0. I will discuss here a short documentary movie, Brent Hoff’s “The Love Competition.”
First, I will summarize the movie. (§1) Then, I will lay out how I have used it in class. (§2) Then, I will list frequent ways in which my students have responded to the documentary. (§3) Finally, I will give some of the conclusions that I have reached. (§4)
1. Brent Hoff had “The Love Competition” (TLC) published in Wholphin in 2012. Wholphin is McSweeney’s quarterly DVD magazine.
1.1 Right away, cards explain how the “First Annual Love Competition” will work. (There has been no second competition so far.)
Contestants will have five minutes in an fMRI machine to love someone as hard as they can. Brain regions involved in producing the neuro-chemical experience of love will be measured. The contestant who generates the greatest amount of activity in those areas, WINS.
Six contestants tell us how they will be loving someone while in the MRI. They present very different “strategies” for “winning”.
1.2 Dr. Melina Uncapher explains that this MRI can detect activity where dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin and vasopressin are produced. “Researchers think [these pathways] are involved in the experience of romantic love.” These pathways converge on the nucleus accumbens “which may be a primary indicator of how much love they are experiencing.” This explanation avoids taking a strong position within the ontological options presented in most philosophy of mind classes. Still, this is close to a psycho-physical definition of love.
1.3 One of the contestants, ten-year-old Milo, says he will be thinking about his baby cousin. He states that he has not experienced “crush love” but he has experienced love. He defines love as “like a feeling you have for someone that you have feelings about.”
1.4 In a beautiful sequence, we see the eyes of the contestants in the MRI. The music soars. It feels like they are launched. The lyrics (which students have missed and I only caught later) are “We’re not in love. We’re just comparing.” (The Pauses, “The Leap Year” in A Cautionary Tale, 2011.)
1.5 The contestants report very profound experiences. Peter thought a lot about what the MRI could pick up and realized that he is no longer in love with his former partner. Marilyn is in tears of gratitude. We see her with another contestant, Ken, and realize that they are married and have been talking about each other this whole time. They married young and have been together a long time.
1.6 A card says “And the winner is…” And we see Ken hold up a print-out and hug Marilyn. “And second place goes to…” Milo. We see the contestants one more time, smiling. The last shot is of Milo walking out the hallway with his scan. After credits we see Peter pumping his fists.
2. I have shown The Love Competition in classes that introduce critical thinking, philosophy of mind, ethics, health care ethics, and philosophy of sport. The film is often found on-line, though the captions are better if you use the DVD in class. The documentary is only sixteen minutes long and holds students’ attention very well. If you give students a link, make sure they know that searching the whole internet for “The Love Competition” will probably link them to a very different sort of film. (Saying this guarantees someone will conduct that very search…)
2.1 I survey the class earlier to see if they think that we could know if someone loves someone else by measuring their neurochemicals. Students express skepticism. (An increasing number of students are waiting to hear from me.)
2.2 Because the movie is short, I can hit pause to get responses from students. I ask what they might do if they were in the competition. When Dr. Uncapher is explaining the method, (§1.2) I tell students they will not need to recall any anatomy in any test in my class but that I want them to be able to analyze this as a definition of love. I also hit pause to say that we should see if we can “do something” with Milo’s on-the-spot definition in §1.3.
2.3 Students all believe that they knew Ken was going to be the winner because he was describing his love profoundly before and after the MRI. So I hit pause right before the winner is announced and poll the class. When I pause, every candidate gets at least one nomination as “likely to win”. Ken and Milo get the most votes for “would like to see win” but others do as well.
2.3.1 This is an example of hindsight bias. It is striking how similarly students respond to this documentary each year. Students who are not asked until after the winner is announced will state that the winner was obvious.
2.3.2 With or without hitting pause, there is always satisfaction in the room when Ken wins and Milo comes in second. There is not a lot of writing about this film but the liner notes in the DVD state that Peter had the lowest score and was glad to hear that. I let the class know this. (Similar hindsight bias happens here.) I point out that Marilyn is crying during her scan, which will lessen the amount of time the scan is working. I joke, with some purpose, that Ken does not actually have proof that he loves her more than she loves him.
2.4 The discussion is shaped very strongly by a conviction that the MRI works as a “love detector” even when most students in my classes express skepticism about this earlier in the semester.
2.4.1 One student pointed out that she has been diagnosed with a low amount of one of these neurochemicals but is still convinced that she loves as much as anyone. I appreciate the student sharing this. I mention her to other classes. I talk about other emotions generating neurochemicals. Students still proceed (and still turn in papers) that show that they believe the MRI accurately finds out who is loving the “hardest”. Most papers explain why Ken loved the most.
2.4.2 No one in medicine or science is arguing that we can use an MRI as a “love detector”. TLC is playing with ideas like competition, emotion, and the mind/body problem. There is no strong claim by the filmmaker that an MRI can do this. How we think about love is given much more time than any argument that we have developed a revolutionary technology.
Se, we can defend the film from the charge of making a strong ontological claim. But I have seen hundreds of students “go there”. Once this movie is finished, students think the machine works. When asked before watching, most were skeptical but now most of them believe. I have seen this happen in about forty classes.
2.4.3 I ask students if they would like to go into the MRI. Most would not. I ask if this would be a good date. Most emphatically say “no”. This is interesting given how positive the experiences are for the contestants.
2.4.4 I have posed to the class a hypothetical dating site. After your first date, each person mails a bio sample to a lab. Then they find out if the other person is “into” them. Would this be good or bad? Would it be easy to lie about the effectiveness of such a service? Could an unscrupulous company sell such a product and make some money? Why do many people still believe that “lie detectors” are valid, despite them being disproven. If we could actually make a love detector work, would it then be a good thing?
3. These responses are discrete and do not form a chain that leads to a single conclusion.
3.1 My students show sophistication when following the narrative in movies. When I show Christopher Nolan’s Memento, students are able to keep track. (Viewers of Memento will tell you that the movie itself does not tell everything we would normally be told. Students keep up with the film, even as it uses very complicated devices to convey the confusion the main character faces.) There are a lot of popular movies that feature very strong plot twists and turns. So a lack of sophistication when it comes to media is not the issue.
3.2 In The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer express concerns about “sound films”:
They are so designed that quickness, powers of observation, and experience are undeniably needed to apprehend them at all; yet sustained thought is out of the question if the spectator is not to miss the relentless rush of facts (Adorno and Horkheimer, 126–127).
They wrote Dialectic while in exile from Nazi Germany, a regime that mobilized film and radio. They have state propaganda in mind but they also diagnose the “culture industry” in the USA. Hollywood films and advertising manipulate the existing desires of the public in order to steer people towards wants that can be monetized for profit.
I would find it hard to consider Brent Hoff’s film to be manipulative. One of its joys is that it is not trying to sell anything. But I have seen it overwhelm many viewers. By “overwhelming”, I only mean convincing while deferring “sustained thought.”
3.2.1 If well-made movies are convincing, and potentially overwhelming, then we should be worried about them. We have just seen millions of people convinced by videos on YouTube and TikTok that vaccines are dangerous or that the COVID virus should just be allowed to run its course.
3.2.2 What can philosophy do in an environment like this? Three options: (1) We acknowledge the extent to which we can be distracted and overwhelmed by movies. (2) We support philosophers who do a good job presenting sustained thought using well-made movie techniques. (3) We explain that the argument and the essay are not low-tech, poorer, versions of other media. They are well-suited to present arguments without overwhelming the reader.
3.2.3 Students need to appreciate charitable and thorough arguments. Students also need to learn to appreciate creative works that avoid overwhelming the viewer by being clear that they are fictional, opinionated, and open to counter-argument. Adorno saw avant-garde art as generating the right relationship between a creator and an audience. This is far from a common view that the avant-garde is just tricky.
3.2.4 In class, I will eventually emphatically counter false conclusions about love detection. Students then think that I dislike the film or that I showed it to them with tricky intentions. The idea that you might analyze something you like and diagnose concerns about it while still wanting to share it confuses most of them. Part of education is getting rid of that confusion.
3.3 Many readers will argue that presenting this film in the context of a class on different ontologies of mind is charitable to psycho-physical identity theory. Fair enough.
3.4 This brings me back to my decision to keep showing this documentary. This film provoked me. I like the way it motivates discussion of philosophy of mind and some medical ethical issues. I also enjoy submitting the contestants’ thoughts on love as an example of the sort of brainstorming that philosophy encourages and eventually aims to sort through. I am pleased to see an older couple be the hero of anything in pop culture. The students’ fondness for that couple is heartening. So, I am likely to continue to use it. But it grows harder if students continue to be overwhelmed by a beautiful story beautifully presented. I fear students leave my class believing gadgets can do things that they cannot. But that sort of concern can be brought to any well-made media narrative.
3.5 I am impressed by how strong the experience is in the MRI. Contestants speak about how important love has been for them. While I know that the MRI cannot serve as a “love detector”, I am very confident that the competitors benefited from a short amount of time concentrating on an important feature of human life. They grew more excited by their own lives and they were clearer about what love meant to them. As an ethicist, I want to generate similar moments for myself and others. I tell students that I went into philosophy because it generated moments like that for me.
3.5.1 The belief that the MRI can “see” how much you love is a factor here. Is there a more truthful way to generate meaningful experiences like this? Shouldn’t our classes generate such experiences?
3.5.2 If philosophy forgoes providing meaningful experiences, who will people turn to? Self-help authors? Social media influencers? Charismatic leaders? Leaving meaning to them is neglectful. There is a tradition of “meaning-of-life” writing in philosophy. Can leaders in our discipline find ways to reward philosophers who provoke listeners, readers, and viewers to visit and revisit their most important beliefs and experiences?
Dr. Murphy wishes to thank the Program for Leadership and Character at Wake Forest University for support during much of the time spent writing this.
Jason Burke Murphy
Jason Burke Murphy is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Elms College, where he teaches health care ethics, philosophy of sport, and political philosophy. He has published on Star Trek, Christopher Nolan, and the narrative force of sporting events.
