All genuine love is a scandal. Loving my friends, family, or children means regarding them as more morally significant than others, and in whatever thought experiment you can concoct — the “trolley problem” or the question of who to put on a crowded lifeboat — I’m picking my own every time.
Ethicists have long found this assessment repugnant. “The fact that a person is physically near to us,” Peter Singer argues, “may make it more likely that we shall assist him, but this does not show that we ought to help him rather than another who happens to be further away.” All that matters is the quantity of good done: The love I feel for particular people has no importance in the cold utilitarian calculus of morality.
Michael Sarnoski’s debut film Pig (reviewed by Graham Hillard in these pages) forcefully depicts love in all its arbitrariness. Nicholas Cage plays Robin Feld, formerly one of the top chefs in Portland, Oregon, now a woodlands hermit who whiles away the days preparing rustic meals and hunting for truffles. He shares his life with his beloved truffle pig, who dutifully helps him locate the fungus beneath the loam and moss of the forest floor. Life is quiet and solemn, but not without happiness. That is, until a pair of tweakers break into Feld’s cabin in the middle of the night and steal his pig. Feld calls Amir, his sports-car-and-sunglasses-loving mushroom buyer, and the two decamp for the city to recover the kidnapped swine. When, later, Feld learns that Amir’s father is responsible for the pignapping, he makes a confession: “I don’t need my pig to find truffles. The trees tell you where to look.” Amir is incredulous. “Then why the f*** did we do all this?” Feld hesitates, stares into the distance, and professes: “I love her.”
For Feld, love is a disruption, a force that cements one bond while dissolving all others. At the end of the film, despite warm reencounters with old colleagues and comrades, he returns once again to his cabin to be alone. He sweeps out the dust that has collected in his absence and pops a cassette into his battery-powered radio, revealing the voice of his late wife, Lori. As the film fades out, the viewer is left to sort out the implications: that Feld’s retreat to the woods was due not to the apocalyptic premonitions he voices to Amir but to the pain of lost love.
St. Augustine understood this pain. In his Confessions, after his beloved friend dies of illness, Augustine finds his “heart … somber with grief”: “My own country became a torment and my own home a grotesque abode of misery … I hated all the places we had known together, because he was not in them.” As Augustine decamped for Carthage, to find a place where “[his] eyes were less tempted to look for [his] friend,” so Feld fled to the forest. A Portland without Lori was no Portland at all, but a hell. And in solitude, one can stay faithful to a memory.
But just as love can isolate a person, so too can it bring them into the world. In Kogonada’s Columbus, Casey, a recent high school grad from Columbus, Indiana, working at her hometown library, meets Jin Lee, the son of a prominent Korean architectural theorist who has recently fallen ill while working on a lecture about the city’s surprising collection of high modernist architecture. Unlike many of her high school classmates, Casey didn’t leave Columbus for more exciting cities on the coasts. Rather, she remains at home to help her mother, a recovering meth addict. Casey’s filial commitments cannot extinguish the longings of her heart, but in her case, the object of her affection is a building.
Between shifts at the library and evening quality time with her mother, Casey devours whatever she can learn about Columbus’s architectural heritage. In one especially moving scene, she takes Jin to the building that awakened her love of modernism: Deborah Berke’s Irwin Union Bank, an unremarkable rectangular box of greenish lighted glass stacked perpendicularly atop a similarly shaped foundation of tan brick. “There were nights that my mother just wouldn’t come home at all,” Casey explains. “I had no clue where she was. That’s when I started coming here. I found it weirdly comforting. In the middle of all the mess — this f***ing strip mall — there was this.” She continues: “I sort of weirdly became obsessed with this building after that. Suddenly, the place I’d lived my whole life felt different, like I’d been transported somewhere else.”
In the end, Columbus becomes a story about Casey and Jin’s love, not for one another but for modernist architecture. But their deep, mutual passion for something beyond the narrow confines of the self creates an opening for them to meet one another and forge bonds of solidarity. Casey’s modernist bank, like Feld’s cabin and truffle pig, becomes a haven from the anguish of a broken love. But whereas Feld’s love reduces the world to the density of a neutron star, hers is the pole around which a world opens.
These forms of love are not opposites but complements. Each one tempers the other’s excesses, and neither can be absent from a full and flourishing human life. Had he been willing to, Feld would have seen how his monomaniacal pig retrieval campaign brought him into contact with equally lovelorn others, most notably Amir, his comrade on the hunt. When Casey leaves for college to pursue her study of architecture, leaving behind both Jin and another potential love interest, one can’t help but feel that her decision carries a pang of tragedy: Her pursuit demands separation, not only from friends and romance but from her mother.
But of course, the ethicists were right: Love is unfair. All worldly union entails exclusion — only God can love universally, and particularity is the nature of human connection. “There has never been, and there will never be, an institutional means of making people brothers,” wrote the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski. Our bonds are formed in precisely the same freedom and spontaneity that make moral reflection necessary. This is why love is an inextricable part of ethics: Love provides the motivation that reason must direct.
We only ask “How should I live?” because there are choices to be made about living, and the same is true of loving. “How should I love?” is a meaningful question only for someone already grabbed by passion. So, while Pig and Columbus may leave us with more questions than answers, that’s precisely what makes them most valuable. They are, certainly, beautifully shot and wonderfully composed. But those of us who know the madness of love should also welcome them as especially insightful meditations on the passion and peril of loving. Taken together, they help us understand what it might mean to love well.
Joseph M. Keegin is an editor at Athwart and the Point. He blogs at www.fxxfy.net.
