Love

I’m a romantic. I’ve always wanted to find love and have love find me. While other boys in primary school in primary school answered the question, ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’ with careers as unlikely as ‘astronaut’ and anachronistic as ‘cowboy,’ I would answer ‘in love.’

As a teacher, this message resonates with me.

In my teenage years my favourite book was The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4. Adrian is the pseudo-intellectual from the suburbs, a romantic for whom ‘unrequited love’ is a specialist subject. He loves Pandora Braithwaite but is too scared to make an advance; instead he watches her from afar, writing lamentable odes to her that strain the parameters of rhyme (Pandora!/ I adore ya/ I implore ye/Don’t ignore me). At school I was very much like Adrian: I would create Pandora Braithwaite’s to mope over because it was easier to play thwarted than it was to risk rejection. Love was what happened to lesser beings. The true romantics were ones that thought about it day and night. Love for me wasn’t a participatory sport, but an academic subject. I had studied it through literature, movies and music. I knew about its ability to embolden, to diminish, to harm and to save. I knew that it could render a clever man stupid and a weak man strong. If there was a test on it, I would pass it – as long as the exam weighted theory over practical. Love was an abstract noun, not a verb.

I wrote worse poetry than Adrian.

Creating a fantasy of love is a mistake that many of us make. For years, I sat in an the audience, observing it played out on stage: initially, I thought, “This is very interesting. I like the complexity of the piece. There’s pathos and comedy. There’s strength and insecurity. It seems to contain the whole gamut of human emotions.” Then, I thought, “I’ve been sitting here for twenty years, which is too long for any performance. Three hours should be the cut-off. Four hours tops if it’s Hamlet. This is just ridiculous. I’m not even down the front. I’m back in the cheap seats. My arse has gone numb. My legs feel like they’ve been in a car accident. It’s not even a very good play. Everyone is very melodramatic. I can’t stand the way the actor’s lip curls when he says, ‘heartache.’ This is bullshit!”

So on passing my theory test, I put in for a practical.

There have been major faults along the way. Times when I’ve felt like my heart has been torn, chucked and run over by a heavy moving vehicle. Crashing failures where I’ve lay at the side of the road wondering how I’m ever going to move again. Then, there are the experiences of elation. To be loved is an incomparable feeling. It’s all very well your mum loving you, but they are contractually obliged to, in terms spelt out in your mother’s stretch marks. If I’m going to put my body through this much, I might as well love the thing. Through no one’s fault but my own, I went a long time without the love of a good woman. And I can now say is that experiencing love first-hand is so much better than experiencing it vicariously through the movies.

This clash between fiction and reality is what the characters in Netflix comedy-drama Love have to contend with. Written by real-life couple Paul Rust and Lesley Arfin, alongside Judd Apatow (40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up), Love is a realistic portrait of romance.

Gus, a Midwestern, and Mickey, a New Jerseyan, are thirty-somethings lost in LA. Neither have the emotional capacity to maintain a relationship: Gus because he believes too much in love and Mickey because she doesn’t believe enough in it. Episode one manifests this through the breakdown of the pair’s respective relationships. Gus is dumped because he doesn’t read the signs; he is too in love with the idea of love to appreciate that his partner isn’t a concept that might not feel the same. Whereas Mickey pulls the plug on her dying relationship when her boyfriend skips sex to go clothes shopping with his mum. Both are treated poorly by their ex’s, but neither are model citizens. Gus tends to play the nice card to imprison girls in relationships, and Mickey gorges on men in the same way she does alcohol and drugs. If each wants to find love, they will have to find the intersection where romanticism and sex meets, otherwise they’re on the slow lane to lonely town.

Mickey (Gillian Jacobs) and Gus (Paul Rust)

The two meet at a gas station at the end of episode one (Mickey has forgotten her wallet so Gus offers to pay for her groceries: coffee and cigarettes), and the episode that follows is a doozy. The two walk and drive the City of Angels with the tentativeness of a new friendship. This isn’t the hyper-articulacy of Linklater’s Before series where on meeting the two discuss the great existential questions; rather it is the uncomfortable silences and mistimed jokes that arise from creating rapport out of anonymity.

Mickey: My mum always says I should date a Midwestern because they’re really sweet and honest

Gus: Oh really, well tell your mum to go fuck herself. (Worried at the impact of his mock-insult) I’m sorry that was … a .. joke.

Mickey: (finding the humour) I got it

Over the episodes the relationship of the two develops, albeit at a casual pace. Much of the series has the two characters apart, exploring Gus’ travails as an on-set tutor for precocious twonks and Mickey’s inability to keep a lid on her wild impulses. I read an article the other week about how the romcom is dying at the multiplex but thriving on television – with shows like this it’s easy to see why. Given the limited running time, a movie has to bring a couple together quickly and apart even quicker before they can be re-united at the end. This is hardly conducive to providing a realistic view of love. In a long-running series, you can focus on the intimate intricacies of love with the mistakes and missteps that make a relationship examined. For example, much of an episode is devoted to Gus’ paranoia over a text message he sends to Mickey. Some people will feel that this naval gazing is a mark of the Indie genre’s bloated obsession with extraneous details over plot; I would argue that it perfectly represents a society where too much emphasis is put on thought over action. Instead of going over to ask someone out, we now do it via text. Rather than leaving a message on someone’s house phone and expecting to wait a day for a response, we now agonise over how many minutes they’ve taken to reply to a text. Technology has over-complicated courtship and made screen-chained idiots of us – why shouldn’t a programme reflect this?

Gus composing the initiating text.

Apatow’s recent films have been criticised for being over-long, perhaps with TV he’s found the right medium to fully explore and stretch his ideas. Whatever his next move, Love is a shambling triumph. Like Catastrophe and Girls, it makes a virtue of its profanity, capturing the ugliness of a beautiful emotion. 

Love is on Netflix now.