“What’s Love Got To Do With It?”
Authors: Brien Donna Lee , Yeates Helen 
Published: October 2020

“Smack habit, love habit – what's the difference? They both can kill you.” (Helen Garner, Monkey Grip, 1976)
From tennis scores to computer viruses, love is all around us, but do we live in an age where “Love is all you need”? In the post-AIDS, post-September 11, post-Bali globalised multimedia present, is love an outmoded concept or more important than ever before? Why is it hard to even say the word without imagining a sea of Barbie pink and the cringe-making verses from greeting cards?
Love, its trials and the search for it, imbues media culture. Love knows no age-bounds, as the film Innocence shows us. While Lola runs for love, others die for love, with Moulin Rouge popularising once again the evergreen ‘doomed love’ syndrome. Love songs dominate the airwaves, sales of romance novels from Bridget Jones' Diary to Mills and Boon are booming, and every evening television presents contemporary negotiations of love, sex and friendship in such fictional comedies and dramas as Friends, The Secret Life of Us and Sex in the City. Jerry Springer and reality TV bring particular versions of real-life love and dating into everyone’s lounge room, Internet dating is a worldwide phenomenon and online chat rooms are filled with punters looking for their perfect match.
But despite this intense popular cultural overload, the universally unanswerable questions “What is love?” and “What does it all mean?” still seem to obsess many contemporary creative artists as well as cultural critics. We use the verb frequently, saying we “love” sport, “love” sex, “love” art, “love” books, “love” KFC, and some people really do love their Apple Macs. Most of us love our mums, a fact about which Freud and his followers have had much to say. But is love adoration, worship, affection, caring, passion, ardour, addiction, covetousness, desire, lust or just plain, unadulterated, greedy obsession? Is love a gendered concept or a psychoanalytical one? Can love be theorised? Is it an obsolete, antiquated, reactionary and limiting idea, or is love ready to be remade in the image of the 21st century into something new and better? Is love the one constant that makes us human and, if we have pig’s hearts transplanted into us will we still love the same? If they were dog’s hearts would we love better?
These were some of the questions and concerns which animated the contributors to this issue of M/C, that which we have always referred to as “the Love Issue”. Love was very much “in the air” as we worked, with one of the editors marrying her long-lost first love during the final stages of the editorial process. A number of contributors were similarly moved to autobiographical revelation as they explored the many manifestations of love across some markedly different media and cultural sites. The very mention of “love” seems to provoke such self-exposure, with many writers’ reflections exposing their (or others’) naked bodies as much as private, deeply felt emotions. In the process, lovers (of media as much as any other love object) have been stripped bare, exposing a spectrum of diverse self- and cultural revelations from the anonymous personal ad to the act of declaring your secret love publicly on prime-time television or radio programs.
The transformative power of love is another common discourse, as well as the ironies, ambiguities, frustrations and the agonies of love’s loss. Love is, it seems, in contemporary thought, as much dystopia as romantic utopia. While love can be contemplative, revealing the introspective power of emotion, it can also be used as metaphor and dissected and investigated for its symbolic and allegorical power. New millennial passions can range from obsessions with novels and books of poetry to a driving love for war, showing that love can be destructive as well as productive.
Queer love, gay and lesbian love, straight love; love exists potently across the sexuality spectrum, with contemporary creative writing, and the films like Head On and Monkey's Mask made from such literary works, exploring sexuality and identity in new and confronting ways. Love can be explosive, taboo territory, challenging cultural, racial and religious divides, and can also involve aberrant longings such as necrophilia and vampiric blood lust. Few of our contributors, it seems, could separate sex – in this case, the act of love – from their thoughts about love in general, while others have attempted to push the boundaries of understanding and, at times, even, conventional taste in their musings. Other works in this issue seek, desire and press love’s spatial boundaries to their limits, while artists performing the act of love live in real and virtual space, frankly reveal human intimacy as they push the graphic boundaries of the art of love and sex. Such performance, as well as explicit (and banned) films and novels and websites, raise discussions of censorship and interrogate the voyeur in all of us. How much do we want, or need, to see? And, should someone else be making the choice for us?
Consideration of what is more frightening, the creation of toys that love you, or that there is a need (and a market) for such, tie in neatly to questions of whether scientifically fabricated robot children will ever be programmable for genuine transcendent love? But are such nightmare scenarios of fabricated and commodified love even a particularly new phenomenon? The media has long manipulated how we express our love, through love songs and dedication radio for the lovelorn for instance. The “tear-jerker” would not be such a money-spinner if there wasn’t something inside many of us that wants to be jerked.
Whether you take on love as commodity or emotion, as feeling or sensation, as intellectual or visceral pursuit, please note that there are warnings on this Love Issue label. CAUTION: This issue will stimulate your mind as much as arouse your fantasies.

Citation reference for this article

Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc...
MLA Style

Brien, Donna Lee and Yeates, Helen. "“What’s Love Got To Do With It?”" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.6 (2002). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/editorial.php>.

APA Style

Brien, D. L. & Yeates, H., (2002, Nov 20). “What’s Love Got To Do With It?”. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 5,(6). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/editorial.html