The song of Radiohead "Creep" and the idealisation of the love object

In 1992, the song "Creep" by one of my favorites band "Radiohead" comes out. Although it was not particularly successful at the beginning and was described as "too depressing," a year later it gained increasing popularity and reached the top positions in various music charts. In 2004, the song played a major role, alongside Johnny Depp and Charlotte Gainsbourg, in a scene from Ivan Attaal's "...And They Lived Happily Ever After". Here is video from this scene:

Successful combination and directorial flair quickly turn it into something like an unofficial clip of the song. In short: After a casual walk in a music store, the character of Charlotte Gainsbourg, Gabriel puts on her audio headphones, unaware of what is to come. Gradually, the noise of the surrounding reality gives way to the first tones in the Sol-Major from the song "Creep" by Radiohead. Along with them, Jonny Depp's character sneaks up and stands beside her. After a few exchanged views against the backdrop of retreating reality and the increasingly insistent music of Radiohed Gabriel, she is about to break away from reality and feel what psychology calls the idealization of the love object. With the beginning of the chorus the trap clicks. Gabriel is already very far from us, and we are very close to what she is experiencing. When it comes to love (or hatred), psychoanalysis often uses the strangely sounding subject of the subject, as if it is something inanimate or an object. That should not make us appease. Indeed, there are unexpected benefits of this concept as it implies that the love object is not just our current partner in life but rather a place, a position, even an imaginary construct, a form through which a different number of real and imaginary characters (partners).

Idealisation of a real object, whether real or not, is a common phenomenon especially during adolescence. No matter if the love object is of flesh and blood or we know it only as an image bathed in the artificial light of the next screen, its overestimation can reach enviable heights. The question "How" this overvaluation happens is much easier to answer than to the question "Why". To answer the question of how overvaluation happens, we must imagine the energy that Freud calls libido as the ultimate amount of money that a person has. The more love we give to a person, the less remains for us. That is why, when we lose a person we love very much, we feel empty and impoverished. In the song "Creep", this conception is reflected in the comparisons that the lyrical hero makes between himself and his love object. The loving object that is pumped up with libido is overwhelming, invaluable and special, and the impoverished in love has lost its shine to a degree of being numb and idiot. We have come to the more difficult question - why is this overestimation going on? In this scene of the movie we have been told one of the possible answers. At the end of the song, the unexpectedly in love with Gabriel feverishly looks for his outgoing Johnny Depp.

The noise of the surrounding reality begins to cast a shadow over her magical experience, but she does not give up and ultimately finds her beloved. Nothing, however, follows from that. Gabriel never communicates with the subject of his feelings. Although it seems paradoxical, this may be one of the functions of the idealisation of the love object - to prevent it from "meeting" with it. This result can be achieved in two ways: if we idealize a real person to the extent that we are already considered unworthy of her feelings (love) and if we idealize our image of the love object so that no one can fulfill our requirements. In the first case, we shy away, and in the second no knight or princess can win our heart. Thus, through idealization, most often the adolescent, is saved from the realization of wishes that are alarming. Of course, the overestimation of the love object may have other purposes, but the particular movie scene, sounded with the song "Creep", portrays this particular case, in which the exaltation of the dream partner in practice hinders the connection with it.