I believe, love is as much a sentimental product as it is a sociological construct. It is a promiscuous conspiracy by the media consortium. Television portrays love as soap operas and melodramas, while newspaper turns it into stories of sexual and murderous obsessions. Hollywood treats it as a fairy tale for the feminine and a muscle show for the masculine. Hence, the terms damsel in distress and knight in shining armor come into existence.
The problem is, we are very much conditioned by the media. Most of us learn a lot about coupleship from the media, from those shallow portrayals of romantic affairs. As a consequence, we grow up dreaming. We grow up with the idea that fate would bring us to our princes or princesses. However, reality suggests otherwise, even to the real princes and princesses. Just look at the tragic love story of Prince Charles and Princess Diana.
My last romantic debacle impelled me to question myself: which comes first, media or misery? Do I consume these songs, films and books because I feel miserable? Or do I feel miserable for the media tell me so? Of all the hype about teenagers listening to suicidal love songs and housewives doing sessions of soap operas, people only worry that some kind of mindless entertainment will take them over. Strangely, almost nobody worries about grown-ups remembering thousands of memories about broken hearts, rejection, pain, and loss. Even less people worry that those grown-ups would continue living with the same flawed dream.
Love might be a comedy for the working class, tragedy for the bourgeois, and both for the enlightened bourgeois. But, really, the only way to survive in this day and age is to lose the illusions created by the media. In this case, losing an illusion is better than finding a truth. Success in love does not depend on the answers you have, but on the questions you ask to yourself.
—Some musings after a late-night conversation in a noodle shop, and a session of ALL ABOUT LILY CHOU-CHOU (Shunji Iwai, 2001)
Saya sangat sangat sangat sangat sangat suka film Shunji Iwai yang satu ini. Fortunately, love to me (still) happened to be the greatest comedy to shed tears to (hope i'm falling to the right conspiracy). Anyway, cheers for the writing!
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