A Note about My Attitude about Love Stories
I’ve been going through a change within myself regarding my attitude toward love stories in fiction. This relates to my opinions about a lot of things that have been going through my head recently, and it all came out more or less intact when I was talking to a friend after seeing the movie Tenet last year. For context, there’s a part in the movie where the main character (whose name I forgot but they make it pretty clear that he is the protagonist of the story) puts his own life at risk to save a woman he just met and barely knows, despite the fact that he is responsible for saving the entire human race. When I saw this, when he jumped into the machine, I thought at the time, “What a load of garbage. This is just another example of Nolan shoe-horning a crappy love story into an awesome intellectual sci-fi action thriller, just like he did in Interstellar, where love itself was the solution to the unsolvable equation, the answer that allowed time travel through black holes.” What absolute bullshit, I thought. But during that conversation with my friend after watching Tenet, I realized I was wrong. I have been getting it all backwards for years.
Literally for years I’ve been thinking and saying that I’m so tired of stupid trite love stories in fiction. In a textbook I studied for my screenwriting course a long time ago, it was stated that audiences need a love story, a real human connection at the center of every story, no matter the genre—and if I don’t like that idea, then I had damn well get my head around it and start putting love stories in everything I write. In fact my unresolved cognitive dissonance on the matter was so powerful that I started to believe I was defective, that I was the only one who didn’t care about showing real human connections. I honestly believed that a clever premise and a twisting yet airtight plot (with healthy doses of action and intrigue) were the only ingredients necessary to cooking up an amazing story. And since I seemed to be the only person on Earth who felt this way, I decided that I was somehow abnormal, an emotionless robot—and I convinced myself that I had better learn (despite my objections) to write believable human love stories—or at least to fake them in the subplots. In retrospect, what a shitty attitude I was developing, right?
My friend helped me understand something important: that scene in Tenet, where he jumps into the machine to save the woman he just met? That doesn’t really have anything to do with a love story. The protagonist makes it clear at many earlier points that he puts everyone else’s life above his own. I won’t get into spoilers here, but there are many instances of the hero taking steps to prevent the loss of life. In fact this is what makes him a hero. So when he springs to action to save the woman, it’s not even supposed to be a love story moment—he jumps in because it’s his fault that she’s in danger, and he refuses to be responsible for her death if there’s anything he can do to stop it. It’s about his mission to protect human life at any cost.
And what about the movie Interstellar? Again, the protagonist does what he does in order to save the entire human race. And besides, the relationship in question is between a father and his daughter. It’s not about romantic love in the slightest—and so in the end I was completely wrong about both films. Hmm… it’s almost as if I had made up my mind beforehand, and then went looking for any scrap of evidence that would help to confirm my previously-held notions—even where no such evidence existed. I think maybe they have a name for that…
[To be continued]
