The medium of film has the
potential to not only to move audiences emotionally, but to speak to
fundamentals in the human condition so that we may know ourselves (and each
other) better on the subterranean level of essences. The 2017
film, Call
Me by Your Name, is not “gay cinema” even though 17-year-old
Elio falls in love with Oliver, a 24-year-old beginning doctoral student when
the latter is staying with Elio and his parents at their villa in Italy during
the summer of 1983. Falling-in-love, so unmistakable once it has hit, is so
utterly human at the gut-level that the twists and turns in a narrative are but
superficial in comparison, and even the gender of the beloved may come to
matter less than would typically be assumed. In fact, both Elio and Oliver are
attracted to women, and after his summer stay Oliver calls the Perlmans during
a winter Jewish festival to announce that he is engaged; for even though Elio
fell for Oliver, Oliver is not in love with Elio. Elio must take the unrequited
love as a given, as about as hard as reality can be felt, and so Elio has the
choice of whether to suffer the loss or "stuff it" emotionally by
burning emotion itself from his very being. Precisely this decision
is the subject of a father-son talk that he has with his dad after Oliver
has left. It is the substance of that talk that anchors the film firmly in the
human condition, such that even the narrative, not to mention the fact that
Elio has fallen for a man, is transcended. It is just such a transcendence that
renders the medium of film so substantial, even meaningful, even if mostly just
potentially. Parsing the father-son dialogue will lay bare this thesis.
At the commencement of the
talk, it seems as if Elio’s dad does not grasp that his son has fallen for
Oliver. “You two had a nice friendship,” his father says. “Yeah,” Elio wantonly
replies. But his father is coy: “You’re too smart not to know how rare, how
special what you two had was.” Falling in love with another person, unlike
friendship—interiorizing another’s personality rather than merely liking it—is
indeed rare, especially if such love is not overlaid by sexual attraction. Nor
is falling in love just or primarily a matter of two intellects bonding.
Accordingly, Elio’s dad says, “Oliver may be intelligent, but he was more than
intelligent. What you two had had everything and nothing to do with
intelligence. It was good. You’re both lucky to have found each other because
you too are good.” Everything and nothing to do with intelligence—intriguing!
It is the goodness of the two men, rather than their respective intelligences,
that is so important in terms of achieving emotional intimacy without being
eclipsed by fear (e.g., of infidelity or, even deeper, emotional betrayal
as in abandonment). For trust is destined to be lacking between two bad people
as well as between a good and a bad person, whereas emotional trust is
naturally extant between two good people. Are people really so dichotomous,
however, as being either “good” and “bad”? Has not humanity gotten beyond the
stark division between heaven and hell, with nothing (but purgatory) in
between? Would it not be more accurate to speak of a spectrum on which we all
lie? Nietzsche would say definitely not.
In regard to sexual
“cheating,” for example, and lying in general, dichotomous categorization fits,
according to Nietzsche, who asserts: “it is part of the fundamental faith of
all aristocrats that the common people lie. ‘We truthful ones’—thus the
nobility of ancient Greece referred to itself.”[1]
Regarding the “most important nuance by virtue of which the noble felt
themselves to be men of a higher rank,” the designation of “good” included a
character trait: “They call themselves, for instance, ‘the truthful’; this is
so above all of the Greek nobility, whose mouthpiece is the Megarian poet
Theognis. The root of the word coined for this, esthlos, signifies
one who is, who possesses reality, who is actual, who is true; with a
subjective turn, the true as the truthful: in this phrase of conceptual
transformation it becomes a slogan and catchword of the nobility and passes
over entirely into the sense of ‘noble,’ as distinct from the lying common
man, which is what Theognis takes him to be and how he describes him . . .”[2] It is “above all
the liars” whom the strong regard as bad. “While the noble man lives in trust
and openness with himself (gennaios ‘of noble descent’ underlines the
nuance ‘upright’ and probably also ‘naïve’), the man of ressentiment is
neither upright nor naïve nor honest and straightforward with himself. His soul
squints; his spirit loves hiding places, secret paths and back doors,
everything covert entices him as his world, his security, his refreshment.”[3] In terms of being in—and even beginning—a romantic
relationship, the weak person who is a slave to momentary desire, who is not
constitutionally strong enough to master whichever instinctual urge happens to
be most powerful internally at a given moment, lacks being in
being so expediently mendacious, so the weakness is more fundamental than
merely being loosely tethered to truth. Behind the problem of achieving
emotional intimacy with such a sordid creature is the fact that he or she is
not fully there, hence not really with. To step
closer to a person, look him or her directly in the eyes, and speak directly,
meaning spontaneously and therefore honestly, is rarely achieved with such a
person as one who lies as a matter of course. Such a weak, slavish person may
even wonder aloud to a prospective romantic partner, I’m afraid I will
be unfaithful and hurt whomever I am with. With? No trust, and thus no
genuine emotional intimacy can be had with such a person, hence, no with.
Accordingly, an abyss of pathos of distance ought to separate
good people, such as Elio and Oliver, from such a sordid creature whose nature
it is to hide in dark recesses of the soul rather than stand
boldly, eye to eye, with another person.
Neither Elio nor Oliver would get involved with a trophy
whore, for instance, who imposes his slave-holder’s openness to the trophy
having separate sex even with romantic attachment onto a prospective real relationship
characterized by genuine emotional intimacy. Such a promiscuous,
narcissistic bad person is actually in dire need of therapy. A societal
norm that eschews commitment and thus responsibility by imposing such a demand for
one-sided promiscuity onto what would otherwise be a genuine relationship, even
if such a norm is collectively proclaimed by the neurotic narcissists as
legitimate and even “good,” and thus rightly to be imposed, actually violates
human nature and is thus highly unethical. Yeah, I would feel
uncomfortable if my partner told me he would be having sex with someone he has
feelings for but knew before he knew me so I am supposed to accept
it, a healthy, well-adjusted human being even
in an open relationship would reluctantly admit, if only to oneself.
Slaves to momentary instinctual urges simply cannot be trusted, and are thus
incapable of emotional intimacy with a romantic partner. They cut themselves
off from good people, and thus ultimately detest themselves, for even amid lots
of sex, people who thwart commitment are alone. Even if they are formally in a
romantic relationship, even if merely in being deluded so by their respective
trophy-holders, they are alone. For only genuine emotional intimacy can bring
relief from that plight, and refusing to master seemingly intractable momentary
instinctual urges eclipses real connection and genuine emotion intimacy. Faced
with life without these things, a person might as well pray for the end of
time.
Even though Nietzsche emphasizes that weakness and strength
are inherently antipodal, a roadmap can be discerned or extrapolated from his
writing even if he did not believe that the weak could become strong. For any weak-willed
people who are interested in, or already in a romantic relationship with a good
person whose will’s dominant instinctual urge is sustained rather than
episodic promise-keeping even in the midst of momentary temptations, the
following passage can offer clues on how a will can be strengthened from
within.
To have “an active desire not to rid oneself [of an
impression], a desire for the continuance of something desired once, a real memory
of the will: so that between the original ‘I will’, ‘I shall do this’ and
the actual discharge of the will, its act, a world of strange new
things, circumstances, even acts of will may be interposed without breaking
this long chain of will,” a person “must first have learned to distinguish
necessary events from chance events, to think causally, to see and anticipate
distant eventualities as if they belonged to the present, to decide with
certainty what is the goal and what the means to it, and in general be able to
calculate and compute. [The person] must first of all have become calculatable,
regular, necessary, even in his own image of himself, if he is able to
stand security for his own future, which is what one who promises does!”[4]
The impression not to be rid of is that of a promise made, and the continuance
of something is precisely that promise being kept by an extension of will even
through tempting forests. In other words, a promise-kept is retained in the
memory of the will rather than forgotten as soon as a sensual temptation walks
by and winks—as such a tempting fruit is a strange new thing that is fleeting, whereas
a promise well-kept can indeed be long-standing in a human will and thus of
great value. Parsing the quote further, a necessary event is one that sustains
a promise-made whereas a chance event is like meeting an enticing stranger at a
bar. To think causally is applicable in realizing that going home with a
seductive temptress would cause a promise not to be kept, and thus to no
longer be able to feel self-confident strength of will and be taken as such.
To see the distant eventuality of one’s promise-breaking being discovered as if
it were being found out in the present, and for such a disappointment to have
more instinctual force in one’s will than does the pleasure of momentary
pleasure, a person must be clear on how means are related to their goals (i.e.,
such as being taken by others and oneself as capable and actually reliable in
promise-keeping), and in this way to be taken as regular, even calculatable in
one’s conduct by others and oneself! In other words, rather than be engulfed by
the present in a bar, a person whose will can support promise-keeping must be
sober enough—serious enough—to keep in mind the distant eventuality of being
dumped for having had momentary sex that counts as promise-breaking. The
causation in this is clear. By
implication, cheaters (and promise-breakers more generally) need to practice thinking
out causation practically. To be regular, even calculatable by others and
oneself is to sustain a long-chain of will such that promises once made are
kept. Practice being regular, and calculate out what effects can be expected to
be caused by certain actions that are relevant to promises-made. If getting
drunk or high put such regularity at risk, and give momentary pleasure with
whomever more power than the instinctual urge of promise-keeping, for example, a
person can practice limiting one’s intake. This is why active alcoholics and
drug addicts cannot be trusted to be promise-keepers, for they are very
susceptible to going with the flow in having a “moment” in preference for momentary
pleasure in the present as itself being absolute. This is precisely what scares
people whose feelings of endearment are oriented to a questionable
promise-keeper, who too easily and conveniently loses sight of distant
eventualities in the present.
The typical constraint imposed on such a person is moral in
nature, but Nietzsche does not advocate such a remedy. Societal cages are not
compatible with self-confident strength (of will). Instead, his ideal is
paradoxically the sovereign-willed individual who is not constrained by
external ethical norms; instead, the constraint lies within a strong,
independent will. The “ripest fruit is the sovereign individual, like
only to himself, liberated again from morality of custom, autonomous and
supramoral (for ‘autonomous’ and ‘moral’ are mutually exclusive), in short, the
man who has his own independent, protracted will and the right to make
promises—and in him a proud consciousness, quivering in every muscle, of what
has at length been achieved and
become flesh in him, a consciousness of his own power and freedom, a sensation
of mankind come to completion. The emancipated individual, with the actual right to make promises, this master of a free will, this sovereign
man—how should he not be aware of his superiority over all those who lack the
right to make promises and stand as their own guarantors, of how much trust,
how much fear, how much reverence he arouses—he ‘deserves’ all three, and
how this mastery over himself also necessarily gives him mastery over
circumstances, over nature, and over all more short-willed and unreliable
creatures?”[5]
To be able to credit oneself rather than any external moral scaffolding in
keeping one’s promises is to interiorize even as an instinct a sustained urge
to keep promises that is more powerful than the desire to act on some momentary
pleasure that would cause a promise not to be kept. The consciousness
of self-confident inner strength, which I contend can result from practicing
being regular, even calculable, is more powerful than the constraining power of
external morality and even the resisting
temptation. After all, it is the
weak who seek to dominate who try to beguile the strong into voluntarily
renouncing their innate strength by saying, “Thou shalt not!”
Ironically, a sovereign,
self-confident will wherein the instinctual urge to keep one’s promises
dominates urges to break one’s promises in slavish attraction to momentary
pleasure can voluntarily bind itself to a beloved through promises that the
beloved can trust. Although Nietzsche characterizes such a will as the
completion of mankind, I contend that along with such a will, love that can be
trusted represents and instantiates us at our highest. Hence Augustine wrote
that God is love. Love that is not feared (e.g., as being
betrayed) is sacrosanct. Figuratively, such love can bend even the time-space fabric,
at least in the very perception of a person who is in love with a
promise-keeper, given the density of unafraid
love and thus unshakable faith in a beloved. Rather than being idyllic utopian
dribble, such an ideal can indeed be actualized as the completion of humanity.
The reality of an authentic, close emotional connection
between two people gives rise to the tragedy that is in Shakespeare's Romeo
and Juliet, both of whom can be viewed as being sovereign individuals
putting their respective promises of love above their petty feuding families
that are at odds. Like Elio and Oliver, Romeo and Juliet are good people.
How dearly such a connection lost is mourned, as if life itself were no longer
deemed worth living without the very presence of the beloved. Indeed, such presence
itself can be saturated with meaning. Relative to such a connection of unafraid
presence, or being, mourning the loss of a bad, promise-breaking person
is actually a blessing in disguise, and can come to be recognized as such in
utter relief, as in, I actually dodged a bullet, with the ungenerous
help of the beloved, whose heart is nonetheless as cold and unbendable as a
hard rock in winter. A pathos of distance, as if over the
dark oceans of time in the Book of Genesis, naturally separates
such a cold, dispassionate person, who so easily severs oneself off emotionally
even in the face of another's suffering, from Elio and Oliver, whose mutual
warmth doubtlessly deserves the refreshment that swimming outside can provide
on those long, meandering sunny days that summer in northern Italy.
So, I think Elio’s dad is on
firm ground in highlighting how special it is that his son, a good person, has
fallen for another good person. The goodness is evinced not only in that trust
was a given for the two, but also by Elio saying of Oliver, “I think he was
better than me,” to which his father replies, “I’m sure he’d say the same thing
about you.” Elio in turn replies, “Yeah. He’d say the same thing.” With
his assertion of mutual goodness demonstrated, his father observes, “It
flatters you both.” How rare—how very special—a romantic relationship is
between two good, emotionally well-adjusted people.
But unlike Romeo and Juliet,
whose love is mutual (hence the tragedy!), Oliver does not fall in love with
Elio during the summer, so even though the two young men are good, no lasting
romantic relationship can, or even should, ensue. Ultimately, this
asymmetry undermines emotional trust, and the movie ends with Elio suffering
the consequences after Oliver phones to announce his engagement to a woman.
Even between two good people, genuine emotional intimacy, and the trust that is
requisite, require that each person loves the other; otherwise, the
relationship is doomed in terms of intimacy and trust. Most likely, the person
who is not in love will leave the person for another. The person left standing
can either stuff emotion itself, which Elio’s father wisely warns his son
against, or grieve the loss (for even love that is not reciprocated is real and
the loss of the beloved must be grieved in emotional pain that, as shown in the
final scene, is longstanding rather than episodic).
Therefore, we can say, how
very rare, and how very, very special a relationship of mutual love
between two good (promise-keeping) people surely is! Holding
such a rarified gem between them, two people who are in love should move
mountains to be and stay together. No job is worth separation. I would flip
burgers, one person might say to the other in following him or her to
another city. That Elio and Oliver could have been together permanently were
they both in love with each other is implied in the film by the fact that an
older gay couple comes to visit the Perlmans. The sad fact is, Oliver has not
fallen for Elio, and Elio must intellectually and emotionally accept
this reality. With respect to Elio, Oliver cannot be relied upon as a
promise-keeper. Recognizing this, Elio’s father observes, “And when you least
expect it, nature has cunning ways of finding our weakest spot. Just remember,
I am here.” Falling in unrequited love exposes us to human nature such that it
is felt at its weakest, perhaps most painful, spot.
Here again, Elio’s father
again brings up the dichotomy of good and bad people in how a person in Elio’s
position choses to deal with the emotional pain—and it is the sort of pain that
comes back unrelentingly every morning rather than quickly dissipates as soon
as the wind changes. “Right now, you may not wanna feel anything, maybe you
never wanted to feel anything,” Elio’s father says. “And maybe it’s not to me
you’d want to speak about these things, but feel something you obviously did.
Look, you had a beautiful friendship. Maybe more than a friendship. And I envy
you. . . . We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster, that
we go bankrupt by the age of 30, and have less to offer, each time we start
with someone new, but to make yourself feel nothing, so as not to feel
anything. What a waste.”
Indeed, what a
waste, for a sensitive heart that has not rashly eviscerated emotion
itself due to past emotional pain is among the most precious gems that can be loved.
Elio is sensitive, so his dad is worried that his son may flee from emotion
altogether and thus be emotionally unavailable for future relationships; after
all, Elio is only 17 years-old. Elio's father acknowledges something
emotionally more than a friendship has gripped his son, and
that that something is of such emotional depth that sensitive
person could rashly decide to rip out emotion from one’s very being in order
not to feel such pain. The dichotomy between good (meaning healthy) and bad
(meaning weak) lies in the choice that the person makes: caste out emotion
itself or accept the feeling of emotional pain as part of being fully human. I
think it is at this point that the film becomes significant. Elio, being good,
allows himself to feel the pain, and in fact the last scene of the film depicts
him in a sustained camera shot looking into the fireplace utterly hurt because
Oliver has just called to inform the Perlman’s of his engagement. That the
camera-shot is very long is ingenious, for such is the nature of that hurt. A
dull soreness can even come to be felt from the emotional grooves that form
from ongoing hurt before time can act as a thickener, or, as Nietzsche would
say, until forgetfulness can set in. Indeed, he states that forgetting is key
even to be able to love one’s enemies, and is not rejection an enemy?
One implication from the
film’s last scene in which teary-eyed Elio stares into the fire in a fireplace is
that he will be able to be fully emotionally available when he falls in love
again (he is just 17 years-old), for he has not severed his emotional life as
if feeling emotion were somehow toxic and thus to be expunged. He deserves to
fall for a person who is also good in the sense of being willing to take hard
choices in not conveniently forgetting promises made in favor of momentary
urges. Drug addicts and sex addicts need not apply, for they are slaves to
momentary desire and thus do not mature. Elio can offer genuine emotional
intimacy wherein emotional trust is a given rather than felt as a vulnerability
as is the case when the other person is weak. Beyond the last scene being able
to serve as a lesson, or guide, on how to deal emotionally with the loss of a
beloved, the father-son talk plus Elio’s decision not to repress emotion itself
gets at a fundamental in what it means to experience being human. It isn’t all
roses, for sometimes we feel even excruciating emotional hurt from unrequited
love—the point being that it is a very good decision to be willing to feel
rather than repress the feeling even though it comes back day after day until
finally time, acting as a thickener, allows for moving on
naturally.
1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Sect. 260 in Basic
Writings of Nietzsche, Trans and Ed., Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern
Library, 1968), p. 395.
2. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, Sect. 5 in
Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Trans and Ed., Walter Kaufmann (New York:
The Modern Library, 1968), pp. 465-66. Theognis of Megara lived in the sixth
century, BCE. Nietzsche’s first journal article, written while he was still a
doctoral student at Leipzig, was on the collection of Theognis’s maxims.
3. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, Sect. 10
in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Trans and Ed., Walter Kaufmann (New
York: The Modern Library, 1968), p. 474.
4. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Second Essay, Sect. 1
in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Trans and Ed., Walter Kaufmann (New
York: The Modern Library, 1968), p. 494.
5. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Second Essay, Sect. 2
in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Trans and Ed., Walter Kaufmann (New
York: The Modern Library, 1968), pp. 495-96.
