"I'll send you a love letter"
- fragentheatre
- Feb 14
- 7 min read
Every love story is the same. Every love story is unique. Artists have explored this most intangible of relations between human beings forever. This Valentine's Day, we take the chance to strip away the cliched red roses and candlelight to explore the perpetual fascination for what lies beneath, a vortex of emotion darker, stranger and far more compelling.
Love makes fools out of us all. Before cinema, before modern literature, Shakespeare used plays and poetry to crystallise so many forms of love in all its bizarre, catastrophic forms. We all know Romeo and Juliet, but there is much to be gleaned from some of his lesser-known couples. Consider Troilus and Cressida, where youthful passion turns to betrayal with chilling swiftness. Or All’s Well That Ends Well, where Helena obsessively pursues Bertram, a man who has no interest in her, and wins him only through trickery. And then there’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where mismatched affections are both hilarious and nightmarish. Love becomes a trick of the light, a farce orchestrated by meddling forces beyond human control.
Sometimes, in the middle of the creative act, love shows an unexpected face to be captured when we least expect it. Such moments can leave characters vulnerable, both touched and almost humiliated in the same instant. We might pity the character but we can't help marvelling at the artistic execution.
Such a memorable moment was captured shooting the second Star Wars movie, The Empire Strikes Back. The script originally had Han Solo replying to Princess Leia’s confession of love before he is frozen in carbonite with a simple and cliched, “I love you too.” But on set, director Irvin Kershner and actor Harrison Ford knew it wasn’t working. The line felt hollow, unworthy of Solo’s roguish charm. Kershner told Ford to abandon the script, to do whatever felt right. Follow the impulse. The camera rolled, Carrie Fisher confessed her love, and Ford replied, “I know.” No twisted lip, no smirk, no irony. A moment of cold detachment, perhaps, or the ultimate act of romantic confidence. Either way, iconic. It is one of cinema’s most unforgettable declarations of love, an unscripted, instinctive response that redefined on-screen romance.
Artists have long been fascinated with love at its most corrupted, dangerous, and forbidden because conflict is the essence of storytelling. Love in its purest form can be beautiful, but it is also static. Art thrives on tension, on the things that tear people apart even as they pull them together. When love is twisted by obsession, betrayal, repression, or destruction, it becomes a powerful dramatic force, one that compels audiences to confront the darker truths about human relationships.
Love at its worst reveals the fragility of human nature. When love turns to jealousy, control, or violence, it exposes our deepest insecurities and fears. Artists explore these themes to show how easily devotion can tip into possession, how affection can mask manipulation, and how even the most intense love can turn toxic. Shakespeare’s Othello is an archetypal manifestation of this. What begins as passion curdles into paranoia and ends in ruin, showing how love, when poisoned by doubt, can destroy everything in its path.
In David Lynch's Blue Velvet, Dennis Hopper's maniacally possessive, lustfully possessed Frank Booth warns Kyle MacLachlan's Jeffrey not to get "neighbourly" with Isabella Rossellini's Dorothy, his mistress, the woman he controls through her kidnapped son and husband.
Frank: Don't be a good neighbour to her. I'll send you a love letter, straight from my heart! You know what a love letter is? It's a bullet from a gun! You receive a love letter from me, you're f*cked forever! You understand? I'll send you straight to hell!
Frank knows the score. Jeffrey might play the part of the goody-two-shoes but only scratch the surface and Frank sees his own reflection in those baby innocent eyes. The eyes of a stone cold killer willing to sacrifice true love to experiment with his wicked desire.
Or think of Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day. Not your usual love story. It’s about hunger, but not for chocolate hearts and candlelit intimacy. Shane and Coré, the film’s tragic lovers, suffer from an affliction that turns their deepest desires into flesh-ripping, cannibalistic violence. The film’s dreamlike horror is a meditation on the consuming nature of love, how passion can turn feral, reducing human connection to something primal, grotesque, and inescapable. It’s the ultimate anti-Valentine’s Day film, stripping romance down to its most terrifying instinct: the need to possess, to consume, to devour.
Forbidden love has always been a source of artistic fascination because it challenges societal norms. Whether it’s Romeo and Juliet defying their feuding families, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray hinting at illicit same-sex desire, or Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love dwelling on longing rather than fulfilment, stories of forbidden romance tap into the tension between personal desire and social expectation. These narratives force audiences to question the rules that govern love. Who is allowed to love whom, under what conditions, and at what cost.
Love in its most perverse or frightening forms also serves as a metaphor for power. In many stories, love is not an equal exchange but a struggle for dominance, control, or survival. Gothic literature is full of relationships where love and power are inextricably linked. Think of Wuthering Heights, where Heathcliff’s obsessive love for Catherine leads him to torment others long after her death. In these stories, love is no longer something that nurtures. It devours.
There is also the undeniable appeal of love as a form of self-destruction. Many of the most haunting love stories are about people who are consumed by their passion, often to the point of death. Anna Karenina throws herself under a train, Emma Bovary takes poison, Jay Gatsby dies for an unattainable dream. These characters remind us that love, in its most extreme forms, can be an addiction, a force that blinds people to reason and pulls them inexorably toward their doom.
Horror and love are deeply intertwined because both deal with vulnerability. To love someone is to risk pain, loss, and rejection. It requires opening oneself up to another in a way that can be terrifying. This is why horror films and psychological thrillers so often use romantic relationships as a source of terror, from Psycho to Gone Girl to Possession. Love and horror are two sides of the same coin; both leave people exposed, at the mercy of another.
Love stories aren’t always about the love that manifests but, as so often in real life, the most memorable loves are those that got away. The loves which cannot be. The unspeakable, the unfulfilled, the unspoken desire simmering beneath the surface. Some of the most powerful romances in literature and film are defined not by grand declarations but by what remains unsaid, by love that is stifled, impossible, or exists only in fleeting moments.
William Burroughs’ Queer, the novella recently adapted to the screen by Luca Guadagnino with Daniel Craig, is not a romance in the conventional sense, but a jagged exploration of obsession. The novel follows a man desperately chasing a younger lover who barely acknowledges his existence. It is a portrait of longing and humiliation, a story where love is not just out of reach but proves a humiliating illusion, a fixation that spirals into despair.
In Carson McCullers’ Reflections in a Golden Eye, love is twisted and repressed, buried beneath rigid social structures. The novel delves into the tortured desires of a closeted military officer, whose unspoken yearning leads him down a path of destruction. Here, love is not a source of joy but a slow-burning torment, its denial warping the lives of those who refuse to acknowledge it. The homosexual impulse is repressed and this repression torments the soul, just as it does for Jean Genet's ship captain in Querelle, who could die from the desire he suppresses for the lustrous, lusty sailors under his command.
Virginia Woolf’s Orlando takes love beyond traditional boundaries, bending time and gender in a luminous meditation on passion and identity. Written as a love letter to Vita Sackville-West, the novel follows its titular character across centuries and shifting bodies, existing in a space where love is eternal yet never fixed. It is both a celebration and a lament. An exploration of how love can endure, even as everything else changes.
Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight is a masterpiece of silence and restraint, capturing the aching power of first love and the decades-long shadow it casts. Chiron, the film’s protagonist, must navigate a world that tells him his love is forbidden, forcing him to suppress his desires. The film moves through time with quiet intensity, showing how love, denied or hidden, shapes a life just as profoundly as love that is freely expressed.
These stories and so many more remind us that love is often defined by its limitations, by the relationships that never fully take shape, the desires left unspoken, the lives constrained by forces beyond our control. In their silence, their restraint, and their longing, they speak volumes.
From the Greeks to Shakespeare to Lynch and Denis and Fassbinder, love stories have never been simple. They’re about transformation, obsession, and destruction. Love is never safe, as subject or as lived experience. It is a force that reshapes lives, sometimes for the better, often for the worse. We cannot live with it and cannot live without it. And that’s why we keep coming back to these tales, watching, reading, and reliving them, over and over again. Because love, in its rawest form, is never just sweet. It’s dangerous. And that’s what makes it unforgettable.
14.02.25
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