Chaos Theory of Love
(A 1990s Sub-Genre)

When Bret Easton Ellis began his 1985 novel Less Than Zero with the famous line, “People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles”, he defined a whole new sensibility for the 1980s and ‘90s – and, in particular, a new kind of love story.

It’s a captivating image: people as cars, caught in close proximity and an inexorable flow of movement, obliged to co-operate but unwilling to – fearing the injury or death that can come from reckless collision.

One immediately recognises the cool, somewhat alienated emotional territory of many contemporary movies – Hal Hartley’s Trust (1990) and Simple Men (1992), for instance, or Michael Almereyda’s fascinating PixelVision feature Another Girl Another Planet (1992). And one especially notes the contemporary taste for describing the delicate play of intimate human relationships in the clinical, impersonal metaphors of science, astronomy or thermodynamics. Modern lovers as automobiles, comets or atomic particles – a veritable chaos theory of love.

A tidal wave of such stories followed in both film and literary fiction. Most chaotic love tales of the 1990s tend to be twentysomething stories. They feature a glamorous ensemble of young things, poised between philosophy classes at university, the dole queue, and careers in the consumer industries of showbiz, fashion, the media or art. A good deal of partner swapping and sexual experimentation goes on as the characters navigate their way in the uneasy zone between casual sex and committed, serious relationships.

Ben Stiller’s Reality Bites (1994) is among the most mainstream-inflected entries, but nonetheless captures several salient features of this loose genre. Lelaina (Winona Ryder) is in the process of making a video-vérité documentary-portrait of herself and her three closest friends. They represent a generation, naturally – according to Lelaina, the generation of young adults who are “searching for their identity without role models or heroes”.

As dutiful Gen-X-ers, these characters dismiss the counter-cultural dramas of 1960s politics, but go crazy over kitsch artifacts of 1970s pop, like The Trammps’ “Disco Inferno” or The Knack’s “My Sharona”. In fact, their complete range of life experiences seems to be defined by the shallow end of TV culture: when one of them complains that she imagines her tragic life as a chintzy episode of Melrose Place [1992-1999], she is swiftly admonished: “Melrose Place is a really good show!” Much self-conscious musing about the nature of love and relationships goes on, too: Troy (Ethan Hawke) offers the X-generation, neo-existentialist line that life is a “random lottery of meaningless tragedy and near escapes”.

Although there’s a smattering of sexual confusion and emotional agony in Reality Bites, it ends up more a modern romantic comedy in the Singles (1992) or Sleepless in Seattle (1993) vein than a chaos theory love story per se. Stiller’s generational testimony is ultimately nostalgic: it expresses a longing for true love, the hard work ethos, authentic art, real emotions – and people you can get to know and trust. In many movies of this type, however, and as a general rule, the characters featured are much harder to know or trust.

They don’t even seem quite to be characters anymore in the old, classical sense – with individual psychologies and motivations, a past and a purpose. Instead, they are beings on automatic pilot, aliens almost, as unknowable to themselves as they are to others, driven by obscure, ever-fickle desires. If they find themselves searching for some Golden Age when relationships, families or life-destinies were simpler and straighter, they will discover – as Hartley’s central subjects invariably do – that this Golden Age was just an insidious illusion or idle fantasy from the outset.

The style and sensibility of the ‘90s chaos theory love stories had been building up for some time. Think of Jane Campion’s celebrated early shorts Peel (1982) and Passionless Moments (1983, co-director Gerard Lee), which present interpersonal relationships in comically condensed, diagrammatic forms, drolly emphasising what is animal, alien or simply void in human beings. Or James Toback’s delightful The Pick-up Artist (1987), with its astrophysical evocations of chance encounters and fiery fusions in love.

Or, further back, the work of Jean-Luc Godard. His Nouvelle Vague classics of the 1960s are full of bodies and cars hurtling headlong into one another, and his work of the ‘80s enthusiastically embraced various chemical, mathematical and biological formulae for understanding and representing the patterns of life – from the Rubik’s Cube and computer systems to chaos theory itself.

Or consider Robert Altman’s place in this history. His unusual approach to character psychology (see my discussion of Kansas City [1996]) and his way of constructing a story though sudden coincidences and surprise moves veritably laid the ground for the chaos theory love stories – as did Choose Me (1984) by Altman’s compatriot Alan Rudolph, which is in many respects the prototype of the 1990s genre.

Among the 1990s films of this ilk, Michael Steinberg’s Bodies, Rest & Motion (1993) best gets to the heart of love’s modern chaos. It has a deliberately slight narrative line – basically, the break-ups and realignments of intimate affection between four people (played by Tim Roth, Bridget Fonda, Eric Stoltz and Phoebe Cates) over a brief period of days. The film takes its title from a principle of physics: that bodies, whether in rest or motion, can only change their direction if acted upon by another body.

And that is about as fine-grain-psychological as the film gets. Steinberg’s mise en scène, his whole way of presenting vivid fragments of personal and interpersonal behaviour – the precise way that people walk, crawl, smoke or drive – stresses only what can be observed on a purely exterior plane of human life, as if that is all that exists, or matters.

Each of the central characters is somehow always out of phase with the rest; each moves at a different personal speed, or is at a different point in the cycle of either wanting to settle or wanting to flee, wanting to bond or wanting to split. These people are perpetually out of phase with each other – a very cinematic theme, which we also find in the cinema of Philippe Garrel. The film’s closing image of the open Arizona highway by night answers Ellis’s opening image of a congested Los Angeles freeway by day – and both are images of frazzled irresolution, disconnection and everyday bewilderment.

There is one especially arresting and haunting moment in Bodies, Rest & Motion: a bed scene. While they are having sex, Sid (Stoltz) feels compelled to declare his deep, sincere feelings of love to Beth (Fonda). She, annoyed and made uneasy by this spiel, hits upon an intriguing way of stopping dead his protestations. She simply murmurs: “Come inside me”. This is a pretty picture of modern love in all its peculiarity: a pas de deux in which (as in a scene of Randa Haines’ Children of a Lesser God [1986]), the most intimate sexual congress can be used not just to dissipate some prickly tension, but to displace the intimacy that is meant to be happening on another, old-fashioned, emotional plane.

While the glamorous twentysomethings I have so far mentioned may experience some hair-raising moments of dislocation and despair, essentially we are in a slightly grown-up version of the teen-move universe. The very dark shadow or obverse of this genre is a glaring anomaly in early 1990s cinema: Mike Leigh’s furiously negative Naked (1993). Here, there’s no fairy-tale or movie-magic whimsy of the type that Altman and (especially) Rudolph sometimes dip into. But there is a commonality when it comes to the chaos theory of love – and, especially, sex.

The random wanderings and collisions of the characters in Naked all have violence, sociopathy (if not outright psychosis) and acute emotional desperation bound up in them. Leigh’s near-apocalyptic (Blakean?) vision of London conjures a nightmarish milieu similar to that offered, just as deliriously or hysterically, in John Cassavetes’ harshest, most misanthropic work, Husbands (1970). In both films, while men are driven, rapacious beasts (ultra-toxic, according to the modern lexicon of gender), women tend to be weak, submissive masochists, victims or (to quote a song title from Altman’s comparably bleak Short Cuts [1993]) prisoners – and the two sexes, forever alien to each other, crunch heads in loveless one-night stands, parting badly and messily, scarred for life, in the bitter air of morning.

Naked may seem a long, long way (and not only geo-socially) from the world of Lelaina and her pals in Reality Bites. Curiously, however, there are things that the films share: philosophical raving sessions, problems of communal living, moments of nostalgia for things past and, above all, a loud rejection of the leftist political ideals and frames of understanding that motivated a previous generation.

Troy waxed eloquently about meaningless tragedy and near escapes; Johnny (David Thewlis), for his part, spits the post-punk generational ethos of No Future and life as a pile of shit. Hopeful talk of the social construction of identity – and thus the possibility of changing that identity, wherever and however it falls into place – has no place in these echo chambers of nihilistic doom. Is it all just a temporary twist of the Zeitgeist toward a fashionable ‘dark side’, or the (alas) trustworthy sign of a longer-lasting, hard-to-vanquish impulse informing (and troubling) human cultures? Stay tuned.

© Adrian Martin July 1994 / September 1997