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Loving And Loathing Love Actually

Chris Orr can’t stand that the 2003 film has become a holiday classic:

Love Actually is a considerable outlier among romantic comedies in its rigorous conviction not only that people fall in love without really knowing one another, but that they don’t even need to learn anything about each other to confirm their initial attraction. … The fundamental problem with Love Actually is that it presents romance as either absurdly easy—something that strikes you like a thunderclap and requires only a single grand gesture in order to be fulfilled—or all but impossible. Notably absent is the idea that love might ever be worth a little sustained effort: some mutual exploration and discovery, a bit of care and nurture, maybe even the overcoming of an obstacle or two. Indeed, it’s hard to shake the sense that what is “classic” about Love Actually is not that it shows us anything about how people fall in love, but that it so conspicuously declines even to try.

Emma Green issues a defense, saying she’s drawn to “the excitement and power of demonstrations of love”:

None of the movie’s characters manages to pull off a Hollywood-perfect version of this.

Hugh Grant, who plays Britain’s prime minister, gets caught kissing one of his staffers, played by Natalie McCutcheon, on stage at her nephew’s Christmas play. Colin Firth proposes to his former house cleaner, Lúcia Moniz, in grammatically sketchy Portuguese. Martin Freeman’s character meets Joanna Page’s character while they’re working as body doubles on the set of a soft-core porn movie, yet he fumbles their first kiss after he finally asks her out on a date. These scenarios are messy, awkward, and often hilarious, but they are also winning, because they make the universe seem ever-so-slightly more wondrous.

If the real world is not like this, then perhaps it’s the real world that needs to change—we’d be better off if there were more grand gestures. These are moments that remind of how special life really is: The gesturer gets the thrill of delighting someone they care about; the recipient feels as though they are uniquely worth of someone’s affections; and bystanders believe that, one day, they too might find the high heights of enthusiastic, whirlwind love.

Ben Dreyfuss echoes Green:

Love Actually is the most pro-romantic film ever. It is a clarion call to share your pent up feelings for other people. That is good. That is decent. That is rare. People like to be told that they’re thought of as wonderful, that they matter to someone else. People should do it more often. And sure, they probably don’t feel the same way about you, but you should find out. Just in cases.

Alyssa Rosenberg, for her part, appreciates the movie “not because I think it’s a compelling celebration of love, or because it’s a good holiday movie, but because of how sad the film often is.” Lindy West joins the haters, and so does Julian Sanchez, who zooms out:

The ultimate wish-fulfillment is not imagining that you can become special through sustained effort, but to have it confirmed that you were special all along, as you always secretly suspected. A romcom in which two characters find love because they are both interesting, clever, funny, accomplished, kind, confident, attractive—insert your favorite adjective here—and play equal parts in winning of the affection of the other would not only fail to scratch this itch, it would be depressing. We don’t go to movies to watch people more interesting, clever, funny etc etc than ourselves achieve love and happiness in a context very much like that of our real lives—that’s what we are watching in our real lives. We go to movies to be reassured that we can have those things without being transformed ourselves. The viewer-identification characters here, then, need to seem basically good and genial—we’re not going to project ourselves onto someone actively unlikable—but also bland and passive enough that they don’t leave us feeling like true love is for people with desirable characteristics we conspicuously lack.

Orr stands by his claim that the film is “not merely unromantic, but actively anti-romantic”:

The problem … is the patterns that emerge when you consider the film as a whole. One subplot about an older man wooing a much-younger subordinate? Fine. But three? And on it goes: not one, but two gags (three, if you count the Colin subplot) about how the only possible way a man could overcome heartbreak is with the assistance of one or more supermodels; two storylines in which women (never men) see their romantic lives shattered by obstacles that ought to be surmountable; and, most important, upwards of half a dozen subplots in which characters go directly from initial physical infatuation to (presumed) happily-ever-afters, without remotely bothering to get to know one another in between. … Set aside the [Laura] Linney and [Alan] Rickman-[Emma] Thompson storylines (which I find problematic in other ways), and it’s almost two hours of rom-com porn, of grand gestures with little buildup and no follow through, of money shots.

Catherine Andrews calls for a truce, claiming that “almost all ‘rom coms’ are this bad”:

Look, in the end, I can forgive anybody, including myself, who likes Love Actually. Because BRITISH ACCENTS. And Colin Firth. And I guess it kinda WOULD be nice to fall in love without having to ever try or talk to a person or go on OKCupid. … And we could also just admit to ourselves, Love Actually is a movie with many sins, but sometimes, things are hard, and we just want to pop a beer and watch a stupid fantasy movie. Arrow-shooting elves don’t exist, but they’re fun to watch — and just because they’re depicted on screen doesn’t necessarily mean that most of us think it’s that way in real life. At least, I hope not.

Face Of The Day

Walking with the Wounded team member Duncan Slater is embraced by his daughter Lilly on his return to London Heathrow on December 23, 2013. The South Pole allied expedition comprised of three international teams made up of wounded servicemen and women from the UK, the US and the Commonwealth (Australia and Canada) trekking across 335km of the Antarctic Plateau to reach the South Pole in 16 days. By Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

“Merry Xmas!”

Matthew Schmitz defends the abbreviation against its religious detractors:

One of the popular indicators of the supposed war on Christmas is the use of the abbreviation Xmas. The well motivated, if grating, “Don’t take Christ out of Christmas” alludes not so subtly to the abbreviation. The former Anglican bishop of Blackburn, Alan Chesters, advised his clergy against using it. Jane Wyles, editor of the Anglican C Magazine, summed up much Christian sentiment when she criticized the “glib way people substitute Christ with this anonymous ‘X’. It’s all part of the PC picture—Christianity gets squashed into a smaller and smaller corner.” …

Xmas is, though, a much more venerable abbreviation than many suppose. The X signifies the Greek letter chi, which was traditionally combined with P, or rho, to signify the name of Christ. Constantine instructed his soldiers to scrawl the letters on their shields before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, his victory in which led to the unlikely establishment of a Christian empire. Far from a symbol of secularization, then, Xmas carries echoes of the clash of battle that inaugurated political Christendom. The abbreviation’s use in English dates back to 1021, when an Anglo-Saxon scribe saved himself space by writing XPmas. The P was dropped but the term soldiered on: Coleridge used Xmas in his letter writing. The wags at Punch pressed it into service as a verb, Xmassing …

Mental Health Break

A yuletide ode to synthesizers:

Middle-Income Migrants

Contrary to popular belief, migrants don’t tend to flow from the poorest countries to the wealthiest:

It is often said that the only way to reduce migration from poor countries is to boost development, but this ignores the inconvenient fact that development is generally not associated with lower levels of emigration. Important emigration countries such as Mexico, Morocco, Turkey and the Philippines are typically not among the poorest countries. Meanwhile – and against popular perceptions of a “continent on the move” – Sub-Saharan Africa is the least migratory region of the world. In fact, when you examine the data, human and economic development is initially associated with increasing emigration. Any form of development in the poorest countries of the world is therefore likely to lead to accelerating emigration. Such findings contradict conventional thinking and force us to radically change our views on migration. …

Improved access to information, images and lifestyles conveyed through education and media tend to broaden people’s mental horizons, change their perceptions of the “good life” and typically increase material aspirations. Development processes tend to initially increase both people’s ability to move and their aspirations, explaining why development often boosts migration.

A Poem From The Year

One of the things I’m proudest of, here at the Dish, is our publishing of poetry on a regular basis. We stared doing it haphazardly a few years back, but this is the second year that the Dish’s poetry offerings have been arranged by Alice Quinn. Not every reader will know what an honor and privilege this is, but Alice was the Knopf’s poetry editor from 1976 – 1986 and the New Yorker’s poetry editor for the next twenty years, and is now the executive director of the Poetry Society of America. To have someone of her experience and judgment be the guardian of a blog’s selection of poetry has always been a coup for us. But this year especially, in its range and depth and often piercing simplicity has been a joy.

If you love the poems, there’s something you can do to thank Alice for her work, which she does for us for the love of bringing poetry to a new medium and new audience. The Poetry Society of America, the wonderful organization Alice directs, is running a special year-end membership campaign from now until January 2nd. While supplies last, anyone who joins at the basic membership level gets a signed, limited-edition broadside of “Keeping Our Small Boat Afloat” by Robert Bly with an extra $50 donation. Any donation is tax-deductible – and for a short time, you also get a beautiful broadside in the bargain. If you want to thank Alice, sign up for your membership here.

In the week ahead, we’ll also be looking back at a few of the poems offered this year, chosen by Alice and Matt – think of it as an idiosyncratic “greatest hits” of Dish poetry. Each of these poems will include a link to the Poetry Society of America’s membership drive. The first poem we’re revisiting is below.

“Hunger for the Absolute” by Frank Bidart:

Earth you know is round but seems flat.

You can’t trust

your senses.

You thought you had seen every variety of creature

but not

this creature.

・

When I met him, I knew I had

weaned myself from God, not

hunger for the absolute. O unquenched

mouth, tonguing what is and must

remain inapprehensible—

saying You are not finite. You are not finite.

Please consider supporting the work of the Poetry Society of America here.

(From Metaphysical Dog by Frank Bidart © 2013 by Frank Bidart. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Photo by Tristan Bowersox)

Presenting The 2013 Dish Awards!

As usual, our blue-ribbon panel – sequestered for days in an undisclosed location – has selected this year’s finalists. It was an agonizing, often nail-biting time. But we did our duty and now it’s that time of year for you to do yours. Click the links listed below and vote for the 2013 Malkin Award, Hewitt Award, Hathos Alert, Moore Award, Poseur Alert, Yglesias Award, and Dick Morris Award. Polls are also open for the Chart Of The Year, Mental Health Break Of The Year, and Face Of The Year.

And, for the first time, you can pick the year’s best Window View and Cool Ad. Yes, a Window View contest everyone can win!

The Dish Awards Glossary

You have until the end of the year to pick the prize-winners. The polls will close on Tuesday, December 31, at midnight. Winners will be announced soon after. You picked many of the entries; we just marshaled the very best (or worst) for your final selection:

Click here to vote for the 2013 Malkin Award!

Click here to vote for the 2013 Moore Award!

Click here to vote for the 2013 Dick Morris Award!

Click here to vote for the 2013 Poseur Alert!

Click here to vote for the 2013 Yglesias Award!

Click here to vote for the 2013 Hewitt Award!

Click here to vote for the 2013 Hathos Alert!

Click here to vote for the Chart Of The Year!

Click here to vote for the Cool Ad Of The Year!

Click here to vote for the Face Of The Year!

Click here to vote for the Mental Health Break Of The Year!

Click here to vote for the Window View Of The Year!

Last-Minute Christmas Shopping: Give The Gift Of The Dish!

[Re-posted from yesterday]

A reader gets in the spirit:

Hooray on being able to gift subscriptions! I just bought one for my 73-year-old, former Catholic nun mother who loves your blog and has been following in non-subscriber status. I’m pretty accustomed to hearing her say to me, “Well, here’s what ANDREW said about that”, so this will be a treat for her. I’ve been reading your blog since the start and was one of the immediate subscribers and love it. Now my mom and I will be able to make it an official family activity to dish on The Dish.  Thank you for all of the awesome stuff that you write. Your long-form piece on Pope Francis made me cry, and I mean in a really, really good way. Happy Christmas in a totally not hathos-causing way.

In case you missed the details: Tinypass, our e-commerce partner, just released an updated version of our gifting service, in time for Christmas. Now you can schedule the delivery of a gift subscription to the day. Just buy it now and have it automatically emailed to your friend or family member on Christmas Day. You can also add a personalized message to the gift email. Just go here to fill out a quick form for a one-year gift subscription – which, remember, is a one-time purchase that won’t recur next year. The price is just $19.99 – or more if you want to give a little extra to the Dish this year. Another gift-giver writes:

I’m a long-time reader and was an early and enthusiastic subscriber, but it wasn’t until I read and listened to the latest Deep Dish that I finally got off my butt to send several gift subscriptions to friends who I know will just LOVE the essay on Pope Francis and the wide-ranging conversation with Dan Savage.  It was really self-interest on my part – this volume of Deep Dish is provoking so many thoughts and ideas that I need smart people to talk to about it all!  What better way, I figured, than to give gift subscriptions to some of my smart, thoughtful friends?  I hope other Dish heads are feeling so inspired – it’s such an easy gift (takes no time at all!), for a friend and for the Dish.

Another:

I just sent gift subscriptions to my cousin and aunt in North Yorkshire, the few relatives of mine who love politics as much as I do. I am Canadian and don’t get to talk to or visit my British relatives all that much, so I am hoping your blog will bring us a little closer.

Another:

I’ve just purchased two gift subscriptions. One for my father, one for my brother. These two people are the ones who were most responsible for my own intellectual and worldview development as I was growing up, and I couldn’t be happier to share back with them my favorite daily source of intellectual exercise – the Dish.

And finally, if you’re one of our 35,000 Dishhead free-riders who maxed out the meter but haven’t subscribed yet, why not give yourselves and us a present? Subscribe here for as little as $1.99 a month. Update from a recovering free-rider:

Sigh. I finally gave in, and subscribed today, after resisting right from the beginning of the year – not out of procrastination, but for philosophical reasons. I realised that I’ve been reading The Dish since 2004, that it was one of the blogs that kept me sane during the Bush years, that it helped me adjust to American life significantly (like Andrew, I am a British person born in the early sixties, Oxbridge educated, came to maturity during the Thatcher years, met and fell in love with an American, and moved here ten years ago). Since that time, I’ve read The Dish several times a day, and it’s been one of the bookmarks on my web browser/mobile phone browser that always gets transferred straight away from device to device. And yet I felt unwilling to fork over the modest sum of just under twenty dollars a year when asked to fund the new venture.

Why? Because, wonderful as it is, The Dish’s marvelous commentary is still largely based on stories that originate elsewhere. It’s like the best opinion page on the planet, but if I wasn’t paying for the news sources that dig up those stories in the first place, it didn’t seem right to spend the money on a blog either. Well, one solution is to pay for both, which I have done (New York Times is getting a subscription, too).

The main reason that made me change my mind is, quite simply, Deep Dish. Longer pieces that are related to the blog but more closely resemble magazine journalism, e-books like the Iraq War penance – that is absolutely worth paying for.

Finally, you’ve heard this many times before, but it’s the fact that I don’t always agree with you that keeps me coming back. You’ve created a unique space on the Internet, and I am now happy to contribute a little cash to keep it going.

The Anti-HIV Pill

Eric Sasson wants more attention paid to “PrEP, or Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis, arguably the biggest breakthrough in HIV prevention medication to come out in the last two years.” He’s dead right. HIV-negative men using PrEP are much, much less likely to get infected, and yet there has been no rush to get this news across or to capitalize on it:

Truvada, the first PrEP drug, was approved by the FDA last summer. When taken daily, it can prevent transmission of HIV 99 percent of the time if taken every day. Even if taken only four times a week, its effectiveness remains as high as 96 percent. One would think that a statistic like that would be widely reported and celebrated, and yet there are few people outside of the LGBT community who have even heard of PrEP.

It’s easy to understand why PrEP hasn’t been heavily publicized by certain institutions involved in HIV prevention. Thirty years into the epidemic, the CDC still says oral sex can result in the transmission of HIV, despite enough evidence showing that the risk is “extremely low.” The agencies play it safe, and PrEP opens them to another kind of risk. There is also the issue of adherence: People are not always good at sticking to a daily regimen of pills, and doctors worry that using Truvada on occasion, rather than as directed, might lead to the emergence of drug resistant strains.

But the lack of reporting about PrEP may stem from something else altogether: a lingering controversy about its use within the gay community itself, and how PrEP has contributed to a growing generational divide between old-guard condom true-believers, many of whom survived the epidemic of the ’80s and ’90s, and a new generation of HIV activists for whom condom use is seen as just one tool in a growing arsenal of prevention methods.

As a survivor of the epidemic, I’m with the new guard and not the old. Not least because I have no core objections to gay men having sex with one another. But those who stand guard over public health policy – gay and straight – don’t seem to share my view.

Why Does Port Pack Such A Punch?

A theory:

One possible answer lies in a drink’s “congeners.” These molecules originate either in the plants used to make the booze, or as a byproduct of the fermentation process, and give a wine, beer, or spirit its distinctive taste. Congeners, rather than ethanol itself, are often blamed for the length and severity of hangovers – high-congener alcohols such as bourbon make you feel much worse the morning after compared with vodka, which has virtually none.

In 2009, José Andrade at the University of Porto in Portugal got some mice tanked up on red wine. He showed that congeners in it – antioxidant polyphenols, to be precise – help to counteract the damage ethanol does to the brain’s hippocampus. The red wine left the mice with a better sense of direction than those fed the same concentration of ethanol in water.

But there was bad news for fans of Andrade’s local tipple. Port, which has an ethanol content of about 20 per cent, seems to be almost as potent as a solution of ethanol of the same strength when it comes to frazzling your hippocampus – a fact that Andrade puts down to the higher concentration of sugar in the drink. If you are a port drinker, best to always take a taxi home.