The camera pans down a church pew. A man named Lars sits, comfortable but distracted. Vaguely in the background a pastor is speaking. He says, “…no one needs ask, Lord what should I do? Because He has told us. Love one another…. Love is God in action.” This background sermon, which could be taken as mere ambient church noise, is essential to the understanding of love demonstrated in the film, Lars and the Real Girl.
Lars lives in the garage next door to the family house where his brother and pregnant sister-in-law live. A coworker from his office job shows him a sex doll website and then Lars orders himself a plastic girlfriend, Bianca. He treats her like his girlfriend. He creates a history for her. He believes she is real. As the psychologist in the film informs his brother, Lars is suffering from a delusion. Instead of alienating him though, the entire town participates in his relationship with Bianca. They give her a job as a manikin in the mall. They give her a haircut, wash her, dress her, and take her to social functions. They sacrifice their time and energy to love Lars in his delusion.
The more I thought about this movie, the more I had a difficult time connecting the love in this film to any of the speeches in Plato’s Symposium. The love in this movie is so other-centered and sacrificial, in a way that I did not see expressed in any of the Symposium speeches. In fact, when Lars’s brother, Gus, comes to the realization that this delusion may not go away, he stops trying to tell Lars “she’s not real” and learns how to still love his brother in the midst of the delusion.
The closest speech that love in this film compares with in Symposium is the love of Diotima’s ladder. Yet it does not reach to the top of the ladder. Somewhere the love in Lars diverges from the rung-by-rung trek of love of the Beautiful. Diotima says, “There is a certain story where lovers are those who seek their halves, to be whole, but in my story a lover does not seek the half nor the whole unless it turns out to be good as well.” She is specifically pointing at the love in Aristophanes speech and saying that it is a false understanding of love. This is where Lars and Diotima are aligned. Love specifically seeks Goodness.
Furthermore, love is productive. Diotima speaks of love as a productive force whereas the love of Phaedrus and Pausanias are centered in sensual desire, primarily for its own sake. Love in Lars is also necessarily productive, in the sense that there are actions of love and more goodness begotten of those actions. The significant introductory line saying “Love is God in action,” points to the productivity of Love. This also true in the sense that it would not be enough to send well meaning thoughts someone’s way, action is necessary to the wholeness of love.
Though the film seems to agree with Diotima’s initial judgments about the falseness of the other ideas of love, it does not seem to have anything to do with the ladder she sets up as the progress of growing love. First of all, Diotima says that lovers seek the Good, not merely appetitive satisfaction. However she almost immediately replaces the word “Good” with “Beautiful.” The ladder begins with the recognition of beauty in one body and then the recognition of beauty in many bodies. This moves to perceiving beauty in souls and then in beautiful customs. Then the pursuit continues into a desire to learn beautiful things; which leads to “learning this very Beauty” and ultimately, knowing what it is to be beautiful.
Lars is not a story of a man climbing Diotima’s ladder. At the very least it is not a story about a man climbing Diotima’s ladder to the top. The point in the movie is about love being sacrificial. Like in Diotima’s story, it is a mark of maturity. Lars’s brother Gus, says, “you grow up when you do what’s right, and not just what’s right for you, what’s right for everybody… even when it hurts.” Gus climbs Diotima’s ladder to the rung where the lover can see beauty in people’s souls. He does not go very far concerning love and the Beautiful but in the movie, and it seems even in the context of real community, Gus truly has gone far in his knowledge of love.
Perhaps this is where love in Lars diverges from Diotima’s ladder. The hierarchy of love in Lars moves differently. It moves from seeing beauty in one body, to seeing beauty in many bodies, to seeing beauty in souls, to caring for that beauty in a community. Love is the bond of community, and it seems that Diotima’s ladder is based on choosing the Good for oneself. Diotima’s idea of love does not seem to be about doing what is good for the sake of others, like love in Lars is about. Instead, it seems self-focused even in its pursuit of knowing what it is to be beautiful. There is no benefit for the town or Lars’s family to extend care to Bianca. There is especially no benefit to it when Gus comes to understand that Lars’s delusion is not going to go away. So, if they (the townspeople and Gus) were seeking the Beautiful, it seems as if they would have moved on from Lars in his delusion.
Therefore, I would venture to say that Lars demonstrates a reinvention of love that is not demonstrated in the Symposium. Furthermore, the love in Lars seems greater than the love that grows with Diotima’s ladder. This second statement however is my opinion and may be founded in my Christian understanding of love as something only truly demonstrated in community. It is an understanding that does not seem present in Diotima’s ladder. The love of the Beautiful does progress, but the activity of progression appears to primarily benefit a singular person and not a community. Lars takes a different spin on love, unique from all the speeches of the Symposium, where a community is necessary for love, that love is in its nature sacrificial, and that it overcomes a multitude of barriers and divisions. Love is God in action.
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