“Girls, Girls, Girls” the sign outside the theater reads. You walk in and discover that all three titular ‘Girls’ are Deborah Kerr – It’s a screening of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943). Of course, you’re not mad at the sign. In the Archers’ technicolor classic, it seems impossible not to fall in love with Deborah Kerr. To be fair, she does play all three love interests.

Yes, in case it hasn’t become clear by the third iteration of our Obsessions sections, like a moth to a flame, a navy drunkard to a neon striptease, or aspiring artists to the nude model, I’m mesmerized by zealous repetition. For the following Obsession our zealous repetition du jour is the figure of the Eternal Lover. 

Yes, I find myself enchanted and disarmed by the reuse of the same actor as a new character in a movie. A derisive pedant might call it a gimmick – but not us, dear reader. We’re charmed by the unrepentant desire to fall in love out of time. To believe that there’s something magical about desire that can bridge a temporal divide. How could we not be swept up in ethereal love when Count Dracula declares, “I have crossed oceans of time to find you.”

Yes, these two films are my North Star when I imagine eternal love – the archetypal apotheoses: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992). 

Colonel Blimp follows the long life of one Clive Wynne-Candy (Roger Livesey). Introduced as a blustering and bald old man, the film recounts his life in the British military throughout the first half of 20th century. The spine of his story is a recurring relationship with a German officer (Anton Walbrook) whose values and station mirror his own. The two form a lasting friendship punctuated by an esoteric love triangle–the triangle is not with one woman, but with three, all played by Deborah Kerr in different periods of the men’s lives. I love, love, love the quiet otherworldliness and melodrama of this romance. It is never clear why these women bear such striking resemblances but, whether the cause is psychic or cosmic, it seems to me that these lives are far greater than the sum of their parts. 

At this point, I would hope the general plot of Dracula needs no regurgitation. What matters for our Obsession, however, is director Francis Ford Coppola’s prologue which recounts the origin story of Dracula’s lost love and vampiric transformation. Gary Oldman is the titular blaspheming Count. Beside him is Winona Ryder playing the Count's tragic lover Elisabeta, prefiguring by a few hundred years another Winona Ryder as Mina Harker. Also there, evoking the odd triangularity of love again, is Anthony Hopkins as the damning priest, brought back centuries later as the vampire's eternal foe, Van Helsing.

In both Blimp and Dracula love is not bound by the restriction of time. Love is always prefiguring its own future and resurrecting its past incarnations. It can swim through the waters and seaways of time! Love is not corporeal but ensouled. It can be blinding or surprising or quaint or vengeful or even transfigurative. Love is eternal! 

These of course aren’t the only films that feature stunt-casted lovers. Any list would be incomplete without mention of Cloud Atlas (2012), the science fiction romantic epic that unfolds across 6 different time periods spread across hundreds of years and features the same actors recast over and over again. Many of the vertigo-vanias detailed in Obsession 1 don’t actually have eternal lovers yet relish in the noir fantasy of them. Suzhou River (2000), which could have been included in the vertigo-vania canon, asks if love can swim through the murky waters of time and space. Familial doppelgangers are another love-addled flourish, like the arrival of Laura Palmer’s cousin Maddy in Twin Peaks (1990) or the comically soapy introduction of Penny, the late-wife’s identical twin sister in Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984). 

On compiling this list, I realized I don’t seem to be the only one tickled by this technique. The trope has turned up in numerous recent films including quite-literally in Mickey 17 (2025), in the memory plays of Oh, Canada (2024) and Between the Temples (2024), and in the disorientingly hypermediated The Shrouds (2025). In an age of images, is it any surprise we can’t escape the romance of reincarnation?

Why do we return to these figures of eternal love? Is it the provocation of sensuality? Where the vertigo-vanias ridicule the delusion of true-love, these films enable them! Let's all sit back, put our feet up, and get lost in the rapturous fiery fantasy of romantic determinism!