Love’s Coming (Out)

Abstract

In The Threshold of the Visible World (1996), Kaja Silverman advances a subtle, ethical, post-Lacanian account of what constitutes “the active gift of love” and how this might be expressed on the screen. She argues for an orientation of subject to love object which is not merely an alternative to romantic passion, but an account of how identification of the loving subject and love object “might function in a way that results in neither the triumph of self-sameness, nor craven submission to an exteriorised but essentialized ideal” (p. 79). In a move particularly relevant to our focus in this paper, she goes on to suggest that a gift of love so constituted entails an escape from conformity with culturally dictated ideals and thence a capacity “to put ourselves in a positive identificatory relation to bodies which we have been taught to abhor and repudiate” (Ibid.). Two lesbian/gay teen films of the late 1990s—Lukas Moodysson’s Fucking Amal (1998; also known as Show Me Love) and Simon Shore’s Get Real (1999)—offer an illuminating contrast in the ways they deal with the possibility of the gift of love in the conflictual contexts of teenage gay and lesbian love and sexuality and of small-town spaces. Space solicits desire, but the sexual frisson that is evoked through encounters in various spaces depicted as offering excitement, risk, and bodily pleasures seems limited in three ways. First, the progression from desire to love is severely circumscribed by cultural presuppositions about the physical and social attributes of appropriate love objects. This is particularly evident in the Hollywood teen film, with its recurrent male and female Cinderella roles. Second, the desire represented is predominantly heterosexual, so the appropriate love object is further specified by the assumption of heteronormativity. Finally, there is a persistent attribution of space to woman and time to man—as early as the late eighteenth century William Blake had written, “Space is a woman” (in Bal, 1988, p.169)—and although this has been questioned by feminist thinkers (see Irigaray 1987) it still pervades filmic imagery. As Sue Best (1995, pp.182-3) notes, the bounded spaces that people inhabit—“the nation, regions, cities and the home”—often rely on feminine metaphor to describe their attributes, contours, architecture; in the case of the romantic ‘home’, its enclosures suggest a warm, uterine space and maternal care. In a related sense, the open spaces of the countryside, the city streets and solitary travel have connoted a masculine space and prerogative. Traditionally, man moves through these spaces with a sense of temporal purpose, while woman bides her time in bounded domestic space. In Fucking Amal, the film’s preoccupation with enclosed spaces, and especially the domestic spaces of home and school, on the one hand generates an intense mood of claustrophobia and on the other communicates the terrifying aloneness of the young person abjected by the “in”-crowd. A measure of the inanity of the teenage boys of this small Swedish community is the unexamined misogyny of their spatial thinking, as when, for example, Jessica’s boyfriend Markus asserts that boys are interested in and understand technology, like cell phones, and that girls are instead good at things like