Two of my favorite romance movies of all time are Moulin Rouge and City of Angels.

I’d say spoiler alert but the title kind of puts us past that already. 

In Moulin Rouge, we’re introduced to Paris in the late 1800s ravaged by disease, addicts, and hopelessness. Our main character (exquisitely played by Ewan McGregor, who I’d like to hurt me, please) is in a deep depressive state, disheveled and unshaven with weeks of grief beard. He tells us that this is a story about love, and that the woman he loves is dead.

Lol guess it’s not just me doing the spoilers.

We are then launched into Baz Luhrmann’s classic breakneck pace complete with wacky editing and loads of sparkles. McGregor’s character Christian is a writer and is trying to sell his poetry to Satine (played even better by Nicole Kidman, she did everything McGregor did in heels and a corset) so he can write a play for the Moulin Rouge. Meanwhile she is trying to sell her body to the Duke (no name, just an ominous title) so he’ll fund the Moulin Rouge becoming a theater. Thanks to a convenient mix up, she mistakes Christian for the Duke and falls for him and he for her, but the two of them have to come up with an elaborate ruse to explain their togetherness to the Duke, who wants to possess Satine for his use and his use only.

The plot of the movie is then revealed (for intense dramatic irony upon rewatch) comedically as the plot of the play that Christian is writing. The one missing detail in Christian’s story is that Satine, unbeknownst to our main characters, has contracted and is dying of consumption. The two of them consummate their love and invent as many different reasons and ways to be together as they can as the renovations proceed and the play is written, with the Duke increasingly suspicious that Satine does not truly love him as she claimed she did.

Eventually Satine has to concede her body to the Duke to keep him from ruining everything, but she’s unable to follow through on this (this scene is embedded in a cover of Roxanne that is so raw and bursting with emotion it makes my skin hurt). She narrowly avoids being raped before fleeing to Christian, and the two of them plan to escape. As she’s packing, she learns that the Duke will have Christian killed if he goes anywhere near her and that she’s dying so trying to run is useless. She goes for the classic 3rd act break up claiming she’s choosing the Duke in an attempt to drive him away and save his life (shattering her own heart in the process) but Christian feels compelled to seek her out one last time to confirm she did not love him.

Unable to ignore the truth in her heart, she confesses her love to him and he is moved to respond to her. This leads to chaos, loads of beautiful singing, the duke is punched in the face, and inevitably the lovers conquer all just before our love interest Satine dies in her lover’s arms, begging with her final breath for him to tell their story. The curtain closes on our depressed McGregor, who presses the final words and message of the film into his typewriter: “The Greatest Thing You’ll Ever Learn is just to Love and Be Loved in Return.”

It’s now a musical! I haven’t seen it because I’m pretty sure my raging nostalgia boner for this film’s cast would absolutely ruin it for me. Jim Broadbent sings Like a Virgin, how am I supposed to emotionally recover from that?

I was probably around 12 when I watched this for the first time and I was done for. I watched it on repeat, I got the album on my iPod shuffle and listened to it excessively on my way to and from school, I sang it loudly and poorly in the shower, and most importantly I dreamed of being loved like Satine. More on this later.

A year or two later I happened upon City of Angels. This, unlike Moulin Rouge, is not a musical nor directed by Baz Luhrmann, so the experience of it is radically different. Instead it’s a classic 90s film of long black dusters, Nicholas Cage making facial expressions and Meg Ryan being plucky and feminist, where the characters are appropriately opposite so we can assign them their tropes without thinking too hard – she’s a scientifically minded independent insomniac and he’s a literal creature of divinity with a deep sense of interconnectedness to the universe and God and he’s here to show her the error of her rigid logic and she’s going to make him feel alive.

Cage’s character Seth falls in love with cardiac surgeon Maggie, (played by Ryan) in a moment where he feels she somehow sees him even when he’s supposed to be invisible to humans. The barrier to his desire to connect with her is that he is incapable of truly knowing her as a lover because he’s an angel and it comes with certain limitations. Instead he casually stalks her until he learns one of her patients is actually a former angel. Turns out that Seth can break free of the Matrix if he chooses to fall and become a human. 

Throughout the film we see that Maggie has a consistent lover, another surgeon named Jordan, and he serves as a foil to Seth. He even poses himself as the same species as her for a reason as to why she should marry him. Maggie is essentially choosing between her default existence of scientific principles, structure, and stability and the possibility of a new self through the unknown, faith, and the transcendent risk of true love. This is important because it’s emphasizing the power of this connection she has to Seth that defies reason. She wants Seth and in wanting him equally craves the sublime, and would choose him if he’d make himself available to her.

He’s waffling on this decision when she finds out about his condition and chooses to end things rather than have him risk losing eternity as an angel, choosing his needs over her own, which propels him into choosing to fall and become human. 

“You’re not the one, Neo.” Bitch my name means new, this is what we call protagonist energy.

He then goes through utter hell to find her without his nifty angel travel and passes out at her door. He finds out that she didn’t choose Jordan because she loves Seth, and of course his love is evident in his newfound humanity. They have incredibly hot sex in front of the fireplace which I cannot believe I’m saying happens in a Nicholas Cage movie, and wake up to plan their lives together.

Hilariously when he falls from grace and “commits” to being human by sleeping with her, this brings a wardrobe change from all black and the coat and the boots into normal man ™ Luke of Gilmore Girls vibes which I just love that that’s the difference between humans and angels in this movie, no special effects just a costume change. Simple, effective, and really fucking funny.

He takes his first shower ever which honestly must’ve felt immaculate, and Maggie is preparing this heartfelt meal for him to enjoy for his first meal as a human. She realizes from one of their previous meet cute moments earlier in the film that she needed one more thing from the store, and takes a bike ride out while he’s luxuriating in the shower. On the way back, she is so filled with joy and pleasure from having enmeshed herself with her soulmate that she is flying down a hill with her eyes closed and no hands, and of course this is a contrived plot so a giant semi truck comes out of nowhere and she runs right into it.

Through the power of the formerly angelic, a candle blows out and he somehow knows this means something is wrong, and he races towards the road to find her dying. She too, dies in his arms, and tells him that when the angels ask what her favorite part of being alive was, her answer is that it was him. Heartbroken, Seth is drifting aimlessly until one of his former angel companions visits. The angel asks if loving and losing her was worth becoming human, and Seth delivers the truth embedded in the film: “I would rather have had one breath of her hair, one kiss of her mouth, one touch of her hand, than eternity without it. One.”

First off in our analysis let’s acknowledge that these are tried and true romantic plotlines. They meet, instant attraction, there’s a barrier or barriers to their relationship being stable, there’s a competing love interest, information leads to a sacrifice on behalf of the main character in the form of a third act break up, and reconnection because they ignore the break up and chase after them anyways, and then immediate demise of the lover upon declaration of true love, the end. I’m not saying it’s original but it fucks me up real good so who cares.

Second off let’s consider why this works. This works because the tension is extended throughout the movie by the barrier(s) (in Moulin Rouge it’s the Duke and Satine’s illness, in City of Angels it’s Jordan and Seth’s angelic nature) and it forces the lovers to delay “consummation” whether that’s being publicly together or literal fucking. It works because we want to believe in two very different people overcoming difficulties to be together, and external difficulties to the relationship keep the barriers believable without introducing the unsexiness of realism. It works because the competing love interests highlight the depth and sincerity of the main characters’ connections through being forced or shallow. It works because we wouldn’t respect their main characters’ choice of partner if their lover wouldn’t put them first and try to save them, but also we believe in love and want them to overcome the break up to reconnect.

But most importantly it works because she dies at the end.

As I mentioned before in my youthful (continued) obsession with Moulin Rouge and City of Angels, I wanted to be Satine and Maggie. I wanted to be the object of artful passion, to inspire boyish smiles and stolen kisses in back hallways. I wanted to be an obsession so profound it drove someone to choose me over God. I wanted to be loved.

This love doesn’t exist in real life and we all know it. Real love includes doing the dishes and reminding them to get an oil change for the third time this week. It has its storybook moments, but much of the time our storybook romance is found in the editing room with monotonous days, months, years left on the cutting room floor.

Romantic tragedy doesn’t ask us to believe in this fake love enduring into happily ever after. Romantic tragedy offers us a bitter truth: all things must come to an end – even love. Romantic tragedy also offers us sweetness to combat this bitter reality by cutting the life of love short before time has rotted love from the inside out and filled it with maggots and pus.

It’s important to understand that high romance as featured in these movies only exists in a state of tension. Simple companionship is not what is being sold. Conflict is necessary to keep the emotional stakes high, but the characters will become unlikeable and unsympathetic if they are the source of the problem. Thus the plot must include external conflicts that keep us sympathetic to the characters while also leaving us up on the psychological highwire. When the conflicts are resolved, the tension is lost and the love begins to fall into safety, and on the other side of safety is staleness and resentment.

In our two example movies it’s not petty disagreements and the simple evils of the day to day that shatter these bonds, it’s the indifferent cruelty of life. It is fundamentally not our main character’s fault, and as such we can wholly take their side and grieve alongside them without guilt. It’s an elegant touch that keeps the gritty reality that if your love withers and dies on the vine in real life, it’s probably because you and your partner killed it with neglect.

To bring us back to our original point (finally) if I want to be loved like Satine and Maggie, this implies I’d like to die at the end of my movie.

This brings up more questions than it answers. When do I want my story to end? Do I think I’m not worthy of having stable, companionate love? Why does my idea of love involve my self destruction? What exactly appeals to me about this?

I don’t particularly want to die young, so that answers the first question at the very least.

I think ultimately on some level I don’t believe that I’m worthy of stable companionate love simply because I was never given it. Stable love feels like more of a fantasy than hot bursts of passion with bittersweet sorrow laced in. If I’m not feeling a looming sense of dramatic irony taking a long look at my inevitable doom, I feel generally uneasy, like I haven’t found the shoe that’s about to drop.

This means that when I see depictions of love that authentically match my own history (chaotic environments populated with a cast of characters that give infrequent attention and care that when felt are incredible and when gone drain the world of color) I do actually feel a resonant frequency. This is what love is to me – transcendent yet short term. Transformative yet fleeting. I never expect myself to be consistently nurtured so why would I want to see that in my characters? It feels almost delusional to expect such things. When I can clearly see my self destruction, or see it in the characters of whatever I’m consuming, all is right in the world.

What essentially appeals to me about all this is that it confirms my inner narrative, with the added benefit of we the audience getting to know that the love is genuine and authentic, while Salacity the author cannot fundamentally know that of her lived experience. It’s a comforting surety that wraps the plot up in a tiny bow for delicious viewing.

And it’s the evidence that the main character’s love is true and real that makes me wish I was the girl who dies at the end. In my own narrative, it’s the object of affection that I am continually losing and grieving, but in these narratives, I am the one who is lost and pined for. It flips the script in such a way that feels viscerally satisfying. In these stories when I insert myself into Satine or Maggie (hot) instead of being the person left grieving, I am the worship object who is enshrined forever in someone’s heart. This fantasy lets me experience the role reversal in a way that is non disruptive to my actual connections. It’s gratifying and helps me believe that maybe I could be that important to the people I love.

After all, we all deserve to be loved madly, deeply, in such a way that defies death. Why not me?