Finnegan

Why no thread on what is arguably the central question posed in Young Americans: What is "true love"? It's raised explicitly at the close of episode 1 by Bella, who implies that she has just lost a "true love," and the rest of the series seems to try to answer it.

By the way, here's further evidence that I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed: only a couple of days ago did I come to understand that the primary reference of the Rawley motto, "Truth is Virtue," is to the question of "true love."

s e r e n i t y

How is truth is virtue the answer to true love?

Hmm as to what it true love, ... Im gonna have to think and come up with an answer, ... its most certainly not what Bella mentions as true love though

wolkenfuehlen

Maybe in the way that you should, ideally, always be able to be honest with your loved one?

People don't meet their true love when they're 15, as far as I'm concerned. Okay, there's maybe a few exceptions, but generally, no. So whatever Bella was referring to, it wasn't true love.

I second what Sheida said, I'm gonna need to think about my definition on true love. It's quite hard to come up with it if you haven't found it yet, I suppose. Because everything you write will end up being some ideal you're trying to find, and you don't even know if you can ever find it....

Finnegan

Sheida, Anja,

Before trying to decide what we think "true love" is, might we not usefully first ask what "Young Americans" suggests that it may be? Doesn't the show seem to be trying to teach us something about this? Maybe it's worth trying to learn ... Perhaps the best place to start might be with the tale of "true love" that YA re-tells that is already familiar to us since childhood: what does the old "test of true love" story, of "The Frog Prince," "Beauty and the Beast" and Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Tale" are variations, seem to suggest that "true love" may be? After answering that, we might ask: How does YA alter or add to that story in re-telling it, and what does that imply about YA's view of "true love"?

I quite agree that Bella's claim, at the end of episode 1, to have lost a "true love," is false, for various reasons, the most important of which has nothing to do with Scout and Bella. Set aside the specifics of the Scout-Bella relationship and think about that claim itself. Can one really lose a "true love," or is "loss of a true love" an oxymoron? Compare Bella' claim to have lost a "true love" at the end of episode 1 to Pratt's line at the end of episode 8: "Who says it's over?" Regardless of whether she ever sees Fleming again, is their love "over" if she uses the chance it has given her to choose life rather than the path of despair and self-destruction? Can "true love" ever fully die? Do the old myths of it die? Or do they get re-told in young ways because we need them, and it? Orpheus is a "failed savior" only if physical death, rather than failure to love truly, is that from which we need redemption. But as YA so often reminds us, and as Krudski's voice-overs so often remind us that it reminds us, what we want often is not what we truly need, and what, miraculously, we often are given, if we will receive it.

How "truth is virtue" bears on the nature of "true love" in YA

"Truth is virtue" is not the whole answer to the question of "What is true love in YA"? But it is a key part of the answer.

Two kinds of truth

The Rawley motto does not mean that truthfulness is a virtue. Instead, it defines truth as being virtue, calling our attention to the fact that there are two distinct kinds of "truth." The usual sense, nowadays -- less usual historically -- is "descriptive accuracy" (including accuracy in describing what will be, predictive accuracy). The other sense of "truth" is prescriptive or normative, and it is this sense of "truth" that the Rawley motto asks us to recover. Our "true" self - the self about which YA and Krudsky speak so often -- is not what we are, but what we should become. What is "true" in this older, prescriptive sense, is what should be in the sense of helping us to become what we should be -- what is "virtuous," edifying, character-building. Love, to be "true" in the sense of the Rawley motto, must help us become what we should be. Of course, that is merely a necessary condition, not a sufficient condition, not all that YA means by "true love." Nor does it answer the question: what kind(s) of love help(s) us become what we should be, and how?

The "child's" naive level of meaning: "true love" requires honesty

Consider the childhood stories that give us our childhood concept of "true love," and which YA re-tells. In what sense(s) is the love of which "test of true love" stories like "The Frog Prince" and "Beauty and the Beast" tell "true"? The descriptive sense? The prescriptive sense? Or both?

Despite being "magical," these old tales are remarkably practical in inspiration, responding to a descriptively "true" predicament of young love. That sexual passion can be driven largely by compassion rather than by physical beauty is evident in and to the old; but that this is possible is doubted by the young, who lack experience of relevant test conditons, and, contemplating marriage, they seek assurance that it is really possible. The point of the old stories is that it is not only possible, but present, even in youth, that compassion plays a large role in engendering and directing sexual passion even in youth, and that awareness this is transformative. To make the point, they suggest a thought experiment. "You're young and in love but you want to know whether you'll still be able to love your lover when he or she is old and ugly, as the marriage vows require? Imagine him or her as old and ugly tonight, and tomorrow night, and the night therafter. Imagine him or her as a frog, or beast, or hag. But imagine that he or she retains the same personality, worthy of love, a secret known only to you, and hence is unlovable, save by you alone. And observe whether lust is lastingly decreased, or ultimately increased by the resulting increase in your compassion. What you learn may suprise you -- you may learn that much of your passion is compassionate in origin."

Having learned this in childhood enables the bride or groom at the altar (traditionally a teenager, at least in the case of the bride) to say "I do," in response to the fearsome question about "for better or for worse ... til death do us part," feeling honest, accurate in self-description, "truthful" in the ordinary sense -- feeling that his or her love is "true." But the stories achieve this effect by showing that, even in youth, one has unsuspected power to become better than one is, or thinks one's self to be; awareness of one's power to love "truly" in the normative sense gives one the courage to commit to do so, and this helps one to become better than one is, to become more virtuous. So on the child's naive level of meaning, "true love," love that passes the fairy-tale test, is "true" in both senses of "truth," between which there is no apparent trade-off, no conflict: this love can dare to be virtuous because it knows itself to be honest.

Just as the transformation in the "test of true love" fairy tales is not really in the frog or beast or hag but in the lover who passes the test, and is not physical but spiritual, so the miraculous transformaton at the cotillion in YA is not really in Jake, but in Hamilton, and is not physical but emotional: the boy grows astonishingly toward what he should become. But in YA, Hamilton does not then kiss Jake and live happily ever after. He looks at her in horror and flees from her -- because by becoming more attractive physically to Hamilton, Pratt reveals herself to be far more emotionally and spiritually ugly than Hamilton had dreamed possible: a straight girl so scarred and disturbed as to enage in the wildly self-destructive behavior of pretending to be a boy at an all-boys' boarding school, with whom any love affair is doomed to end in heartbreak, probably soon, since she mustn't (even if she could) continue her gender deception and must leave Rawley to do so. To love Jacqueline, Hamilton must and does perform a second moral miracle that is an inversion of the "Frog Prince" moral miracle he performed to love "Jake." Obviously, insofar s the Jake-Hamilton story is YA's "true love" story, YA's notion of "true love" includes but goes beyond the notion of "true love" found in "The Frog Prince" and "Beauty and the Beast." YA poses a second "test of true love," namely: "Will you try to deliver me from my emotional hell, my despair of love, by loving me, even though it will be painful for you, and we may be parted before you can deliver me, and must part if you do deliver me?"

The adult level of meaning: "true" love must wear a mask

To pass this second test, I think, requires deception, a deliberate lack of "truthfulness" in the sense of "accuracy of self-description." I've posted repeatedly about why I think Fleming masks his mind from Pratt during the second half of YA, just as she masks her body from him during its first half, and about why he choses the particular mask that he wears. So I won't repeat the specifics. Instead, let me pose the question in a general form: can compassion be effective in helping its object become what it should be if it fully reveals itself to its object? Can compasson that is "true," in the prescriptive sense of the Rawley motto, be fully honest without loss of effectiveness? Can it ever speak other than "like silence," by deeds rather than words? Is it, like Eurydice, dissolved by sunlight, must it walk only in the shadows? Must it wear a mask of passon, pretending to be both less selfless and less spiritual than it is? Bluntly: if I tell you that I love you because you need love to become what you should be, even if you know that's true, will you feel more or less loved than if I just shut up and love you? But insofar as love is compassionate -- and it always is partly although never wholly compassonate -- it does in fact respond to need for love to help sustain emotional growth or prevent emotional deterioration. Hence love, insofar as it is compassionate, cannot be fully true in the "descriptive accuracy" sense if it is also to be true in the prescriptive sense of the Rawley motto.

Passion, by contrast, must be honest, must be accurate in self-descripton. If it's not, it can't be gratified, and can't help sustain compassion. That's Pratt's story in the first half of YA. She's as wrong to mask her body as Fleming is right to mask his mind. (However, whereas Fleming fails to see through Pratt's body-mask in the first half of YA, I think Pratt largely sees through Fleming's mind-mask in the second half of YA ... but that's another story.)

That compassion, unlike passion, must wear a mask, must not be "fully true" in the descriptive accuracy" sense of "truth" in order to be "true" in the prescriptive virtue sense of truth, is, in my view, is close to the core of what YA tries to convey in its Pratt-Fleming story-line in the second half of YA. And the Rawley motto articulates the more important sense of truth to which "true love" must sacrifice some self-descriptive accuracy.

None of this will be new to anyone who has ever given any serious attention to Judaism, Christianity or Islam, in all of which an essentially compassionate God never fully reveals himself to us because to do so would render his love for us less effective in helping us to become what we should be. Theological literature has long abounded in explanations of why God's true love for us requires him to mask himself from us. And theology struggles to resolve the tension beteen this theme and the Biblical insistance that "God cannot lie," which underpins the credibility of such limited Revelation as is believed to be given to us.

However, in a culture that is "post-Christian" theologically but not morally, that still wants compassion to rule our world, this has implications for art as a means of moral edification, of redemption, of inspiring compassion and "true love" -- as a means of doing what religious faith once did. It implies that insofar as art aspires to such goals, it must sometimes sacrifice descriptive accuracy or "realism," and use "myth." Rawley is "too good to be true" in the usual decriptive sense of "truth" in order to be "true" in the prescritive sense of the Rawley motto. And that's why it re-tells myths. Krudski, despite being descriptively deceptive both as a character and as a narrator, loves Rawley truely, but only because he loves us, his viewers, "truly," and Rawley is just a means to that end. My view is that YA masks its narrative perspective, and thereby of its adult level of meaning, for the same reason that Hamilton masks his emotions from Jacqueline during the second half of YA - in order to be prescriptively "true" in a redemptive love. On YA's adult level of meaning, Hamilton's masking of his mind in the second half of YA helps us understand why Krudski masks his narrative perspective, and why Antin masks YA's adult meaning. YA couldn't help redeem us if its compassionate intent to do so were too obvious. Yet Jake Pratt is Everyman, the old morality play protagonist, in desperate need of redemption. And Hamilton Fleming, who reenacts the hero role of old myths, also a photographer, is art trying to save us from our self-content by re-telling those myths in new ways: if he not kissing the us, he's kissing nobody, because we are the frog he exists in order to transform. If Jake and Hamilton don't make us want to love more "truly," YA fails on the adult level, and it's just another teen TV show. But insofar as they do, then: "Who says its over?"

True love: young and old at once

YA's adult-level message about the role of "truth" in "true love" does not negate but rather ironically complements its "teen-level" message about this, just as the adult meanings of fairy tales ironically complement rather than negate their meanings for children. "True love" must be honest, insofar as it is passionate; but it must also be a bit dishonest, insofar as it is compassionate. Each is true, but incomplete without the other: one must get both messages, must be both "young and old at once," to see the whole truth about "truth" in true love, and to love in a way that is fully "true." And Hamilton, who reenacts old myths of true love and passes the very "adult" tests that they pose, definitely is both young and old at once, in a deeper and stronger way than Krudski is; Fleming's re-living old myths of rebirth through true love is what inspires and enables Krudski to rejuvenate, to recover youth's passion and apply it to moral growth -- Fleming is the "warp drive" in Krudski's time-travel machine.

Why the two kinds of truth matter for "true love"

Again, this does not begin to capture all of YA's message about what "true love" is. It's not even the most important part. The core of YA's message about "true love," I think, is about the relatonship between two kinds of love, passion and compassion, not about the relationship between two kinds of truth, descriptive accuracy and prescriptive virtue. The relationship between the two kinds of truth matters only because it bears on our perception of how the two kinds of love interact, and on how that perception tends to make our love less than "true," less than what it could and should be.

Because compassion must be masked in order to be prescriptively "true," we tend not to appreciate adequately either compassion's power to engender and sustain passion or the power of passion to evoke compassion. Those powers are shown in the first half of YA, in which Fleming tries to mask, not his compassion, but his passion (because Pratt masks her body). In the first half of YA, the Pratt-Fleming story-line shows us how we should view the relationship between passion and compassion, and how much more prescriptively "true" and powerful our love might be if we did; it could transform us as it transforms Fleming. In the second half of YA, in which Fleming masks his mind in order to mask his ruling emotion, compassion, the Pratt-Fleming story-line shows us why we fail to understand the relationship between passion and compassion adequately: we fail to see through the mask that compassion must wear in order to be "true" in the prescriptive sense. But the relationship between passion and compassion in "true love" is a different story from this one about "truth" in "true love," which is already too long.

Finnegan

Bumped.

Summer's over, school's back in session. Anyone for a discussion of what, surely, is the core question posed by "Young Americans"?

Finnegan

Well, the Socratic approach to starting a discussion of this question seems to have failed. Perhaps I should just say what I think it is and invite comment?

It seems to me that Young Americans suggests that true love -- what Hamilton Fleming embodies, and what Will Krudski "goes to Rawley" to learn and transmits to us in YA -- is a passion that:

• is born of and expresses compassion, directed toward helping another (or others) become what he or she (or they) should become, hence essentially "virtuous;"
• often must and does masks the compassion it expresses, which is why we tend not to see the compassion underlying it, and is part of why we tend wrongly to regard passion and compassion as incompatible rather than complementary;
• is calculating and deliberate, although not outcome-contingent;
• effects moral growth, or "virtue," no less in its giver than in its recpiient;
• can, if recovered and redirected in maturity, be rejuvenating, by helping one overcome complacency, to set new expectations beyond the expectations of youth that one has fulfilled, and so continue to grow morally; and
• finds artistic expression in moral idealism rather than realism, in art that inspires striving for perfection, rather than depicting what is.

In YA, "true love" is given, most obviously, by Hamilton Fleming to "Jake" Pratt, in a "play within the play" that re-tells in a new way two old tales of "true love." However, it is also given by Rawley to Krudski-as-character and by Krudski-as-narrator to us as viewers. And it is offered to Scout Calhoun by Bella Banks, who, unwilling to risk her modest security for it, is unable to accept it; Calhoun is no less passionately compassionate that Fleming, although less archetypally so. And we may infer, from YA's many hints that the mature Krudski-as-narrator is married to Bella, that Krudski "goes to Ralwey" to learn to love Bella more truly -- to love beauty more truly through morally edifying art, to love us, his "readers," more truly. For all the recipients of "true love" in YA are, in some sense, "us," are Everyman: "Jake" Pratt, in needing true love desperately, is us; Banks, in being unwilling to accept it, is us; and Krudski, in needing to "go to school" and receive it in order to learn how to give it, is us.

Young Americans is a post-theological cinema essay on love for a largely post-Christian audience, for whom love is all that remains of what we once called "God," or who have ceased to pretend that we can know more of God than love, or know God other than through love. At the core of the drama is the question of how passion (eros) relates to compassion (agape), a question at the core not only of 20th-century philosophy of love (Anders Nygren, Denis de Rougement, Martin D'Arcy) but also of 20th century nouvelle theologie, an effort, foreshadowed by Kierkegaard, to re-base faith on emotion rather than on intellectual assent to dogma. That movement has so far succeeded that one of its foremost advocates became Pope in 2005, and titled his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est. an encyclical, the message of which a leading U.S. Jesuit scholar summarized as: "God’s Eros Is Agape" -- compassion is God's passion.

This is surely deliberate. Steven Anitin, in an interview in the Los Angeles Times in August 2000, mentioned that his two favorite authors are Flannery O'Connor and Ellen Gilchrist. Both these Southern American woman writers are centrally concerned with the post-Christian predicament, although they respond to it in quite different ways. The Catholicism, O'Connor's passionate commitment to which pervades her fiction, is that of the nouvelle theologie, a faith more of the heart than of the head; see Ralph C. Woods, Flannery O'Connor, Benedict XVI, and the Divine Eros, Christianity and Literature, Autumn 2010. On the centrality of Gilchrist's post-theological faith to her life and writing, see her essay, "Sunday Morning," in her The Writing Life (pages 105-109); see also her short story, "Witness to the Crucifixion."

And it is no accident that, at the climax of YA, the end of episode 4, Antin reads to us a poem from a poet whose central concern was the cultural predicament posed by the non-viability of traditional faith for moderns, whose best-known poem is so unforgettable:

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

There, in "Dover Beach," is the despair to which Young Americans responds. An emotional despair, a feeling of being unloved, represented in YA as being in the heart of a fatherless girl whose mother sees in love nothing more than sex. A pain for which YA suggests that help, represented by the persona of Hamilton Fleming, is, miraculously, accessible -- if only we will love another more truly. It is the old tale, "love one another," retold with exigent but practical moral idealism, with an insistence that we do it better than we do -- that true love is an art that we must go back to school to learn:

Here, as so often in YA, it is the seemingly vapid and platitudinous lines that are most fraught with meaning. This is an anti-catechism by YA's AntiChrist:

Finnegan

Is Shakespeare's oft-quoted line about true love descriptive or tautological? Is there some hubris in true love that draws the wrath of envious gods down upon it? Or, rather, does love have opportunity to prove itself true only in the presence of adversity?

Shakespeare, being Christian rather than pagan, presumably meant the latter, and Lysander's speech in Midsummer Night's Dream therefore seems ironic.

YA also seems to suggest the latter. Its theme, Antin repeatedly told the press in 2000, is "star-crossed love," depicted in deliberate imitation of Shakespearean models. However, Will Krudski's essay in episode 1 speaks of turning obstacles into opportunities by overcoming them. It is (illusory and hence surmountable) obstacles that give Hamilton Fleming and Bella Banks opportunity to prove their loves true; he seizes the opportunity, she fails to do so.

We may all hope to love as truly as Fleming, but must hope no less never to be so tested. Hence the drama's "there but for the grace of God go I" quality. And we may all hope to be loved as truly as is 'Jake' Pratt, but we dare not demand that love prove itself true by inflicting adversity upon our lover as a test. 'Jake,' by cross-dressing and then pursuing Hamilton, does exactly that: she effectively albeit perhaps unintentionally demands demonstrably "true" love while cutting herself off from anything less. She is wrong to do so, and Hamilton, no matter how cunning or deep his thoughts on the night of the cotillion may be, is right to tell her that "If you were a guy, I would punch you." Only the fact that she is in hell herself excuses her demand that Hamilton descend into hell to save her -- excuses, but does not justify.

Quote:

Ay me! for aught that I could ever read, Could ever hear by tale or history, The course of true love never did run smooth; But, either it was different in blood,-- Or else misgraffed in respect of years,-- Or else it stood upon the choice of friends,-- Or, if there were a sympathy in choice, War, death, or sickness did lay siege to it, Making it momentary as a sound, Swift as a shadow, short as any dream; Brief as the lightning in the collied night, That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth, And ere a man hath power to say 'Behold!' The jaws of darkness do devour it up. -- Lysander, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act I, scene 1