In all about love, bell hooks makes some bold assertions about our cultural values and our beliefs about love. It comes out pretty bleak, and such bold assertions demand proof, right? If she’s right, the proof should be pretty easy to find in the products of our popular culture, like movies and songs. So let’s see if she’s right.

We’re going to look at 3 examples, of the tens of thousands that our culture gives us to choose from. 3 very popular movies of the last 22 years. Two of them star Kate Winslet. But not the first one. Watch the trailer for each, read the breakdown of the plot (summaries largely provided by Wikipedia), and then see if the movie does indeed exhibit the cultural beliefs about love that hooks has identified. And after this, you’ll choose a fourth movie for yourself, and do the same.

Spoiler alert: everything about these movies will be spoiled for you.

1. The Notebook

The Notebook Movie Trailer [HD] (2:12),https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FC6biTjEyZwLinks to an external site.

There are 2 elements to this movie: the basic story, and the way it is framed.

This is the basic story: Noah, a poor, working-class manual laborer sees Allie, a 17 year old heiress, at the carnival. They’re both teenagers. They fall in love at first sight, and have a summer affair, almost but not quite having romantic sex in an abandoned house, but her parents break up the relationship because he is from a lower social class. Her parents move the family away. Noah writes to Allie every day for a year, but her mother intercepts and hides the letters, so she never knows. She waits for him for several years, but she eventually meets and gets engaged a lawyer from her social class. It’s a “good match,” and her parents are happy.

He has been away at war for several years, and when he comes back, he buys the abandoned house that they almost had sex in. One day Noah accidentally sees Allie with her fiancé, and decides that if he refurbishes that house like she wanted him to, he will get her back. Later on she reads a story in the newspaper that he has done just that. She goes and finds him in the house, they finally do have sex. It’s great. Her mom reveals that she hid all those letters from him. She breaks up with her fiancé and returns to Noah. They get married.

We know that they live happily ever after because the framing story is an old man reading a story to an old woman who has dementia. It turns out that it’s Noah and Allie, still together decades later, and he is reading her their journals she can relive their love every day. And at the end of the movie, they go to sleep together holding hands, and they die together.

What does this movie teach us about love?
Does it show us those messages identified by bell hooks?

• Love is very important. Definitely it’s more important than social compatibility.
• Love is inevitable. It will happen for you, no matter who you are, no matter what you do. Even if your mom hides the letters.
• Love is passive and effortless; you don’t need to do a thing to make it happen, and in fact it’s better if you don’t do anything.
• Love is led by sexuality.
• Love is blind and intuitive. If love tells you to climb the ferris wheel, then you climb the ferris wheel.

2. Titanic

Titanic – Official Trailer [1997] (4:08), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezcvpLIyifU&t=7sLinks to an external site.

There are 2 elements to this movie: the basic story, and the way it is framed.

This is the basic story: 17 year old Rose is a first-class passenger on the Titanic. She’s sailing with her mother and her fiancé, to whom she does not wish to be engaged—but social class is an issue. Jack, an impulsive working-class artist stops her suicide attempt, and soon after Rose joins Jack in the 3rd class compartment. They eventually have sex inside an automobile in the cargo hold. Then the Titanic crashes into an iceberg, and it’s all over. Further social complications ensue, but ultimately, Jack dies of hypothermia, but Rose is saved. Her spurned fiancé ends up committing suicide in the Wall Street Crash of 1929, which is an added emphasis to the message that social class means nothing in the face of love.

The framing story? A treasure hunter searches the wreck of the Titanic for a necklace with a rare diamond, finding only a drawing of a young woman wearing the necklace. The drawing bears the same date as the day the Titanic was struck by an iceberg, and the woman is Rose. The diamond-hunter decides to stop hunting for the diamond after he interviews Rose about it, but Rose actually still has the diamond, and she dumps it in the ocean over where the wreck happened. The film ends with her dying in her sleep, and us seeing her reuniting in the afterlife with Jack and some other people who died on the Titanic on the ship’s Grand Staircase.

What does this movie teach us about love? Does it show us those messages identified by bell hooks?

• Love is very important. Definitely it’s more important than social class—and in fact, one of the great repeated messages in our popular films is that love is democratic, which is not exactly true. It’s a lot easier to do if you have time and money.
• Love is inevitable. It will happen for you, no matter who you are, no matter what you do. Even if you have a fiancé.
• Love is passive and effortless.
• Love is led by sexuality.
• Love is blind and intuitive.

Both of these movies are Romeo and Juliet. Our culture feeds us Romeo and Juliet over and over again as if it is a desirable ideal, which it is not. I think what we desire is a certainty that we are powerless to change, because this would relieve us of the responsibility and action that we need to take in love.

3. The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

And what better way to relieve you of taking responsibility in love than to simply remove your memory? Do that and you become incapable of anything but chemically-driven impulse, which is the way love is presented again and again and again.

Shy Joel and outgoing Clementine are magnetically drawn together, in spite of their contrasting personalities. They are actually former lovers who have dated for two years, but she hired a company to erase all of her memories of their relationship, then he did it too. The whole movie is Joel experiencing his memories of Clementine in reverse. Just before his last memory of her is erased, he has the memory of her telling him to meet her somewhere—to which they then both travel again, where they meet on a train. Their turbulent relationships memories have been mailed to them, so they review them, and Clementine says maybe we should just stop this now—but Joel says no, we can’t, because we have such a deep connection. They agree that they are meant to be together.

And there is a framing story, where one of the employees of the memory-erasing company uses Joel’s memories to try to seduce Clementine.

ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND (2004) – Official Movie Trailer (2:01),https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zFywiAh7N0 Links to an external site.

• Love is very important. Definitely it’s more important than being compatible.
• Love is inevitable. It will happen for you, no matter who you are, no matter what you do. Even if you have your memories erased.
• Love is passive and effortless; your chemistry will put you in the same place at the same time, again and again and again.
• Love is led by sexuality.
• And love is blind and intuitive. Your impulses will always beat your lack of real compatibility.

The messages conveyed in these films are not outliers. They are the standard. They are the norm. The script is repeated again and again, so no wonder we learn it so well, and we come to believe it, even if it’s a destructive fantasy.
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Now you.

This discussion has five parts:

Part 1. Choose a popular love/romantic movie of the last 20 years. It’s more fun if it’s one you know and enjoy.

Part 2. Post a link to a trailer of the movie. You should be able to find one on YouTube.

Part 3. Summarize the movie. If you use Wikipedia to help you out, be sure to reference it.

Part 4. Explain (in greater detail than I did above) how the film illustrates what bell hooks says are American cultural beliefs about love. Use quotes from, and properly reference, hooks’ all about love. I strongly suggest you use the video lecture to help you do that. Just like in the above analyses, I want you to illustrate how your chosen movie illustrates these key points from hooks:

• Love is very important.
• Love is inevitable.
• Love is passive and effortless.
• Love is led by sexuality.
• Love is blind and intuitive.

Your initial post should be about 500 words long. and use this book

• hooks, b. (2001). All About Love: New Visions. Three/Honesty: Be True to Love; Six/Values: Living By a Love Ethic; Seven/Greed: Simply Love; Nine/Mutuality: The Heart of Love; Ten/Romance: Sweet Love.New York, NY: Harper Collins Publishers