The Significance Of Eros In The Fisher King

Love is a funny thing. Love between two people is often confusing and hard to understand. Many people don’t know how or why we fall in love. Eros, in Greek mythology, refers to the god of love, and Eros is essentially the reason for love. Eros explains how people fall in love or why for that matter. The term Eros is used to refer to the part of love that constitutes an intense desire for something, often referenced to a particular sexual desire that one has toward another. Eros is a “now” feeling, or what the more common phrase would be which is “love at first sight.” Eros is all about the moment, about the feeling, the intensity right here, right now. The intense desire for immediate sexual and physical attraction, as well as intense passion

and romance between two people is what ultimately drives the human race to love one and other.
Eros could be looked through the lens of Lee Strasberg, who happened to be the father of Method acting along with Konstantin Stanislavsky. Method acting is when actors or actresses use their own emotions, imaginations, and senses and apply them to the character they are trying to portray. The idea is that the individual who is method acting will create a more lifelike performance. Strasberg's teaching emphasized the practice of connecting to a character by drawing on personal emotions and memories, aided by a set of exercises and practices including sense memory and an affective memory.
The short story of the Hitchhiking Game, by Milan Kundera, displays the idea of method acting based upon the interactions between the young man and woman in the story. As the story progresses the woman puts on the role of a hitchhiker and engages in classical acting, and based on what the young man sees begins to engage in acting himself. So by the end of the story both the young woman and man are engaging in method acting. As the story and the acting progress it’s clear that the couple is becoming more agitated with one and other. Although each other’s role-playing is agitating both, they continued to play the game, mostly from the young girl not dropping her act. Towards the end of the story, while at dinner the young man engages in method acting and it is clearly noticed. He begins to believe that his girlfriend is using method acting because if she can act like this type of woman so well and so easily then it must be who this woman really is. He truly believes she must be showing her true self to him, a self she has been hiding inside of her, until now. He has now reached inside of him and brought out his old emotions and experiences of his past, including the whorish women he would pick up on the road, and he has applied them to this girl sitting next to him, his girlfriend. In this role of method acting, he asks her to stand up on the table and take her clothes off, because the man only sees her as a whore now, then the two have intercourse. He explains to her “you aren’t worth more.” (Kundera13), than just a whore. The young man in this process of acting decides he would stop playing around with classical acting and treat her the way he treated all other women like her, entering into method acting. Perhaps it is the girl and the guy’s intense passion for love that causes the couple to engage in method acting simply to hold onto a partner who each can love, rather than split up, even though the two appeared to be fighting by the end of the story.
Colette also applies Strasberg’s idea of method acting and passion to the short story of “The Secret Woman”. In this particular story the young woman, Irene, wants to go to a dance but is nervous that her husband will not want her to go to the dance. It appears that Irene is playing the role of a traditional housewife at the start of the story and we see this when Irene contemplates going to the ball because she doesn’t want her husband to see her as a wild woman. Irene says to her husband, “As for me...Can you see me in a crowd, at the mercy of all those hands…. What do you think, I’m not straight laced, I’m…I’m put out!” (Colette 56-57). Eventually the husband allows for Irene to go to this ball and interact with other men and woman. It is clear that while at the ball Irene changes her role completely from the start of the story and begins to method act. While at the ball Irene’s husband is shocked that his wife has this new side of her, which he has not seen up until this point. At first he is worried about the way Irene is acting and it isn’t until she flirts with another girl that he eases up on his initial reaction and the reason is because “he longer feared, no longer hoped for betrayal.” (59). It is also at this point in the story when the husband realizes that Irene is only at this ball to have a good time. Irene can act in a way that displays her true thoughts and emotions and she is able to do this by flirting with random men at the ball. Perhaps Irene acts in this role at the ball to show her husband that there is a constant desire for human interaction and sexual desires; and Irene’s husband isn’t going to stop her from interacting in the way she typically would without any constraints, which by human nature is to act in a way similar to the way Irene acts at the ball.

Joseph Campbell has a theory of Eros that connects humans to one and other. Campbell says, “Eros is a biological urge”(Campbell 186). According to Campbell Eros is the simplest and most basic form of love. Campbell believes that the troubadours (composers) were interested in figuring out the psychology of love, as well as a person-to-person relationship, and according to Campbell before this point “love was simply Eros, the god who excites you to sexual desire.” (186). Campbell also believes Eros is much more impersonal than two individuals falling in love, and a personal kind of love is termed Amor.
Campbell’s idea of Eros can be applied to the short story “The story of Ying-Ying.” In this story a young man by the name of Chang is an emperor and makes friends with some officers in P’u, and eventually ends up saving some villagers in the town from rioting soldiers. Due to Chang’s good deed, Mrs. Ts’ui tries to return the favor and invite him to a banquet, saying “Your widowed aunt with her helpless children would never have been able to escape alive from these rioting soldiers. It is no ordinary favor you have done us.” (Chen 126). When Chang meets Mrs. Ts’ui daughter, he is instantly attracted to her, before any conversation occurs. Upon initially meeting this young girl, Chang sends a poem to her in hopes she will write back and does eventually, then as the story progresses Chang realizes his power and status would diminish if he were to marry her; so he has his friend write one final poem about this woman and named it “Young Miss Ts’ui.” Although the two are bound together for only a short time through poems, it appears Chang only loves this woman because of her looks. Chang initially loved her due to his natural sexual desires and attractions, rather than having a more personal kind of love with Mrs. Ts’ui’s daughter, which equates to Amor.
John Alan Lee equates his own version of Eros in his “Ideologies of Love styles and Sexes” and mentions, “Eros is a conception of love centered on an expectation of intense emotional and physical attraction to be loved” (Lee 27). A lover with Eros will have a “mental image of what the ideal beloved individual looks like.” (28). Also it is specified that the individual becomes extremely disappointed if the would-be lover discovers that their partner does not have the same physical attributes that were initially expected. The individual must have a high self-assurance if the relationship with a spouse is going to work out.
Lee’s idea of Eros appears in the movie “The Fisher King.” The Fisher king is about a radio host named Jack Lucas who inadvertently causes a person to commit mass murder at a popular Manhattan bar.

One day about three years after the mass murder, Jack is working with his girlfriend Anne in a video store in a mostly drunken, depressed state, and one night he attempts suicide. Before he can do so, he is mistaken for a homeless person and is attacked and nearly set on fire by thugs. He is rescued by Parry, a deluded homeless man who is on a mission to find the Holy Grail, and tries to convince Jack to help him. Jack is initially reluctant, but comes to feel responsible for Parry when he learns that the man's condition is a result of witnessing his wife's murder at the hands of Jack's crazy caller. Then later in the movie Jack seeks to redeem himself by helping Parry find love again. He sets Parry up with Lydia, a shy woman, who works as an accountant for a Manhattan publishing house. Jack and Anne then join them for a dinner date. Following dinner, Parry declares his love for Lydia but is once again haunted by the Red Knight. As he flees his hallucinatory tormentor, the same thugs who had earlier attacked Jack attack him again. The beating is not fatal but causes Parry to become catatonic again. Jack breaks up with Anne and begins to rebuild his career. Eventually, after some time, Jack goes back to the video store and tells Anne that he loves her. She slaps him and then grabs him and kisses him. The film ends with Jack and Parry lying naked in Central Park looking at the clouds. In the end of the movie it doesn’t specifically say why Parry went back to Jack, but perhaps based on an instinct of an affinity for sexual desire. Why he left her originally is not specifically stated either. But it appears that Jack left Parry because he didn’t love her for her looks and sexual appearance and for this simple reason Jack still appeared to have Eros written all

over his relationship. Also Jacks initial images of his lover Parry change as the movie progresses and are different than what he expected initially and this leads him to become angrier. Then as stated earlier, Jack eventually ends up back with Parry but only for the simple reason he still has a sexual desire for himself and Parry fulfills that. It could be argued that as Lee mentions it was “only the initial mental images” that Jack saw in Parry that is what ultimately led him back to Parry in the first place, and this shows Jack has some sort of Eros inside of him.
It’s very difficult to pin point how two individuals initially fall in love. One way it could be explained is through the lens of Eros. Eros attempts to explain why there is an initial urge or desire to be with a spouse. Eros says that the initial desire for immediate sexual relations, as well as a desire to love, is the reason two people ultimately get together and form a relationship. Love is very difficult to figure out, but the ideology of Eros can be used to further explain why two individuals fall in love.