and turned it into the so-called New Age movement filled with expensive workshops, attire, books, and gurus of various kinds. With globalization operating with high octane the new age of narcissism and hyperindividualism is permeating the planet. So much for personal transformation leading to social transformation…is there hope for that approach? The world must transform. We must get out of our alienated paradigms and enter into an age of planetary citizenship in solidarity with one another.
Hope never dies, to be sure. From Plato to Habermas the idea of dialogue facilitating transformation-for more than one person at a time-has been theorized and practiced by thinkers, teachers, and other intellectual practitioners of social justice. What is dialogue? Is it like a tennis match? I listen to your point of view, catch the main points, and once the ball is in my court, I respond with my point of view to crush yours and make you miss the ball or hit it into the net? ABSOLUTELY NOT!
Imagine, if you will, that the self and the other have an opportunity to engage in dialogue.
To practice dialogue the self not only listens to the other, but also allows the other’s point of view to be heard as a whole and ushered into the self’s consciousness with welcome. The self only responds when the other’s point of view has been understood at a satisfactory level. Only then does the self present his or her point of view, dialectical, complimentary, or in concurrence to the other. To be sure, the other will have to do as the self and accept the self’s point of view to land in the other’s consciousness in its entirety. This process takes time and what is required of the self and the other is patience and mindful attention. There exists a need for a field of mutuality between the self and the other in order to the self to merge with the other. If and when the self becomes the other and conversely, then and only then transformation can take place. This is a diffused form of transformation and can lead into a collective transformation for societies at large.