Love Is The Devil

For Crashie and anyone else for whom matters of the heart hit close.

I saw a film once, many years ago, which moved me profoundly. A true story.
The name of the film says it all. Though perhaps, it didn't really hit home to me straight away.
But many times I find myself reminded of it and I find myself thinking 'Love IS the devil'.
Sometimes it is.

The film is one you should definitely see. It concerns the homosexual relationship of the painter Francis Bacon and his working class bit of rough, George Dyer. Two great actors in the lead roles, Derek Jacobi as Bacon, Daniel Craig as Dyer.
The affair begins when Dyer, a small time criminal is caught by Bacon in the process of burgling his flat. Bacon offers him the deal 'Come to bed and you can take anything you want'.
And the film shows where this goes.

For Bacon, Dyer fulfills several functions. Bacon is a flamboyant, flaunting, promiscuous homosexual in an era when homosexuality was illegal still. So his public displays and candid love of, as he puts it 'finding his pleasure with men fucking', can also be seen as a kind of rejection of social constraints of the time. It is about sex, but it isn't. In the circles he moves in, homosexuality fulfills much the same role as the appearance of lines of white powder does on coffee tables at parties today; it is a statement of rejection of the repressive constraints of 'respectable' society and a cry of unashamed libertinism.
He drags Dyer around his social functions, but almost treats him as a dog. He patronises, ridicules him, only in the bedroom do the roles reverse when Bacon adopts the submissive role.

It is difficult sometimes, to like Bacon as portrayed in this film, but that of course, is to miss the point.

Eventually, it gets too much for Dyer. Because there is one thing that Dyer can never shake. To be sure, he has accepted his role as Bacon's lover, a role totally at odds with the mores of his background, but the values ingrained with in him he cannot ever truly lose. He cannot ever quite see things as Bacon does.
And towards the end we see that gap.
Bacon is increasingly neglecting Dyer, as a series of exhibitions leave Dyer confined to hotel rooms, as Bacon does not want him along where others might see him. A tearful Dyer sobs 'I love you Francis'.

Bacon contemptuously replies 'George! Where did you get that from? 'Orf the tellervision?''
And it is in that answer, the real difference shows. Bacon is an artist. He studies human emotions to bring them out in canvass. Dyer to him, is an entertainment. He doesn't see Dyer in simple terms the way Dyer does. It is easy to see Bacon's response as callous- and it is- but to do so, again, is to miss the point.



In Dyer's world, love has a simple meaning. It isn't something complex, it isn't something that is deconstructed, people love eachother, or they don't. True, in his world, the one he grew up in, men didn't love men, but loving and being together was what people did.
It isn't in Bacon's world. Things are more complex. To Bacon, a statement such as 'I love you', is simplistic, it is an overused phrase that people use because their minds cannot grasp anything more complex than that, it cannot in fact truly express the multiplicity of differing emotions grouped together in that term. To Bacon- and when I first saw the film, I wasn't old enough to appreciate this point- saying 'I love you' is a melodramatic cop out from actually assessing the true situation.

Because the situation to Bacon is he's an artist. His art is important. Dyer is part of his art. Dyer stimulates his art, and in return Bacon gives Dyer a world of culture. The two provide company for eachother and satisfy sexual needs in the other. The word love is an inadequate expression of the situation.

It's interesting that the older I've got, the more sympathy I've had for Bacon. The ending of the film- Dyer's suicide- makes it hard to do so, it's only life experience makes you realise WHY the film is called 'Love is the Devil'.

Because if the film was meant to be about Bacon being a bastard, it would have been called 'Bacon was a Bastard'. It isn't.
It's about the horrifyingly destructive power love can have.



Why it can be tragic.

The problem is, too many of us are fed as children on happy ever after love stories. We come into adulthood believing it to be that simple.
That 'love' is always a force for good. Only it isn't.

Human beings are just too varied for it to be that simple.

I suppose you really have to be confronted with it, and till you are, it doesn't make sense.
It didn't click home to me till I found myself in a situation with someone of the opposite sex, for whom it really was simple, as simple as George Dyer wanted it to be. For her it was 'If I love you and you love me, that's all that matters, we should be together'.
But of course, that wasn't the right answer. Because the word love is too simple a word, a unites a lot of disparate feelings. And as she was saying all the cliches 'Love is beautiful', 'I'll care for you', etc, etc, the phrase running through my mind over and over again was; 'Love is the Devil'. And in this case, it clearly was. To her, the simple fact she felt such a powerful feeling was proof that it should be 'worked on'. To me, it was clear proof that BOTH parties should make a deliberate effort to suppress all emotions and kill all sentiment. Because for me, having people near me having such strong passions, is something I don't want.
That the reality was, it was a destructive situation that could only end in someone getting hurt. And trying to convey to her that the reason that a total- and potentially hard- severance was the right answer, and was the logical answer, was hard.
Because to her, the logic of the situation didn't impact. To her, if people love eachother, they should be together. The fact that ultimately, this might lead to the misery of both parties, didn't make sense to her.

Because the variety of feelings people get from love, and what they want from it, are entirely different things.
Quite often people think they're in love, but in fact, the problem is in the use of a single blanket word to describe a complexity of different emotions.

What is often meant is that two people may be inspiring strong feelings in eachother, but ultimately, those feelings are actually completely different.
And this is when 'Love is the Devil'.

I guess I've often been seen as a heartbreaker in my time. But it's not really because I've been a bastard. It's just that the strong feeling I use the word 'Love' to cover, is a totally different strong feeling to the strong feeling it has inspired in others.

For some, it's about sex. For me, in many ways, there is a fairly total divide between sex and love. The two can connect: they're not mutually exclusive, but nor is there any necessary connection between the two. I am more than capable of having sex with someone and not loving them, just as I am of loving someone and actually not really wanting to have sex with them.
For me, it's pretty much about the stimulation. The mental stimulation.

In other words, you're either exciting my mind- or you're not. When I say I love someone, what I mean is I find that the time I spend in their company is valuable, partly for its own sake, but more crucially, because it's inspirational.

These sentiments aren't clear cut. Sometimes the love one person has to give, is poison to another, and vice versa.

And you have to be on the receiving end of a love that really is poison to you, to realise that.
Oxygen is a toxin to many forms of bacteria...

You have to be there to understand it, to hear the genuine passion in someone's voice and still feel that shiver run through your bones, that realisation that their love for you, is dangerous to you. That to some it might not be, but for you, for you it would be, for you it is the path to misery. To realise that through their very feelings for you, all your deepest darkest fears could come true.

There is nothing in the world more terrifying than knowing you are powerless to simply remove someone from your life.



How do you tell someone, it's not that you don't care for them, it's not love you reject, it's THEIR love. Because there's no way you can make their love for you anything other than a poison to you, their love is the greatest possible threat to your happiness there is, that your life truly will be happier when they are able to suppress their feelings, take them away, and bestow them on someone else.

It is the Devil, because there it is, the finest temptation, because there it is, it deludes you, it says 'I am love, I am the finest sentiment of all'. Because it blinds. People will destroy those they love, through loving them in a way that is fatal to them. You can love someone to death.

Sometimes, it is not beautiful. Sometimes it is a dark, destructive force, that ultimately tends towards evil, an acid that destroys all that is good in the people involved.

Love isn't enough in itself, that is the problem. It isn't. The Beatles, wise though they were, were wrong there. Sometimes it isn't. Sometimes in itself, it is worth nothing, and sometimes less than that.

Love is worth nothing if it has no self awareness, if it cannot objectify itself, sometimes even sacrifice itself TO itself. Perhaps we can see Christ as an allegory there yet again. That sometimes walking away from all hope of love, is the only way we truly understand love.
Because otherwise, Love truly IS the Devil.