Is love a con­ser­v­a­tive force?

In Dou­glas Sirk’s 1955 film All That Heav­en Allows, the daugh­ter of the main char­ac­ter Cary (Jane Wyman), played by Glo­ria Tal­bott cites The Oedi­pus Com­plex dur­ing a fam­i­ly back-and-forth. Accord­ing to Sig­mund Freud, love is defined as some­thing that we think we want. Before it arrives, we have a pre­con­ceived fan­ta­sy of what it will mean. We are not open to who­ev­er comes along and what they have to offer. We are slaves to pre-exist­ing desires. In oth­er words, love is a con­ser­v­a­tive force.

On Wednes­day 9 Decem­ber, Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty schol­ar John David Rhodes deliv­ered a detailed and knowl­edgable talk on queer melo­dra­ma as part of the BFI’s ​‘Love’ sea­son. He plumbed the depths of Dou­glas Sirk’s All That Heav­en Allows, Rain­er Wern­er Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and Todd Haynes’ Far from Heav­en. Clips brought to life the links between films bound by a shared visu­al lan­guage, an obses­sion with doomed love and explic­it homage in the lat­ter two titles.

Impres­sive­ly, con­sid­er­ing the pow­er of the flick­er­ing images on screen, the star of the show was Rhodes. His range of infor­ma­tion, ease with abstract con­cepts, insid­er anec­dotes and an engag­ing style meshed to cre­ate a cather­ine wheel of thought-pro­vok­ing and evoca­tive ideas. But the most rad­i­cal and far-reach­ing point was the con­ser­vatism of love.

This is mas­sive. In the con­text of a talk about queer expres­sion, it’s even big­ger. Is love con­ser­v­a­tive? If it is, can any of us that choose the secu­ri­ty of love ahead of the lone­ly busi­ness of explor­ing the fringes, make any claim to queer iden­ti­fi­ca­tion? Is the way we con­duct our per­son­al lives a rev­e­la­tion of our inner­most polit­i­cal val­ues or is it some­thing else entirely?

What do you think? Let us know @LWLies