Entrance/d
by Sue Lee

In a rhetorical theory class, the professor analyzed the underlying western ideology of what it means to "fall in love." "To fall or to trip" he said, "is an accidental act, which implies that we perceive such event to be in the hands of fate (or chance) and out of our control." He then moved on to discuss ideas about attitude, motive and rhetorical acts. I remembered that talk, because I remember being rather amused by the idea of "accidental" as if it's a bad thing to be avoided. Chuckling internally, I had kept my mouth shut in class at the time and did not offer my goofy interpretation[1]. The professor's focus was, as you could see, on the romantic notion of the verb "to fall" - accidental, despite the self, and adrenaline-inducing (something I did not notice till I write this very sentence). I still find these ideas interesting and do not refute them, though my curiosity has now shifted to the next word in line - in love. (Well, it's impossible to define love so we might as well let that one go and figure out the only remaining part that hasn't been analyzed to death.)

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What I just wrote in the paragraph above is meant to give personal context and literary pretext to the rest of the essay. What really triggered the thinking about the concept of being in love was the movie Hable con Ella (Talk to Her), or at least the movie provided the story (the text) that I can use as illustration for talk of love and desire.

Oh, this is not a sarcastic wordplay where I point out the obvious (some would say inevitable) outcome/alternative of being in love - out of love (depleted of it and departed from it). C'mon, a 13 year old could probably tell you the lowdown about broken hearts with equal eloquence of what I could say. Instead, I am intrigued and puzzled by love as the desire to get inside the woman. Alright, I stole that line from a man and I cannot identify with the urge to get inside a woman's body in anyway. But that desire for entrance is intriguing and I think instinctive as well.

The two progressive love stories in the film are the one between Alicia (the dancer) and Benigno (the nurse) and the one between Lydia (the bullfighter) and Marco (the travel writer). It is obvious how the different levels of this desire to enter get illustrated in Benigno's actions. The penetrating gaze through the dance studio glass window[2], the uninvited visit to Alicia's bedroom, and the eventual rape. All of these are acts of entrance. Into her performance space, her home, and her body. Illicit as these actions may be, there strangely remains room for sympathy. The silent film The Shrinking Lover epitomizes this desire through comic exaggeration that extends the limits of permissibility and focuses our attention on the man's desperation to please the woman. So we excuse Benigno because he was in love in the true quixotic sense and could not help but to enter.

Studio, bedroom, and body - these are physical spaces that become pervious when the woman is unaware, either through neglect or coma. But physical entrance is not the ultimate lover's mergence. As shown in the ending of The Shrinking Lover, the ideal state is the obliteration of the self where the boundary and presence of the individual disappears. In the silent film, this takes place when the man lunges into the woman's body and becomes no longer visible - the fulfillment is comical and surreal. Equally surreal but pathetic (and frightening) is Benigno's attempt to replicate Alicia's world in his own life so that the similarities in overlapping details mimics fusion. Unable to enter her life even in her comatose state, he takes on her hobbies and modifies his room to be just like hers, so that if she should one day awaken his world would be just as familiar to her as her own[3]. Her participation in this created world is subliminal. She is there and there is action in this make-belief world patterned after her own reality, but there is no progress. Love exists in a utopic realm where comatose condition suspends time and reaction indefinitely - only the reality of biology (sex and pregnancy) breaks that suspension.

Of course, there is more than one way to get in. Marco and Lydia's affair parallels that between Benigno and Alicia, but his desire for entrance is manifested differently. Less idealized, the passion is more real (not to mention acceptable) because the actions are wilful. He talked. He talked on and on when they travelled, so much that she didn't get much of a chance to talk back. Instead of appropriating her life, he pours his words into her ears and inserts his life into her mind so that even in her solitary stage of bullfighting, he is right inside. And when he escorted her out of the bar, whisked her away from her snake-tainted home, and swept her off her feet with memories of lost affair in faraway deserts, he entranced[4] her. Love happens in constant transit - a utopic realm where road trips prolong transience.

"Talk to her" says Benigno to Marco, when the two men discuss their correlative situations. The audience chuckle partly because it's ironic that the loquacious Marco would be getting such an advice but mostly because Marco was obviously uncomfortable with the sight of Benigno sneaking affectionate comments to the scantily-clad Alicia while holding this man-to-man conversation. We are touched by Benigno's persistent tender talk to the comatose Alicia - definitely before the revelation of the rape and likely still afterwards - but Marco's inability to talk to Lydia makes their relationship more realistic, or at least more understandable. It is an unromantic reaction showing that output of love is not unconditional; it is audience response dependent. And it is this expectation for response that delineates Marco's attachment from Benigno's obsessive love. The coma does not enable expressions of love; it suspends it. Meanwhile, ego (jealousy) and hope (care) continue to work as Marco contends with Lydia's bullfighter boyfriend to be the culprit of her injury and consults the nurse about the possibility of putting Lydia's medallion back on her. And when ego wavers (another loves her more so he is not needed), he leaves, but still expects her to be his responsibility - "I would've liked to be told", reproached Marco when he spoke with the nurse after finding out Lydia's death from the newspaper. This is possessive, albeit mild, but we are equally (likely more) sympathetic to Marco as we are to Benigno. Perhaps it is a reluctance to accuse because we too are prone to the same pathologies.

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The men with whom I watched the film said that the characterization is convincing. "How so?" I enquired. They uttered a few responses that fell far below their usual eloquence, but the gist of it was intelligible and it had to with the attractiveness and strength of the women. "Do you think there are women like that?" I supplemented. They agreed in unison almost immediately.

I was a bit puzzled by their swift unanimity, because I found it difficult to get a clear sense of the women's personality. To me, Alicia is an illusively charming figure even to the end when she was no longer in coma. Her actions are too brief for me to know her motives. They are promising of love, but we do not know how she loves or how she would like to be loved. Lydia, I figured, is more substantial, because we see enough interaction to know her temperament, but much of her narrative is still left a mystery.

At some point, I understood my friends' response. That they should so unquestioningly point to the women as the filmic focus of plausibility was not to say that the female characters made the film convincing. What they had found convincing is the seductive power the women had over the men. They had known what it feels like to be in love like that. And the film is not so much about the romance but about the lovers - the person loving and seeking entrance. And this desire to get inside is instinctive and independent of gender and sexuality. Lydia, too, loves the same way - asking questions to probe Marco's private thoughts, flinging herself into his embrace, and demanding the chance to talk. As lovers, we may recognize our own passion in another's longing (willingness to receive) but we could never really know the response of the loved. And the poignant fidelity of the film is exactly that.

Footnotes:

[1] It surprised even myself that I had actually written (and typed out) a short passage based on what the professor said. I was 21 and had tried harder to be original rather than citing my sources of my ideas. The writing now reads a bit like notes, like the mumbling of an intellectual parrot with some interpretive power. And here it is:

Why is that we "fall" in love. Instinctually, the action of falling seems to indicate a kind of misfortune or an unwilled descent. In fact, what is it that it makes love an accidental act, something out of the control of our hand? In fact this notion of falling in love is purely a construct of western ideal. That we wander and by chance meet the right one. The myth that very very long ago, each person had two heads, two pairs of limbs, two stomachs and only one heart. One day a stroke of lightening separated the conjoined human, so now we spend our lives searching for the person with the other half of our heart. These romantic concepts define what we believe love is, and so we wait for the right person to come along. Love becomes passive. Since passive, the responsibility is also out of our hands. So love depends on magic from some other divine source.

[2] The scene where Benigno admires the dancing Alicia is shot from within the studio, as if the gaze literally takes him into the bright dance hall. Such filmic technique demonstrates the invasiveness of the gaze at the same time it expresses Benigno's desperate need to displace himself from his own world.

[3] In cultural studies, such behaviour would be labelled as "appropriation" but, really, don't all lovers take on each other's characteristics to some degree? In an intimate embrace, you'd undoubtedly and unwittingly rub off another's scent.

[4] To entrance, as a metaphor, means to charm someone so much that he/she feels taken out of the mundanity of the existing reality and transported to a more fantastical world. Literally, however, to entrance means to put into a trance - a hypnotic, cataleptic, or semi-conscious state. So one could interpret Lydia's affair with Marco as the en-trancing factor - the distraction that led to the coma-inducing error and removed her from the ring forever.