5 Stars for Love
Musings on Our Favorite Pieces of Love Media
with an introductory note from Sydney
Happy Valentine’s Day from the VTY girls! This time of year has us thinking about love in all its forms with an emphasis on romantic love. We had a long discussion about what love means to each of us earlier this week and released it as a podcast episode today so give it a listen if you want to pretend you;re on facetime with friends and have a thing for deep, sometimes dark, sometimes unhinged conversation (the knife, iykyk).
Mackenzie brought up the idea that love, often being too complex for words, lends itself more naturally to expression in art. In a similar vein, we’ve each prepared some thoughts on how a piece of media has captured what it is to be in love or to experience a fulness of love.
We hope you enjoy and if you feel so compelled send us an email at vty.verytrulyyours@gmail.com with thoughts on your favorite piece of love media. We’ll share our favorites to our stories throughout love month.
Sydney: About Time
My second favorite type of movie is romance, specifically romantic comedy. My first? Anything to do with time travel. So it’s no surprise that I adore the 2013 boy meets girl modern time travel classic - About Time. Though it can definitely be argued that the real love story in the movie is about a father and son, I find the main romance of Tim and Mary particularly endearing.
Tim, an awkward and typically unsure individual, learns of a unique family ability to time travel back to points in his own life. He quickly decides that the best use of this new superpower is to find love. He has the good fortune of meeting Mary, a similarly awkward fellow romantic, and utilizes his never ending do-overs to woo and eventually marry her.
The movie follows their shockingly normal romance, aside from the time travel bit. They go about their careers, have some darling children, and live with an exceptional propensity for kindness for each other and those around them. I think this model of love is what is most appealing to me. I strive to build a cozy, even uneventful romance on a deep understanding of mutual love, respect, and kindness.
Toward the end of the movie, Tim encounters familial tragedy and is forced to reckon with what is most important to him in life. He resolves “to live every day as if [he’s] deliberately come back to this one day, to enjoy it, as if it was the full final day of [his] extraordinary, ordinary life.”
With this perspective, each day becomes a unique opportunity to love those around us. I love that this realization, though informed by time travel, is accessible to us mere mortals. Specifically in romantic love where it is all too easy to become wrapped up in some trivial discontentment, living in an effort to relish the remarkable ride of traveling through time together allows and encourages me to look outside of myself and treasure the miracle of falling, being, and staying in love.
For the way it has shaped my perspective on life and love, I give About Time 5 stars.
Grace: Bone of My Bone and Flesh of My Flesh and 365 Days
My favorite type of “love media” would be the soap-opera-esc romance series such as the After series, the 365 Days series, and the 2 seasons of “Sex-Life” on Netflix ( I had to watch after Kim K confessed she was crying in the finale). These movies share crucial qualities that make them fantastic entertainment, including lots of spontaneous sex scenes, bad acting (typically by the female lead), characters whose main objective in life is to have sex, a plot that is somewhat applicable to real life but heinous nonetheless, and extremely unnecessary use of bad wigs. These pieces of media are indeed works of art to me. They simplify the complexities of our relationships into very simple and straightforward dialogue. These movies give it to you straight forward, and they scratch an inevitable part of my brain that just wants to be entertained.
But whenever I want to use my brain a little more and scratch an itch that makes me think about the small moments found through love, I listen to Pádraig Ó Tuama’s Poetry Unbound podcast episode, where he reads “Bone of My Bone and Flesh of My Flesh” by Ellen Bass. This poem shows how all romantic love can engulf us and change how we interact with the world. It informs how we report to our insurance agent, family, and jobs. It may tell the way we vote or make our coffee. It can change everything for us and simultaneously begin to be so ordinary. I like to listen to how Pádraig thinks about this poem and expands upon these ideas. I like the way this poem makes me think about the way everyday tasks and our roles in society are affected by our romantic love.
Avery:
Happy V-Day Bitches! Here is my love media run-down!!
Movie: Pride and Prejudice. 2005. Keira Knightly version.
Not niche or anything but genuinely I think every element of this movie is so well done. While many iterations are wonderful (Hi Colin Firth ;), no other version encapsulates the wistful, yearning atmosphere of Jane Austin’s Elizabeth Bennet’s world so well. Everything about the movie is inherently romantic, from the color palette to the costumes to the use of light and shadow in the shot compositions. THE NETHERFIELD BALL SCENE?!?! UGH. Despite all these things, the music is what I keep coming back to again and again. Every year since 9th grade, The Pride and Prejudice soundtrack has been at the top of my Spotify wrapped. I listen to the score at least once a week, and if you never have I strongly suggest you get the fuck on it.
I specifically recommend “Liz On Top of the World”. The best word I can use to describe it is “sweeping.” It is one of the most beautiful pieces of music I have ever heard and perfectly suited to listen to while you romanticize your life. The composer, Dario Marinanelli, can like, get it.
Fave lines from the movie:
“What excellent boiled potatoes”
“You have bewitched me body and soul, and I love, I love-... I love you!!!!!” LIKE SHUT UP!!!
“Your hands are cold :’)”
Book: Song Of Achilles
This book actually ruined my life. I resonated so deeply with the way Achilles and Patroclus' relationship is depicted. The queer yearning was so, so familiar, and as soon as I started it I knew it would devastate me. There’s something tragically beautiful about falling in love with and rooting for characters you know are doomed to a brutal ending. The coming end makes you savor their tender moments all the more, which is maybe an excellent way for us to view falling in love despite a world seemingly headed toward imminent destruction.
Author Madeline Miller's exquisite prose and detailed imagery pull you in, the jarring brutality of the war makes for a morally complex read. I love a tragic little gay story, and this book came! through! I think there’s something inherently fatalistic about being in love and choosing to, ideally, be with someone for life, knowing that they could be taken from you at any moment leaving you alone and unmoored. It's all at once grounding and volatile, comforting and dangerous, eternal and temporary, but so worth the risk.
Album: UNREAL UNEARTH by Hozier. That’s all.
To Someone From A Warm Climate!!
Abstract/Psychopomp!!!!!! WOW
Mackenzie
Past Lives, a film by Celine Song
My favorite film release of the past year behind Anatomy of a Fall (which also details the pangs of love in a much different manner), Past Lives is playwright Celine Song’s beautiful directorial debut. It follows Nora and Hae Sung, two childhood friends in South Korea after they are disconnected when Nora emigrates to the United States, only to reconnect in adult life. From there, they fluctuate between residing in each other’s memory and forging a relationship in the present—a dance that contemplates the link between mundane, everyday decisions and monumental connections, something like fate, and the hand we have in love.
After years apart, Hae Sung and Nora decide to reunite in New York City, where Nora lives with her husband, Arthur. On paper this could sound very dramatic—but that’s what I love about this film, it completely undermines the black-and-white melodrama that we expect from stories about love. In Past Lives, though the situation is difficult for all involved, nobody is villainized. You do not watch scenes between Hae Sung and Nora with a held breath and crossed fingers, waiting for her to choose one man over the other. They are reuniting as something more than friends and something less than lovers, exploring each other again through slow conversations across the city, showing you how everything is not so easily defined.
Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
Rilke is my favorite poet. He has been with me since I was young, and when I read his sentiments about love in these letters, I felt as though somebody had broken into my mind and extracted my own.
"For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. For this reason young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it. With their whole being, with all their forces, fathered close about their lonely, timid, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and so loving, for a long while ahead and far on into life, is—solitude, intensified and deepened loneness for him who loves."
"Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over, and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate–?), it is a high inducement of the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world for himself for another's sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things."
“And this more human love (that will fulfill itself, infinitely considerate and gentle, and kind and clear in binding and releasing) will resemble that which we are preparing with struggle and toil, the love that consists in this, that two solitudes protect and border and salute each other."
What they mean to me: There is a concept in my head that I call Self Containment! It applies to all aspects of my life and, especially, to love: of wanting to remain a separate, self contained entity, so that I can hold my own emotions, my own experience, everywhere; and wanting a partner that can do the same. Once I saw that Ben was able to hold his own suffering, his own uncomfortability, I found it more bearable to be in his presence–I no longer felt pressure to break away from myself in order to manage his emotions for him. There is no spilling of selves. He is clearly him and I am clearly me, but he loves me as though he does not exist. He loves me outside of himself. And I love him in the same way. Now, because I know that I can contain all of me, hold all of me, I can choose to extend myself outwards and allow him to hold me as well, to share myself with him. It is deliberate and tender.
Though always in the context of a unit, love can be extremely lonely and solitary. It is as much about you as the other person, and I think everything comes full circle in that, when you embrace this fully, you begin to love more selflessly. You begin to love more deliberately, able to extend outwards from your self-contained core to hold and witness another individual, and to give yourself to them too, should they be able and willing to hold you as well. It is a dance of selves within an insular unit of your making! How wonderful and terrifying!
Give all to Love by Ralph Waldo Emerson
I will leave you earnestly with the closing lines of this poem, which I think about constantly and would urge all to consider:
“When half-gods go,
The Gods arrive”
Julianne:
Alex Turner’s Love Letter to Alexa Chung
"My mouth hasn't shut up about you since you kissed it. The idea that you may kiss it again is stuck in my brain, which hasn't stopped thinking about you since, well, before any kiss. And now the prospect of those kisses seems to wind me like when you slip on the stairs and one of the steps hits you in the middle of the back. The notion of them continuing for what is traditionally terrifying forever excites me to an unfamiliar degree."
This rewired something in my adolescent brain when I saw it on tumblr. The idea that someone would be so obsessed with you and would be brave enough to write that down and give it to you blew my mind and became something I wanted desperately.
Lemonade by Beyonce
Stick with me-- I think this is actually a stunning piece of love media because it depicts such a range of emotions and messiness regarding relationships. Born out of the pain of a nasty affair, Beyonce rages and screams and cries and then finds it in herself to forgive her cheating rat bastard husband (sorry Jay Z, it’s how I feel). It speaks to sacrifice, pain, deep love, forgiveness and redemption. Listen to All Night and tell me again she doesn’t love that man.
