Why Do We Keep Falling in Love with Fish? (Patreon)

Warning. You might want some tunes while reading this one. 

While contemplating the vastness and strange condition that we, as humans, spend our lives under, Huey Lewis and the News correctly identified love as “The power that makes the world go ‘round.” Love is a curious, and some might say capricious, condition. Not really an emotion as much as it is a heady draught of humanity’s finest. We fall in love everywhere, it seems. From loud dance floors to the quiet corners of our lives. So much of our artistic space is devoted to the times we fall in love with the perfect person, and the times we don’t. There is room in this space as well, for the times we fall in love with fish.

Spring (2014) by directors Moorhead and Benson, is a timeless tale of love against the odds. Our protagonist Evan is a better than average representation of an American abroad—a point which the film is very keen on making. Fleeing an incredibly minor assault charge and an incredibly major crumbling personal life, Evan winds up in Italy where he meets the love of his life. Louise is a well educated woman, attractive, and also a 2,000 year old Lovecraftian monster. Spring is a beautiful film, which includes some amazing early drone videography, but the story it tells is a tale as old as time. 

Humanity loves loving monsters. Beauty and the Beast, King Kong, Dracula, are all examples of this story we keep telling ourselves. There’s a subset of monster-loving fiction dedicated for creatures of the deep. It contains everything from The Little Mermaid to Cthulhurotica, from The Shape of Water to The Incredible Mr. Limpet. Like their land-loving counterparts, these fictions point us towards a deeper truth about the nature of love. To love is to become monstrous.

We recognize something Other in love. A foundational condition of the monstrous is its lack of certainty. Monsters are metaphoric, and often literal, shapeshifters. They refuse to and can not belong in easy categories. They defy control. Their complex and shifting desires threaten to drag our lives into their uncharted territory and reshape humanity as they see fit. All of this is also true for love. 

Like Frankenstein’s Creature, love once created exists beyond the control of its creators. It has its own goals and desire beyond what the individuals who precipitated its advent can foresee. In the end, Evan and Louise have fallen in love. This suspends Louise’s monstrous nature, but rather than ending her monstrosity it allows them to become a greater monster together than either were apart. Like all works of art, the film shows us an intimate truth about ourselves. To embrace love is to embrace a force not altogether human or, perhaps, beyond human—monstrous. 

-Ash