Warm Bodies? Dead Bodies. The romantic myths we believe.

I saw the movie Warm Bodies with my 14-year-old daughter last week. The whole time I was watching the movie, I could not stop thinking about narcissism, because I think this movie perfectly illustrates a myth that often gets passed on through our romantic stories. It’s a beautiful myth, but it’s one that can cause a lot of trouble and heartache in your life. I know it has in mine.

In the movie, a girl falls in love with a dead boy, a zombie. Through the power of her love, he is healed and transformed, and eventually he actually begins to come back to life. In fact, the power of her love is so strong that it begins to heal all the zombies, all of whom begin coming back to life. This girl’s love heals and transforms the whole world.

The notion that we can heal people by loving them is powerfully appealing, and it’s an idea that many people (especially girls and women) embrace. And I do think that it’s often possible, through love, to heal damage in people who are basically still warm and human at heart.

But it’s not possible to bring people back to life. One of the hardest things to accept in life is the permanence of death. People who are dead inside – and, in a very real sense, pathological narcissists are people who are dead inside – are not healed by our love. In fact, what do movie zombies usually do? They feed on you. They are drawn to your humanness, your aliveness, and they devour you to feed themselves. You don’t heal them. You die.

I had a talk with my daughter, after the movie, about its messages. About how important it is to treat our own warm, alive, human love as the precious thing it is, and to be careful where we spend it and to whom we give it. Sweet and romantic as that story is, it’s important to understand that dead is dead, and zombies don’t really come back to life. And they don’t make good partners for the living.