For those who are about to love, we salute you—here’s my Big Hot Love Valentine’s Day playlist for ya.
The Passions - I’m In Love with a German Film Star
In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, let’s talk about one of my favorite pop songs about love, the 1981 single I’m In Love with a German Film Star, because I think it’s telling us something about how music conveys emotions. And because, spoiler, I think we’re all a little in love with German film stars these days.
The song’s got a beautiful, Smithesque reverby/surfy guitar line, very dreamy, and builds from a steady post-punk groove to an ecstatic, almost psych rock-y climax with the vocalist repeating I’m in love….I’m in love….again and again. The lyrics mirror the music’s sense of swoon, of the tidal swells of lust and obsession, in a mini-film plot of their own. And it’s all about the perfect image of the love object, of the love object as the perfect image up on the silver screen.
The first time the singer mentions the star—whose gender isn’t specified—the star is actually not performing, actually not coinciding with their own image: they’re at a bar, wearing “imperfect clothes, trying not to pose for the cameras and the girls”. It might seem like ah, actually we’re seeing the star in an authentic moment, with their guard down. But then she remarks….”It’s a glamorous world.….” In other words, even this “real” moment of the star offscreen has become idealized, glamor-ized, eroticized, turned into a moment of fantasy, for the singer/lover.
These days, with our digital mediascapes surrounding us, permeating our unconscious, our eyeballs are essentially fed German film stars all day—idealized love objects, people and figures we can fantasize about remotely. But even beyond our tech-ified lives, you can make the case, as Lacan and others do, that even without movies, social media, what have you, our desires are essentially structured around idealized images, around being drawn to fantasies that give our desires purpose. Before you even meet someone and fall in love with them, you have a love-image, your own private German film star, that you’re in love with, and the trajectory of your desire is fueled by how much that individual does or does not correspond with your fantasy. But it’s a dialectic, isn’t it? The real person you love and your innermost fantasy are in endless collaboration inside you.
And the end? That enraptured, ecstatic outro to the song with the “I’m in love….I’m in love….” repeated? What medium besides music could so lean into repetition that much, could so simply convey that feeling that time has stopped, that there is only a feeling overwhelming your entire being that you can only blissfully repeat the line, and never dream of ceasing? It shows us that erotic climaxes in music are about that feeling of a feeling going on forever. So put that shit repeat and have a lovely Valentine’s Day.