`Love Story' is Nothing to Laugh About

Thursday night's showing of "Love Story" was a true rite of passage for the freshman class. The event showcased Harvard's legendary dry wit, an intellectual disdain for the mawkishness of popular culture, and the disparaging insouciance of those who've made it to top. It was also obscene.

To fill in anyone who didn't hike over to the Science Center, the evening's entertainment was a screening of the classic melodrama, accompanied by running commentary from a chorus of Crimson Key members. During the film's first hour, most comments were sophomoric but harmless, consisting largely of sexual innuendoes and repeated references to the lead actress' ostensible ugliness. Several shouts foreshadowed the cancer that, by reel three, would take the young woman's life. As the disease progressed, a similar malignancy claimed the commentators' attempts at humor: as the hero aided his limping wife through a snowy lawn, the chorus declared, "Nice day for a drag,"; a pain-wracked hailing of a taxi elicited, "To the morgue--and step on it!"; finally, as the husband entered his lover's deathbed for a tender farewell, the Crimson Key offered, "Necrophilia!"

Like many Harvard students, I have lost a loved one to cancer. My friend died bravely, with her passion for life undimmed. Her lover lent her his shoulder on moonlit "drags" around their hillside farm. He spent sleepless nights in a shared bed, massaging her into brief respites from excruciating pain. They--and all who loved this woman--shared not necrophilia, but its antithesis, a celebration of living that continued until she could live no more.

Thursday's efforts at satire utterly degraded the strength and courage of those who manage the difficult task of dying with dignity. By treating terminal illness as a quality to be mocked, it both dehumanized the dying and, in its scornful laughter, turned death into a bad joke played on other people. In short, it made us all, and even life itself, seem a little cheaper, a little more ugly.

As the movie neared its end, I remembered Robert Coles's welcoming lecture, delivered in the same auditorium only two days before. Professor Coles spoke of the emptiness of knowledge and intelligence devoid of moral character and respect for life, and declared it a source of the supreme dehumanization of fascism. His warnings evidently wore off rather quickly. The pitiless cynicism of the "Love Story" chorus was a macabre and frightening celebration of inhumanity, and it was a disgrace. Jedediah Purdey '97