life as we know it and young adult: ballbreaking 101

Life As We Know It: (2010. dir: Greg Berlanti)
I have long been of the opinion that certain movies exert a malign influence on an audience. I suppose every demographic has its insidious examples, but it’s the girls in whom I’m most interested (since boys run the studios, I guess they can take care of their own), and so I notice when Hollywood slips a devil into a film to try and lull my demographic into unhealthy perspectives on life.

Sleepless in Seattle was one of the first offenders I noticed (I'm certain there had been many before which slipped worm-like into my subconscious and are probably still causing all manner of grief). You can’t call it evil, of course, but it’s a dangerous girl-fantasy in that it pushes forward an absurd but absurdly attractive paradigm in which finding your soul-mate is the hard part of a relationship; that once you make it to the top of the Empire State Building, the hard work is done and your relationship will be smooth sailing from there on out. It’s a dangerous message, but not deadly, since every girl in the world is going to find out it’s a crock of shit about four days after she first falls in love.

Now let’s look at Life As We Know It. Not a girl-fantasy so much as a woman-fantasy, it was obviously made for a specific demographic (women whose biological clocks are sounding, relatively new mothers, and with a wider and probably more dangerous reach into the set of women who are raising children and are unhappy in their spousal relationships). I call this kind of movie Ballbreaking 101, but The Stepford Husband Effect might be more to the point. These movies teach us, if we allow it, that as long as we are focused on those noble goals of Marriage and Child-rearing, then we are fully within our rights to ALTER our flawed male companion by any tactics necessary, whether it be through guilt, self-righteous carping, even violence, until he is sufficiently neutered to cause us no further trouble.

The basics are these: Messer (Josh Duhamel from the Transformers series) is the anti-romantic-hero. He is slovenly (symbolized by the baseball cap he wears constantly), sluttish, seducing women and casting them aside in the mornings with "I'll-call-you" lies, determined not to settle down (symbolized by his beloved motorcycle), and completely sexually irresistible to everyone except our heroine (Katherine Heigl as Holly), who is staunchly immune to his charms. Through a series of Hollywood plot-devices, the two of them inherit their best friends' baby and must move into their house and raise the child together.

But these two are archenemies, and, ultimately, either one must fall or one must change. Because this is a romcom, we know nobody will fall, and because it is a woman-fantasy, we know who will do the changing. Slowly and surely, Messer is stripped of everything he calls his own. Holly gets the baseball cap by letting the baby take a crap in it and using that as an excuse to throw it out. (Message to Holly: the bathroom floor is linoleum. Let the baby crap on the floor then clean it up.) She wrecks his motorcycle, tossing it beneath a bus to ensure that the damage is irreparable. When he gets a break in his career, an opportunity to direct a live sportscast, she refuses to take the kid and so his chance is ruined. Yes, OK, this last was his-job-or-her-job, so it's nice that she didn’t place more importance on his job than on her own, but the point is this whole movie is a Take-a-Sexy-Man-and-Change-Him-Into-Your-Lapdog thing. The worst part is that he lets it happen. In the paradigm of the film, he secretly knows, as the women in the audience gloatingly think they know, that her view is the true one, her feminine wisdom will triumph, for her goals are the noble ones.

My question is this: is this really the world-view we want to support? Is it really alright to enter into a relationship with an aim to reshape our partner from the ground up as if he's some sort of accessory to our (more important) lives? And what kind of a kid will this baby grow into, used as it is as a weapon in this ongoing war?

It is well acted, this incubus-film, and well-photographed, with one very effective shot at the end, where the camera snorkels out of the house as they're walking into their little girl's birthday party, backs up, flies over the house then backs away over the trees, a sort of "and they lived happily ever after" shot. Well done, and that's all part of the insidious nature of this devil-film.



Young Adult: (2011. dir: Jason Reitman)
And then there's Young Adult. This is the anti-Life As We Know It:

Matt: Buddy Slade has a life.
Mavis: No, Buddy Slade has a baby, and babies are boring.

Charlize Theron (Mavis) and Patton Oswalt (Matt) share a galvanic chemistry as the bitter-tongued duo who, it turns out, are perfectly matched once you dig beneath their mismatched skins, his body malformed after an ancient beating, her body perfect but her soul malformed by her own seemingly endless series of terrible personal choices.

Mavis is heavily damaged, living an empty life as the author of a vapid Young Adult series of novellas in a slovenly apartment with a neglected dog and a television constantly tuned to the Kardashian sisters. On finding out that her high school sweetheart has a newborn baby, she becomes obsessed with winning him back, thereby revivifying her lost youth, those years when she was seemingly unassailable. Her journey back to her hometown is a journey into hell, but thanks to Cody’s unflinching pen, a very funny journey into hell. These people have flaws and quirks, and, in Mavis' case, an almost pathological gracelessness (to her crippled friend: "Could you walk any slower?") and extremes of self-medication to fend off self-examination. They talk like real people talk, and are upon occasion deadly, seriously funny.

It's official; I'm now a Diablo Cody fan. I appreciated Juno's cleverness but in the end felt a little moist with it preciousness. Then there was Jennifer's Body, which I watched almost secretly, almost apologetically, expecting a sort of cataclysmic debacle, but I was happily surprised with it, its boldness, its strangeness, how it kept twisting my expectations with odd moments of truth.

And now this. This movie is such a relief. Sometimes watching Mavis' trainwreck approach to life is nearly unbearable, but Cody always gives a reprieve just at the last minute: a moment of long-overdue self-awareness or wry humour in the nick of time. And it's got a throwback-to-the-90s hipster soundtrack, crowded with Mats, Dino Jr, Cracker, Teenage Fanclub, a soundtrack Mavis uses to transport herself back into a past in which she remembers herself happy, whether she was or not.

This is a movie for those of us who got broken along the way but manage to go on living, regardless. In the end, although its ostensible message is that, reprehensible as your behaviour is, you don't really have to change as long as you keep running fast enough, that message is delivered with sufficiently ironic humour to twist itself back around into a question.

the swimming pool: the sex lives of the rich and gorgeous

Swimming Pool: (1969. dir: Jacques Deray) One of those overheated, madly sensuous European films from the sixties that fails only as often as its sexual tension fails, which is more often than it ought, since Alain Delon is ridiculously beautiful here, impossibly beautiful. In the protracted quiet of the film's opening moments, we close in on him while he sweats, motionless by the eponymous pool, burnished and lethargized with constant sun and sexual satisfaction and encroaching ennui. We hear a woman call his name and see his indifferent response; he is roused only for an enraged moment when she douses him with water before he falls back into his stupor. She emerges, and we see it is Romy Schneider, wearing an enigmatic smile and little else, and the ensuing make-out scene is one of the most sensuously filmed ever, with camera angles I can only call very French indeed. Delon's enthusiasm to get her top off in order to scratch her back properly, with its contrast to his previous inertia, is galvanic.

Schneider is very good in a nearly thankless role which involves a lot of Mona-Lisa-like suggestive smiling at both her lover and her obnoxious ex-lover (who comes to visit with his coltishly sexy MacGuffin of a virgin-daughter), smiles evocative of a supreme confidence in her sexual power. It is only towards the end, when the plot breaks through the almost silly thickness of constant libidinous energy and takes a more interesting turn that she, and indeed the movie itself, really begins to engage above the crotch level.

The trouble with these films, -- the kind of swinging film showing us the lifestyle of the sexually liberated rich and beautiful people, -- is that they tend towards a strange naivete, perhaps because they're designed for the leering, voyeuristic pleasure of those of us who don't engage in the lifestyle and therefore have little knowledge to draw on in judging their veracity (or perhaps because the lifestyle itself is based on some basic fallacy; I cannot speak to that, however, never having lived among the rich and beautiful except in the cinema). The truest part of it seemed to me that heaviness of boredom at the beginning, as if the life of this gorgeous couple was constructed around a wall of ennui punctuated by great ecstatic lunges of passion followed by ever-deeper plunges into a treacherous hogwallow of post-coital melancholy. Add to that what my boyfriend would call its coy "black-out" amorphousness (as in, "OK, so did they have sex after the black-out or not?"), and you get a lot of teasing with no clear answers.

Which is alright, it turns out, since in the end it's not the sex which matters; it's the sexual tension that is the force which propels the action. One of the film's flaws is that the script employs a Pinteresque avoidance of the central issue (which is always sex) in its conversation, but without Pinter's, you know, genius, so for example the dinner-scene during which the four child-adults are sitting around pointedly Not Talking About The Sex Which May Or May Not Have Happened During The Black-out is a little embarrassing, but in a way which seems true enough to life, so one forgives it, even as one is thinking rather wistfully of Pinter.

It's possible this film was trying to evoke Purple Noon, that grand gesture of boldly-colored French noir which cemented Delon's stardom in the first place, with its sun-soaked eroticism and twisted psychological darkness. It's not as good as that, but it's not bad. And Delon and Schneider are not just easy on the eyes; the mere act of watching them is in fact so pleasurable that it's nigh on impossible to look away.

the burglar's ruminations while he's tied to a chair awaiting the cops

from Steve Erickson's Zeroville, Europa Editions, NY, 2007:

"My Darling Clementine. John Ford's greatest movie. Now I know what you're going to say. Stagecoach. Right? The Searchers. Well, Stagecoach was a distinct landmark in the genre, no getting around it. But that shit hasn't aged well, though no one wants to cop to it, while The Searchers is one wicked bad-ass movie whenever my man the Duke is on screen, evil white racist honky pigfucker though he may be. I mean he may be a racist pigfucker, but he's bad in The Searchers, no getting around it...

"I mean Duke gives a performance of terrifying intensity and sublime psychological complexity, whether by intent or just natural fucked-up white American mojo. The Searchers loses it, though, whenever Jeffrey Hunter and Vera Miles come on -- Ford, he couldn't direct the ladies for shit, unlike my man Howard Hawks where all the ladies are fine and kick-ass on top of it, even if they're all versions of the same fox, or as William Demarest puts it down in Preston Sturges' The Lady Eve, "Positively the same dame!' I mean Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not actually has some of the same exact lines as Jean Arthur in Only Angels Have Wings.

"But now My Darling Clementine here, it's practically noir Western, all moody and shit. Ford's first after the War and all the concentration camps and maybe he wasn't in his usual sentimental rollicking drunk Irish jive-ass mood. Check out my man Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp and, dig it, Victor Mature as Doc Holliday and, dig it again, Walter Brennan as Pa Clanton! I don't mean no Grandpa McCoy from TV, I mean in My Darling Clementine Walter Brennan is one stone fucked-up killer, you hear what I'm saying? 'When you pull a gun, kill a man!' Damn!

"My Darling Clementine, it's got the inherent mythic resonance of the Western form but in terms post-War white folks understood, figuring they were all worldlier and more sophisticated than before the War. Ford's creation of the archetypal West, laying out codes of conduct that folks either honored or betrayed -- and I'm just trying to give the motherfucker due credit, not even holding against him, not too much anyway, the fact that he played a Klansman in that jive Birth of a Nation bullshit -- anyway Ford's view of the West was so complete by this point that Hawks, Budd Boetticher, Anthony Mann, they could only add to it, you hear what I'm saying?

"But of course the Western changed along with America's view of itself, from some sort of heroic country, where everybody's free, to the spiritually fucked-up defiled place it really is, and now you got jive Italians, if you can feature that, making the only Westerns worth seeing anymore because white America's just too fucking CONFUSED, can't figure out whether to embrace the myth or the anti-myth, so in a country where folks always figured you can escape your past, now the word is out that this is the country where you can do no such thing, this is the one place where, like the jive that finally becomes impossible to distinguish from the anti-jive, honor becomes impossible to distinguish from betrayal or just, you know, stone cold murder."

I love this book. It's worth the price of admission just for the chapter in which the aging, hard-drinking editor (who might possibly be based on Dorothy Spencer? help me out here) instructs our hero in the finer points of construction of A Place In The Sun. You also get to hang out at a beach house which will seem very familiar if you've read Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (and if you haven't, you should go and do that right now) with the likes of John Milius, Paul Schrader, Brian De Palma, Margo Kidder and Robert De Niro amongst others, all very thinly disguised.