{"id":16581,"date":"2018-02-12T21:22:22","date_gmt":"2018-02-13T05:22:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/independentlens\/?post_type=blog&p=16581"},"modified":"2019-09-30T14:36:53","modified_gmt":"2019-09-30T22:36:53","slug":"beyond-romance-searching-for-the-meaning-of-love-on-screen-for-valentines-day","status":"publish","type":"blog","link":"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/independentlens\/blog\/beyond-romance-searching-for-the-meaning-of-love-on-screen-for-valentines-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Beyond Romance: Searching for the Meaning of Love on Screen"},"content":{"rendered":"

Although there are as many ways to love as there are people to do the loving, we are trained from an early age to value the pair-bond above all else.<\/span> The tension and release of romantic love (and its loss) powers everything. By the time we\u2019re old enough to question a system that teaches us to pour all of our goodness and rottenness into one other person, pop music and cinema and parents and poetry have already primed our hearts to accept nothing less than the redemptive love of a soul mate. <\/span><\/p>\n

There is grace in the love between friends. There is power in the love between comrades. There is release in the love of a god. These kinds of love often flow more freely than romantic love, but it is the wicked pain and sublime surrender of romance we long for on lonely nights. <\/span><\/p>\n

Romantic love is too often experienced as a realm of scarcity, a delimited zone with rules about who we should love and how we should love and when we should love. When we enter this realm, we find bigots who want to police certain kinds of love. We find idealists who refuse to negotiate terms. We find myth masquerading as truth. If we are lucky, we also… find someone cool there.pop music and cinema and parents and poetry have already primed our hearts to accept nothing less than the redemptive love of a soul mate.<\/pullquote><\/span><\/p>\n

The best documentaries about love and romance zero in on the conflicts that flare up when we enter this fraught land, when we discover it is not a province of total freedom but yet another long and treacherous path to it, when we realize that love is really, really hard work. <\/span><\/p>\n

Love Versus the World<\/b><\/p>\n

Love and desire can be staging grounds for war–battlefields on which patriarchy and white supremacy fight to maintain power and control. In his peerless 1989 documentary <\/span>Tongues Untied <\/i><\/b><\/a>(which aired on POV on PBS), Marlon Riggs<\/strong> orchestrates a soaring chorus of voices and images that lay bare the mechanisms of fetishization and demonization that have tried to keep black gay men silent, invisible and shamed. It is a film fueled by pain and its conquering, a love letter to black men who love black men in a world bent on denying the truth and beauty of such love, and it is among the greatest documentaries of the 20th century.<\/span><\/p>\n