This Valentine’s Day Eve as my honey and I wait for the homemade pizza dough to rise for our casual romantic eve, I felt compelled to sit down and write about what inspires me about love in non-fiction film. Mostly because it’s the only kind of depiction of love that really inspires and moves me. Hollywood doesn’t have anything on docs when it comes to love. Their formula typically goes something like this: boy meets girl, flirtation ensues, they are confronted by forces out of their control, they break up, and in most cases they get back together for happily ever after. Documentary love is much more complicated, layered, and profound.
I think about Billy the Kid, the story about an autistic boy living in Maine who dreams of that Hollywood love story. But as he says, “I’m not black, I’m not white, not foreign… just different in the mind.” And so he’s yet to save the damsel in distress, both his mother who has chosen abusive mates and the teen girl he’s sweet on. But his ambition to do so is heart warming, not in a quaint way but in a way that you want to emulate yourself.
There’s unrequited love, perhaps the most tragic. In Hollywood, the person who desperately loves is never let down in the end. They find someone even more fantastic and good looking than the person they originally pined for. But in stories like Man On Wire, an admirer of dangerous tight-rope walker Phillipe Petit goes long unnoticed. While she loves him for his art, his dare-devil and ambition, he is more in love with himself. And years later she shares her pain in film.
There’s love lived in the face of intolerance, as seen in The Loving Story, a documentary about Richard and Mildred Loving, an interracial couple living in Virginia in the 1950s when their marital union was illegal. It was their landmark Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia that changed the course of history. Hopefully this film, which will be screening on HBO this month, not only warms the heart but will provide continued fuel for our country’s continued fight against marriage inequality and intolerance. This film shows that love and acceptance prevail, perhaps the Hollywood ending we’re seeking after all.
