I can’t say how the movie 1982 begins because I was 10 minutes late to it. But when I arrived, the face of a delicate little boy spread across the screen. The movie follows this little boy, Wissam, throughout his day in elementary school. He is trying to tell a girl from his class, Joana, that he loves her. Simultaneously, Beirut, the city where the movie is set, is erupting in war, a tense backdrop to the sweet romance playing out in the fore.
About two years ago, I read in a book (What Love Is and What It Could Be) that the part of our brain that lights up when we fall in love is the same one stimulated by cocaine. The book cites some science that indicates withdrawal from the beloved resembles withdrawal from drugs; the part of the brain that is stimulated when you’re in love remains stimulated by the beloved even after rejection. Perhaps this is why Wissam just can’t quit. Wissam risks getting in serious trouble and slips an anonymous love note in Joana’s locker. In one tender scene, he practices professing his love to Joanna in the bathroom mirror. He squirms and stretches to see his reflection in the mirror, oscillating between Joana, I love you and Joana, I love you so much, before deciding on the former and ultimately, saying neither. How was the geography test for you? he ends up asking.
We also learn that the two elementary teachers in the movie are in a relationship. Their conversations erupt into arguments in the hallway between their classrooms — the crux being his discussion of politics when meeting her family, despite her explicit and singular request that he not do that. He asks her if they had simply wasted each other’s time. For the rest of the movie, he listens pedantically to war updates through the radio. She pretends nothing is happening until she absolutely cannot anymore, even forcing her students to proceed with their math exam as students watch bombs drop through the classroom window.
What interests me about this film is its use of love and the looming possibility of death to animate its temporality, organized into the course of a single day. The film asks us to consider how love events and violent traumas both mark the passing of time and impact the affective experience of time. In conversation with Michael Hardt, Lauren Berlant remarks that, “The question of duration is also important in this regard because there are many places that one holds duration. One holds duration in one’s head, and one holds duration in relation. As a formal relation, love could have continuity, whereas, as an experiential relation it could have discontinuities.” If I understand what Berlant is trying to distinguish, “love” as a “formal relation” refers to its use as classification, characterization, or description in contrast with the experience of love, which is more chaotic and transient, less linear. The distinction is between two different ways of demarcating love, neither necessarily more salient.
In the film, time is punctuated both by the fantastically banal (young love, stale love) and by war (extraordinary, violent). Wissam is desperate to tell Joana how he feels before the day is over, which becomes critically important as we, the audience, see that this could be his last chance to tell her how he feels depending on the course of the war and the locality of the erupting violence. Wissam doesn’t realize this, though; he has very little awareness of what is going on around him besides Joana’s movements around the school. He is motivated by some other sense of urgency, some deadline that is internal and intimately his. The director, Mouannes, described it like this: "the idea that children have a world that's complete for them. They sort of understand what's going on in the adult world but they have peace with how complete their own world is in and of itself." In contrast, the eruption of war becomes the the impetus for the two teachers to put aside their argument and take comfort in their companionship — the war becomes their world in a way of reorienting them towards one another. Love in 1982 is approximated by its urgency relative to impending destruction and possible death, where the two transform the experience of time and of world.
How do we make sense of the love’s duration when it fucks time up? Love can have a way of making time feel like more “time” than it was — whatever that would mean. A “short” period of time that is experienced intensely may be remembered as having been longer. Love may also has a way of making you feel like you blinked and you missed the important part, like every attempt to savor it makes it that much more elusive and limited. Violence may do the same — a violent event may pass abruptly and horribly, or be stretched out, elongated. A bad memory produces a similar trajectory, where in either case the experience of time is liable to change.
I’m currently trying to translate the screenplay Hiroshima, Mon Amour, by Marguerite Duras, a story that also takes place over the course of a single day. There are two lovers, a French actress (Her) and a Japanese architect (Him), in Hiroshima. After meeting in a café and sleeping together, they are consumed by one another, fascinated and infatuated. They spend the following day chasing or being chased by one around town. “Je crois que je t’aime”/ “I think I love you,” He says to Her, as they stand in the street alongside a parade of children, painted white to represent the burned baby casualties of the H bomb. The line is striking both in its content and its locale. Juxtaposed to the memorialization of Hiroshima’s tragedy, He contemplates his love for Her after having known her for just a few hours.
The two have deeply intimate conversations, intense and at times angry — about love, about war, about the H bomb. About their other lovers, about her plane that leaves for Paris tomorrow. About Nevers, her childhood home. Criterion Collection describes their mutual fascination as an impetus for either to “exorcise their own scarred memories of love and suffering.”
In Part I, she embarks on a long monologue (translation my own…):
…I meet you.
I remember you.
Who are you?
You kill me.
You do me good.
How would I doubt that this city was made in the size of love (or tailored to love?)
How would I doubt that you were made in the size of my same body?
You please me. What an event. You please me.
How slow all of the sudden.
How sweet.
You cannot know.
You kill me.
You do me well.
You kill me.
You do me well.
I have the time.
You are welcome.
Devour me.
Deform me just until ugliness.
Why not you?
Why not you in this city and in this night, same as the others, to the point of misunderstanding?
She is expressing the discontinuities Berlant associated with the experiential form of love, wherein pleasure is theorized as an event that coincides being deformed, devoured, and killed. “You do me well,” She says. “You kill me,” She says. She accuses him of not knowing, not being able to know (to know what?) which in some ways he responds to later, in Part III:
Lui: Tu me donnes beaucoup l’envie d’aimer.
Elle: Toujours… les amours de… rencontre… Moi aussi.
Lui: Non. Pas toujours aussi fort. Tu le sais.Him: You make me want to love you so much.
Her: Always… the loves of… meetings… Me too.
Him: No. Not always this strong. You know it.
You know it, he says. He rejects her attempt to extrapolate their encounter, using intensity as his barometer. This strength, he argues, is begotten from some inexplicable knowledge, inexplicable insofar as he does not explain. She does not respond, either: “On dit qu’il va faire de l’orage avant la nuit” (“They say there will be a storm before the night.”)
The screenplay (+ film) utilizes flashbacks throughout, interrupting the linearity of the romance and the story. Perhaps the flashbacks and the ongoing discussions of the past — past lovers, the war, death — and the future — Her impending departure and the fantasy of their reunion — gesture to how much the invocation of other “times” interrupts the romance, while also bolstering it and providing it with the substance upon which they connect and built intimacy (where we are the conglomerate of all of our experiences).
What do these two works, both about love and about war, offer us about understanding temporality in love? Both films offer us a glimpse at a quasi-circular, enclosed world constructed and contained by lovers and love, while critiquing the impossibility of said circle where lovers in love are always being impacted by the sociopolitical situation. Berlant begins to consider later in the interview “how we could have a political pedagogy that deals with incoherence” the way that love theory and queer theory so readily do. Berlant argues that this incoherence and non-sovereignty that is central to love “can never be resolved by the political,” thereby propositioning the potential for an understanding of incoherence in love as a vehicle for understanding and reifying incoherence in politics. In this way, I think that both films present utilise the political to structure and destructure the temporality of love, where you have multiple affective experiences of time coexisting, feeding into and off of one another.
The longue durée is a way of examining history that “gives priority to long-term historical structures over what François Simiand called histoire événementielle ("evental history", the short-term time-scale that is the domain of the chronicler and the journalist). It concentrates instead on all-but-permanent or slowly evolving structures, and replaces elite biographies with the broader syntheses of prosopography. The crux of the idea is to examine extended periods of time and draw conclusions from historical trends and patterns.” I’m not a historian and I got this definition off of Wikipedia. But, I think it could be interesting to consider an application of this to love durée — a deeply improper, bastardized version that contextualizes the experience of love’s duration via political events, presenting an opportunity to consider love in the longue durée and love in the histoire événementielle, and/or love as status or love as experience.
Would you confess your love to someone you met last night? If you did, what would that mean for love, what would that mean for time? Love is, for better or worse, obsessed with and justified by time. We use time to make less of an emotion (it was only x months) or more of an emotion (we were together for x years). Time may be used to disqualify love, like when the two teachers in 1982 suggested that they may have wasted one another’s time because they can’t resolve this argument. It is their eventual proximity to death that refocuses their orientation towards their time and their love. It’s worth asking, maybe, not if the love the two teachers share is more real than the love of Joana by Wissam, or of the two protagonists in Hiroshima — certainly, it’s more established and formal given the context of meeting each other’s families — but rather on what grounds can we reconfigure love outside of time, without belying the gravity of it as an emotion? How much time is required for love? How much time is required for love to pass? How does time pass at all? Where does love go when it passes?
Carlo Rovelli’s book The Order of Time examines the physics of time, which is to say “we still don’t know how time actually works.” He presents that much of how we understand time remains approximate and wrong, “mistakes determined by our perspective.” If the organization of time itself is predicated on a series of subjective mistakes, what might that imply for our experience of it (derived, in this case, from love)?
Maybe my favorite fact I encountered thus far from Rovelli’s book is this: “time passes faster in the mountains than it does at sea level.”