Conclusion

Abstract

In Mike Mills’2011 film Beginners, we view an ageing museum curator (Christopher Plummer) decides to come out as a gay man months before his death; later, in the wake of his loss, the curator’s son (Ewan McGregor) is forced to reckon with his father’s self-denial of love and how it might have shaped his own adult life. Struggling to articulate his thoughts and make sense of his father’s final few months learning about love, we hear him proclaim flatly ‘this is what love looks like’. These words are strikingly accompanied by a series of collage shots (see Figures 9.1 and 9.2), a multiplicity of photographs and generic images representing romance as a commodified entity. Mills’protagonist is searching for an understanding of love, but all he can recall are images that are irreconcilable with what his father has taught him: love is, more often than not, the strangest and most enigmatic emotion of all.