More Top Picks Grow Tents
player ready...Even in this jaded era, people can’t seem to get enough of love-at least of the make-believe variety.
The No. 1 fiction best seller, “The Bridges of Madison County,” is about a passionate if unlikely love affair between a staid Iowa farm wife and a National Geographic photographer who appears at her doorstep to ask directions.
The country’s top-grossing movie is “Indecent Proposal,” in which a high-roller billionaire offers an ostensibly happily married woman a million dollars for a one-night stand, igniting another improbable romance.
And “Aladdin”-the ultimate fantasy romance featuring lovers who are animated cartoon characters-just passed the milestone $200 million mark at the box office.
Such mass appeal illustrates an anomaly of the ’90s: No matter how cynical people say they are about love, or how much the subject has been analyzed to death, audiences still respond to it.
The result: an onslaught of movies and novels that speak to people’s craving for romance while turning upside-down the traditional notion of romantic love.
They are a far cry from the ’70s film “Love Story.” The relationships they chronicle are often troubled, bordering on dysfunctional. In these stories, love means always having to say you’re sorry.
It makes sense
Arthur Aron, a social psychologist at the University of California at Santa Cruz who has conducted studies on what makes people fall in love, isn’t surprised audiences are responding to quirky love stories. The experience of falling in love “takes you out of the normal day-to-day pattern of life. That is what it is about,” he said.
But when people fall in and out of love often, “it is possible to be jaded. The more you are familiar with the unusual, it is no longer unusual.”
To vicariously experience a romance on the screen or on the printed page, he said, it has to be something people feel they haven’t seen or done before.
“It has got to be unusual compared to what you vicariously experienced before,” Aron said. “If you have seen a million movies and read a million romances, then the next one to be interesting is going to have to be a little different.”
The themes and buzzwords of some fiction seem to be lifted from pop psychology books that inform people how they have messed up their love lives. Glenn Savan, author of “White Palace,” which was made into a movie, admits he read “Women Who Love Too Much” while working on his new novel, “Goldman’s Anatomy.”
“I realized I was writing a character whose behavior bore a suspicious resemblance to the behavior of a woman who loved too much.”
The objective of his novels has been “to take a skewed look at what it’s like to be in an odd stereotypical relationship,” said Savan, 39. “I think it is my job to stir up the pot.”
He has found himself elevated to the position of expert in matters of the heart. After “White Palace” came out, he received some “plaintive heart-wrenching letters” from people who were in relationships where there was either an age gap or a gap in social class, asking his advice on whether they should stick it out.
“I wrote back and tried to get them to understand that I was only a fiction writer and I had no more idea than they did.”
Reality check
Because of all the analysis available on the subject of love, it’s harder than ever to write fiction about it, said Sue Miller, whose novel “The Good Mother” also became a film.
“One liability you are dealing with is the fact that people do understand something about the way love works for us psychologically,” said Miller, 49.
“People didn’t used to be so psychologically aware. That undercuts the ability to simply go with romantic feelings.”
However, those feelings seem to gush out while watching certain movies. Take “Indecent Proposal.” Critics have lambasted it as stupid and immoral, but audiences have been moved to applause and even tears.
They see it as what director Adrian Lyne said he intended it to be: “a shameless romance.”
This is the second time recently that critics have missed the romantic appeal of a movie. They knocked “The Bodyguard,” while audiences-largely women and teenage girls-made it one of the top box-office hits of 1992.
Robert Redford plays the billionaire as if he were the second coming of that great fallen romantic Jay Gatsby. Redford even dons a white suit for the part. This time, however, he is determined to get the girl no matter what it costs. It’s as if Gatsby’s mistake were to throw money around in the hope of attracting his love object, when he should have just offered it to her directly.
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Neil Smelser, professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley, thinks “Indecent Proposal” isn’t about love at all, “but about corruption and the power of money to corrupt love.” The reason it has struck such a nerve is that “Americans at this particular moment in history are extremely preoccupied, if not hung up on, corruption in society.”
That men are blatantly buying women on the screen, however, could simply be a comment on how hard it is to meet people these days.
It seems in keeping with the proliferation of pricey dating services charging thousands of dollars on the premise that successful professional people are just too busy to try to find someone on their own. Who says money can’t buy love?
The need to believe love will find you against all odds has propelled the sales of “The Bridges of Madison County” and “Griffin & Sabine.” With almost no initial publicity, both wound up on the best-seller list and have stayed there more than 30 weeks. People tell their friends they simply have to read them or they give them as presents.
Although very different-“Griffin & Sabine” and its sequel, “Sabine’s Journal,” are lavishly illustrated letters between two people who never seem able to meet, possibly because one may be a figment of the other’s imagination-“Bridges” and the Sabine series share an appealing message: There is someone you are destined to be with if only you leave yourself open to it.
“What I am talking about in my books is not so much karma as it is timing,” said Nick Bantock, 43, whose final Sabine book, “The Golden Mean,” will be out in September. “When you get to a certain point of growth within yourself then you are capable of being with someone who is going to actually stimulate the next stage of your growth. But if you can’t handle them, if they are too much for you, you will walk straight past them.”
Call collect
The romance between that farm wife and photographer in “Bridges” is written so convincingly, and seems so fated to be, that many readers are unwilling to accept the fact it never happened. They have called National Geographic asking for copies of pictures taken by the fictional hero.
“I had people claim they had seen the two of them on television,” said author Robert James Waller, who may have led readers astray with an introduction that made it sound as if everything in the book really happened.
Waller, 53, has a good sense of how readers have reacted because he has talked to so many of them. He still has a listed phone number. When people call, they get a recorded message inviting them to leave a number where he can call them back collect.
“One woman said to me the other day, `You have opened doors inside of me I closed a long time ago, and I don’t know what to do with them now that they’re open.”‘
Another told him that because of his book, she was able to tell her husband about a long ago past love.
“There must be a lot of loneliness out there,” Waller said, “and some kind of hunger for simpler things we have gotten away from. And there is a hunger for romance.”