Does Love let someone believe a lie? Is Love merely lovely? Does it ignore pain and injustice? Did Agathon speak of it correctly in his pleasant praise of love as the father of elegance? Is Love good and nice things? For the sake of argument and further analysis I will be taking a devil’s advocate sort of position on Love in Lars and the Real Girl. When I last wrote of it I praised it as a reinvention of Love, a voice not contained in the Symposium.
However, Agathon spoke of love filling us with togetherness and draining all divisiveness away, and that is most definitely what love does in Lars. The entire town comes together around Lars and Bianca. Then again, at the beginning of the film it doesn’t seem like there is significant divisiveness for the town to be drained of. Furthermore, the togetherness that Agathon is speaking of specifically points to the gathering of the symposium, intellectual drinking parties, festivals and the like. Love is fun, prettiness, games, and drinking. According to Agathon violence never touches Love, and “his place is wherever it is flowery and fragrant.”
So it appears that the Love described by Agathon is not the Love in Lars because it is directly related to all things pretty and fun. The Love in Lars is not so concerned with the pretty and fun. It works through confusion, tragedy, and a sex doll. It takes the ugly things and uses them to bring out the shades of beautiful color in a landscape of human beings. The challenge of relating with someone who legitimately believes a doll is real presents an obstacle that the townsfolk and Lars’s family can embrace, ignore, or fight. Their overwhelmingly positive embracing response, demonstrates Love in the film.
Not everyone is on board with the idea of embracing Lars’s delusion when it first enters and has to be dealt with. Gus, Lars’s brother first responds with, “What the hell is he doing with a delusion, for Christ’s sake?!...We need to fix him. Can we fix him?” Even Gus’s wife Karen, who demonstrates deep concern and care for Lars, responds with “Oh no, we couldn’t possibly do that,” when the psychologist says they should go along with the delusion. Their first reaction digs its heels in. No, they will not coddle an adult believing in a fantasy. They both do eventually go along with it, because they cannot convince Lars otherwise, and because by playing along they are also getting time with Lars. This is where the question comes in. Does Love let someone believe in a lie?
It does not seem to be a problem when looked at as letting children believe in Santa Claus or the tooth fairy. Even as kids grow older and grow out of imaginary friends, they have fantasies of being successful and famous. These fantasies are still fantasies, dreams, games of pretend, but the aim for success or fame is grounded in some kind of truth and so this is more difficult to compare. The belief in Santa Claus is much more like Lars’s delusion. Is it unloving to allow a child to believe in Santa Claus? Perhaps it is not. Then, is it unloving to cultivate the belief in Santa Claus by going along with it?
Love is so tied to truth. Yet, it is still loving to play along because the lie they are believing is not harmful. Even more than that though, in some cases the lie may actually be good and helpful for them for a time. For example, when children develop imaginary friends. The children learn to expand their imaginations and creativity with these phantom friends. Imaginary friends are not merely harmless. They are actually beneficial. In the case of Lars, his delusion is essentially the same. Lars has spent the majority of his life living in solitude, feeling guilty for his mother’s death (she died during childbirth), and pulling away from people entirely. Then Bianca arrives and Lars now has a way to communicate and relate with people. Playing along that Bianca is real is an act of Love because it paves a wide road for Lars to come back to relationship with. Love is tied to truth but love is also gracious and wise and discerns when false beliefs are to be rebuked and when they are to be temporarily engaged. It weighs the value of the person, the value of the belief and the consequences of the actions regarding either.
The Love in Lars is completely unlike the flowery and fragrant picture of Agathon’s speech. It is hearty, persistent, sacrificial, discerning, kind, and it never gives up. Furthermore the fact that the family and townsfolk are playing along with a lie does not invalidate their Love, because it is only through that lie that Lars can bring himself back to the world and allow others to love him. Their love for him goes beyond Bianca’s plastic and directs itself toward Lars’s heart and soul.
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