love to the rescue

There's nothing wrong with me
Lovin' you ...
Givin' yourself to me
Could never be wrong
If the love is true

--Marvin Gaye & Ed Townsend, "Let's Get It On"

It's been interesting for me to think this week about how popular culture influenced the ideas and expectations I have of relationships. I recall latching on to a lot of different things in what might be considered my "formative years": the portrayal of D'Artagnan and Constance in the Richard Lester-directed films The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers, the letters and poetry of Lord Byron and T.S. Eliot, John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost, the Archibald Macleish play "J.B.", Jane Austen, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the songs of Marvin Gaye, Elton John, James Taylor, Neil Young and others. Granted, some of that is a little peculiar to consider in the light of "popular culture," but I definitely was a little bit of a peculiar kid. And in considering them all I discovered two things. Firstly, I encountered most of these influences in roughly the same time period (1973 to 1977—high school, what a surprise), and secondly, they all seem to have a common theme: namely, Love Can Fix It.

Here are a couple of highlights.

Star Wars
No, I don't mean the "franchise" of uneven quality films and hoo-hah that George Lucas eventually managed to thrust upon us. I mean the original film in all its wacky glory. I saw the original Star Wars seventeen times the summer it was released. It's an adventure story and a "coming of age" story, but most of all it's a story about all different kinds of love and dedication: Luke and Leia, Han Solo and Chewbacca, Han Solo and his space ship, even R2D2 and C-3PO. Mix in a little deeply patriotic "love of home planet" and what have you got? Love to the rescue, Love can carry you through, Love can fix what ails ya, even if it's the intergallactic menace of an all-powerful dark overlord.

J.B.
This wonderful play, thematically playing off the biblical story of Job, was written by Archibald Macleish and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1959. I didn't encounter this work probably until 1976, however, and was so taken with it that I used Sarah's monologue in the final scene as an audition piece for a number of years. In that scene, Sarah has left J.B.--who, like Job in the Bible, has lost everything, and is heading out into the darkness that this play-within-a-play has made of the world, no doubt to her death. But she returns unexpectedly. When J.B. asks her why she left, she replies:

You wanted justice, didn’t you?
There isn’t any. There’s the world . . .
Cry for justice and the stars
Will stare until your eyes sting. Weep,
Enormous winds will thrash the water.
Cry in sleep for your lost children,
Snow will fall . . .
You wanted justice and there was none—
Only love.

Her love for life kept her from going, she explains: "Even the forsythia beside the Stair could stop me."

Thus, J.B. and Sarah begin again through love, defeating both "God" and "Satan." Love can fix it, even when you've lost everything and even God is against you.

Pride and Prejudice
I was an Austenite before it was popular to be one, absorbing all six of Jane Austen's completed novels by the time I was 17 years old, and devouring countless biographies and collections of her letters, juvenelia, and novel fragments in the interceding 30 years. Her work is substantially more complex and multilayered than the casual viewer of recent film versions of her work might believe; parody and satire can be hard to make clear on the small screen, and make no doubt about it, Jane Austen was all about parody and satire. Yet there is a romanticism in her work that makes it both accessible and attractive.

Pride and Prejudice is a particular favorite. Elizabeth Bennet suffers a ridiculous embarassing family, a wild scandalous sister, the future loss of her home (via the common practice of estate entailment to an odious cousin), and the prospect of being shunned by society in general and eligible bachelors in particular as a woman with little fortune and no "name" of distinction. Even her personality is likely to get her in trouble as she digs in her heels against those whom she is "beneath" on the social pyramid. But enter Love, and her future changes abrubtly to one of wealth, security, respectability, and the upper echelon of society, not to mention being freed from sharing the same household as horrifyingly dimwitted parents and a selection of sisters about whose future one would prefer not to speculate. (Her favorite sister, the older Jane, is also rescued from the family and a dismal future by love.) Once again, Love has Fixed Everything.

Do I still believe that Love Can Fix Everything? In a way, I think I do. Not that I have empirical evidence of that, but I do tend to think that when things go oddly wrong it is a failure of love—not enough, or the wrong kind, or the wrong time. Because if it was Right, the world would be a verse from Marvin Gaye ... it "could never be wrong if the love is true."

Right? Right, indeed.

—E. Marie