1

Introduction

Love exists as a hypothesis, not because it fails to measure up to a thesis, but because it
cannot be tamed or contained by one. Even the state of being in love is difficult to articulate
in a thetically clear and definitive form. Love remains elusive to reason and reflection. An
argumentation or an assertion about love simply renders love even more slippery and
inaccessible. How might one gain access to love, given its hypotheticality? While
contemporary sociological perspectives observe that love’s hypothetical existence derives
mainly from the precarious human connection and capitalist alienation, Lacanian
psychoanalysis and Badiouian philosophy advance more structural answers. For Lacan, love
remains hypothetical because of the (symbolic and real) unconscious. To discuss love as a
substantial being would be tantamount to engaging in “the aseptic business of the imaginary
perfections of which one dreams.”1 Moreover, speaking subjects, as the effect of language on
the body, do now know what they do when they make love. Such subjects are engaged in
particular types of love without knowing why. For Badiou, love remains hypothetical because
it begins with an unpredictable encounter and persists only due to the faithful construction of
the consequences of the encounter. Moreover, the emergence of the amorous subject as the
bearer of the trans-human truth is not necessarily guaranteed, for the human animal’s
sexuality may cover up this trans-human amorous truth. This article explores Paul Thomas
Anderson’s films, especially Magnolia and his subsequent works, in terms of the problematic
of the amorous hypothesis. While Badiou argues that Magnolia posits the hypothesis that
“humanity is love,”2 he does not describe or examine the conditions in which this hypothesis
can be verified; this article attempts to remedy that omission, using the lens of Lacanian
psychoanalysis and Badiou’s own diagnosis of contemporary youth. According to Badiou, for
love to obtain, an individual must go beyond solitude. But Badiou does not give a descriptive
account of how and why humanity falls into solitude. Lacan’s perspective could shed some
light on this issue. In this regard, with Lacan and Badiou, one could recognize that what is at
stake is not a voluntary or forced choice between solitude and love, but the necessity of
working through solitude and the rare possibility of transitioning from solitude to love.
Finally, this article probes Anderson’s later works, providing an account of their engagement
with the amorous hypothesis in various forms.

1. The Subject of the Unconscious and Solitude

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Based on the cross cut of a series of interrelated episodes that happen during one day in LA,
Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999) features various characters, including Frank (Tom
Cruise), a motivational speaker and pick-up artist; Earl (Jason Robards), Frank’s father and
the former producer of the quiz show entitled What Do Kids Know?; Linda (Julianne Moore),
Earl’s present wife; Jimmy (Philip Baker Hall), the host of the quiz show; Claudia (Melora
Walters), Jimmy’s daughter; Jim (John C. Reilly), a police officer; Stanley (Jeremy
Blakman), a prodigy who participates in the quiz show; and Donnie (William H. Macy), a
former champion of the quiz show.

The lives of these characters vividly illustrate how the unconscious determines the subject’s
life. For example, Frank’s male chauvinism and misogyny can be read as a defensive
mechanism for his trauma. As a teenager, Frank felt helpless in the presence of his dying
mother. His father, Earl, was not there with Frank and his mother. In Lacanian terms, due to
Earl’s paternal malfunction, Frank has lived with the psychotic structure in which he had to
depend on the narcissistic satisfaction of his machismo based on the fantasy of mastery over
women. When Frank finally encountered his father, we see Frank’s ambivalence toward his
father explode alternatively: “You die” and then “Don’t go away.”

Earl’s case shows how the phallic man only ends up confusing desire with love. As a young
and smart businessman, he cheated on his wife Lily to prove that he was “something.” In
psychoanalysis, this something is called phallus as the grandiose illusion of omnipotence. A
man with a phallus (a phallophore man) is incapable of love, for he reduces his beloved to an
object of desire and remains ignorant about love as the acknowledgement of lack. On his
deathbed, Earl is just an old man full of regret about his loss of love.

Linda, who married Earl for money without love and cheated on Earl, shows how a woman
can be equally enslaved to phallic logic. Linda’s concern was merely about what Earl had, not
his true subjectivity. Her love is imaginary based on property and possession. This is why
Earl’s impending death, the real event, makes Linda seized by panic. She does not know what
to do with his body after his death. Finally she hysterically confesses that she has fallen in
love with Earl for real. However, this belated love ends up leading Linda into a suicide
attempt.

Claudia’s drug addiction and prostitution serve as a substitution for her father Jimmy’s
paternal malfunction, similar to Frank’s case. When her father goes to see and reconcile with
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her, she immediately kicks him out and then does drugs. Claudia’s case seems worse than
Frank’s case not only in terms of the intensity of her aggressiveness toward her father but also
in terms of the absence of a stable relationship with her body image. Like Stephen Dedalus in
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, who feels that his body image is peeling away,
Claudia is devoid of her body image, which reduces her body to the medium of addictive
jouissance. She relates to herself not through body image but through a-subjective drive. As
she indulges in cocaine, her only partner is her own body, which repeats its fatal self-
destruction.

Stanley’s case shows how a child’s subjectivity is constituted by the desire of the Other,
represented by his father and the media. Despite his father’s daily enunciation “love you,”
Stanley is not truly taken care of. All his father wants is for Stanley to become the object of
his fantasy, the winner who can answer all the questions in the quiz show. With the media’s
obscene fantasy of prodigy, Stanley is reduced to be an object to be gazed at as a spectacle.
These two forms of desire make Stanley study all alone in school just for the quiz show,
without interacting with friends and family. It is thus no coincidence that Stanley wets his
pants during the show, which implies that the irruption of the real bypasses the alienating
effect of the Other. Stanley’s body presents its own symptom, not by revolting against the
Other but by ignoring the Other. In the end, Stanley asserts to the show host Jimmy and
spectators, “I’m not a toy to be looked at.” Also to his father, Stanley asserts, “dad, you need
to be nicer to me.”

As someone who was the champion of the quiz show but is now a fired salesman, Donnie
thinks that he would be loved by the bartender if he got braces through oral surgery. Here
again, love is dominated by the imaginary that is authorized by the symbolic, an image of
oneself that is lovable from the perspective of the Other. The effect of this imaginary love is,
however, not imaginary but real; Donnie attempts to steal the money from the store he
worked for, and he is caught and thwarted by Jim. Donnie, for whom getting braces or not
determines the possibility of loving and being loved, groans about love, “I really do have love
to give, I just don’t know where to put it.” Love as something that can be had belongs to the
imaginary love, which makes the subject bogged down.

Jim’s case shows how law is blind to the real but is ultimately overwhelmed by the real.
When Jim first comes across the rapper kid Dixon (Emmanuel L. Johnson), Jim disregards
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Dixon’s help concerning the investigation of the criminal, moralizing about the strong
language in Dixon’s rap. Ironically, it is this rap that contains a truth about Jim and what
happens to the world: “You think you get a grip because your hip got a holster. […] Check
that ego. When the sunshine don’t work, the good Lord brings the rain in” (I will get back to
“the rain” below). It is also Dixon who later makes Jim lose his gun, shattering his self-pride
as a police officer (The breakdown of Jim’s ego will be accelerated by the encounter with
Claudia). Law does not listen to the voice of the real, but the real always sounds the alarm.

In sum, the lives of these characters can be encapsulated by the psychoanalytic aphorism that
Donnie proffers at one point: “we may be through with the past, but the past is not through
with us.” However, this does not fully measure up to the definition of the unconscious
because the unconscious is instituted not only temporally but also structurally. The
unconscious is constituted by a familial, social, phallic, and ideological framework in a
synchronic and diachronic way. This preconstituted, existing unconscious in turn has an effect
on a way of loving, which is true of these characters. In fact, Magnolia displays a wide range
of the forms of love: a misogynist’s love for his own narcissistic machismo, a smart man’s
love for the phallus, a young woman’s love for money, a father’s love for his child as an
object of fantasy, love for drugs, love for the self-image with braces, love for the job as the
guardian of the law. However, at the same time, these characters are not in love. Rather, they
are all in solitude. The pick-up artist is surrounded by the male spectators indoctrinated by the
war between the sexes. The young wife is next to the old man, but she is full of remorse and
anxiety. The child is brought to school and home like a machine by his father. The prostitute
is busy doing drugs, and the police officer is busy making people do the right thing. They all
make some kind of two, but they are still lonely. According to the song ‘One’ on the film
soundtrack, “one is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do. Two can be as bad as one, it’s the
loneliest number since the number one.” The point is not that you are lonely because you
exist as the one, but that you are lonely even when you belong to the two. And this state of
being lonely in two does not easily change. As another OST song ‘wise up’ states, “it’s not
going to stop until you wise up.” A crippled love based on the existing unconscious is not far
from solitude.

2. Un-initiated Bodies in Contemporary Youth

One theme that is useful in terms of the analysis of the unconscious of many characters in this
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film is the father and son relationship (Earl and Frank, Stanley and his father, and Donnie and
his parents). Here, let us refer to Badiou’s “About the contemporary fate of boys.” 3 Based on
a reading of Freud’s Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism, Badiou observes that the
relationship between father and son can be approached in three stages. First, the son kills the
father who enjoys all the women in the tribes. Second, when the dead father returns in the
form of the law, the son submits to the father out of his sense of guilt. Finally, as in crucified
Christ’s Ascension and participation in God’s glory, which replaces God of judgment with
God of love, the son embodies the sign of universal love. In sum, the son’s body goes through
a dialectical initiation process (revolt, submission, love) to become the father. According to
Badiou, however, this initiation is no longer operative today, for the contemporary world is
dominated by the disappearance of fatherhood. Who enjoys is no longer the father but the son
or the muscular body, which never gets old due to the contemporary ideology of anti-aging.
The law is no longer embodied in the father. The law is exterior to him in the form of the
market. This absence of fatherhood directly affects the son’s initiation. Without a fraternal
pact, the son loses his target of aggressiveness. Instead, he himself becomes the vehicle of
market circulation in the state of separation. The law of the market does not provide the son
with an opportunity to transform himself into the father, but fixes him in passive immobility.
Moreover, the son was traditionally initiated as he joined the army or became the head of
household. Today, these ways of initiation are outdated and attenuated, as he rather chooses to
be de-initiated by working for the transnational corporate or enjoying pornography without
getting married.

In sum, Freud’s schema is inadequate now because the son no longer becomes the father. The
phenomenon of eternal adolescence dominates the contemporary world. This is what Badiou
calls “the aleatory character of son’s identity.” Here, Badiou observes that three possibilities
are left to the body of the son. Indulged lonely in the a-symbolic initiation materials such as
drugs or pornography, the son could become the “perverted body” without any idea of love.
Secondly, returning to the ancient law and committing to traditional ideology, the son could
become the “sacrificed body” in the figure of a fascist, terrorist, or extremist. Lastly,
consigning himself to the flux of capitalism and offering himself on the market as product,
the son could become the “meritorious body.” Without doubt, all these ways of initiation,
which amount to an initiation without initiation, are commonly heterogeneous to the
subjective incorporation into truths.
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The characters in Magnolia show how the son and the daughter are caught up in the logic of a
de-initiated body. Frank’s show “Seduce and Destroy” is based on the nihilist mindset that
there is no love between sexes, not even mutual care (“do you really think that she’s going to
be there when things go wrong?”). What is employed to suture this antagonistic situation is
either the male chauvinism that man’s mastery over woman is evolutional or the calculative
tips that a few female friends are only useful in terms of provoking jealousy. The male
spectators, possessed by machismo or heart-broken by a relationship, hail Frank’s
performance, and sexuality becomes the field of power struggle. Frank’s case shows how the
sacrificed body can be operative in sexuality and romance.

Claudia belongs to the case of the perverted body. Without an idea of the amorous two, her
partners are drugs and sex to be enjoyed fatally and lonely. On her first date with Jim,
Claudia suggests that they break the unwritten laws of the first date about not telling who one
really is. This suggestion is a radical gesture, given that love is often oriented by the image
rather than the subjective real. However, overwhelmed by the possibility that Jim would hate
her if he comes to know her subjective real, she hysterically runs away from Jim. This scene
shows how the contemporary perverted body is stuck with the dilemma of loneliness,
between the repetitive fatigue of the imaginary and the private fatality of the real. A lonely
subject desires to be with the other beyond the imaginary love that makes one disillusioned
after recurrent trials and errors, but the subject is also afraid of exposing his/her real
subjectivity and sharing it with the partner. In the end, Claudia fails to abide by her own
proposal: “I will tell you everything and you tell me everything.” The perverted body is the
one deprived of the ability to draw the consequence of the amorous encounter and launch into
the amorous process. The conservatism of the symptom outdoes the novelty of an encounter.

In the case of Jim (before the encounter), Stanley, and Donnie, what is at stake is the
meritorious body. In his public proposal, Jim’s concern was about having a “relationship that
is calm, undemanding, and loving,” namely, a relationship that conforms to his normal course
of life and his identity as a police officer, as if making a successful career and having a
mature relationship define a happy life. However, as every amorous encounter is erratic and
unpredictable, Jim encounters Claudia, the addict and prostitute, and has to decide what to do
with her. Concerning Stanley and Donnie, we can see that one is not born but raised as a
meritorious body. A meritorious body like Stanley who is trained perforce to be a prodigy
quiz champion, is simultaneously a symptomatic body that wets his pants, which proves the
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psychoanalytic axiom that what is repressed returns in a radical way. For Donnie’s part, we
can recognize that a meritorious body, a grown-up who had to satisfy the expectation of his
parents when young by becoming a winner of the quiz show, ends up equating the amorous
body with the meritorious body that has braces.

For Badiou, the state, with its transcendental law and evaluative scale, serves as an operator
that endows one with his/her own identity. This law is often reflected by family, whose
anchoring point is paternal function. Now, the message of Magnolia is that these two
instances of the law no longer tell who the sons and the daughters are. As Badiou states,
“Today’s sons, with their unstable identities, are the symptom of some deep-rooted disease
afflicting the state.”4 What matters for Badiou is then how sons and daughters can create a
new order, namely, their own fatherhood and motherhood beyond their symptoms. It is also a
matter of how sons and daughters can become the subject of truths beyond the symptomatic
body. Today, the symptomatic sons and daughters declare altogether that the father cannot fix
their identity and that their trauma, anxiety, jouissance, and loneliness pose an aporia to the
law of the father. In this sense, Magnolia is Pauline, because it shows that “the law of fathers
is over, the world is not based on that anymore.”5

3. Humanity and The Subject of Love

While the end of fatherhood definitely occupies an important pole, the cinematic thought
implied in Magnolia reaches its peak in relation to the problem of humanity or human
community. At the formal and compositional level, while one could see the movie in terms of
the baroque multiplicity that every part cannot be reducible to the whole, Magnolia also
engages with a thematic unity of humanity. The question here is about what kind of humanity
it is. In addressing Magnolia as Pauline apocalyptic cinema, David Congdon notes that one of
the essential features is “the establishment of a new community through the event.” 6 While
Magnolia addresses the possibility of the formation of a post-evental community, it also
soberly describes how the existing humanity hardly measures up to a community. Notably,
the problem of community is connected to the problem of confession, because confession
serves as the most powerful tool to institute a community. There is no better way of creating a
new bond and community than revealing the so far unconcealed truth or sharing the so far
unexposed secret. In the film, we see the numerous scenes of confession, such as Earl’s
confession of regret, Frank’s ambivalent cry, Jimmy’s confession of his death, Claudia’s and
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Jim’s deal to tell everything each other, Donnie’s declaration of love, and Stanley’s asking for
care. Here, Badiou points out that contrary to the conventional therapeutic role of the
character’s confession in classical melodrama to form a new bond, Magnolia presents
“humanity that can’t be totalized, that won’t come together.” 7 Confession does not restore the
broken community. Earl finally dies without being forgiven by Frank, whose cry does not
reach his father. Jimmy’s desperate attempt to reconcile with his daughter provokes her
explosion of aggressiveness, and even his wife finally abandons Jimmy, who is dying of
cancer. Although Jim confesses his fear about being a laughingstock for losing his gun,
Claudia breaks the deal. Donnie’s declaration of love leads not to the institution of the
amorous process but to the criminal act to fulfill his imaginary love. Despite the revelation of
Stanley’s symptom and his request for care, his father only dejectedly tells Stanley to go to
bed. No community is reconnected and recovered from its being severed and fractured.
Humanity appears as a community that is radically torn apart.

However, by the time loneliness seems to prevail over love, we confront the scene of the rain
of frogs as the narratival peripeteia. Something happens in the world of loneliness. Something
happens to the disconnected humanity. Although the biblical reference to the Plague of Egypt
was not originally conceived by the director, this scene is enough to be read as an allegorical
appeal to humanity as a whole, beyond different characters and their different contexts.
According to Badiou, the thesis of Magnolia is that “insofar as humanity exists (…there is a
big risk that it doesn’t), its only real figure is love.” 8 On the one hand, this thesis can be read
as a stern warning that where there is no love, there are only drugs, sexuality, money, and
career, which hides loneliness behind it. On the other hand, this thesis is in fact a bold
hypothesis that humanity is love. But what supports this presumed identity between humanity
and love?

It seems that the only character who strongly supports this hypothesis is Jim as the subject of
love. Jim experiences an aleatory deviation from a normal course of things, not just in
relation to his position as a cop but in relation to his way of living and loving. Admitting that
he is not supposed to take action in private while publicly investigating a case, Jim
nevertheless asks Claudia for a date when he encounters her. Before their date, Jim has lost
his gun, a phallic symbol. That is to say, Jim is castrated. Moreover, Jim’s existing
unconscious structure based on his career and his subjectivity as the meritorious body face an
occasion of change. While love based on the imaginary retreats before the revelation of lack,
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Jim exposes this lack by telling Claudia about losing his gun. Love makes Jim have the guts
to say things that are real. After Claudia leaves him, Jim catches on to Donnie’s stealing.
However, instead of arresting him as a police officer, Jim edifies Donnie, stating that
“sometimes people need to be forgiven.” At this point, he is not merely a guardian of the law
but a subject of thought who acknowledges the “tricky part” of his job, the indistinct
borderline between law and forgiveness. Love changes the police officer who judges based
on the law of “doing the right thing” into a subject of forgiveness. If love completes the law,
it is by way of forgiveness.

According to Derrida, forgiveness is an act of the impossible because true forgiveness lies in
forgiving the unforgivable and forgiving the forgivable belongs to the perimeter of the
calculative transaction or strategic reconciliation. 9 The fact that Jim forgives Donnie, who has
much love to give without knowing where to put it, is also notable, for it shows that love as
forgiveness embraces crippled, errant, and misfired love. Forgiveness gives a second chance
to make up for one’s wrongdoing due to lovelessness. In the final scene where Jim sits beside
Claudia, he tells her that he will not let her go. This implies that Jim will have faced the test
of deciding what to do when he comes to know that Claudia has done drugs. Here,
Augustine’s formulation is worth referring to: “Thus the Law is at once a command for those
who fear and grace for those who love.” 10 Jim, as the guardian of the Law, is at a crossroads,
for whether Claudia becomes the subject who obeys the commandment with fear or the
subject who loves in grace depends on Jim. Considering the dialectic between the law and
transgression, if Jim simply makes Claudia obey the commandment, she is more likely to
commit her crimes again. Only forgiveness can interrupt the vicious cycle of commandment-
transgression-punishment. Jim is responsible for the completion of the law into love through
the act of forgiveness.

The final image of Magnolia is Claudia’s smile, which seems to suggest that Claudia will be
forgiven, not calculatively or juridically, but unconditionally. Here, it is necessary to expand
Badiou’s reading of the thesis of Magnolia. The figure of humanity can be love, insofar as
humanity knows how to forgive. Forgiveness is an archiamorous act. It is an act that enables
love to follow through with love itself. Forgiveness refers to the way in which Jim as the
faithful subject of love strives for his limping march with Claudia by acknowledging her
subjective real and letting her choose between cocaine-induced dopamine and love-induced
dopamine.
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In sum, if Jim, prior to an amorous encounter, embodies a meritorious body regulated by the
Lacanian phallic function (Φx), he later becomes the subject of love based on the Badiouian
Humanity function (Hx) that there is humanity because there are truths. More specifically,
Jim’s position is feminine because it is the feminine position of Hx that enables love to
support all the other truth processes (politics, science, art) and serves as the guardian of
universality. Magnolia thus shows that whether there could be such a thing as humanity or
not depends on one subject of love. Where there is a singular subject of love, there abides
humanity. Universal love as the dogma takes a step backward, for the primary concern is
about the birth of a rare subject of love beyond the law. In Erich Fromm’s formulation, “if I
truly love one person, I love all persons, I love the world, I love life. If I can say to somebody
else, ‘I love you,’ I must be able to say, ‘I love in you everybody, I love through you the
world, I love in you also myself.’”11 Love, not as a relationship with an object of love, but as
an orientation toward the entire world, authorizes the radical juxtaposition of love of one
person and love of humanity. What matters is then to fully recognize that “truly” loving one
person appears to be a difficult or even impossible thing to do. In Lacanian terms, loving one
person includes the process in which each lover assumes one’s unrecognized unconscious
structure, faces one’s innermost weakness, deals with one’s symptoms, and works toward the
singularization of his subjectivity in the form of the sinthome. In Badiouian terms, loving one
person requires not only an exceptional subjectivization that incorporates one’s body into the
evental encounter but also an enduring process that draws the consequences of the encounter
in a faithful way.

For Jim’s part, as a way of drawing the consequences of his encounter with Claudia, he has to
work together with Claudia to symbolize her addictive jouissance and build up her true
subjectivity. Jim has to address Claudia’s crime not through juridical power but through
unconditional forgiveness. The equation of humanity with love depends on whether Jim
measures up to this task. According to Fromm, this equation is possible on the condition that
an individual liberates him/herself from helpless attachment to mother’s protection and
obedient attachment to father’s order, just as humanity liberates itself from its attachment to
God and incorporates the divine principles of justice, love, and forgiveness into itself. 12 Love
as the mediator between one person and humanity requires as its condition the transformation
of a dependent infant into an independent subject. The figure of humanity can be love when
love is not an infantile impotence but an infinite potentiality whereby love weaves together
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oneself, the other, the world, and humanity.

In parallel, Badiou concludes his interview on Magnolia, “‘what is it that makes humanity
hold together as a world, given that it no longer seems to be respect for the law of the father?’
It’s not that anymore but rather the chance nature of love. That’s what we are reduced to,
there’s nothing else, with all that entails in terms of riskiness and the absence of law.” 13 Since
the essentially Badiouian idea about love is not its miraculous contingent nature but its
laborious procedural nature,14 there is no such thing as a royal road to love. The lover only
has to ceaselessly pass through trials and errors and assume numerous risks, dealing with the
absence of law in love.

4. Post-Magnolia

Given that the paternal law has ceased to operate reliably in love, it is no coincidence that
Anderson’s subsequent work, Punch-Drunk Love (2002), addresses masculinity in a post-
patriarchal context. How can a man love when he loses his father as a patron? How does a
man approach a woman when masculinity is divested of patriarchal arche? At the antipode of
masculine hegemony, Barry Egan (Adam Sandler) is a man with neither power nor wealth.
The owner of a toilet accessory business, Egan is professionally incompetent. Surrounded by
his seven sisters at a family meeting, he demonstrates his inadequacy. He suffers from
intermittent explosive disorder, a crying problem, and self-hatred. A disconnected modern
man, Egan pursues companionship through a phone sex service, only to find himself the
victim of blackmail by the phone sex operator. Lena (Emily Watson), who turned out to be a
friend of Egan’s sister, finds herself attracted to Egan and asks him out. In their first date,
however, Egan is afraid of revealing his subjective real to her, and he fails to come clean with
her about a childhood episode, in which his explosive anger prompted him to break a
window. Moreover, as he is unable to bear the situation in which his subjective real is
exposed to Lena, he actually leaves the table and destroys the bathroom of the restroom.
Following their date, when Lena wants him to return to her apartment to kiss him, he
stumbles and has a difficulty finding her room to accomplish satisfy her demand. When Lena
is attacked by the gangsters extorting him, he leaves her at the hospital, to fight with those
who imposed violence on her and show off his strength. In this regard, Barry embodies the
figure of a farcical clown in a world of post-patriarchal masculinity. In the absence of
patriarchal law, men are embedded within a chaotic and puzzling role-playing situation. As
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Timothy Stanley observes, “trapped, they become disconnected toilet-accessory salesmen,

perverts who jack off to phone sex chat lines, or idealized Popeyes who protect Olive Oyls
who no longer want protection.”15

In the context of our discussion, what matters is how the amorous hypothesis is refashioned
here. The condition of love is no longer related to whether miserable solitude is replaced by
encounter and fidelity. Love remains hypothetical, because the (masculine) lover is asked
with assuming arbitrary roles. Love changes, according to the way in which man struggles
with the problem of a manly semblance. This struggle is inevitable, insofar as “love is
addressed to the semblance of being.”16 Love has no substantial being, because the lover must
experiment with various types of gender performances, to determine which type is most
appropriate to the pursuit of the amorous itinerary. To use another formulation by Lacan,
when it comes to love, which has only a hypothetical being, “what we must get used to is
substituting the ‘para-being (par-être)’ … for the being that would take flight.” 17 Instead of
reaching for the slippery and vanishing being of love, one had better work on the para-being
of love. In the end, Barry confesses to Lena, about his explosive anger, his use of the phone
sex service, and his fight with the gangsters. Employing such honesty concerning his
subjective real is ultimately the only way to successfully liberate Barry from the confusion
that characterizes the gender roles he assumes. “Punch-drunk syndrome” literally refers to the
condition caused by repeated trauma of professional boxers, and is acknowledged as the
cause of Muhammad Ali’s Parkinson’s disease; the use of this term in the title implies that no
dedicated lover can emerge unwounded. Supporting love, in its hypothetical form, demands
the kind of role-playing that involves various trials and tribulations. Love can persist, and
even if it afflicts the lover with grogginess, it may not become a fatal disease; this, however,
requires one to keep working through roles, and thereby revitalizing the amorous process.
Love is hypothetical, because it is a laborious experimentation in the punch-drunk condition.

After There Will Be Blood (2007), The Master (2012), and Inherent Vice (2014), Anderson
returns to the amorous hypothesis, in Phantom Thread (2017). This is a story about the
encounter and relationship between the controlling couturier Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel
Day-Lewis) and the restaurant server Alma (Vicky Krieps). Following their romantic
encounter, Alma moves into Reynolds’s house, but soon feels herself geared to succumb to
the regulation of the Reynolds’s world, as if she were a disposable cog in the machine
Reynolds orchestrates. The value of her existence lies solely in serving as a model for his
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dresses and conforming to his rigorous daily routine; she can do nothing but feed him when
he is hungry and tend to him when he is sick. When Barbara Rose, Reynolds’s patron, is
ultimately revealed to be undeserving of the dress Reynolds has created for her, it is Alma
who helps Reynolds to retrieve the dress, along with his artistic pride. Reynolds pays
gratitude to Alma with a kiss, but the next morning, Alma still feels alienated on account of
the absence of her meaningful place in Reynolds’s house. To achieve such a place, Alma
surprises Reynolds with a dinner, which prompts him to feel embarrassed, rather than
grateful. Alma subsequently confesses to Reynolds that she has grown sick and tired of his
“rules.” To have Reynolds to herself, Alma decides to serve him poisoned soup, because she
knows that sickness transforms Reynolds into “a spoiled child, open and tender,” and only
under these conditions can Alma freely act as a caring maternal figure for Reynolds.
Following their marriage, as Reynolds begins to feel that Alma is not a suitable fit within his
household, Alma decides to poison Reynolds again. On this occasion, Reynolds composedly
consumes the soup, despite his awareness that it is poisoned. Reynolds recovers, under
Alma’s tender ministrations. The film’s final image renders Reynolds as a hungry boy,
submitting peacefully to Alma’s embrace.

Although it might seem tempting to assert that an ethos of masculine patriarchy dominates
the film, such an interpretation can only facilitate a partial reading of the film. While the first
part of the movie manifestly demonstrates Alma’s submission to Reynolds’ symbolic world,
ultimately, the movie reveals that their relationship does not consist merely of a power
dynamic between a master and his slave, but is, rather, a mutually agreed-upon contract. At
stake, here, is neither a unilateral power dynamic nor a perverse sadomasochistic game. It is a
shifting anaclitic relationship wherein the roles regularly alternate. At times, the man
becomes father for the woman as a girl. At other times, the woman becomes mother for the
man as a boy. As Alma tells Reynolds, “I want you flat on your back, helpless, tender, open,
with only me to help. And then I want you strong again.” She simultaneously desires
Reynolds’s strength and his helplessness. On the one hand, Reynolds must be a powerful
paternal figure whom she can admire and depend on for his fame, charisma, wealth, and
pride; on the other hand, Reynolds must also be a powerless boy who depends on her
maternal feeding and healing. This duality can be also observed in Alma’s narration in the
film’s opening scene. “Reynolds has made my dreams come true. And I have given him what
he desires most in return.” Reynolds has furnished Alma with the potential for upwardly
 14

mobility, while Alma has provided Reynolds with a substitute for his mother. For Reynolds,
his mother is un-dead like an eternal phantom in every aspect of his life. If Alma has given
him “every piece of hers,” she does so in the sense that she embodies the missing element
that Reynolds needs to fill up the loss of his mother, to continue his working with the
phantom thread he ultimately dedicates to his mother. Here, we can observe the emergence of
a new amorous hypothesis. Love is hypothetical because in the absence of sexual relationship
there is only something like an interfantasmatic relationship. “There is no sexual relationship,
except for neighboring generations, namely, the parents on the one hand, the children on the
other.”18 Instead of sexual relationship, there is a parent-child relationship between lost
mother and son, ideal father and daughter. Beyond the union of man and woman, a boy
needing the tender care of a substitute mother, and a girl desiring the fulfillment of her dream
through a substitute father. As Alma states, “to be in love with him makes life no great
mystery,” which is to say that, in their role-playing game, both are perfectly aware of the
roles they are expected to assume. They become co-conspirators in a well-organized world
with a well-defined gender performance. Life is so neatly ordered through love’s hypothetical
existence as an interfantasmatic relationship. Unlike Punch-Drunk Love, which demonstrates
how a masculine lover negotiates his gender roles in a post-patriarchal context, Phantom
Thread illustrates how the unconscious relationship with fixed gender roles supports the
amorous community, thereby returning to the problem of linking the amorous hypothesis to
the unconscious. However, unlike Magnolia, in which love is hypothetical because of
solitude, as structured by the unconscious, Phantom Thread reveals the unconscious fantasy
as the driving force behind the amorous hypothesis. While Magnolia demonstrates that the
amorous community cannot be seen as an automatic given and that solitude might take the
place of love, Phantom Thread suggests that the programmatic operation of the fantasmatic
relationship can work to perfectly establish the amorous community.

Conclusion

Reading Paul Thomas Anderson’s films about love through the lens of Lacanian
psychoanalysis and Badiouian philosophy enables us to discern four discrete types of the
amorous hypothesis. First, love is hypothetical, because the stubborn and alienating force of
solitude establishes inroads to love and determines the unconscious subject. Second, love is
hypothetical, because there is no guarantee of the exceptional emergence of the faithful
subject of the amorous truth. Third, love is hypothetical, because the masculine lover should
 15

engage in the experimentation of his gender performances in the context of a post-patriarchal

world, devoid of a predefined law regarding love. Finally, love is hypothetical, because love
is not merely addressed to an actual sexual partner, but also to the fantasy of one’s parent
projected onto the partner. What can we make of such hypotheses? Can we make any further
elaborations on these hypotheses? To wit, are these hypotheses open to empirical observation,
experimental verification, or theoretical generalization? In the history of science, one can see
various positions competing with regard to the utility of hypotheses. While heliocentrism, as
espoused by Copernicus and Kepler, was enabled via the bold hypothesis against the
Baconian induction, Newton dismissed the viability of hypotheses (“I do not make
hypotheses”), because of their unscientific and mystical qualities. Centuries later, the
hypothetical postulation about the invariability of the speed of light allowed Einstein to draw
the further conclusions. With regard to love, there are no objective criteria by which one can
estimate, classify, or synthesize the amorous hypotheses. Nevertheless, this does not render
the amorous hypothesis totally useless. Humanity has, after all, ceaselessly produced
hypotheses about love, and this work will persist for as long as humanity exists. The
nonthetic nature of love leads humanity to keep identifying and constructing new amorous
hypotheses. Even when humanity seems to be through with love, love in its hypothetical form
would never be through with humanity. This perspective should prompt us to await the
emergence of other amorous hypotheses, in Anderson’s future works on love, with more than
a passing interest.
1
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XXI, December 18, 1973 (Unpublished Translation by Cormac Gallagher).
2
Alain Badiou, ‘Say Yes to Love, Or Else Be Lonely’, in Cinema, ed. Antoine de Baecque, trans. Susan Spitzer
(Cambridge: Polity, 2013), p. 183.
3
Alain Badiou, ‘About the contemporary fate of boys’, in The True Life, trans. Susan Spitzer (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), pp.
50–72.
4
Badiou, ‘About the contemporary fate of boys’, p. 67.
5
Badiou, ‘Say Yes to Love, Or Else Be Lonely’, p. 191.
6
David Congdon, ‘Reconsidering Apocalyptic Cinema: Pauline Apocalyptic and Paul Thomas Anderson’, Journal of
Religion and Popular Culture, vol. 24, no. 3 (2012), pp. 407.
7
Badiou, ‘Say Yes to Love, Or Else Be Lonely’, p. 182.
8
Badiou, ‘Say Yes to Love, Or Else Be Lonely’, p. 183.
9
Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (London: Routledge,
2001), p. 32.
10
Augustine, cited in Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, trans. Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 91.
11
Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1956), p. 46.
12
Fromm, The Art of Loving, p. 81.
13
Badiou, ‘Say Yes to Love, Or Else Be Lonely’, pp. 191–192.
14
Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love, trans. Peter Bush (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2012), p. 80.
15
Timothy Stanley, ‘Punch-Drunk Masculinity’, The Journal of Men’s Studies, vol. 14, no. 2 (2006), p. 241.
16
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XX: Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–1973, ed.
Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), p. 92.
17
Lacan, Seminar XX, p. 44.
18
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XXV: The Moment to Conclude, 1977–1978, April 11, 1978 (Unpublished Translation by Cormac
Gallagher).