A Kiss is Still a Kiss...

A writer, probably underpaid, sits down at a typewriter or a computer in some undersized room with bad lighting. If he's savvy, he takes a dozen cheap legal pads and plastic pens* to the mountains or beach and writes there. If he's not so broke as that, he has a laptop.

He writes a love story. Sometimes the love story is surrounded with other elements. Sometimes it isn't even the main thrust of the story. But the component is there.

He takes his story to his agent, and a couple of years later somebody decides to make a movie out of it. They cast a couple of people, usually a man and a woman, but hey, we're not prejudiced. It might be a man and a man, a woman and a woman, or even some alternative life form angling for some other theoretical sentient.

They are represented by real human beings who maybe don't know each other, maybe don't like each other. And maybe it's beyond their skills to represent what the writer gave them.

But sometimes it isn't. Sometimes, these two people, who in the real world don't know or like each other, sometimes they're able to portray an elemental desire that is universal to us all. And we go to the movie, and pay our two or four or six or eight or God forbid even ten bucks, and we see them kiss. For a minute or a second we are sucked into the ideal. The perfect manifestation of real and honest contact with another person.

Maybe it's a conventional mouth to mouth kiss. Maybe another touch, statement or action, gentle or violent. But however it happens, it is the manifestation of pure and absolute truth, shown so strongly that an Eskimo or a Bushman or a tentacled blob from Alpha Centauri or even a hardboiled political lobbyist can understand it.

*Or if he's lucky like me, someone gave him nicer pens that are fomenting revolt against the keyboard.

© Gabrielle Taylor 1997-2001. All rights reserved. Contact: gtaylor@hypercube.org