On my subsequent viewings of The Thing Called Love after first seeing it in a cinema upon its initial release, after the film became available on home video, I was aware that River Phoenix had died just a few months after the theatrical release of the film. I was unfamiliar with Phoenix's other performances; I was too young to have seen his celebrated work in My Own Private Idaho when it was released in 1991. The Thing Called Love, in this way, was both the beginning and the end of (at least during Phoenix's own life) my encounter with his performances. Where my initial viewing of the film in a theater fell under the spell of Mathis's radiance, my subsequent viewings on home video were my first self-conscious encounter with death in and around cinema, given my fresh attention to Phoenix's presence in the film as the character James Wright. On some level I had an awareness that the person onscreen, in a movie that was already very much part of my life, was now quite literally gone, his animation in the frames of a film no longer corresponding to any existing human outside of it. The absence of the actor, as described so beautifully by Cavell, was now ineluctable and permanent, an emotional attachment to a performer now tethered to a melancholy awareness of that performer's death.

My desire to see and perpetually re-see The Thing Called Love was born out of an attraction, which developed at different times and for different reasons, to two actors who did not quite become the stars they might have become— Phoenix, having died so heartbreakingly young, and Mathis, facing a future of mostly supporting roles in big movies and leading roles in small movies none of which, for me, were as enchanting as The Thing Called Love. Early death and the cutting short of stardom—of course not equivalent things, but in their way each a kind of loss—were also, as I discovered later, part of the context that accompanied the release of Peter Bogdanovich's earlier film, They All Laughed.