God of Love

The film featured in today’s blog post is “God of Love”. I Believe the best scene to analyze is the scene where Ray realizes that his best friend, Fozzie, is actually in love with Kelly, the girl Ray also loves. Though Kelly does love Fozzie, Fozzie makes it painfully clearly that he has no interest in her (or rather, he does, but he does not want to feel as though he has betrayed Ray). To me, this scene seems to tie together and summarize all of the notions provided in the beginning and end of the film. Ray states “You can’t control who you love, you can’t control who loves you. You can’t control when it happens, where it happens, or why it happens. You can’t control any of that stuff”, a realization he came to during this scene, when he decides to use his last “love dart” on Fozzie, so that he may fall in love with Kelly, instead of Kelly so that she may fall in love with him. This act of selflessness best exemplifies what I found to be a central theme of this film, and perhaps the concept of love in general, which is control. From the beginning of the flashback, Ray seems very keen on controlling who he loves and who loves him. This is evident by the opening prayer, which is as follows: “Dear god, whose name I do not know, I pray to you in a time of personal crisis. As you know I’ve been praying to you in the assistance of winning the affections of one Kelly Moran, which I’ve made consistently clear is the only thing I’ve ever prayed for.. at all. Thus I remain surprised and confused that last month, you saw fit to have Kelly fall in love with my best friend Fozzie”. The prayer is demonstrative of Ray’s unwillingness to accept the limit to the control he has over certain aspects of love and life. Similarly, the skepticism with which it is riddled is demonstrative of his unwillingness to surrender his control to a God, perhaps because he might not believe in one, or perhaps because he does not want to surrender his control to anyone. He expressed similar obsession with controlling aspects he believe will help him win the affection of Kelly, such as serving chicken pot pie instead of seafood, or seeing “Romeo and Juliet” instead of “Black Swan”. In the end, I think the darts served as the tool that allowed him to see that even with divine intervention, there are certain things, like love, that he cannot control. Once he comes to the realization that “love doesn’t make any sense” and surrenders his control by assisting his friends (among others) with falling in love, he becomes the God of Love.