Fearful Illusions
I have been doing up a module on the theme of love and fear and, as my case study for that, I revisited the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, where one in their sorrow tries to erase the memory of a former beloved, only to recant and search for an island of memory that escapes the erasure.
At first, I struggled with the listing of love and fear as opposites, thinking that love’s foe would actually be hate. However, the movie was a beautiful (if incredibly quirky) demonstration of a more fundamental truth, that hate is epiphenomenal to a deeper disposition, namely fear.
Seen in an Augustinian light, this makes sense given that the main driver for one stricken by sin is not hate per se, but a distorted love that morphs into a desire for control - what Augustine calls the “lust for domination”. Beneath this seemingly macho desire is another more fundamental fragility, namely the fear that this control would be lost. It is this fear that then that manifests itself in hate of the other, only it is a hatred insofar as that person is truly other, outside the scope of our control. Fear then translates to resentment.
Not only that, in the same way that Augustine said that the “lust for domination” makes us lose our grip on reality, the movie also demonstrated how, when gripped by fear, a person could also be made to lose their grip on reality. More accurately, they can be made to desire after illusions that suit their own fantasies. These are trimmed down and polished out facsimiles of reality that are easy to engage because they suit our drive to control reality.
By contrast, what love causes us to do is to have a hard nosed look at the complexity of reality. More specifically, it causes us to look at the facets of reality we do not control, and yet work towards the good of it anyway. In the case of the movie, this is demonstrated in a protest that one should be pursued as a person (in this case a “fucked up person”), not a simplified concept that fulfils one’s fantasy.
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