Romantic love has never been what it’s cracked up to be. That’s why
we have always needed two things: an ideal of romantic love in popular
culture and a more sober, chastened picture of it in high art.
At
first glance, it might seem that today we need the ideal more than
ever. Nowadays if you want to meet someone, you get onto the mobile app
Tinder, pick out a few people the way you would pick out some nice
things at a store, and then swipe on their images as if you were buying
shoes.
What a far cry from that anthem of our national holiday
of love, “My Funny Valentine.” Will anyone ever again write a song as
loving as that again? No. Way. “My funny valentine/Sweet comic
valentine.” Lorenz Hart’s lyrics are so tender:
Actually,
now that I see those words in print, they seem humiliating. Maybe you
have to go back to the greatest movie about romantic love ever made:
“Casablanca.” They sure don’t make them like that anymore. A man. A
woman. Paris. Morocco. Sultry, dangerous nightclubs. He sacrifices the
greatest love of his life and gives up Ingrid Bergman for…Claude Rains,
transparently dishonest card games and lots of secondhand smoke. Jeez.
No,
for true romance, we have to go way back, to the primal myths and
stories of Western Culture: Cupid, Paris and Helen, Romeo and Juliet.
Yes, Cupid, the illegitimate son of heaven-knows-who, with the maturity
of a 5-year-old, sporting ridiculously tiny wings from the ancient
world’s equivalent of Dollar Tree, shooting arrows tipped with dangerous
narcotics into random pedestrians while sometimes wearing a blindfold.
Or beautiful Helen of Troy, kidnapped and probably raped by
narcissistic Paris; or Romeo and Juliet, the maladjusted products of an
angry environment; or Lancelot and Guinevere and Tristan and Isolde, the
judgment-impaired Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice of the Middle
Ages.... In other words, although we might seem to have lost the
romantic ideal altogether, it was never that ideal to begin with.
Of
course, there used to be a fairly clear line between romance in popular
culture and its depiction in high art. Since America is a place of hope
and reinvention, it gave birth to modern popular culture, which tells
the story, again and again, of hope and reinvention. For 42 years,
starting in 1960, “The Fantasticks” played at an off-Broadway theater,
with newspapers and magazines summing up its plot more or less like
this: “Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy finds girl again.”
