Melancholia

I think it’s callous to assume or assert any true definition of what love means or is. It’s an inherently arbitrary word and I sort of vomit a little in my mouth every time I hear or watch someone try to explain to me what love is, which in the current moment, is frankly a lot. But whatever that word means, I’m becoming more and more convinced that it can be used as a technology of nation building and power. The capacity to frame and define it, to imagine and broadcast its definition, reward it with tax incentives to Couples who do a good job of satisfying its script like seagulls swooping toward aerialized whole wheat bread pieces, and excise and police that which it, supposedly, is not. The “elite capture” of love, to use a phrase by Olufemi O Taiwo, is not new (The History of Sexuality by Foucault makes that abundantly clear), but the mutations it takes, how its definition changes over time and across space, it just begs the question, I think: what if all the images of love, marriage, relationships, this 2026 surge of date movies, are seeking to define what love exactly is? What if these films, as they explore the inner turmoil of relationships, are already assuming a completely arbitrary definition for what constitutes a “relationship” yet fails to acknowledge that arbitrariness?

To be clear, this is not to suggest that whatever notion of love or relationship is explored in those films are “fake” or “not real”—that would merely reproduce the very attitude I’m seeking to deconstruct by presupposing some version of an “authentic” love. I think what I mean is that the hegemonic quality of whatever that reproduced, cookie cutter trope that we consume and understand as Love and Romance is what I feel inclined to deconstruct— to reveal that even as it feels like this image of love has hegemonic power, that its script is so incredibly dominant that it transforms the very way we imagine acceptable social relations—in order to provincialize and reveal that love, whatever it is, is a socially constructed and conditioned phrase that doesn’t necessarily have to reflect a dominantly viewed script or carve out we constantly consume. And, that that constant consumption might potentially narrow the field of what we imagine as being Love. 

I think it’s really easy to see images of Love or Relationships in cinema and just take as given that these are the sort of bondages that are normal and given in the social and public arena. It’s a strain of cinema that, when you pull away it’s probably 5 to 6 layers, is telling the viewer nothing much other than “Marry and Reproduce” — a cinema that casts that exact ideology across screens all over the US—a cinema that monopolizes and constrains the consumer’s choice of what love to purchase on those screens.

I feel what’s unique and important about this film, especially in the first part, is precisely that it heightens and deepens and unveils so much of what feels, to me, so incredibly odd about bourgeois notions of love, marriage, relationships, and generally, what has been encoded and debated for centuries into the law as “legitimate bondage”. It’s very easy to forget that whatever a “legitimate bondage” is is not a set in stone rule or phrase or idea but a term that rests on an inherently shaky foundation. Yet, it feels to me like a hegemonic understanding of that phrase is reaffirmed and reinforced through bourgeois social customs, such that what we understand to be Love has been severely narrowed, such that what falls outside of conditioned social custom or the law fails to be recognized as legible forms of kinship or bondage. (*1)

It’s difficult to put into words what exactly this moment was in the film, and I don’t think it was necessarily a single moment but a build up of a lot of different ones. I felt as if Justine, even as she participates in her own wedding, is silently or internally processing why this particular event has to be an event at all. In theory, one could maintain a meaningful and committed lifelong relationship with a life partner without ever having a wedding. Yet the various customs, traditions, fashions, peoples, rituals, and routines that are packed into a wedding, the sheer amount of cultural weight that are vested into them, where people are literally thinking about the day of their weddings since they still had baby teeth, may make it appear as if it is a necessity. I think, in response to all of that, what if it’s possible to have a committed lifelong relationship without such an event? Maybe that is very unprofound of me to say, something that feels so blatantly true and obvious—of course, you can have a choice about whether or not you want to have a wedding. But I think for many, it might seem like there isn’t another option, where marriage is the only option, where children are socially conditioned to imagine and wonder and think about their wedding days 20 years into the future— that none of that actually has to happen, that there is no prewritten rule etched into the cave walls that says “one must have a wedding in order to have a legitimate social bond”, but rather, that wedding are simply events that are vested with large sums of social custom and ritual, such that it appears to be the only option.

Maybe what is blatantly obvious, that we have a choice about what we imagine as being Love, Relationships, or Romance, is nonetheless so hard to really understand sometimes, and I think this film did a very good job of conveying that.
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(*1) For me, being Bangladeshi, this really looks like living in an extended family network, where anyone that is Bangladeshi is not a stranger but referred to as Bhai or Apu or Aunti or Uncle. It’s a form of kinship that, I think, fails to be recognized by the state —no census report or personal document that the state owns would know that the woman I met selling fruits from a fruit cart in New York and spoke to for roughly 5 minutes is someone that I consider my Aunti, that the man I met at the masjid once and then never spoke to for over a year, only to run into him again in Ramadan and talk for hours as if no time has passed, is someone I consider a Bhaiya. In other words, there are all sorts of forms of kinship and relationships that exist all throughout society, yet fail to be acknowledged or recognized by the state.