Love and lies

And the language of Intermezzo, Anora and The Substance

The words “I love you” appear about 25 times in Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, each one carrying a loaded, charged power. Every twenty pages or so, one of Rooney’s characters offers a different version of “I love you” to a lover in their orbit — desperate, selfish, drunk, pleading, hopeful, lonely. In a book about the way language rules our relationships, Rooney wields these particular moments like a weapon.

Rooney told The Paris Review earlier this month that the later work of the language philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein helped her break through a spate of rewriting as she tried to hone the point of her story:

My characters were playing language-games and trying to figure out the rules of one another’s language-games all the way through the novel … [Wittgenstein] gave me a new way of thinking about language that is grounded in relationality. When you say something, there has to be someone you’re saying it to. Otherwise, it has no meaning. Language gains meaning from the person who is uttering it and the person who is receiving that utterance.

This idea coalesces into the foreground of the story when — spoilers ahead, I guess — Peter, a 32-year-old wayward lawyer, stumbles home drunk to his 23-year-old girlfriend, Naomi, a sometimes sex worker. He’s spiraling after an intimate night with an ex, and confesses that he’s always been in love with this old flame who’s never exited his life. Strung out and strung along over his feelings for two women, Peter forces himself into a decision by kindly kicking Naomi out.

Do you hate me? she asks. Then immediately she gives something like a strained laugh and adds: Actually, don’t say, I don’t want to know.

Feeling his jaw weakening again, sense in his throat that if he tries to answer he will only cry, so drunk he can hardly see, and he lays his head on her lap again. I don’t hate you, he says. Tight and painful his throat. If I say what I really feel it’s just worse, he says. But I don’t hate you, not at all. Pathetic, he thinks. Hard to believe even real. What did he want her for if not to ruin his life.

Do you love me, she says.

And he answers: Yeah. I love you, of course I do.

Silence for a moment and then her tone thin and managed saying: But then why are you making me go away?

Naomi suggests they work something out. That Peter keeps seeing both women. They fight. They discuss fucking but Peter can barely move. He delays until the morning, before she leaves seemingly for good.

In a whisper she tells him to promise and he promises. Lower again and almost inaudible she says: And you’ll tell me you love me. He closes his eyes. Because she wants that. To hear him say it to her when they. Happy woman: yes, to make her. What is he thinking. What on earth. Why, for what possible reason, why. To send her away. Aloud he hears himself say simply: Yeah. I’ll tell you in the morning. Now let’s get some sleep.

I imagined Rooney’s characters with eyes either as wide as possible or completely shut every time they said, “I love you.” Begging to see if it would get the response they felt they needed. Or crawling inside themselves, hoping the words put them at ease. Or, in the case of Peter’s 22-year-old brother Ivan and his tryst with a 36-year-old Margaret, overwhelmed by a first love and letting the words blindly spill out like an easy habit. Said and reciprocated out of need following his father’s death and her failed marriage.

In the weeks since his father died Ivan has not heard these words from anyone, I love you, or said them to anyone either. Does this explain his intense longing to hear and say them again, to relieve the pressure of this confined force inside his body? Even to think of Margaret with love gives a little relief, to allow the feeling of love into his thoughts, like a flower opening outwards inside his mind.

I’ve had these ideas rattling around in my head throughout Intermezzo, Anora and The Substance, the big pieces of pop culture I’ve discussed the most at dinners and parties this month. They’ve made me think about our modern relationship to love, the words we use and crave when surrounded by what we think is love, and what we run away from. 

Love is referenced sparingly throughout The Substance. It’s always in the context of Margaret Qualley’s Sue as an object of desire. A billboarded, porn-adjacent music video star. She’s ogled and told “people are gonna love that” or “they’re gonna love you.” It makes her smile and drives her mad. The language in this script leaves little to interpretation. It’s a blunt object in a blunt instrument of a film. 

The substance that transforms Demi Moore’s Elisabeth into a younger, better version isn’t a love drug. That’s not the point. Lust, perfection, surface-level aesthetics, the ways in which we inherently prioritize those qualities until they overwhelm us — that’s what this story is getting at. Despite a clunky ending, the movie’s execution is powerful. Every guy I’ve talked to about it has said some version of, “Good movie … and Margaret Qualley is so hot in it.” Demi Moore’s character throws herself into unknown risk and danger in order to experience the world as someone who forces those remarks. Someone who is wanted and valued, but not loved. Not really.

A few scenes before Anora’s divisive ending — it worked on me, for what it’s worth — Mikey Madison’s character Ani spits out a few final, pleading declarations of love. Like Naomi, Ani is a young sex worker. She’s at the end of a week-long journey with the doofus son of ultrarich Russians, compelled to annul a marriage under threat of life-altering sabotage. She looks at her soon-to-be-never husband, Vanya, and makes one last plea that she loves him and that they love each other. He’s more hangover than person at this point, and it’s clear what she’s saying is that she loves the life his money unlocks for her. That it’s a power beyond the one her body wields, the same way Sue’s does. 

This isn’t perverse. It’s reality. The film opens by showing off Ani’s sexual power and closes by showing its limits. Throughout Anora, love is merely transactional. It’s the thing that might be your way out, whether it’s real or not. Anora’s hammer is that the only thing worse than being poor in America is poor and delusionally in love.

Naomi and Peter share one last I love you near the end of Intermezzo. They’re reconnected yet collectively intertwined with Sylvia, brought back together by one of Peter’s destructive benders. Naomi says it first, and Peter reciprocates the affirmation. Then he watches her order takeout and the perspective floats.

Maybe we both thought we could get away with it. To be loved, yes, for no reason, with no imaginable reward. Sudden proliferation of grace. It probably just makes everything worse. Which in a way it does, worse, more complicated. Tethering him down into the world, barring the emergency exits. Stay and suffer. I promise. Of course.

I think those lines are what made this my favorite of Rooney’s novels. In that same Paris Review interview, she says, “That’s what I have been interested in, from my first book through to this one—the essence of things in their relation to other things, not in the thing itself.” The book goes on to a less brutal ending, with reconciliation between lovers and brothers. But Sally Rooney has always been a master at portraying the messed up ways in which young people interact in love. The lies and delusion, the relief and elation. The ways in which a connection with no imaginable reward, for no ulterior motive, can feel like getting away with it.