The Haunted Spectacle: What has happened to our perception of love?
The graphic of Ghostface with a pink heart around him with the words “no you hang up” is on stock at Spirit Halloween as part of their Halloween graphic tee collection, as is a notorious photo of Edward Cullen from Twilight, backed by a black unisex t-shirt. These graphics, oddly enough, show up now just as frequently in the Valentine’s Day section in mid-January as they do in the back of Halloween pop ups like Spirit. Yet, conversation hearts are yet to show up in children’s pillowcases as they trick-or-treat in their suburban neighborhood. My prediction is that in the coming years, conversation hearts will also begin to frequent the Halloween sections just as Ghostface has made his way into the Valentine’s Day section. Perhaps our perception of love and what we find to be sweet or affectionate has been shaped rather dramatically by horror, making the most pure aspect of our humanity something that is actually far more sinister and chilling.
From Romeo and Juliet to the Twilight Saga, love has always beheld the tried and true romanticization of death and resurrection. I mean, come on, Juliet literally rose in the morgue after her much older boyfriend had just taken a shot of bane. Bella Swan literally died in the last book of Twilight and we witnessed as all her blood vessels freeze before they disintegrated. From our early childhood, from class to the comfort of our bedrooms on a gloomy day, the narratives of love have often been accompanied by the bitterness or romanticization of death; the idea that, if you die for someone, they must mean the world to you and you have done your due diligence in loving them. The loud and attention grabbing narrative of these works naturally makes consumers of media like this feel singled out and understood, and so our perception of love has become that it is something loud and attention grabbing— not something to live for, but something so final and so devastating that it will be the death of you.
However, I do not think that the culture of love being so devastating that it is fatal is not the most sinister thing about our Western ideals of love (for my psychology final in high school, I presented on whether or not you could die from a broken heart). What is more sinister is the desire to live only for a lover. To live for a person, and only one person, is to consent to their everpresent impression that they own you. It is spectacular to believe it is normal for characters like Edward Cullen to sneak into Bella’s room at night to watch her sleep, or to believe that it is normal to hand your lover a pink conversation heart with the words “be mine” written in stark red ink on it. We have come to romanticize this romantic surrender of our agency.
To love is to either die or surrender all of yourself to your counterpart. It is to romanticize characters like Ghostface, as if Ghostface is not the father of the popular masked slasher serial killer trope. It is the constant exchange and fetishization of inhibiting pain. The only thing that would make the Twilight Saga more accurate would be if Edward peered into Bella’s ear to whisper her name in the sing songy voice of horror movies— or if he just said boo.