Love and Sebastian meet by coincidence in the street in the Swedish summer night. They happen to share the same secret, but their encounter will have severe consequences for the both of them. An innocent flirtation soon turns into a dangerous liaison.
My Name Is Love (2008)
Love (original title)
Love, a young 20-year-old male, has made his decision. Tonight he’s gonna let all those hidden feelings he’s been having for all these years come out, and create a possibility to meet someone special. Enter Sebastian, a 28-year-old male, with a secret desire, which is getting harder to deny. His girlfriend is out of town so the timing is perfect. An encounter between Love and Sebastian causes severe consequences when an innocent flirt soon turns in to a dangerously liaison.
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When ‘Love’, a young college student, spends the night with another man, he surrenders to manipulation. This man, named Sebastian, mocks Love for being a virgin and tells him to get out of there, as he has no interest in having sex with someone who doesn’t know what to do. Love then affirms that he is willing to do whatever Sebastian asks of him. And that proves to be a most calamitous mistake.
Why is Love so willing to accept the conditions forced upon him by a complete stranger? Well, there is the psychoanalytic imperative of joy which sometimes can be more powerful than anything else. Here the imperative is a necessity, it’s what Love needs to do but it’s never what he wants to do. Jouissance, after all, is different from pleasure. We are immersed in a fetishistic culture of disavowal: one wants to be the object of desire of the other. But when a male turns another male into the object of his desire, what happens to the ‘object a’ in a culture of ‘plus de jouir’? Simply that desire gets diluted and only the jouissance remains.
As a result, Sebastian feels compelled to perform anal rape even when Love begs him to stop. Both of them are enslaved by the imperative of joy. In a society so concerned with virginity, or rather the loss of virginity, Love feels ashamed of being a virgin at 22; at the same time, Sebastian, married with a woman, feels the need to circumnavigate his heterosexual position by engaging into homosexual intercourse, even though he regrets it and feels awfully disgusted at himself afterwards. Jacques-Alain Miller wrote on the subject: ‘Their mutual presence in flesh and blood is necessary, if for no other reason than to have emerge the sexual non-relation’. After all, there is no rapport at all between the two characters; and that’s the way it plays out from the very beginning: they are two strangers which have effaced any possibility of a real contact (Love and Sebastian constantly maintain their distances, even when they’re just drinking beers and making casual chit-chat).
One could then ask, why does Sebastian insist on denying his homosexuality and keeps on living a life of lies? And why does Love refuse to go into the gay bar at the beginning of the short film? Perhaps, the unconscious imperative of joy drives them around, or perhaps this is yet another symptom of society’s malady.
