[lbo-talk] Film examples of impossible love

[Carrol Cox]

I would think impossible love would be radically different from merely
"a love affair or potential love affair that got trashed." There is
nothing impossible about the love in Anna Karenina, for example, anymore
than it was impossible for Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman) to survive in
Unforgiven. It was just that the plot as worked out by the writer or
writer/director) called for Anna's adulterous love affair to fail.

Ape & woman in King Kong is probably a good extreme for impossible love.
The adulterous lovers get together in What Maisie Knew. And there was
nothing impossible about Nanda's lover for Vanderbank in The Awkward
Age; V could have been less than a complete jerk. And in Casablanca I
would say that far from its being an impossible love it is not only a
possible but a highly probable love that the lovers deliberately choose
not to pursue. (The Hayes Office rules make it impossible of course, but
that is not, I think, relevant.)

Carrol