Return to Me (2000) has a plot so gross I’m almost embarrassed to admit how much I like it: Bob (David Duchovny) falls in love with Grace (Minnie Driver), but unbeknownst to them both, she is the recipient of his late wife’s donated heart. Before we can get to their meet-cute, we watch long, lingering shots of a blood-spattered, weeping David Duchovny intercut with a gory heart being taken out of a cooler and put into Minnie Driver. Rarely have I encountered a premise in such poor taste, presented so unapologetically and so insistant on the beauty of its bloodiness — except in my day job studying medieval literature.
In religious and romantic literature from the European Middle Ages, love and gore often go hand in hand. Late medieval Christianity treated blood and the material body as vehicles of profound emotional and spiritual connection. Take an anecdote from Mirk’s Festial, a collection of sermons from the 1380s that no one but a scholar could love: a women has committed a sin that she is too ashamed to confess. One night, Christ appears to her in a dream, seizes her hand, and plunges it into the wound in his side. He says, “Do not be ashamed to open your heart to me, any more than I am to open my side to you.” When she wakes, her hand is stained a deep, bloody red, and she can’t get it clean until she confesses the sin. The story, like many in medieval literature, links the body at its most vulnerable to the soul at its most fulfilled. Or, in the words of Leona Lewis’ 2007 pop hit: “You cut me open and I keep bleeding love.”
The eroticism of Mirk’s anecdote is no accident. After all, as Tom Hanks’ Joe Fox explains in You’ve Got Mail (1998), everyone is looking for “the one single person in the world who fills your heart with joy,” and one of the central claims of Christianity is that the “one single person” is Christ. As St. Augustine writes in his Confessions at the end of the fourth century: “You made us for yourself, and our heart is restless, until it rests in you.” The rom-com’s central soul mate topos takes a page from devotional literature. All the speeches about “magic” in Sleepless in Seattle or “fate” in Serendipity are, after all, ways of saying that the universe cares about you, maybe even has some normative plans for your inner life — an essentially religious claim.
Even during the Middle Ages, the language of being “made for each other” didn’t stay confined to the religious. Instead, romantic writing and religious writing enjoyed a symbiotic relationship—a friendship with benefits, if you will—sharing language and benefitting from one another’s cultural weight. So, in Troilus and Criseyde (late 14th century), Chaucer imagines his Trojan lovers exchanging hearts, a transaction also enjoyed by female mystics like Catherine of Siena to seal their love affair with Christ. Conversely, in Marie de France’s Laustic (late 12th century), a cruel husband puts a stop to his wife’s affair with a kind neighbor by spearing her nightingale through the heart and throwing its bloody corpse at her. She then sends the martyred bird to her lover, who carries it around with him ever after in a golden reliquary.
Put plainly, medieval writers often spoke of erotic love as sacrament and of sacramental love as erotic. In both cases, the body, in all its bloody vulnerability, played a central role.
In this carnal fixation, medieval love literature is at odds with most modern rom-coms, with their PG ratings and aspirationally-decorated interiors. Modern romantic comedies often offer a comfortably bourgeois version of love, upholding existing hierarchies and resolving any possible conflicts between passion and social success. Think again of You’ve Got Mail: big box stores and small businesses can fall in love and live in peace, brought together in the disembodied intimacy of the internet. These tales of fulfillment often require the protagonists to undergo some mild moral and social improvement: in You’ve Got Mail, Kathleen Kelly needs to move forward in her life, and Joe Fox needs to learn that there’s more to life than corporate profit (while making a substantial corporate profit). Joe may talk airily about hearts filling with joy, but he means it metaphorically, of course.
Which brings us back to my admiration for Return to Me, a film that calls the modern rom com’s bluff. It carries the genre markers of the modern rom-com: Duchovny’s Bob is an architect, after all, like so many other rom-com love interests. But despite these trappings, the film goes rogue, rejecting metaphor and instead treating the literal heart as a vehicle for love and connection. What if someone’s physical heart was filled with joy, but then they gave it—again literally—to someone else in an act of generosity born out of tragedy?
The narrative begins in the tragedy of life’s contingency: Bob’s wife Elizabeth (Joely Richardson) dies in a car accident on the way home from celebrating a triumphant career milestone. In an instant, a woman who seemingly has it all (including a gorilla she taught sign language!) swaps places with another who has given up on a future. We meet Minnie Driver’s Grace (a name which could not be more on the nose if it tried) lying in a hospital bed, barely able to move, bravely telling her best friend (Bonnie Hunt, who also wrote and directed the film) to face the fact that she may never get the heart she needs. But her friend insists that she will not only receive a heart but as a result, she will (a) ride a bike (b) travel and (c) date really handsome men — a prophecy that will of course be fulfilled. But for any of us to meet cute, Return to Me insists in these ominously intercut scenes, we must meet in fragile bodies, vulnerable to chance and guaranteed to experience loss.
Medieval writers would have recognized this problem right away: we are stuck on Lady Fortune’s wheel. In medieval iconography, Lady Fortune ties us all to her giant wheel, straps on a blindfold, and spins it hard. This, according to writers like Boethius and Dante, is why bad things happen to good people: God has deputized Fortune to distribute wealth, power, and pleasure, and by her very nature, Fortune distributes them randomly. One rule holds true: no matter who you are, what goes up on the wheel must always come down. When one young woman to gets a heart, another loses hers. That is what living in time means. We only get to decide whether we respond to that reality with love or malice, resignation or resistance.
An underrated grace note to this premise, too, is Bob’s personal mediocrity, which emphasizes how little our personal merits dictate what happens in a world of these kinds of contingencies — he’s not much of a catch, and he doesn’t become one over the course of the plot. His best quality is how much he loves his wife (and later, Grace) and how that love opens him up to other people. Alone, he’s intolerant of others’ failings, takes his friend Charlie (David Alan Grier) for granted and in general, seems like one of those people who can’t be alone. In a Nora Ephron or Nancy Meyers world, Bob needs to grow as a person. Bob needs to get comfortable with himself.
But in Return to Me, Bob doesn’t live in a world of personal growth and mysteriously affordable real estate. Bob lives in a world where life is fragile, and love cannot be earned. Bob gets to love and be loved, in an absolutely belief-beggaring way, whether he deserves it or not. Love isn’t a reward for his goodness but is itself the thing that makes him better, the thing that brings Grace (on the nose, remember?) to the painful turning of Fortune’s wheel, This, too, is more Marie de France than Nora Ephron: love just happens to people, gratuitously, bringing both sorrow and joy as it filters through life’s contingencies.
When Bob and Grace finally discover their organ donation MacGuffin, it takes Grace’s grandfather (played with gentle piety and an Irish accent by Carroll O’Connor) to bring them back together. But his case for their reunion obscures as much as it explains:
All the times I prayed that Gracie would have a second chance at life, I always knew that if God blessed us, the heart she got would have to be from a very special person, if it were going to be at home in Grace. When she met you, her heart beat truly for the first time. Perhaps it was meant to be with you always.
Grace’s grandfather offers only love: love for what’s lost, love for what is, love for an unknowable future. If rom-coms offer the dream of finding your true self in finding the right person, then Return to Me treats that dream as a sacrament, the kind of offering we make when we realize we can’t control everything that happens to us.
Medieval readers and writers lived on intimate terms with the fragility of the human body and the fickleness of Fortune; these days, so do we. That might be why Return to Me, resplendent in its poor taste, holds up pretty well. The old medieval stories of love and gore continue to invite us to embrace our vulnerable humanity: perhaps they were meant to be with us always.
Michelle De Groot is an associate professor in the Department of English & Creative Writing at Hollins University. Her research focuses on medieval constructions of secularity, but she spends much of her time standing in front of a board with strings and insisting that all pop culture connects back to medieval literature. Ask her about Wagner at your own risk and find her on Bluesky as @troynovaunt.bsky.social.