Lifestyles Matter in Love: Rear Window

The idea that love can overcome any barrier is nice in theory. In reality, it is less than practical.

That doesn't mean, love can't overcome differences in backgrounds, family, social standing, economic disparities, educational experience, and future goals. But if members of a couple think that declarations of affection are enough, they are kidding themselves. 

In Rear Window, Jeffries argues that (1) Lisa wants him to change (she implies he could change by becoming a society photographer, which, of course, he would loath); (2) Lisa isn't prepared for the life he leads. He is entirely correct, at least in that moment. The exchange also produces one of the best lines by Jeffries: "I'm just trying to make [my lifestyle] sound good." 

They come together over the case. Lisa is daring and clever. Moreover, the script implies a few times that she is not entirely enthralled by her shop-lunch-get-quotes-from-celebrities lifestyle. She may in fact be up for jaunts in the wild. 

Which doesn't mean Lisa has subordinated her personality. She still is greatly interested in fashion, which world can be cut-throat in its own way. 

The relationship could possibly work if both parties accepted that certain things they do are off-limits. So Jeffries visits warlords and takes pictures, then returns to Paris where Lisa is easily navigating political and personal minefields within the fashion world. He attends a show. And then they both go to, say, the 1956 Olympics or the first interfaith meeting in Morocco or a session of the House Un-American Activities Committee. 

In other words, I don't think Lisa should be hanging out around the Suez Crisis with Jeffries. It has nothing to do with competence or well-meaningness. It has everything to do with experience. And I rather suspect that Jeffries' sardonic comments may not go over terribly well with Balenciaga (though fashion designers are fairly tough), especially since it is doubtful that he would have any  idea what he was talking about. 

They could be a working couple, who each respect the work the other does partly alone.

The Conservatism of Erotica: Reibun Ike's Series

The 2-volume manga series here is about men from a group of related islands--all with different economic specialties--who battle to be king of the island alliance.

They engage in a frankly biologically-based battle that comes down to who can get the other man to..."spill." 

I'm being coy because being more direct would turn this into a sex blog, which it isn't (precisely). 

The manga is much more direct, both visually and verbally. 

And the series is one of the most thoroughly conservative series I've ever read. 

It is also remarkably well-written. Not only are the characters given clear and memorable personalities and not only does each couple have its own arc--the arcs are connected to human behavior, culture, and the central conflict. 

The primary couple is Harto and Matthew. Harto attends Oxford, where he has to learn to dress somewhat differently. There he meets Matthew, his boyfriend-to-be. He isn't sure how Matthew will react to his cultural practices. Matthew, an anthropologist, isn't sure either. But he is able to make the leap from I'm may not like this personally to I'm not the issue here--he is a rather objective guy. 

Another couple, Vampir and Naga, have to deal with Vampir turning into a somewhat different person--due to his island's mystical practices--during battle. Where exactly does love begin and end when the issue is "you are the person I want to be with"? 

And another couple have to deal with family members insisting that their marriage can't go forward unless the battle delivers a certain outcome. That particular storyline produces an examination of various cultural practices associated with permanent relationships, like who builds the couple's house and where.

And so on...

The series is truly remarkable and falls into erotica rather than porn because the set-ups are not merely excuses for characters to have sex or even loving dialog. I've read manga which were supposedly "cleaner" where I could never figure out whether the characters even had personalities, let along motivations for anything. But Reibun Ike's series is story--or, rather, a series of stories about characters and sex. 

In the end, how to be in relationships is what matters. And who people are--how they look, think, battle, and resolve problems--also matters. The physical is important. So is the emotional (feelings, memories). And fidelity is always on the table. 

A-Z Romance! Drake

I picked up Olivia Drake's The Duke I Once Knew. Although I found the main character engaging, and I appreciated her desire to head out on her own, I found the premise somewhat unappealing:

She goes to work as a governess for the sister of a man with whom she lost contact years earlier. They blame each other for the ceased contact, and she never wants to see him again!

Yet she goes to work for his sister...

Right.

I think Elizabeth Bennet visiting Pemberley is allowable because (1) it is one day; (2) she is honestly curious about Darcy. She is shocked to encounter Darcy but accepts his appearance as an acceptable possibility. They use the encounter to reach a friendly peace, before Darcy determines to court her again.

But going to stay on an estate owned by a man whom one supposedly loathes because he broke one's heart--with the excuse that he won't ever visit--makes me roll my eyes. Even though the main character has limited options and is afraid her family will change her mind if she doesn't move rapidly (one of her more believable motivations), she does have other options.

Take Jane Eyre:

Jane spends eight years at Lowood as a student where she "had the means of an excellent education" and two as a teacher. However, once Miss Temple leaves, she finds she is tired of the "uniform" life.

I desired liberty; for liberty I gasped; for liberty I uttered a prayer; it seemed scattered on the wind then faintly blowing. I abandoned it and framed a humbler supplication; for change, stimulus: that petition, too, seemed swept off into vague space: “Then,” I cried, half desperate, “grant me at least a new servitude!”

So she places an advertisement in the paper.

"A young lady accustomed to tuition is desirous of meeting with a situation in a private family where the children are under fourteen. She is qualified to teach the usual branches of a good English education, together with French, Drawing, and Music.”

She only receives one reply--from Mrs. Fairfax--but here is a young lady at the age of eighteen showing more careful thought and activity about her future than a character who is near thirty. She later uses her education to help at St. Rivers' school. 

I don't much care for female characters who treat every encounter as an opportunity to argue; however, I do rather like them to use their heads. I don't care for heroines who are maneuvered into situations they would never have brought upon themselves: oh, my, how did that happen? 

Elizabeth and Jane comes across as more modern than some contemporarily written historical characters.  

The issue of lovers who previously fell out beginning over--see Austen's Persuasion--will crop up again.

Shakespeare's Couples: Antony & Cleopatra

These posts examine Shakespeare's couples. For Antony and Cleopatra, however, I went to the Hollywood extravaganza rather than Shakespeare's play. Cleopatra stars Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra and Richard Burton as Antony.

By all accounts, the historical couple truly were that attached and tempestuous. That is, Cleopatra and Caesar slept together as high-powered political entities. They knew exactly how to use each other.

But Cleopatra and Antony were apparently that much in love and that...dumb about it. A number of historians tut-tut over Roman insularity, used by Augustus, to argue that Antony was pitting a "foreign" mistress/power against Rome. They point out, correctly, that Egypt wasn't seen as a different Empire but as part of Rome. Every Roman general was occupying land outside of "Rome."

However, I think the historian's arguments are special pleading. I think any populace would look askance at Antony's behavior: a guy who leaves his wife and family to spend more time than necessary with a royal entity who has already linked herself to Caesar--who is also a problem for Rome. She is, moreover, a canny politician (not the drug-addled character in HBO's Rome) and has her own host of familial complications. And all of this during a Civil War!

In any case, the pair require smoldering passion. Elizabeth and Burton mostly deliver. Critics have accused Taylor of being too shrill and Burton as being too sour. Both criticisms are true. 

However, Taylor is far better than most Cleopatras, who far too often are too young, pretty, and pouty. Taylor, at least, comes across as self-possessed. At best, she comes across as tough while being sexy, not sexy in spite of being tough. And Burton exhibits charisma, a great man in diminishment. They are believably romantic and believably dysfunctional. 

Everybody in Romance Should Have a Job: Cops in Fake

On Votaries, I discuss the importance of jobs in fiction, specifically mystery shows, specifically Blue Bloods. 

Job are important in romance too. 

I especially enjoy the cops in Sanami Matoh's Fake.

Fake is the first yaoi series that I read--if one discounts Descendants of Darkness (which many critics do, placing it in the "too complicated to label" genre).

I believe that I read the first volume through the local library system. Memory being what it is, it is possible that I initially Interlibrary-loaned the first 6 volumes (I know I had to order the 7th from Amazon--I then worked backwards to collect them all). 

I was immediately enchanted. I love police procedurals, for one thing (Blue Bloods, The Closer, Law & Order). The series is also exceptionally well-translated; I'm convinced that the translator, Nan Rymer is also a Law & Order fan. The slang, interoffice grumblings, in-office arguments, use of expletives and contemporary allusions are entirely appropriate to the genre and to Law & Order specifically. The series came out in 1994 and was translated in 2003. I have elsewhere compared Dee to Mike Logan from original Law & Order. Ryo, on the other hand, is the archetypal dreamy hero though he is a sharpshooter par excellence!

Dee in Mike Logan-mode

In some ways, Fake was an entirely appropriate introduction to yaoi: the high jinks, ADHD ongoing action, the entire lack of reality despite the realistic setting: everyone in the police department is completely blithe about Dee and J.J.'s sexuality. Eh, so they're bi and gay; hey, who cares?! FYI: The series is set in the late 1990s, not the distant future.

In some ways, reading Fake first was a little misleading. I had no idea until much later that having Dee and Ryo be tall, obviously masculine, and equally aggressive (cop-wise) was in any way unusual for yaoi, especially yaoi in the late 1990s. Dee is the pursuer while Ryo is the pursued--but again, I didn't realize until much later that their seme/uke roles are quite unlike those in much other yaoi. Dee is always trying to kiss Ryo but there is no non-con, and he accepts Ryo's apparent disinterest with grace and surprising maturity (this is Dee we're talking about). As for Ryo, he isn't a straight man falling in love against his will with another guy. He's a gay man coming to terms with being gay.

I had no idea that any of this was outside-the-box. All I cared about, then and now, was the stories and character development. Each volume has several "cases" from a serial bomber to several serial killers to a couple of drug lords. Each case is well-plotted. There's an overarching plot with a sweet resolution.

The character development is aided, of course, by the fact that the romance takes place in the workplace. The characters have jobs! 

They are cops, so they have cases to discuss (see above), witnesses to interview and protect, clues to track down, fights to end. They also have a blustery Gormley-type boss, a competitive detective who tries to break up their partnership, and--after the station house is blown up--a new office to move into. 

They do all of that while presenting personal character flaws and virtues in a comprehensible context.

The series does end a tad abruptly--though there have been additions. Matoh's art changed slightly later on--I discuss this when I reviewed Until the Full Moon. For now, I will state that Matoh continues to represent for me the powerful enchantment of art-in-motion (see post about Good Manga Art). 

A-Z Romance! Chase

Loretta Chase is one of my favorite romance writers. She captures the Regency time period alongside screwball comedy banter and various set-ups that require strong pay-offs.

I reread Knaves' Wager, one of her earliest. Her later novels are somewhat more complex plotwise, but this early novel indicates Chase's strengths. It provides characters and conflicts that are resolved through more than an abrupt death or sudden change of mind, both the equivalent of deus ex machinas.

 

Loretta's characters are clever; her problems demanding. The set-ups demand clever and demanding resolutions.

 

In terms of character growth, she does a decent job with her "knave," Lord Julian Brandon, who comes to realize how much he wants to seduce widow Lilith Davenant and spend time with her, even to the point of discussing...drainage!

 

Her heroine, strong-minded and somewhat regal and more than a little shattered by her past marriage, is likable. Strong-minded heroines will come up again and again in this list. If they have reasons for their strong-mindedness, including their fundamental personalities, they are far more likable than if they are operating within some kind of slated role. Chase's strong-minded women are always well-rounded characters. 

In fact, my favorite Chase is Mr. Impossible, which takes place in Egypt, involves a rascally hero and a smart, strong-minded, somewhat tunnel-visioned heroine (in the Temperance Brennan tradition). It delivers hilarious dialog alongside a Rider Haggard adventure.

 

Chase brings home to readers that romance is a story; it is an art in its own right.

Romance in Historical Epic Films: Couples as a Given

Although romance is almost always in epics, it is usually not the focus of the epic, not even Last of the Mohicans, which I would argue is mostly an excuse to look at the landscape and the beautiful people.

I don't consider the lack of romance a flaw. It isn't good to not have it. It isn't bad to not have it. It just is.

I do get irritated when it seems like the romance is there just to be a source of epic angst. I quite enjoy the first half of Cleopatra with Elizabeth Taylor. I find the second half--as Antony self-destructs--rather dull. Likewise, I never moved on to Rome's second season, in part because I thought the death of the wife was pointless (I was far more interested in watching an ordinary family survive the upheavals in Ancient Rome than watching them enact melodramas) and mostly because I don't care how much Cleopatra and Antony loved each other or destroyed one another, which the second season, by default, focused on.

 

From a more workable standpoint, Dov's romance with Karen in Exodus belongs in the "and then she died" category since no parental figure of good sense would encourage Karen to commit to Dov. Her death is more about Dov's growth than Karen's in any case. 

Maria and Andrea

Two non-doomed romances in epics--Hawkeye and Cora from Last of the Mohicans and Andrea and Maria from Guns of Navarone--work to an extent because they are taken for granted. Hawkeye does rescue Cora and there is a kind of a rival but the relationship by the leads is assumed. In Guns, Andrea's relationship with the freedom fighter, Maria, provides motivation for Andrea to change direction in his life. The romance is skillfully set up in prior scenes, in part because Maria announces her attraction to Andrea (providing an opportunity for Gregory Peck's Keith Mallory, who is in the car during the exchange, to look blankly bemused, which he does effortlessly). 

 

Epics in romance are opportunities to present romances as givens, which approach can itself be quite relaxing.