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Tuesday, April 25, 2006
Something I wrote in a past life for the late, lamented, almost entirely unavailable FEED. A bit long, and a bit outdated, but what the hell....One's-self I sing, a simple separate person,
Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse
-Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
Perhaps you will need a motto. I suggest this one:
"Wounded by the Million; Healed - One by One."
-George W.S. Trow, Collapsing Dominant
TAKE, FOR INSTANCE, the romantic comedy. Once upon a time in California, a trivial, technologically driven art form became a vessel for America's most delicate outpourings of affection. Free of adrenaline highs and the terrible burden of having something Terribly Important to say, films driven solely by the torque and traction between dialogue and character emerged. They were pure in a way that nothing seems pure anymore. At their best, they allowed screenwriters, directors, and actors the freedom to revel in the sheer pleasure of filmmaking, and audiences their best chance to forget themselves in it. Don't get me wrong: Double Indemnity was conversational kung fu of the highest caliber. But in the great romantic comedies - The Palm Beach Story, The Shop Around the Corner, The Philadelphia Story - talk was a dance, wit was an engine, and conventions existed to court and toy with, rather than to fall back on or fling oneself against. Whatever happened to them?
SOMEBODY'S BABY
Jackson Browne
Fast Times At Ridgemont High: Music From The Motion Picture
Elektra : 1982
[Buy It]
"Look," American sweetheart Julia Roberts tells the interviewer. "It's almost impossible to find a good romantic comedy script... Really, I make as many good romantic comedies as I can find. But people talk as though I avoid [the] genre." Actually, Roberts goes beyond the call of duty; so intent is she on not avoiding the genre that she often ends up with the treacly, incontinent, or just plain terrible. Who can blame her? Today's best scriptwriter seems, when she turns to romantic comedy, incapable of approaching even the middling work of a 1930s hack. The audience seems incapable of telling the difference. Somehow our hearts have lost a good deal of their sweetness.
When intimacy is the agenda, young stars of our independent cinema - Todd Solondz, Neil LaBute - turn cynical and sour beyond their years; their films are the emotional equivalents of Jerry Bruckheimer blockbusters. But they've got the right idea: black comedy as black hole. A vindication, for the Hollywood suit, that for all the flack he catches for grinding out one vapid movie after another, the independents aren't producing anything more resonant. American Beauty, the year's "best" studio film, is a pastiche of such indies, and wildly successful, because given the grotesque cynicism of a movie like You've Got Mail (whose very title is a marketing pitch), its misanthropy seems genial and lyrical. Meanwhile, the genuine lyricism of a Noah Baumbach, or the screwball whimsy of an Emma-Kate Croghan, goes unnoticed. [Or did six years ago, when I wrote this.] Director, don't deal with intimacy in earnest! It's no longer viable as either a cultural or commercial commodity.
Which isn't to say we've grown shallower as a people, or that our need for intimacy has somehow diminished. Rather, it seems that intimacy - the space two people create to ward off the trespasses of the world at large - now runs counter to the interests of the people who shape the tone and tenor of our lives. Fifty-odd years ago, Orwell predicted a world in which the individual's bond to a state negated the possibility of any other relationship, and though it seems absurd to stack the demise of romantic comedy next to the collapse of democracy, Orwellian isn't a bad adjective to use if you want to describe what happened to it. It's not that the conventions changed, but that the space in which these films thrived - a space American audiences were invited to share and dream about for the price of a nickel - no longer exists. Meanwhile, another genre, which has only the most superficial relationship to comedy, and none at all to romance, has risen to take its place. I'm thinking, in particular, of deposition movies like Erin Brockovich and A Civil Action; films which take the grit of the depression years and transpose it into a language today's audiences can understand, and today's studios can stomach: that of tying individuals directly to a mass, or a movement, and creating a space which resembles intimacy, but doesn't quite provide it.
OH, PRETTY WOMAN
Al Green
I'm Still In Love With You
Hi : 1972
[Buy It]-They hate us.
-I hate us.
-I do too.
-My friends, during the Oscars "YOU KNOW WHAT THEY SAY - it's all about money.'" These are the first words you hear in Pretty Woman, which launched Julia Roberts' career as a star (her actual career in Hollywood began three years earlier, when she played second-fiddle to Justine Bateman in a film called Satisfaction). It's a telling start. In Pretty Woman, which relaunched the moribund genre of romantic comedy as a blockbuster form, Roberts' trajectory can be measured in one of two ways. In terms of narrative drive, we watch her character's value rise from twenty dollars an hour to a hundred, then to three thousand per week, and finally, as she metamorphoses from whore to princess bride, to "priceless." In terms of Pretty Woman as a career-maker, we see the star-making apparatus establish Roberts' own cultural currency through a series of implicit connections to a series of cultural signifiers - Carol Lombard, Carol Channing, Lucille Ball, and Audrey Hepburn. (More specifically, Audrey Hepburn in Charade. If Roberts doesn't quite acquit herself, it's Richard Gere that suffers more for the comparison to Cary Grant.)
Time will tell if she lives up to it; Roberts is not Hepburn. But she's got talent and charisma to spare, and throws herself fully into even the weakest roles; grins and gams go a long way, but they alone don't get you to the top. Still, the intervening years have done nothing to dampen Roberts' head for figures. While Pretty Woman was all about money in a rather disgusting eighties sort of way, the emotional climax of Roberts' latest film involves her receiving a bonus check for two million dollars! As Erin Brockovich, a role which earned her twenty million dollars, Roberts crunches numbers in much the same way that Demi Moore crunches abs, or Arnold Schwarzenegger crushes skulls. Thus, we see the embattled Erin defending her research before a big-time lawyer: Lawyer: Erin, you don't even have a phone number for [the plantiffs].
Erin: Whose number do you need?
Lawyer: Everyone's. This is a law suit -- we need to be able to contact the plaintiffs.
Erin: I said, whose number do you need?
Lawyer: You don't know six hundred plaintiffs' numbers by heart... Annabelle Daniels.
Erin: Annabelle Daniels, (714) 454-9346, ten years old, eleven in May. Lived on the Plume since birth, wanted to be a synchronized swimmer so she spent every minute she could in the P.G.&E. pool. She had a tumor on her brain stem detected last November. An operation on Thanksgiving, shrunk it with radiation after that. Her parents are Ted and Rita. Ted's got Crohn's disease, Rita has chronic headaches and nausea, and underwent a hysterectomy last fall. Ted grew up in Hinkley. His brother Robby and his wife, May, and their five children, Robbie Junior, Martha, Ed, Rose, and Peter also lived on the Plume. Their number is 454-9554. You want their diseases? And defending her body before the advances of a suspiciously friendly neighbor:Erin: You want my number?
George: I do. I do want your number.
Erin: Which number do you want? George?
George: George, now I like the way you say that: 'George.' Uh, well how many numbers you got?
Erin: Oh, I got numbers comin' out of my ears. For instance, ten.
George: Ten?
Erin: Yeah, that's how many months old my baby girl is.
George: You got a little girl?
Erin: Yeah, yeah. Sexy huh? How about this for a number: six. That's how old my other daughter is. Eight is the age of my son. Two is how many times I've been married and divorced. Sixteen is the number of dollars I have in my bank account. 850-3943, that's my phone number. And with all the numbers I gave you, I'm guessing zero is the number of times you're going to call.
George: Hey, how the hell'd you remember your bank balance right off the top of your head like that? See, that impresses me. You're dead wrong about that zero thing, baby.
I REMEMBER
Naked Raygun
All Rise
Quarterstick : 1985
[Buy It]
Good recall isn't the same thing as intelligence, of course, but in a Roberts movie it does just as well, because Roberts isn't playing a character so much as a projection against the scrim of celebrity. By sheer virtue of having made it to the top of the acting heap, Roberts' work is free of the odor of ambition that taints the performance of an actress like Sharon Stone. With Stone, you get the sense that she isn't so much throwing herself into a character as taking and holding by force a position that Rebecca DeMornay or Demi Moore might otherwise occupy. Sandra Bullock's girls next-door are inadvertently pathetic, because what shows under the surface is Bullock's own ambition to become the girl living next-door to Julia Roberts. (Rene Russo, whose sense of self was developed long before she turned to acting is a much better actress for it; she plays with her roles, and against her costars. Actresses like Glenn Close, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Susan Sarandon are another story entirely, for their stardom is incidental to their acting ability.) But Roberts' presence and celebrity makes it hard, no matter how generously she plays, to share the screen with her, and she is left with only the membrane of her own fame to play against: Her performances resonate in direct proportion to how sensitively she gives in to, or subverts, the audience's expectations. Watching her recite a list of facts and figures is like watching a favorite daughter win a spelling bee.
Nowhere is this more explicit than in Notting Hill, the romantic comedy in which Hugh Grant plays a charmingly befuddled English bloke who falls for "the world's most famous movie star," played, of course, by Roberts. Roberts seems to have made the film solely to convey a message about movie stars being real people with real thoughts, or, at least, real feelings. In any case, the film is full of monologues about what it's like to live on the wrong side of the screen: "I've been on a diet since I was nineteen," Roberts' Anna says at one point, "which basically means I've been hungry for a decade. I've had a series of not-nice boyfriends, including one who beat me, and every time I get my heart broken, the newspapers splash it about as though it's entertainment. And it's taken two rather painful operations to get me looking like this. And one day, not long from now, they will discover that I can't act, and I will become some sad middle-aged woman who looks a bit like someone who was famous for a while."
What Anna has to say for herself in the end is that she is "just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her." Somehow, though, her admission seems besides the point. Perhaps it's because it's not "just a girl" we've come to see fall in love, it's Roberts, and because it's not really love we've come to expect from her, but victory. More like it is seeing Roberts, at the climax of Runaway Bride, fleeing the altar in a FedEx truck.
SHIT FROM AN OLD NOTEBOOK
The Minutemen
Double Nickels On The Dime
SST : 1984
[Buy It]
IS THERE ANYTHING more pernicious in today's cinema than that ever-present FedEx truck? Anything more cynical, and anti-romantic, than product placement? But approach a young director with the proposition that, for a certain amount of money, you will insert into her film a twenty-second spot that will single-handedly undermine the bond of good faith between the film and its audience, and her first question will be "How much money?" Romantic comedy, that most delicate of genres, which we flock to in order to recapture a sense of the intimacy today's monolithic culture destroys daily, has become the leading victim of the most indelicate intrusions on that culture's part, and seems, at this point, the most compromised. Are audiences not wounded by this? Is the moviegoer not thrust deeper into her loneliness and insularity? Are we not surprised to see her snatch up gossip sheets, which, with their own brutal intrusions into the lives of celebrity, are her only means of lashing out at the thing that wounded her?
If romantic comedy no longer offers a refuge, there's a form that does: The deposition film. A subset of the courtroom dramas Hollywood's been making for decades, the archetypal deposition film - A Civil Action, The Sweet Hereafter, and A Few Good Men are all variations on the genre - involves a muckraker who goes about collecting testimony from grievously wounded individuals and collating them into a single, staggering lawsuit against a faceless entity (the military, the government, the media, the utility company, the corporation, or a conspiracy between any and all of these elements). Erin Brockovich sticks closely to the template: The residents of a small town in California have been steadily poisoned by their local utility company (which is itself a local branch of a gigantic, national corporation). We never see an employee of the company itself, only a series of bumbling lawyers who represent it. We do, however, see the individuals it wounds, flung against a desert landscape, united only by the efforts of Brockovich herself, who visits each in turn, collecting depositions. Alone, they are sick, dispirited, dying. United they defeat the corporation and win the biggest settlement in American history.
This is a powerful, resonant, agon: A single, despotic force versus a group of individuals, hurt one by one, united to form an aggregate mass; a true democracy united by revenge, and money. The one time we see Brockovich's individual victims in a single room, they are assembled to vote (and the vote must be unanimous) on whether to accept a certain settlement. Their acceptance is a victory. Their individual wounds are subsumed into it - each is wounded differently, yet each agrees to raise or lower the value of his or her wound to fit the value of the single, collective wound. The collective wins, the wound is healed. Movies need a hero, of course, so certain individuals are allowed to remain individual: Brockovich and the lawyers. That is to say, the heroes remain to rescue the individual into the fold.
ONE MILLION LAWYERS
Tom Paxton
Live From Mountain Stage
Blue Plate : 2001
[Buy It]
Here is George W.S. Trow on lawyers, and the love of lawyers, and the diseases they cure. At least here's Trow on lawyers we encounter on television screens, which, after all, bear some resemblance to lawyers we encounter in real life: He's a lawyer because you like a lawyer; of course you also don't like a lawyer, so we left those parts out. Not completely out. An edge of what you don't like in a lawyer, but he's going to find that the law isn't what it seems to be, he's going to find out that the law is more like what you think it is! He's going to learn that the law is warm and human and caring, because Jenny's blind... The affliction spins the context. To a problem, like blindness or drug addiction or cancer, to a simple state of trouble - to that state there adheres more reality than adheres to the ragged patchwork of abandoned realities that costumes the lawyer on the frontier. How closely does Brockovich match this description? So closely that she is not, herself, a lawyer, but a direct representative of the mass: poorly educated, poorly dressed, foul-mouthed, and messy in other, varied particulars. But beautiful and victorious, despite her lack of education, through drive, moxie, the terrible desire to win and prove herself - to persevere. She is terribly real; at least, she seems terribly close to the kinds of characters we see on reality programs like Cops. Cops itself is one of two kinds of shows that show real people: those that show real people trying to become stars (Star Search, or Showtime at the Apollo), and those that show real people as they really are. But real people as they really are boring, and inarticulate, when matched against the shimmer of celebrity, so it's only the extremities we see. Only at our most desperate can we hope to compete against celebrity. Perhaps, in time, even the appeal of the desperate will fade.
WE'RE DESPERATE
X
Wild Gift
Elektra : 1981
[Buy It]
ERIN BROCKOVICH - that is to say, Julia Roberts' bid towards becoming, within her stardom, a serious actress - is also Steven Soderbergh's bid towards becoming a serious director (that is to say, a director within the Hollywood system of big budgets, big stars, blockbuster movies). Which is also to say that Erin Brockovich is an example of art by consensus, the kind of movie America told Soderbergh it wanted to see. And it is a fine movie, perhaps the finest example of its kind. But what doesn't it have? It doesn't, as it happens, have intimacy. Its bid towards intimacy is Roberts' relationship with George, the biker next-door. But George isn't so much a biker as an ideal representative of the ideal man for a strong-willed white-trash woman fighting her way, against terrible odds, through the world. He is finely played, by Aaron Eckhardt, but he is a phantom. Rather, he is a mirror image of the character Sam Elliott played in Mask, who was himself a mirror image of other characters. Aaron Ekhardt is handsome, and Julia Roberts is beautiful, and so they love each other. George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez were beautiful in Soderbergh's 1998 film Out of Sight, and they loved each other, too. But neither couple was believable. Neither love resembled any sort of love any of us have known.
It is, in fact, impossible to love Julia Roberts, just as it is impossible not to love her. Because Julia Roberts - though I have seen her myself, dressed in black and a black beret standing with a camera outside the office building on Spring and Lafayette Street in which I sit writing this - does not exist. And, in spite of the fantastic performances Soderbergh coaxes from his cast in Erin Brockovich, only one character exists, in any recognizable sense, in the audience's mind: Scott, a clerk so seduced by Roberts that he trips over himself in letting her riffle through his files. Hip in his sideburns and skater gear, Scott resembles nothing so much as the knowing kid sitting in the third row of your standard pre-Brockovich Soderbergh flick. In fact, he looks, in bearing and attitude and attire, a bit like Soderbergh himself. But Roberts is no more real to Scott than she is to the audience. One gets the sense that not many things are real to Scott anymore: At the first sign of pressure from the corporation, he becomes the first to betray Roberts and the individuals she represents. What does Roberts have to say to him? "People are dying, Scott," she says. "You've got document after document here, right under your nose that say why. And you haven't said one word about it. I wanna know how the hell you sleep at night."
I CAN'T SLEEP
The La's
The La's
Go! London : 1990
[Buy It]
HOW DO ANY OF US? More and more, it seems, we sleep alone, or not at all. As the common ground of geography, community, and family disappears, we're forced more and more to connect through contexts that are pre-established for us, and find ourselves with less and less to talk about. We spin in a cultural centrifuge, the earth drops from beneath our feet, and all that's left to look at is the blur of faces spinning next to our own. Ultimately, we all begin to look the same, and to check the same boxes on movie-screening questionnaires. Meanwhile, art - the most direct, intense means we have of connecting to what's inside another individual's head, and a last refuge from cultural vertigo - no longer seems to be made by individuals, or for them. Certainly, it isn't being made about them.
In today's Hollywood, it isn't even made so much as propelled, by money and demography, through a hall of mirrors without end or destination. We learn in school that the subject of art is art itself, and imagine a great conversation taking place over centuries. Today the trope is true of necessity, and only in the narrowest of senses, and conversation is stilled. Forty years ago, Dwight Macdonald warned that, caught in a cold war deadlock, the U.S.S.R. and the United States would propel each other further and further towards mass-industrialization on a scale that would leave little room for individual expression. The reality turns out to be more haunting: Unfettered by competition, we're racing towards Socialist Realisms all our own.Labels: alex
posted by Alex
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