Love love love love love. All we ever hear about in life is love. That love is what makes life beautiful. And that love conquers all… but does it really? Does love conquer ambition? And what even is love? Love is but a social construct built from the foundations of hormones and good old fashioned reproduction. Love is just a concept that humans have come up with to distract themselves from the harsh reality of their pathetic lives. Because let’s be honest without this so-called ‘love’, life is pretty crappy. We are born, we are educated for 20 years, then we work for 50 and then we die. It is not a particularly exciting existence. The concept that ambition conquers love is explored in the texts Macbeth by William Shakespeare, Gattaca directed by Andrew Nicol, The Little Mermaid by Hans Christan Anderson and The Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard. Ambition is seen as the will to achieve, an unstoppable force, to seize one’s innermost desires. However in a world full of love, romantics and distractions how does ambition still manage to thrive?
Love is complicated, sometimes we don’t realise how much we love someone until we lose them. This is the case for Macbeth when he lost Lady Macbeth. Throughout the play their relationship was questionable. Did they love each other? Sometimes, maybe, sometimes. Yes, they wanted the best for each other, but that became not enough, their ambitions caused them so much guilt that their relationship was no longer a priority. Once Macbeth lost Lady Macbeth he realised the worthlessness of his actions and that ambition whilst it conquered love he now had no one to share his ambitions with. Before he was defeated he realised the worthlessness of ambition without his love to share it. In his soliloquy, after he finds out about Lady Macbeth’s suicide he mourns by saying :
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
This quotation shows that whilst his ambition conquered his love, without love he believed that his ambition was meaningless. Which led to his final demise. Death conquers all.
Gattaca follows a similar theme, Vincent believed that his ambition was more important than his love. However, unlike Macbeth, he never realised that without love, ambition is meaningless. He left Irene with the potential of return. He didn’t know whether he would survive the trip so he put his ambitions above love, therefore sacrificing his love for ambition. As the audience, we don’t the bestowed future of Vincent and Irene and so we will never know if he survived his trip to space because his genetic inferiority however because he was willing to risk dying to fulfil his ambition which we know is true from the quote “I never saved anything for the swim back”. It meant that he accepted death as an element to his ambition and therefore death conquers all.
The Little Mermaid had the same view as Vincent from Gattaca, however, they had different ambitions. For the little mermaid, her ambition became love, unlike Vincent who sacrificed love for ambition to become an astronaut. They were both willing to die to fulfil their desires we know this from the quote “the morning after he marries another, your heart will break and you will become the foam on the crest of the waves”. This shows us that The Little Mermaid was willing to risk the possibility of death for her ambition to love and be loved. Due to her ambition being love, you could say that her ambition killed her, showing that ambition conquers love but once again death conquers all.
Love is complicated, it’s an illusion, when you truly love a person you struggle to see the worst in them. Love is blinding and sometimes it hides the truth. Mare Burrow from The Red Queen like the Little Mermaid was led on. Their princes promised the safe haven and protection of marriage and love. However, in the end, the prince’s ambitions were never to fulfil the promise. Mare had no choice she was forced into death by her prince, unlike the Little Mermaid who chose death to save her prince. The quotation “I—I loved you. I trusted you. I needed you. And now I’m going to die for it.” shows us the deception and betrayal of love. That the prince’s ambition conquered her love and that her love led to her potential death and therefore was worthless. This again supports that ambition conquers love, that life is worthless and death once again conquers all.
The rollercoaster of life always has a dark tunnelled fate. The reality is that all we do, who we are, what we achieve signifies nothing because, in the end, we are all just going to become the foam on top of the sea. So screw ambition, screw life, screw hormones, screw being a teenager one day we are all going to die anyway so we might as well make the most of the short time that we have on this earth. Dare to love, dare to dream, dare to conquer, dare to achieve because right now as we live “Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist” as said by Epicurus (epic – cure-e- us).
