Love & Loss
Story by Rachel Evenson, photo by Courtney Spring
There is a scene in Liebelei, an early film by the German-Jewish director
Max Ophüls, in which two young lovers are enjoying a romantic winter
carriage ride. Bundled close together, the beautiful woman and her handsome
soldier speak passionately about their overwhelming desire for one another;
they marvel at how the intensity of their love has never been felt before
by anyone, nor will it ever diminish. As their white horse pulls them through
the snow, bells jingling, the audience is absorbed in the tenderness of
the moment. Then the camera pulls away to reveal that the lovers are riding
along through a graveyard.
“Nothing lasts forever,” observes Rick Blackwood, “and
you might not even see Ophüls’s critique, you’re so taken
up in the romance of the scene.” English 2123: Sex and Violence in
Cinema, is one of two classes Blackwood teaches at LSU. A study of the connection
between love and war as it relates to a wide range of classic and modern
films, the class also incorporates philosophy, psychology, and literature,
all elements that are crucial to understanding the art of film.
“This, to me, is amazing brilliance,” Blackwood says of Ophüls’s
ability to disguise his uncompromising opinions of love’s complexities
within simple romance movies. Among these are The Earrings of Madame D’,
Le Plaisir, and Letters from an Unknown Woman, films which, Blackwood says,
clearly portray both the joy and the danger of ecstasy as permanently intertwined.
“Max Ophüls,” he says, “changed the way I think about
love.”
Blackwood himself is a surprising set of contradictions. He is at once intimidating
and inviting, equally fond of Harley Davidson motorcycles and Mozart violin
concertos, an expert on Freud’s theories of sexual expression but
a twice-divorced man who jokingly admits his own failures in love. A graduate
of both the UCLA Film School and the U.S. Naval War College, Rick Blackwood
has enough credentials to inflate the heads of ten college professors, and
yet he remains humble, cautioning his students that he knows nothing for
certain. “I could be wrong about all of this,” he interjects
from time to time during his lectures. “If Freud walked in here and
heard me, he’d probably punch me in the nose.”
Blackwood’s class is captivating; his commanding presence holds the
attention of even the sleepiest of students until the 3-hour lecture and
film presentation is over. He invites discussion, and he voices shocking
truths; he speaks honestly about his own experiences, and he demands that
his students delve into the deepest secrets of dreams and the subconscious.
He doesn’t merely ask questions, he fires them off emphatically, often
at the most dramatic moments of the films he screens. “Does Norman
love his mother?” he asks in the middle of Psycho, pausing the film
and gesticulating at the screen, his sinewy, 6-foot frame casting a shadow
across the stricken face of Anthony Perkins.
Despite the questions he poses in class, Blackwood is careful when defining,
or even clarifying, what love means. “Freud calls love 'object libidinal
cathexis.' If Freud was right and love is in fact this kind of psychical
and somatic phenomenon, then love is object libidinal cathexis [emotional
projection] with charity. When looking at movies, the line between infatuation
and love is a permeable one. And yet, real love lasts in a way that infatuation
does not. In movies, love is when this kind of infatuation has this character
of generosity and charity to it that lust doesn’t. I’d say that’s
true in life too.”
Blackwood is generally close-mouthed about his personal relationships, but
he does emphasize that he has maintained a close friendship with his ex-wife,
Beverly, whom he still considers his one of his best friends. “We
were friends when we were married, almost always when we were quarreling,
and now in the divorce, we’re still very good friends,” he says.
Blackwood asserts that marriage can be an inherently complicated arrangement,
the problems of which are not necessarily the fault of a single person.
“Most of us, if honest, admit to being underachievers at marriage.
You see that often neither person is bad, neither person needs to be wicked,
nobody needs to be a psychopath or an insane person, for marriage not to
work. It's just that marriage, friendship, all these personal things that
we do are extremely difficult; so if marriage is hard work then I look at
divorce as a kind of industrial accident. You’re in this thing together,
and something goes wrong.”
As an example, he describes the common “long-distance” factor
that plagues many college and post-graduation relationships. If two young
people fall in love and marry, he muses, and one is accepted to Harvard
medical school while the other is accepted to the MFA program at UCLA, is
one spouse going to tell the other not to pursue his or her career? The
consequences of being 2,800-miles apart are potentially fatal to the relationship,
and yet neither person wants the marriage to come to an end.
“None of this is happening because either person is bad, but because
both are successful and working hard,” Blackwood explains. Even when
people are not physically separated, other equally serious issues can arise.
Despite the usual hostility associated with the divorce process, Blackwood
has found peace and friendship where there once had been a marriage. “Both
times when I got divorced, I looked across the table at the other person
and thought, ‘That’s as good a human being as I am ever going
to meet.’”
Blackwood credits his fascination with love to his mother, to whom he was
quite close growing up. “My mother was tough, but clear-headed. She
was certainly not a sentimental person, or a particularly romantic one,
but was empathetic with others. She felt that the men around her did not
treat women with sufficient respect; I was trained rigorously in this and
it marked me, like all tough upbringing, in some ways that she wanted and
in some ways she didn’t want, I’m sure.” His unique perspective
on films and relationships, and the ease with which he has been able to
remain friends with his ex-wives, he says, has everything to do with his
relationship with his mother.
“In my adult life, the women I’ve loved have been superb human
beings and have possessed an incredible moral strength, much like my mother,”
Blackwood observes. He compares this to what Freud calls the Oedipal complex,
in which a young boy’s first unconscious love object is said to be
his mother. The women whom the boy picks to be his lovers in his adult life
will likely have some clear relationship to her.
This leads Blackwood to the idea that in film, and in life, there is “always
another love.” As Ophüls presents in his 1950 film La Ronde,
love is a sort of theoretical romantic merry-go-round in which characters
in a story, or love objects in one’s life, are constantly replaced.
Blackwood explains, “Let’s say that, as a child, a little girl
looks at her father, perhaps a little boy looks at his mother, and suddenly
discovers love. This love is fierce—he has this incredibly intense
feeling for this other person. Well, a boy can’t stay with his mother,
but he can look at the next wonderful woman he meets and fall in love with
her, but then something happens to her—she dies, or the relationship
simply doesn’t work. He’s very likely to move that same pattern
onto the next person. Generally, the first person we love in adulthood is
not the person we spend the rest of our life with. But if that one [person]
doesn’t work, very often, there’s another one. You have a period
of heartbreak, you don’t want anyone near you, you want to climb a
tree, but then, something in your heart turns around . . .”
Ophüls was an admirer of Freud, and Arthur Schnitzler, the Austrian
playwright whose works Ophüls often adapted to the screen, was a Freudian
as well. Thus, the class’s focus is upon Freud. A parallel of the
Oedipal complex described by Freud is found in father-daughter relationships.
Often, a young woman’s attraction to older men can be traced back
to the relationship she had with her father as a child. Perhaps her father
died, or did not love his daughter the way she wanted, and as a result the
woman’s life becomes geared toward finding a replacement father figure
in a lover. The same kind of relationship can develop as well between young
men and older women. The results of this attempt to “fix the problem”
can have terrible results or can be successful, according to Blackwood.
“It all depends. What I’m talking about is the link from Freud
to the wedding chapel,” he says.
A series of teachers at UCLA Film School and the U.S. Naval War College
influenced Blackwood and pushed him in the direction that helped him discover
this link. Blackwood incorporates much of the literature his college professors
introduced to him into his English 2123 curriculum. Hubert Dreyfus, a professor
at Berkeley, sparked his interest in Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, while Janet
Bergstrom at UCLA taught an advanced graduate course on Freud that fascinated
Blackwood, and whose teaching style he strives to emulate. Blackwood’s
admiration of Michael Handel, one of the world’s leading Clausewitz
scholars, was in part why he chose to spend a year at the U.S. Naval War
College.
Blackwood doesn’t keep in touch with any of his old professors, despite
their significant role in molding his opinions and appreciation of literature.
To him, relationships between students and teachers have a specific time
and place; when the student has finished a semester or graduated from school,
the grounds for a relationship to flourish have gone. He describes his relationships
with his own students as gentle and charitable, but not very close; he believes
the student-teacher relationship has a lasting impact, but the relationship
itself has a limited duration. Not one to dwell sentimentally on the passing
of friendships, Blackwood speaks honestly about the transient nature of
human relationships: “They do wonderful things for us, but I’m
not sure they’re supposed to last forever.”
Rather than answer from personal experience, Blackwood often circumvents
questions using quotes from authors and examples from literature to illustrate
the point he’s making before venturing to speak in first person.
He pauses for a moment to reflect on what he has learned from his relationships
with his ex-wives. When he begins to answer, he does so via a speech made
in The Web and the Rock, a semi-autobiographical novel by Thomas Wolfe in
which a young writer falls in love with a 50-year-old married woman. The
speech is given by the writer after he realizes he cannot pursue this difficult
romance any further. Speaking to his lover, he explains how, in his teens,
he had pined for an idealized, fairy-tale woman: a flawless, well-educated
blonde from a wonderful family who charmed his parents and always looked
perfect. He then says to his lover, “ . . . and what I found was you.”
Blackwood describes this as one of the most wonderful speeches he’s
encountered in a book; to the young man, a real relationship with a complex
human being is far richer and more fascinating than any imaginary false
perfection.
“It ends by his saying to her, ‘You are the best and truest
friend I ever had,’ which is a wonderful thing to be able to say to
somebody you’ve loved so passionately. I read this when I was 20,
and I have never forgotten it. I recalled it throughout my own friendships
and relationships, where I was finding that the difficulties simply come
with all the wonderful things and you can’t separate them. The class
is about how you can’t really separate aggression and libido, you
can’t separate sex and violence, you can’t separate love and
conflict. You can’t have one without the other.”
Such juxtaposition may explain an audience’s, (and Blackwood’s)
love of movies. “We like intense experiences that don’t hurt
us,” he says. One can watch a film that reveals uncomfortable truths
about one’s own psyche, one’s own relationship to sex or violence,
but, as in dreams, the environment is controlled. “A movie allows
us to safely go into the darkest and scariest parts of the universe, the
darkest and scariest parts of our own interior and look at things very clearly
looking back at us.”
Blackwood says that what he loves best about movies is not only this intensity,
but, like the most enigmatic polarities that exist both in dreams and waking
life, their ability to be shared. If you can’t separate sex from violence,
or destruction from creation, then you must look at the two parts as a whole—death
necessitates sex, which in turn creates life. Two lovers in a carriage may
be oblivious to the decay that surrounds them, but they cannot escape its
inevitability, no matter how immortal their passion seems.
Does such pessimism lead to hopelessness? If love and conflict are inseparable,
is there a point in loving at all? Blackwood doesn’t think so. “Part
of what we like about love is that it is so breathtaking and intense at
its beginning; but if it doesn’t work the first time you try it, though
we’re hurt, we try it again. God knows it must be an awful world if
you don’t have people to love.”