The Cure and Philosophy: Love as a Parade of Identities

Myma Benzarti

The unbridgeable gap between the alter and the ego in the Swedish masterpiece Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)

The Cure’s album Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, released in 1987, is one of those rare, fully realized works that serve as a journey into the inner self—a kind of rock opera where the main character is a feeling: love. The different songs explore the experiences love confronts us with: the naivety and tenderness of a first encounter in “Catch”, the pain of emotional imprisonment in “Torture”, the most sensual eroticism in “If Only Tonight We Could Sleep”, hatred in “Shiver and Shake”, the despair of endings in “Fight”, and the frenzied nostalgia of “All I Want”… not to mention the immense masterpiece that is “The Kiss”, which alone encapsulates the full intensity of such a feeling.

The sequential songs “Why Can’t I Be You” and “How Beautiful You Are” call for attention because of their striking contrast. The first celebrates love in a joyful and almost naive way, while the second seethes with disappointment and hate. But more than merely describing an evolution of a feeling that most of us, unfortunately, are familiar with, the shift in perspective between the two songs reveals something deeper about how love playfully toys with identity. Ever-shifting and deceptive, it seduces us through a parade of selves, all revolving around the myth that the ultimate goal is a fusion of souls, a joining of two missing pieces to feel whole.

Is There an Ego Without an Alter?

Before we dig deeper into understanding how relationships affect one’s identity, it’s important to note that the self—as an entity interacting with its environment and evolving within it—is also shaped and conditioned by environment. In other words, the question of the self, or ego, cannot be raised without taking into account the self as a being-in-the-world, as Heidegger puts it. As constantly evolving and adaptive creatures, we build our identity by shifting it to fit the world we live in. It’s therefore hard to fully encapsulate one’s identity if we isolate it from its relations with the world. As Sartre says in Existentialism Is a Humanism: “Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world—and defines himself afterwards.” That the definition of the self follows existence shows the importance of interactions with the world—and thereby, with others, the alter.

The ego is inevitably altered by others. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre describes this as an objectification of the self: one stops being simply a subject and starts being an object when seeing themselves through the eyes of the other. To put it simply: I am no longer only myself, the subject, but also what others see and think of me, the object. How this affects my identity depends on how strongly I feel as a subject, and how much I value and internalize the other’s gaze. Pushing this reasoning further, we could say that the deeper the relationship, the more the self could be altered, as the other’s idea of me may have more importance in how I see myself.

Everything is fine so far. Then enters the parade of seduction.

The Seductive Dance of Ideals

In the game of seduction, the desire to please can lead the seducer to aim toward what the person they seek to seduce considers ideal, while the seduced believes they recognize in the former the very ideal they themselves have long sought. In this way, the ideal becomes shared, a mutual illusion binding both. It’s not that different from the parades in the animal world where certain species will seek something very specific in their partner that will, in-return, show off ostentatiously those features to attract them. Does the male peacock always look as flamboyant as when fanning out its tail to attract a mate? No. But it serves a purpose.

This illusion triggers excitement, expressed in the song “Why Can’t I Be You”. It opens with a typically funky, rhythmic riff, an upbeat announcement of what is to come. The driving beat of the drums, the trumpets echoing the main phrase, Robert Smith’s expressive voice bursting out of its usual restraint, and the impetuous repetitions of the vocals (“you make me make me make me make me hungry for you”) immerse us in a feverish ecstasy of infatuation. Everything seems like a glorious parade. We are on the side of the enamored, who loses all reference points, blinded by the idealized perfection of the other: “You turn my head when you turn around — You turn the whole world upside down.” But don’t be fooled, it is not toward reality that one is drawn, but toward an imagined perfection. This is why he exclaims: “you’re so perfect!” or “too good to be true!”, phrases that betray the unreality of what is felt. And when the same thing happens for the other person, it creates a dangerous love fantasy where each believes they have found themselves reflected in the other. This incredible and unreal convergence lifts the individual out of their essential solitude. Believing they are no longer alone, they rejoice, unaware and unwilling to acknowledge that they are blindly sinking into one of the most pleasant and wonderful deceptions.

This enthusiasm can only end in disappointment. It is a magical fantasy, radiant, intoxicating, and doomed from the very beginning.

The Trial of Disillusion

Like any illusion, it is bound to fade. But when it does, reality often strikes with brutal force. To illustrate this, in the next track of the album, Robert Smith revisits Charles Baudelaire’s poem The Eyes of the Poor with the song “How Beautiful You Are”. The song starts with a very blunt statement “You want to know why I hate you?” which contrasts with the beautiful and perfect arrangements of chords that introduced the song. After which he proceeds to tell the story of a couple that loved each other and promised each other to always think alike.

And we promised to each other

That we’d always think the same.

And dreamed that dream

To be two souls as one.

They’re walking the streets of Paris and encountering three beggars: a father holding one child’s hand while carrying another. The three indigents observe the couple and are struck by the radiant beauty of the interlocutor’s partner. The six eyes, touched by the sublime, each express in turn the inexplicable joy this beauty transmits. While the interlocutor is embarrassed by the scene, feeling shame because of the apparent difference in wealth between them and the poor people who barely have any clothes to wear, he is brought low when confronted with the cruel gaze of his partner, who immediately demands that the three unfortunates be removed.

I turned to look at you

To read my thought upon your face

And gazed so deep into your eyes

So beautiful and strange

Until you spoke

And showed me understanding is a dream

“I hate these people staring

Make them go away from me!”

He is faced with the brutal disillusion of a dream. His partner is not the person he thought she was: while he was feeling sympathy for the poor people, she was filled with disgust. Smith goes further and concludes, after stating the protagonist’s switch from love to hate, that no one ever truly knows or loves another:

And this is why I hate you

And how I understand

That no-one ever knows or loves another

Is it the dramatic expression of disappointment that leads to such an extreme statement, or is it truly what he believes? Whatever the answer, it becomes clear that the ideal of perfect soul-fusion in love is a fantasy that collapses once the initial excitement passes. To know someone and love them in the way that he described it in the beginning of the song – “always think the same” / “be two souls as one”—is impossible. But does that mean that love is necessarily doomed ?

When Reality Strikes: The Dull Joining of Selves

Hardly as exciting and romantic as the idea of two souls magically fusing into one, the reality of long-lasting love is more like how a tight shoe will end up fitting a foot after wearing it for some time. The shoe might stretch a little, and the foot will probably still ache as well. No wonder there’s no song on the album that illustrates this: it is neither flamboyant nor magical. When the illusion fades, what remains are two people clumsily learning to make their identities coexist over time. After some time colliding, those who succeed will find ways to complete and/or tolerate each other’s individualities at the cost of time, effort, and change.

This is what Sartre’s lifelong partner and lover, Simone de Beauvoir, describes as authentic love. As opposed to a narcissistic love or devotional love where there is imbalance in favor of one person in the relationship, authentic love describes a relationship where both partners will find freedom in expressing their own selves, and thereby discover ways to exist together as two distinct individuals within one shared relationship. Here, because of the nature of the bond, the alteration of the self runs deeper. It allows for a communion of existence without the erasure of identity.

The romantic journey of the self starts in a glorious but deceptive reflection of ideals in the beginning of a relationship, and ends in the slow interweaving of flawed but genuine selves in a lasting one. Ultimately, through these two songs, Robert Smith shows us that the ideal of the union of souls is only truly graspable in art. It is a lesson reminding us that if one must love, one must also embrace the bittersweetness of reality, welcoming the crushing weight of disappointment. And if love overcomes that crushing trial, altering the egos into versions that fit into each other, only then will it reach the closest thing to a fusion. Perhaps this is why in Plato’s Symposium the androgynes still have two pairs of legs and arms and two faces, rather than one of each: because even in the most symbiotic relationships, we still need to freely exist as our own self. 

Graduated in Philosophy from La Sorbonne, with a master in Digital Business from HEC Paris and a Computer Science program from 42school, Myma (Myriam) Benzarti began her career as a Data Scientist in the video game industry before trading algorithms for waves. Now a competitive surfer representing Morocco, and a surf coach, she spends more time in the ocean than in lecture halls, but still writes about pop philosophy whenever the tide is low.