Contrary to the prevailing Valentine’s Day sentiment, the question the Arts section poses this holiday is not “who wants me,” but rather, “what do we want?” The time of selfless love and devoted yearning has not come to an end, but we are putting it on pause. Instead, take this year’s Valentine’s Day to make sure that you’re showing love to yourself — in the form of, you guessed it, love-related arts to consume. Movies, television, literature and music, all about love. What better gift could there be from your favorite section of your college’s newspaper? Regardless of if you do or don’t have a special love in your life at the moment, remember this: The News-Letter’s Arts & Entertainment section always loves you — and here are our specially curated picks of Valentine’s Day art, for all of our loyal readers.
To watch...
Saffron Hallett: Eternity (2025), directed by David Freyne
Do you know where you would like to spend eternity? Imagine if you had the chance to pick your paradise after death. What would it look like, and who would you want to spend it with?
These are the questions that Joan (Elizabeth Olsen) must grapple with as she finds herself at the Junction, a place between the living world and the afterlife. On the one hand, she could spend her eternity with her first husband, Luke (Callum Turner), who died during a war and has waited for her here for 67 years. On the other hand, she could spend eternity with her second husband Larry (Miles Teller), with whom she has been married to for 65 years and has children with. She only has one week to decide, and whichever eternity she chooses, she will be forced to stay in forever.
Watch as Larry and Luke fight for their wife with the help of their Afterlife Coordinators, Anna (Da'Vine Joy Randolph) and Ryan (John Early), respectively, in this surreal, ‘70s convention center-style atmosphere. Director David Freyne takes his audience on a heartwarming and emotional journey that lets us reflect on our lives and the relationships we make along the way. Who would you spend your eternity with?
Grace Oh: Be Melodramatic (2019), directed by Lee Byeong-heon and Kim Hye-young
Be Melodramatic is a meta love letter to Korean dramas, where the main characters include a drama writer, a marketing team leader of a drama production company and a documentary director. Distinguished by the witty and thoughtful dialogue, the writers and directors of Be Melodramatic are not afraid to make fun of the self-referenced genre’s cliches or the characteristics of typical weekday Korean drama, even directly addressing the looming presence of product placement. Many shades of love are portrayed, such as the simmering, latent love present in the aftermath of a seven-year relationship, the steadiness of friendships that spill over from college to adult life and the grief that persists after the death of a partner.
The show’s strength is plainly stated by one of the protagonists in Episode 5 as she prepares to convince higher-ups at a network company to pick up her drama, which works as the in-universe version of Be Melodramatic: It’s character-driven, relying on the viewers’ empathy and curiosity for the ensemble cast to get them to continue watching episode after episode. And when the writers and directors trust the audience to care for and love the characters as they do, gracing their minor characters with the same empathy their main counterparts get, how can the stories be anything short of romantic?
River Phan: The Beast (2023), directed by Bertrand Bonello
Incel ideology is a response to an identity conceived from an incongruence between oneself and one’s desires within the libidinal economy, or rudimentarily, a state without sexual (or, sometimes, romantic) love. This ideology has been compounded and reified into vitriol and violence by Western postmodernity’s specific tactics of alienation, such as work-driven isolation to maximize productivity and technological substitutes for human companionship or comfort. This imposition onto the individual is central to Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast (2023). Based on the Henry James novella, The Beast in the Jungle, which tracks a fatalistic fear of impending doom materializing into inescapable loneliness, The Beast uses its non-linear, genre-crossing form to ask what happens to love in the aftermath of catastrophe.
Part period drama and part sci-fi dystopia, The Beast follows Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) and Louis (George MacKay) through their past and present lives in 1910, 2014 and 2044. Its 2014 set piece could be categorized as a horror-thriller since Louis, in this iteration, is an incel stalking Gabrielle. Beyond its experimental structure through disjointed editing and uneven sound design, this section is dreadfully eerie because it conveys the crux of a certain type of solitude, one that creates incel culture and other reactionary mindsets: Maybe, love is not enough, and fear — of failure or the unknown or being known — is going to prevail in its place. The Beast offers no exhaustive solace, but its picture of love as a mild palliative is precisely and perversely human.
Shreya Tiwari: Jab We Met (2007), directed by Imtiaz Ali
I never quite connected fully with English-speaking rom-coms that have been released recently; I find that there’s something missing when characters just say “I love you” instead of speaking in poetry the way a Bollywood actor confesses to his one true love mid-movie. But most Bollywood movies are over-the-top and soap-opera-esque — younger-me saw them as a caricature of love as opposed to the real thing. However, there’s one movie which I’ve rewatched countless times, that has defined exactly how I see love.
Jab We Met is the story of Geet (Kareena Kapoor Khan), a vivacious, slightly immature girl who runs into heartbroken and burnt-out Aditya (Shahid Kapoor) on her train. A series of unfortunate events eventually leads to the two missing their train, and the two connect along a journey to her hometown of Bhatinda. The story becomes one where both characters heal each other — Geet’s infectious joy and her self-confidence inspire Aditya, and later, he returns to help Geet find herself after heartbreak. It’s not the basic “I can fix him” or “I can fix her” plot; it’s two imperfect people learning from each other. There are so many scenes where their affection for one another shows up in glances and subtleties compared to other rom-coms, where I often feel like lovey-dovey scenes are shoved down my throat. The effect is heightened by the amazing songs that accompany these scenes, where lyricism shows the hundreds of details the two characters notice about each other as they fall in love.
It’s rare that a romance movie leaves me without nausea. But a love like Geet and Aditya’s, with its stupid silly moments and its commitment to constantly making each other better people, is enough to melt the heart of this “disillusioned-with-romance” viewer.
Steve Wang: In the Mood for Love (2000), directed by Wong Kar Wai
Tony Leung’s Mr. Chen and Maggie Cheung’s Mrs. Chan play characters that would, in any other movie, be relegated to the background — reduced into mere collateral of an unfortunate, melodramatic betrayal. There should be yelling and fighting and screaming in the drama, but instead of such an explicit, aggressive approach to love, the characters of In the Mood for Love choose to bury their feelings behind mountainous facades of role-playing and “platonic” silences.
Mr. Chen never pleads for Mrs. Chan to follow him — never seems to allow himself to ask for the world he wants to live in. The love that ties the two characters doesn’t bring them together. It instead tears at their organs and splits the world into two halves: the half he is on and the half she is on. They didn’t even ever really fall in love: Chen was never in love. He was always in love.
Just like the black pitch sitting in an empty hall in Queensland, Chen’s heart seemed not to move at all, until suddenly, when nobody noticed, it fell right out of his chest and filled the gutters of the rainy alleyway outside his window.
Even though it's not the most upbeat movie to watch while snuggled up in your loved one’s arms, it’s still an incredibly important one to watch. Its poetic nature leaves so much room for self-exploration and personal interpretation that you will inevitably (re)discover some part of yourself when you watch it. The plot is purposefully muddy, so don’t ChatGPT or Google the ending. Struggle with it, let it live with you and eventually, you will see yourself in the reflection.
Shuwen Zheng: 500 Days of Summer (2019), directed by Marc Webb
As Valentine’s Day fast approaches, it is the perfect time to revisit some iconic romance films. Directed by Marc Webb, 500 Days of Summer (2009) is one such film that has slowly transitioned from cult classic to wide acceptance within the public consciousness. The film reverses the stereotypical “boy meets girl” tale to explore the realities of love. While Tom starts out as a naive romantic who believes in “true love” and Summer is much more cynical about the existence of such a concept, their united exploration of what love means for them pushes the film forward.
As the rise of social media has reset people’s expectations and perceptions of love, often leading to commitment and attachment issues, many resonated with Tom’s hopelessly romantic yet failed pursuit of Summer. However, those quick to assign blame for why the relationship didn’t work are missing the bigger picture. At the end of the film, in an ironic reversal, Summer has taken Tom’s stance of true love while Tom has given up on the notion of finding love. The switching of perspectives indicates there is nothing inherently wrong with either approach to love, and there is no one at blame. The ultimate solace that the audience should find in Tom’s journey from first sight to heartbreak across these 500 days is that sometimes people are just not meant to be, and there is nothing to be sad about over that. People love different people differently at different stages of their life: There is no one or “correct” way to approach love.
To read...
Estelle Chen: So Many Constellations, by Paul Celan
Love, like all of my favorite things, makes strange what had been familiar. Naturally, Paul Celan — who twisted and turned, bent and molded German into strange new formations — wrote one of my favorite love poems, So Many Constellations. The poem rambles through paradox: The speaker and their lover both “knew” and “did not know,” “were there, after all, and not there.” Things are not in their proper place; it seems like they are in no place at all.
The translation by Michael Hamburger treats us to a spectacularly paradoxical promise: “at times when / only the void stood between us we got / all the way to each other.” Love is a void; desire is lack (thank you, Lacan), but that is not all that they are. Between the poem’s speaker and their lover is a special kind of emptiness: a lack that’s unbearably full, a void that is also a bridge.
How are any of these paradoxes possible? Love’s rationale is nonsensical: It flips everything on its head to ultimately transcend the mess it's made so that there's no longer a mess at all. Love does not negate rationality or proper places. Rather, it moves us beyond the distinction between rational and irrational, order and mess. Love brings us to the site of constant movement, a place that is no place, where it's possible to cross even — and especially — the most impossible voids.
Austin Moon: The Clod and the Pebble, by William Blake
In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, I was drawn toward William Blake’s love poem The Clod and the Pebble. Structured in two parallel halves, the poem asks a question about the purpose of love and what it demands of us. Through the personified voices of the clod and the pebble, Blake presents two clashing visions: one selfless and open, the other self-preserving and binding in its relationships.
What makes the poem so powerful is how clearly these positions mirror one another. Flipped, the poem retains its meaning when read backward. Each side gives itself fully to the other in its own way. Blake does not tell us which vision is correct. Instead, he allows the reader to choose, or to recognize themselves shifting between the two. At different moments in my own life, I can see how I side more with the pebble, and at other times with the clod, however ridiculous it may sound.
The personification is just distinct enough to make each voice feel alive without turning the poem into an allegory that feels distant or abstract. Poetry allows us to stay present long enough for that recognition to matter. I believe that is what makes this poem, and poetry as a medium, worth returning to.
If you have a spare moment, take a second to breeze through Blake’s poem in full and ask yourself, on this day of love and reflection: Are you the Clod or the Pebble?
To listen...
Riley Strait: “Maps,” covered by Lola Kirke and Willow Avalon
When I first heard “Maps” on my Discover Weekly, I thought I was doing something. I thought, “They don’t love you like I love you,” in which I am the I, and the you is “Maps.” I thought I was being underground, if only a little. A TikTok virgin, I had no idea the song I was listening to was only a cover by Lola Kirke and Willow Avalon, not the original by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. The harder realization was that I was enjoying a song becoming popularized by an unflattering remix with, I’m sorry to say, a stupid dance.
The Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Maps” is a good song, too. The lyrics live a new life, however, when sung by Lola Kirke and Willow Avalon. With the gentle yet aching plea of a country voice, Kirke breathes fresh urgency into the chorus’s plea: “Wait, they don’t love you like I love you.” Backed by instrumentals that can’t help but conjure crops of corn, sorghum, wheat or what-have-you, Kirke and Avalon’s “Maps” is a sincere, bittersweet call to save a love going south — and to reclaim music from distasteful dance trends.
