There are some storytelling tropes that are so cliche that you just know they speak to something deep inside us.
Take this one, the trope that happens at the end of so many romantic comedies, of someone dashing through an airport, train station or city street to profess their love to someone else before it's too late.
Does this happen in real life?
I mean, I'm sure it does sometimes.
People, of course, profess their love all the time, though usually it's not so dramatic or kinetic, I should say.
Every profession of romantic love is dramatic, it's just that the drama is happening inside.
This trope externalizes those interior fireworks, which is to say, it makes the feeling cinematic.
But you know, it doesn't really matter if these mad dashes are happening in real life.
The trope isn't so much a reflection of reality as it is a reflection or projection of a deep desire that exists in all of us.
In rom-coms.
That desire takes the form of true love, but at its core it's a desire for meaning, for a meaningful life.
In the modern day.
We live in a world without a cosmic moral order, a framework of meaning to which everyone automatically subscribes.
We had one for a while, but round about the year 1700, give or take a century, that framework started cracking fragmenting, losing its authority and the burden of finding meaning shifted onto individuals.
We all became desperate seekers in a confusing and disjointed world.
It's no coincidence that this shift roughly coincides with the emergence of the novel as a form of storytelling.
In a profoundly new way.
The novel concerned itself with individuals, ordinary individuals, their internal motivations, their inner lives, their ability to overcome obstacles to achieve a goal.
Novels both reflected and shaped the way modern people saw their identities as narratives, as stories with a beginning, middle and end, as quests for meaning.
As Alastair MacIntyre writes, the unity of a human life is the unity of a narrative quest.
And what's the grail for this quest?
It's fulfillment.
The sense of living a full and meaningful life.
You can get that in lots of ways.
Religion, work, community, charity, art, parenthood.
But around this time, culture, with the help of the novel, invented another way.
One that was theoretically, if not practically, open to everybody.
Romantic love.
Now, did love exist before modernity?
Yes.
Did people feel overwhelming romantic affection before modernity?
Of course they did.
What changes, writes Charles Taylor, is not that people begin feeling affection for their spouses, but that these dispositions come to be seen as a crucial part of what makes life worthy and significant.
The other, by being who he or she is, answers a lack.
And this lack is directly to do with self-identity.
In some sense, the flawed individual is made whole.
Or to put that Anthony Giddens quote another way.
You.
Complete.
And so in the 1800s there's an explosion of romantic novels and, in the following century, romantic comedy films.
These films, like those novels, are not always, or even usually, that sophisticated, but fantasies of this kind don't have to be to work.
They work because romantic love, this product, this invention of modernity works.
It can be a strong anchor in a confusing and disjointed world, a way of feeling psychologically grounded, a way of giving your life real meaning.
Is it the only way?
No.
Are there complexities?
Obviously, yes.
But the fantasy is allergic to complexity.
In the fantasy, the goal is simple, singular, and the achievement of that goal is all that matters.
There is just something deeply comforting about seeing people on a quest for love run in straight lines toward meaning that they're absolutely certain of.
In reality, lines are never so straight.
There are no lines.
We stumble and spiral, haunted by doubt and ambivalence.
That's the curse of modernity.
Or maybe that's too harsh.
It's the challenge of modernity.
And while we all face it, who can begrudge us a few fantasies here and there?
Hey everybody, thank you so much for watching.
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