I've always loved the Andrew McCarthey character, Kevin, in the film, in particular his "Love Sucks" and the whole speech around the "Love is an illusion" line. On one level these lines are of course just Kevin's way of dealing with his unrequited love for Leslie, and yet, on the actual level of the statement, aren't these lines precisely the film's message - that love sucks, only friendship counts? However, given that Kevin can only break his writer's block and write something on the "meaning of life" while he is successfully "with" Leslie, isn't Kimbo's counter to the "love is an illusion" line - that "it's the only illusion that counts" - also of importance, where does this stand with the friendship? Are we simply in some sort of flux between romantic love and friendship as love? And, something else that has recently been brought to my attention, what precisely does it mean that when Kevin finally writes his great piece on the "meaning of life" it turns out to be about the range of pop tarts available?
The first thing to note with regards to the "Love is an illusion" line is that, well, of course it is. Here we are of course dealing with the Lacanian proposition that, as speaking beings, we have no access to reality but through the lens of language, consequently everything is an illusion - we have no access to the Real. The question is thus - why is Love a privileged illusion. For Kevin his whole life is structured round his love, whether Love sucks or not. The scene where Leslie comes to his apartment and everything there turns out to be a prop for him to use in the act of seduction (everything that is except the photos of Leslie which, while not a prop for the seduction of nameless others, are still a prop - a prop for his long unfulfilled love for Leslie herself), demonstrate this adequately, but we also have the fact that it is only through fulfilling his desire for Leslie that he can write his long desired words on "The Meaning of Life". Love may well be an illusion, but, for Kevin, it is truly "the only illusion that counts", it is that which everything else in his life revolves around.
The other point to be made here is the ease with which love is thrown off in the film. Love is this privileged illusion and yet it is cast off with hardly a care: Kimbo takes off in his car, completely over his love, after changing career, then dropping any career, all for the lady, and, in many respects don't Kevin and Alec give up Leslie just as easily? The exchange can pretty much be summed up as, "Let's all be friends", says Leslie - "OK then!" chorus the boys. We, of course, have no way to know how these fictional characters react to this internally, but this is the point, we can only use the film itself as a guide, and on that level, Love is shown as disposable.
So, while the film is ostensibly about "growing up" - they have to deal in their different ways with the reality of life after college, what actually occurs during the film is an avoidance of reality. The ending recalls the beginning, but rather than this recollection making us see how far they have come, it reminds us that they are in the same place as before. Or perhaps not place, because they decide they have outgrown their usual bar, but they still meet elsewhere - the place has changed, but nothing else. We can link this with what Lacan says of development in Seminar XX:
"development," which is merely a hypothesis of mastery. It suggests that a baby has nothing to do with the Real-Ich, poor tot, and is incapable of having the slightest notion of the real. That is reserved for people we know, adults concerning whom, moreover, it is expressly stated that they never manage to wake up - when something happens in their dreams that threatens to cross over into the real, it distresses them so much that they immediately awaken, in other words, they go on dreaming. ... Development is confused with the development of mastery. (55-56)
Everytime something comes to upset the balance they recoil, wake up. And this is represented as adulthood. The film, as coming-of-age drama, neatly shows us that adulthood is precisely this: waking up to carry on dreaming. The element of mastery being the mastery over love. This is illustrated in the difference between the sex scene involving Leslie and Kevin and that involving Billy and Wendy. With Leslie and Kevin there is passion, with Billy and Wendy the whole thing is controlled: the sex happens after they have mastered their feelings for each other, on Billy's last night before heading off for New York. It is a parting gift. This difference encapsulates the quandary at the heart of the film - passion or control - and the film absolutely comes down on the side of control, for at the end isn't the only successful relationship that between Wendy and Billy? And they now live miles apart as friends. Here we could also note what Lacan says of revolution: that the centre doesn't change: the places may well change but the centre around which they turn remain the same.
A related aspect of the sex scene between Leslie and Kevin is the fact that she keeps her huge pearl necklace (a literal pearl necklace...) throughout sex.
A constant reminder of consumer capitalism throughout the throes of passion. This of course fits in with Kevin's analysis of Love as economics - that Love is an illusion designed to perpetuate the capitalist system. This being the centre around which everything turns. At odds with this love is the Love of Kevin, a love that breaks with capitalism, a love that is revolutionary, a love that would change the centre - this being the love that Kevin attributes to himself. So is what we see in the sex scene the difference between Kevin - on the side of a revolutionary Love - and Leslie - on the side of love that changes nothing? No, because the sex scene is all about jouissance, as Lacan says, "when one loves, it has nothing to do with sex," as Leslie herself says later on. We could also here note the role of the pearl necklace in attempting to ensnare the female jouissance which is "beyond discourse and knowledge" (Grosz 1998:139).
In this context it is interesting to approach the fact of Kevin being enabled to write his piece on "The Meaning of Life" after his love for Leslie is consumated. I want to argue that it is not the success of his love that enables his writing, but the very failure of the love. This is what Lacan has to say:
Repression is produced only to attest, in all statements and in the slightest statement that I just enunciated, that jouissance is inappropiate - non decet - to the sexual relationship. It is precisely because the said jouissance speaks that the sexual relationship is not.
Which is why that jouissance would do better to hush up, but when it does, that makes the very absence of the sexual relationship a bit harder yet to bear. Which is why, in the final analysis, it doesn't hush up, and why the first effect of repression is that it speaks of something else. That is what constitutes the mainspring of metaphor. (Seminar XX: 61-62)
While Kevin has been in love with Leslie from a distance his belief in the possibility of the sexual relationship has continued undiminished, after the sex he must repress the truth of its impossibility, he has got too close. His words are consequently born of disappointment rather than joy.
Here is the text of the article that Kevin writes immediately after the night of passion, or at least the little bit which is shown on camera:
Pop Tarts now come in 12 flavors; music videos are a twenty-four hour a day phenomenon; ordinary women can now transform themselves into Goddesses in aerobic temples. All signs indicate that we are in the zenith of contemporary civilization.
...ture, and take along your favorite albums, preferably THE DOORS, so you'll have something to listen to. There's life in my three volume set."
"It speaks of something else". He does not speak of love but of consumerism. We can draw something from the ordinary women turning into Goddesses thing - Kevin having made a Goddess of Leslie now has to realise that she is just an (ordinary) woman - but perhaps the most telling allusion here, given that this is in the context of consumerism, is to the quotation that Marx uses from
Timon of Athens:Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold? No, Gods, I am no idle votarist! ...
Thus much of this will make black white, foul fair,
Wrong right, base noble, old young, coward valiant.
... Why this
Will lug your priests and servants from your sides,
Pluck stout men's pillows from their heads:
This yellow slave
Will knit and break religions, bless the accursed;
Make the hoar leprosy adored, place thieves
And give them title, knee and approbation
With senators on the bench: This is it
That makes the wappen'd widow wed again;
She, whom the spital-house and ulcerous sores
Would cast the gorge at, this embalms and spices
To the April day again.
It is money which enables this transformation from ordinary woman to Goddess, and the opposite, that a lack of money can transform a woman from Goddess to ordinary woman. Kevin returns to his statement that "Love is economics". His "rival" Alec is driven by money, he turns Republican for a better paying job, Kevin meanwhile is striving to remain honest to his art, turning away from money, thus he knows that Leslie would be
better off with Alec. The final couple of paragraphs of the section of
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts which contain this quotation are also relevant here, as they speak of love:
He who can buy bravery is brave, though he be a coward. As money is not exchanged for any one specific quality, for any one specific thing, or for any particular human essential power, but for the entire objective world of man and nature, from the standpoint of its possessor it therefore serves to exchange every quality for every other, even contradictory, quality and object: it is the fraternisation of impossibilities. It makes contradictions embrace.
Assume man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust, etc. If you want to enjoy art, you must be an artistically cultivated person; if you want to exercise influence over other people, you must be a person with a stimulating and encouraging effect on other people. Every one of your relations to man and to nature must be a specific expression, corresponding to the object of your will, of your real individual life. If you love without evoking love in return - that is, if your loving as loving does not produce reciprocal love; if through a living expression of yourself as a loving person you do not make yourself a beloved one, then your love is impotent - a misfortune. (Marx:1981 124-125)
So we can see that Kevin needs all the object of seduction in his apartment because he lacks that true object of seduction - money. What this brings out is that if one removes money one does not come across the "living expression of yourself" - the immediately accessible self - instead one simply makes do with other objects to take the place of money. What the final part of this quotation allows is for a lack of money to become an excuse for a lack of love - the object of my affection does not love me but it is nothing to do with me, only my lack of money. This logic is seen clearly in the film via Kirby, who becomes convinced that he need only become rich to get the girl. It is only when he stops attributing the reason for his rejection onto outside forces and accepts responsibilty on himself that he snaps out of his love for Dale. The moment he takes responsibility and kisses Dale and she returns his kiss, the moment the power is back in his hands, rather than in the hands of his career choice or in his financial condition, is the moment he realises that he didn't even want her in the first place.
The difference between this and the denoument of the Kevin/Leslie/Alec relationship is that in this case none of them face anything, they return to being friends, how they started out, without confronting anything that actually happened between them. The ready acceptance of both Alec and Kevin to Leslie's declaration of being friends is taken too easily. Kevin can return to his previous love from afar, Alec can find a replacement for Leslie, but nothing will have changed with regards to his sleeping around and belief that the figure of a wife, any wife, will change him. For both of their [fantasy] has not been confronted. And Leslie?
Isn't Leslie the only figure who emerges with anything? She refuses to play the role of either housewife for Alec, or sublime object for Kevin. Is there a feminist message to be drawn then: Leslie refuses the male fantasy and asserts her own identity? I think this is too simplistic for the reason already stated - that their is no confronting of anything, they return to their previous friendship without working through anything - they return to friendship, but for Kevin therefore she is in the exact position she was in before, and for Alec, whose attitude towards women we see no signs of having changed, she is still the "little woman", whether she is his "little woman" is beside the point, Leslie still appears to Alec as the fantasy of the submissive woman, a position she seems to accept; in a truly feminist ending she would simply tell them both to go to hell. Instead their continued friendship serves as an avoidance of the Real, they go nowhere, it is a film about growing up in which growing up means that "when something happens in their dreams that threatens to cross over into the real, it distresses them so much that they immediately awaken, in other words, they go on dreaming." They awaken from what could have changed them, so that they can continue as good, fully functioning members of society. Alec as lawyer, Kevin as journalist (note that his awakewning as a writer involves not a great work of art but a step up in his career), and Leslie as, we can only assume, eventually returning to the arms of Alec, accepting her role as housewife.
