Stacey Sude
PHI 299
Aspects
of Plato’s Symposium in “Love and Death on Long Island”
The film, “Love and Death on Long Island,” adapted from Gilbert Adair’s novel for the screen by Richard Kwietniowski, is a stunning portrayal of infatuation and unrequited love. The plot centers on an aging, secluded, and stodgy British writer, Giles De’Ath, who begins to undergo a personal awakening. Though he has, for the most part, forsaken the public and the modern world, as well as intimate relationships, he is becoming more open to new experiences since his wife’s death. When Giles accidentally locks himself out of the house, he wanders into a theatre and attends a pop-American teen film by mistake. The beauty of one of the young American actors, Ronnie Bostock, unwittingly entrances him. He develops an obsession with the teenager, whom he deems “winsome, young, neoclassical, isolated by beauty, death.” He imagines a brand of friendship and love between them that is in the tradition of members of the elite classes of classical Greece, a form of pederasty celebrated and discussed at length by the characters of Plato’s Symposium. Giles’s relationship to Ronnie can be examined in light of the speeches of the famous dialogue. The old writer parallels the Symposium’s Pausanius and the young actor, Phaedrus and Agathon, and the odd connection between them corresponds to elements of Eros “adorned” in Plato’s work.
The perspective on love expressed in the Symposium that perhaps best fits Giles is Pausanius’s. Like Giles, Pausanius is a pedantic, unattractive, and somewhat crotchety older man. They are both established, Giles as a writer and Pausanius as a well-known master of rhetoric. The object of Pausanius’s affections is the young beautiful poet, Agathon, much as Ronnie is the eromanos of Giles. Pausanius’s speech on Eros indicates a view on love that is primarily self-serving. He skews the truth in favor of the pederastic lover, in order to convince Agathon to sustain their relationship. He presents an argument that distinguishes between what he calls “vulgar” and “heavenly”(Plato, 180C-185C) Eros and applies these to heterosexual versus homosexual, and particularly pederastic, love. Pausanius proposes that heterosexual love is a vulgar and corporeal love, the main objective of which is to produce children. He argues that this type of love is base and inferior to the love of young men, the “heavenly” or “celestial”(Plato, 180C-185C) type. He claims that those who are inspired by pederasty “love what is more manly and intelligent,”(Plato, 180C-185C) and that this love’s objective is the cultivation of virtue. Similarly, Giles De’Ath is equally self-serving and actively indulges his affection for Ronnie Bostock, while he seems displeased with women in general. Giles does not speak nostalgically or lovingly of his late wife, if he mentions her at all, and he comments that they never had children, suggesting that there was minimal romance between them. While giving a scholarly lecture, Giles launches into verbal reverie about the power of an actor’s screen presence, picturing his Ronnie in his mind’s eye, and only grudgingly adds the pronoun, “she,” to politely ascribe the same power to female actors. He appears disconcerted to have to adapt his vision of masculine beauty and power to the mixed-sex group, out of social obligation. Correspondingly, when Giles finally meets Ronnie in the flesh and positions himself as a friend, he treats Ronnie’s fiancé with a dismissive indifference. He does not so much view her as a threat to his relationship with Ronnie, so much as a harmless, if annoying, inferior. Giles generally ignores her remarks. He denies Ronnie any real love for his fiancé, referring to her as a “temporary attachment” when he finally confesses to Ronnie his devotion at the end of the film.
Ronnie Bostock’s role as beloved is mirrored by that of Phaedrus and Agathon in the Symposium. Phaedrus and Agathon are attractive youths who capture the attention and resources of older men, Eryximachus and Pausanius, respectively. They have entered into symbiotic pederastic relationships with these men, in which they offer up their youthful charms in exchange for the tutelage of their more experienced lovers. Though Ronnie is not clued in to Giles’s motives until the end of the film, he is inadvertently being initiated into this type of relationship. Giles has plans for him; he has developed an idea for a screenplay that would feature Ronnie and later reveals that he is prepared to devote himself to Ronnie’s career. He compares Ronnie’s performance in “Hotpants College II” to Shakespeare’s work, noting that Shakespeare used lowbrow humor to appease the masses in the pit. However, Giles is projecting his fantasies onto Ronnie. Ronnie accepts Giles’s offer to help him move beyond the teen film genre and get some “real” acting work, as he puts it, but Ronnie is not a true artist. He is intrigued when Giles tells him that the reason he acts is because “a film can change the way people think,” but he does not really internalize it. Ronnie is more like Plato’s Phaedrus, the common sense man who dabbles in creative arts and represents an audience for artists, than like Agathon, the talented and prolific poet. Phaedrus is concerned with the usefulness of love and Ronnie is analogously concerned with what is useful to his career. Ronnie’s beauty might rival Agathon’s, but his skill, inspiration, and intelligence are not comparable. His acting ability rather suits films at the level of his best-known work, “Tex Mex” and “Hotpants College II,” and when Giles describes the very cerebral plot of the screenplay he intends to write for Ronnie, Ronnie’s pensive praise is, “It’s kind-of artsy, I guess.”
Though Giles’s love turns out to be misinformed and misplaced, Eros, as defined by Diotima through Socrates in the Symposium, is diligently and ruthlessly at work in Giles’s spirit. In the conversation relayed by Socrates, Diotima explains that Eros is a child of Poros and Penia, resource and poverty, and so represents a state of desire, in between having and lacking. Giles’s life is a lonely, dispassionate routine until he beholds Ronnie and desire fills him like a fuel. When Giles confesses his love for Ronnie, he reveals that a void was filled by his love, emoting, “There is nothing more solitary than an artist’s life…One yearns for solace without quite knowing where to look for it. But I found it in you.” Desire drives and directs him like never before. He begins to go to the cinema to see Ronnie’s movies, though he has not attended a film in years. He purchases a television and video player, and becomes a member of a video rental store chain, though he was previously a kind of luddite. He flies to Chesterton, Long Island, Ronnie’s town of residence, though he has always believed that travel, for its own sake, is frivolous. The effect of Giles’s ardor for Ronnie is a change of attitude, a new openness to the world. If the love Giles envisions with Ronnie were palpable, and if he were able to temper it with rational reigns, perhaps it would grow and prosper and pass through the various stages of Diotima’s “ascent of love.”(Plato, 209e-210e) Giles imagines a higher potential for his love, though it remains on the lower rungs of Diotima’s ladder throughout the movie. He is able to love and appreciate Ronnie’s body, from a distance for seven years and in person for a week or two, but he also desires to know and to nurture Ronnie’s mind, specifically his artistic inclination. When Giles is trying to persuade Ronnie to consider a relationship with him, albeit unsuccessfully, he offers Ronnie a life of, not only romance, but also mutual artistic appreciation. His dream is consistent with Diotima’s progression of love, “from corporeal beauty to beautiful behavior, from beautiful human acts to the beauty of learning, from the beauty of knowledge to a revelation of Beauty itself”(Plato, 210e-212a). Giles intends a relationship with Ronnie at least at the level of embracing beautiful human acts, in this case, art. Of course, Giles’s vision is selfish and hopeless; it is not shared by his beloved and Giles is so enchanted with his idea of Ronnie that he does not attempt to understand what is actually in Ronnie’s best interest.
“Love and Death on Long Island” constitutes an interesting contemporary correlation to the characters and themes of Plato’s Symposium. Giles’s rejection of women in response to his self-centered passion for a teenage actor coincides with Pausanius’s glorification of pederasty in support of his relationship with Agathon. Ronnie, in his youth, beauty, and interest in Giles’s ability to further his career, reflects the motivations behind Phaedrus’s and Agathon’s associations with their lovers. Giles deeply longs for the type of bond Phaedrus and Agathon share with their erostes, though it is infeasible. The longing within Giles, however, stirs him alive with a desire for beauty that is the first step in Diotima’s ascent. His contemplation of a love shared with Ronnie encompasses several aspects of the hierarchy of Eros, but it could never materialize, not only because Ronnie is heterosexual, but also because Giles refuses to see Ronnie incarnate, independent of his conception of him.
Plato. Symposium. Trans. Emil Piscitelli.
Love and Death on Long Island. Dir. Richard Kwietnowski. Perf. John Hurt and Jason Priestly. Videocassette. Skyline/Imagex, 1998.