First Kiss

If you've had access to the internet any time within this past week, it's likely that you came into contact with this film:

 

Directed by LA-based filmmaker Tatia Pilieva, "First Kiss" is an intimate short film that offers a real view of the rarely-seen first kiss between two people. This provocative video has received an impressive amount of attention, garnering over 36 million views within the first three days of it being posted to youtube. 

I first came across the video via a Facebook post that linked this article at Gizmodo.com, an article with which I can totally get down. This film is beautiful. It shows human beings in a moment of vulnerability and giddy discomfort and follows their transition to a moment of confidence and joy, using a kiss as a catalyst. A kiss does that. A kiss does all of that. 

This article from Jezebel.com (as well as a choice few of my Facebook friends) has beef with this video, lamenting the fact that the project is apparently intended to be a clothing advertisement. I'm going to be honest and say, uh, who cares? There are plenty of beautiful commercials in the world (eg: this one, this one, that one). They act as short films; it's true that their motivation may be to introduce or sell a product, but they also say kind of amazing things about their target audience, and humanity in general. And I don't believe that product pushing hinders or takes away from those messages. Nothing in "First Kiss" made me want to buy clothes. WREN, the clothing studio that produced the video, does nothing in the way of demanding that we buy their shit, save for a link in the video's description. (Though, ladies, the clothes are mad nice. If a little pricey.)

The Jezebel article goes on to point out that many of the video's participants "are people whose jobs revolve around being charismatic on camera." This does not change the fact that the people that kiss each other in the video are strangers. The film is no less real because the participants have been in front of cameras for all of or part of their lives. Whether a people is old or young, charismatic or shy, sexy or fugly, they is still a people. And people act like people.

The intention of the company was to make a film that people would watch, and watch it we did. Because people love love. Kissing is one of the nicest and most powerful things we get to do in our lives. Plath: "Kiss me and you will see how important I am." A kiss is revealing. Kissing fucks us up in incredible ways. It makes us reconcile with ourselves, makes us be okay with ourselves–at least for long enough to try to convince our kissing partner. It's teamwork. It's call-and-answer. It's give and take. And if it's good: we glow. 

This video is charming and beautiful and simple, and I love it for that. It reminds us of the deep-seated hopefulness that accompanies falling in love, or (perhaps even more powerfully) not being alone. 

I'll end with the brilliant Regina Spektor, "Maybe you should kiss someone nice, or lick a rock, or both." I'm game.