Abstract
Walk over a major bridge in a Western city and chances are you will come across at least one or two love-locks. These are padlocks inscribed with names or initials and attached to a public structure, typically by a couple in declaration of romantic commitment, who then proceed to throw the key into the river below. Some assemblages of these love tokens are modest; others number the thousands. This has become a truly global phenomenon, with over 400 love-lock assemblages catalogued across 62 countries in all continents bar Antarctica: popular custom in the true sense of the term. Although this custom was practised prior to the 21st century, with evidence of it in Serbia and Hungary in the 1900s, it did not gain widespread popularity until the mid-2000s — sparked, this paper contends, by an Italian teenage romance novel. This paper explores the transition from popular culture, defined here as mass-produced cultural products — including but not limited to television, film, literature and music — accessible to and consumed by the majority of a given society, to popular (or folk) custom. It also explores the reverse. As the love-lock custom gained popularity and familiarity, it became an established folk motif in films, television, and novels — from popular custom to popular culture — and this paper considers what these transitions demonstrate about the relationship, or interrelationship, between popular custom and popular culture.
Highlights
In 2006 Italian novelist Federico Moccia published Ho voglia di te (I Want You), the sequel to the highly popular Tre Metri Sopra il Cielo (Three Metres Above Heaven)
As the love-lock custom gained popularity and familiarity, it became an established folk motif in films, television, and novels — from popular custom to popular culture — and this paper considers what these transitions demonstrate about the relationship, or interrelationship, between popular custom and popular culture
In an interview with USA Today, Moccia admitted to placing a padlock on the third lamppost of the Ponte Milvio the night before Ho voglia di te was published, for the benefit of any curious readers who might visit the site to check if the love-lock custom was real
Summary
This conversion from popular culture to popular custom is not uncommon. Literature, film and television are well-known travel inducements, attracting fans to the sites that feature in the fiction. Ashley Orr writes that fans seek connections with fictional ‘characters through a sense of shared geographical, if not temporal, space’ and such trips ‘offer the possibility of inhabiting a beloved narrative’ (ibid: 247–8) This form of visit, known as literary tourism and film tourism, can sometimes offer more than habitation in a narrative; it can offer the opportunity for imaginative and embodied play through the re-enactment of character actions. This is what is happening when, as Nick Couldry writes, visitors to the Manchester set of British soap opera Coronation Street ‘pretend for a moment they live on the Street, posing with door knocker in hand or calling upstairs to a Street character’ (Couldry, 1998: 97). Love-lock assemblages became something more than features of tourist attractions; they became tourist attractions in and of themselves
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