Modern Love, more than anything else, is a story, a traditional tragic tale. But it isn’t like a soap opera. Soap operas don’t have beginnings and endings – Modern Love does. Instead, it asks to be compared to the film genre it alludes to: Neo-Realism. The elements that differentiate the video image form a film image, suit the use that Campbell has made of the medium. The video image being more immediate, les rich and detailed, as well as significantly smaller than a film image, is conducive to the ‘close-up-on-real-life’ intention that the Realists worked for. Other of many similarities, the use of open frames and long takes, are purported to allow quietly sentimental emotions to spontaneously erupt without the intervention of an energetic editor. Most Neo-Realist films (ie. those of DeSicca and Rossellini) also tend toward a ‘pity the little guy’ attitude. Like Modern Love, these films are magnifying glasses on a previously unnoticed victim of a larger, established powerful group. In Modern Love, Robin is the victim and the new wave/post-punk/suburban gone warehouse-urban ‘scene’ is the group.

The tape is perfectly narrative: essentially narrative. Given the many forms of ‘making meaning’ that video art has coined and evolved, it’s significant that Colin Campbell chose a strict traditional narrative vehicle. Stripped of all secondary and tertiary story telling tricks Modern Love’s narrative is bare, and totally conscious of itself, and of its audience. It’s a simple story about a girl’s attempted penetration into the cosmo life. Her name is Robin and she is played by Campbell. She leaves the suburbs to live alone in the city and work at a mundane job. She spends her leisure time with other self-exiled Thornhillians looking for collectively defined glamour and unconditional love. She has a hard time fitting in, and ends up being dumped by her boyfriend (Lamonte, as played by David Buchan), fired by her employer and evicted by her landlord. In the end she forecasts a re-attempted integration, only this time, with the guide book.

In Modern Love, all of the characters are in drag this includes David playing his alter ego Lamonte, the hot show biz entertainer). Having characters in drag highlights Campbell’s interest in understanding the meaning of coiffed, institutionalized gestures, that are particular to each sex, or to each faction. Everyone is playing what they apparently are not or cannot be. It’s like the French sunbather in the opening shot, who uses a wig as a bathing cap, stretching it over her hair – that is also a wig.

The first sequence, the French sunbather, establishes the camera-lens as mirror. Lisa adjusts herself, the way women are apt to do, into the lens-mirror. She then puts on her protective coatings, the way women have learned to do, and goes to find the warmest spot in the ocean to bathe in. The second sequence is simply a man stroking his non-extent goatee, which is all that is necessary to denote maleness. He tries, unsuccessfully, to understand road directions from an off-camera female voice. In fact, misunderstanding recipes and directions is what the story is largely about. Although these two sequences are not part of the narrative, they establish the major themes in the story, and the storytelling.

The third sequence declares the man-woman love relationship. The camera is on Heidi, a German woman who later meets Pierre, a French man. (Heidi is played by Rodney Werden and Pierre by Susan Britton.) The camera pans up her body like it did the sunbather’s starting at the crotch. Only this time the crotch is obscured by all the paraphernalia of ‘breakfast for two’ (indicating that sex is over, it’s time to eat). As Heidi’s face comes into frame she mechanically begins to serve.

The Heidi-Pierre love relationship is not connected to the Robin-Lamonte liaison, except in a formal way. Although they share the same fate, they never meet. The strong sense of establishing gender differences, in ritual, activity, dress and demeanour, is the grand gesture of this tape. Everyone does this depressingly well. Polar differences are increased by the characters playing off each other.

Susan’s Pierre is straight. His shoulders are straight, his hair is straight. His moustache and cigarettes are straight. Only his eyebrows and smirk are crooked, and Clark Gable taught us what that meant. Rodney’s Heidi would have it that ‘female’ is denoted by a wig that doesn’t fit, wide red lips, little binding bras, delicate sweaters ‘that forever need ironing’ and shoulders with motorized joints. In short, Heidi is an hysterical, vacuous blood-red orifice, centered in a fluid but tamed circle of fluffiness.

The incredible ability to reverse roles, synthesize the ‘others’ personality, and portray it, kindles a hopeless sadness. First in the ironic pathos of the story’s resolution and second in the ‘sad-but-true points it makes about women understanding men not understanding women, and, men understanding or seeing why women hate men.

The reversal of roles has another effect: it confuses audiences responses to stories like these. In a story so much about love and sex, told in such a visually personal style, it is difficult not to fall, even in an unarticulated way, for one of the actors or characters. If for example, you fall for a man in the story, you are falling for a man played by a woman, and have to justify that. If you fall for a woman, you are falling for a woman played by a man, and have to be conscious of that. In the end, Campbell is discussing irreconcilable differences in love and further undermines our desire to be attracted to anyone anyway. So any response is invited to question itself.

As viewers, we can perhaps ‘identify’ (for lack of a better word) with Colin’s Robin. She’s ill-equipped and destined for oblivion. But because she is on screen, she’s not-us – besides, we clap to the music, Robin claps not to the music. And because we know that Campbell has fashioned Robin, he is-not Robin either. For Campbell and Robin the lens is mediator. Each stands on opposite sides of the camera denying and crystallizing him/herself for the other. While recording, Coin makes Robin more Robinish for Colin, When its played back, Robin tells Colin she’s ONLY Robin. She acknowledges him in the Xerox room and says, “Oh Colin, he’s so cute. But he’s married.” At the same time Campbell, by being both character and creator, tells us that the two of them stand together but are distinguishable.

Modern Love isn’t pointed criticism of the world it is trying to portray or the people in it. The empathetic treatment of the characters and the non-editorialized presentation of the dilemmas undermines any hard line judgments that might have been detected. Portraying characters and creating a story that is as rich as this one is an often unrecognized major achievement. It is not simple to tell a simple story. Campbell’s clear and brutal method is rare and admirable. There are a few problems though. One is the use of an Aristotitlan tragic form. Even if it is the most effective disseminator we know, it still eliminates choice and predetermines the outcome. The structure of the characters’ relationship allowed the potential for change, but was restricted by the prejudices of narrative form. The understanding of the ‘other’ that was demonstrated by the actors could have lead to a more sympathetic, less misunderstood or typical end than the inevitable pain-and-loneliness-for-all declaration that tragedy makes. Campbell may have chosen this classical form, precisely for these qualities, but we have to remind ourselves of its origins (totalitarian, patriarchal aesthetics) and limitations. People acting as ‘others’ rejecting themselves, or absolving themselves of guilt incurred or pain felt is marvelous catharsis, but in a political way, irresponsible to its audience. But these are not new problems only more irreconcilable differences.