Love and Lonliness Through the Eyes of Joel Haver

BY OWEN WILEY

LONELINESS is a surprisingly hard feeling to describe: when you are feeling it, no words can accurately express the depth of your emotion – the almost unbearable desire for some sort of connection with another person. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, as I faced feelings of extreme loneliness, I found a film that depicted with incredible accuracy the exact feelings and desires that I had and made me feel that there was someone who understood me. With his 2020 film Pretend That You Love Me , Joel Haver told me the story of a character who seeks and achieves love as a solution to loneliness, providing me with a feeling of comfort and catharsis at a time when I truly needed it.

My first experience with Joel Haver was a video entitled “A rough approximation of how I react when a date is going well,” in which a slightly awkward Joel narrates his internal barrage of questions about whether or not he’s bad at peeing, smells like farts, or has pants that make it look like he has an erection. While it lightly touches on topics of social anxiety and desire for love, this video is purely comedic, and I got the impression that Haver was simply a funny YouTuber I should check out. As I continued to watch his videos, though, I began to notice the aforementioned themes in multiple videos, culminating in my viewing of his feature film Pretend That You Love Me in late

2020. In the brief YouTube description of Pretend That You Love Me , Haver describes this work as “A film about dating, love, art and pain,” and it is a far deeper exploration of the themes of loneliness and desire for love that are present in his short films. Through various storytelling and cinematography techniques, Haver represents the idealistic and difficult to express desires of a lonely person by conditioning the audience to the protagonist’s struggles with loneliness and his belief that the solution to those struggles is love.

Like many of Haver’s films, Pretend That You Love Me features Haver playing a character named Joel who is representative of Haver himself – a reading supported by Joel’s pinned comment for this YouTube video, where he describes it as “a deeply personal film.” The film opens with an intercut montage of five different first dates, all set in Joel’s living room. For ten minutes, the audience watches each date go more or less the same, and despite the normal awkwardness of a first meeting, each date appears to go well with Joel seeming to form at least a basic connection with each woman. Despite this, the use of intercutting highlights the monotony of Joel’s dating life and the failure of his relationships to amount to anything meaningful.

As the film continues, it follows the evolution of the previously estab - lished relationships in a similar, intercut style. As each relationship moves through its early stages, the first explicit indications of Joel’s loneliness are presented. For example, while participating in a vulnerability exercise with one of his partners, Joel admits that he is lonely, hoping to open himself up to a partner who could cure that loneliness. There are multiple scenes in which Joel asks his partner if she would be interested in a romantic relationship with him, implying that it is something that he is pursuing. However, when he is asked the same question, he can’t give a straight answer. On multiple occasions, Joel is reticent or unable to say out loud what he wants, likely due to social anxiety and a fear of rejection. Joel’s slight awkwardness is developed throughout the first half of the film, in which the dialogue is mainly improvised in order to create realistic and mildly uncomfortable conversations. As each relationship reaches this conversation, it is revealed that this inability to express himself is probably the reason why none of his relationships worked out.

In the first half of the film, Haver’s unique cinematographic style distances Joel from both the viewer and the rest of the world in order to build the feeling of loneliness and lack of connec - tion that is inherent to this story. Many of the shots are incredibly wide, with Joel a tiny figure in a vast frame, giving the impression that Joel is almost insignificant and only a small part of a large world. In shots that are closer, Joel’s face is often obscured, whether it be by physically facing him away from the camera or by using backlighting to wash out the foreground of shots. Without clear views of Joel, a divide is created between him and the audience, much like it exists between him and his world. Furthermore, all of the shots are filmed with a static “hidden” camera, which, combined with incredibly realistic, improvised dialogue, creates the sensation that the audience is simply watching Joel’s story play out in front of them rather than actively participating in it. Like everyone else in Joel’s life, the audience is kept out of Joel’s world, and he is left alone inside of it. Only once is the audience allowed into Joel’s world, during a conversation about commitment issues about two-thirds of the way into the film. An obscured wide shot shows Joel and one of his partners in bed as she expresses disappointment with the lack of progression in their relationship and asks him what he really wants. Joel begins to speak: “I need hugs, I need kisses, a friend to catch my misses. Someone to lay by my side.” Speaking turns into singing and the harsh lighting dims as the camera is picked up and moves shakily towards Joel, the only instance of camera movement in the whole film. Wide shots turn to close-ups which physically bring the audience closer to Joel. He expresses his doubts (“I need you, maybe, I don’t know”), his pains (“it hurts so bad I could cry”), and his desires (“I need something that feels like love”) as cuts show him having the same conversation with each partner. Many of the things that Joel wants are contradictory (“I need happiness, I need sadness. A calm for this madness”), highlighting the confusion and complexity in his mind that makes love so difficult for him. Just as soon as it began, though, the song ends, the camera and lights return to their original positions, and Joel says “cut,” ending the first part of the film and severing the brief connection between himself and the outside world.

As Joel calls “cut,” it is revealed that everything the viewer has seen so far was a movie-within-a-movie that the “real” Joel was making in order to try to emulate the experience of love in his actual life (per the title, Pretend That You Love Me ). Throughout the first part, the audience gets to know the more superficial version of Joel, while in the second part, Joel’s character is opened up and the audience is finally allowed to understand his feelings. He is seen speaking at the funeral for his father, who was previously established to be one of Joel’s closest friends. Reference is made to the COVID-19 pandemic, which increased feelings of isolation among millions of people. Joel rewatches clips from his film of him kissing the actresses, and he invites one of them to his home because he thinks there is a chance that they could fall in love. With these scenes, Joel’s lack of meaningful connections and his desire to solve that through love are all established in preparation for the climax of the film.

The final scene has Joel inviting Annalisa, one of the actresses, to his home under the guise of re-filming a scene for his movie. Quickly, though, Joel begins to break down, overwhelmed by his feelings and his perceived inability to connect with anyone. When Annalisa asks him what is wrong, he is unable to answer, embarrassed and ashamed for asking her over and feeling like he has absolutely no one. Annalisa asks him what he needs to feel good, and he looks at her, afraid to tell her that it is her, or anyone, that he needs. Finally, Annalisa kisses Joel and the film concludes with the hope that Joel has finally found a cure for his loneliness. As the resolution for the strong feelings that Haver evokes throughout the film, Joel’s final kiss creates an intense rush of emotion and feeling that everything will be okay, comforting both Haver and the audience. Although when viewing the ending in retrospect it can feel very idealistic, it represents the feelings of people in the midst of loneliness: Haver seeks to create a feeling of catharsis rather than a realistic situation.

In a video on his Patreon, Haver said that “you like to think that love can make you stronger and can help you through the hard times,” and Pretend That You Love Me is an embodiment of that philosophy. Released in June of 2020, this film could not have been more topical. As I and many others stayed at home, isolated from everyone else, it became incredibly easy to get lost within myself and imagine a simple yet unattainable solution to my problems. In my case, as well as Joel’s, that imagined solution was love, which is why this film spoke to me so deeply when I watched it. Haver conditions the audience to Joel’s struggles and his belief that the solution to those struggles is love, but for me, that always felt like the solution. The film’s powerfully hopeful, yet sadly idealistic ending gave me exactly what I needed at that point in my life: the brief feeling that everything may actually be alright.