yeah, yeah, yeah, 9/11. But also...love and the lost self

It seems that a number of typically snark-jock movie critics really seem to like Reign Over Me. It's true, the real allure of Adam Sandler resides in his characteristic cocktail of rage, self-loathing and soulfulness. And, at last, this film is a real showcase for those aspects of his soul. He's subtle and funny and furious and it really works. For once, viewers can, perhaps, put Opera Man out of their heads while watching... not that I really have anything against Opera Man, per se. I'm of the camp that concedes that some of Sandler's deconstructionist comedy in the SNL Weekend Update segments were really fairly innovative. However, this piece is about character, not rule-breaking, and he carries it pretty well. It's no doubt he won some critic-fans with the role-- and the film.

However, all the reviews discussed the barely-scabbed-over lives of those whose families were affected by 9/11-- and how sensitive a story this movie is... blah, blah, blah. Sure, I guess it IS sensitive, but, just for the sake of argument, let's take 9/11 off the table. What if this were just a story about a couple of guys who've conceded some portion of their selfhoods to their relationships?

I've oft heard a very female lament about the girl who marries her dreamboat of choice and then winds up "losing herself" to the relationship, sacrificing her identity, her soul, her likes and dislikes, for the purpose of being the wife HE wants her to be. Oprah is a big pusher of the notion of the tragic narrative of the just-can't-say-no girls. I've had friends complain about having lost track of some aspect of identity when ensconced in a romantic relationship-- and I think I might even have phrased my own complaints similarly (though, in retrospect, I know I have most often been the one to force concessions from my partners--having a strong personality sometimes breeds some curious obliviousness), but I've wondered: what of the men who no longer recognize themselves, so lost are they in the daily morass of gesture and habit and ritual? Surely, assimilation into a relational unit couldn't possibly be a single-gendered activity, could it?

And along comes this movie. In it, we've got two guys. One guy loses his wife and three daughters (it's significant that all three kids are female, I think) to one of the passenger projectiles that have since entered our lexical commonality. As a result, he devolves into some crazy amalgam of automaton, ghost and rabid wolf. Simply put, without his family, his female flotilla, he has no real self left. When they were alive, his life was full because of them. And without them, there really isn't much man to spare. And the other guy, well, he still has his wife-- and two female children. But as a result of his "putting family first," he's manifested such a disconnect with his own desires, his own identity, that he begins to foment a fairly expected variety of resentment towards his wife.

Now, the solution to this problem is really the hinge of the plot. Both men seek refuge from domesticity in each other and, because they each adopt this outlet, they are able to return (or at least begin to heal in order to return at some point in the future) to some modified version of the family fold. Easy. Total cake. It's a reasonable and real-life solution to the emotional deprivation experienced by some men. And it works. But, it's also not all that interesting to me.

What is interesting, however, is the set of social constructs that create the types of ravenous hunger so readily apparent in these men. To be fair, I'm sure this aspect of the film's emotional tenor stuck out to me because I've been reading Laura Kipnis' book Against Love: A Polemic of late. This is a book that would be incendiary if it were required reading for the population at large, but, as it is, it's more like a flagpole sporting some tattered rag outside a seedy bar on the fringes of town. It rages about the ways in which conventional companionate co-habitation squelches our emotional lives and lulls our libidos into sad little stupors. The book wants more for us than so-called wedded bliss. It wants actual bliss. And I suppose I'm reading it because I, too, want actual bliss-- for myself and for the people (plural) with whom I fall in love. And so I read books that swear up and down that that which is packaged as blissful (love, stability, monogamy) is actually the enemy of the temporality and flightiness of real, mindful fun. I keep hoping that if I resist that which feels like it might entrap me or own me, I'll find a new transgressive joy. So far, so good. No, wait: so far, so occasionally good. It's a trepidatious mountain passage at best.

But anyway, I look at the stories of these two men-- one who is a veritable wraith of loss without his primary relationship and one who can barely speak, so gagged by the confines of being a "good father" or "good husband" or even "good man" is he-- and I am fascinated by the meandering avenues through which their marriages lead them-- and deposit them squarely in their respective marital miseries. Sure, they find their ways out again (via the flip-side of the self-same love that drove them to despair in the first place, mind you), but it is the insularity of love that is the problem for each. I can't help but wonder: if these two men dedicated a little less of themselves to their primary relationships-- and a little more to a legitimate pursuance of bliss? Would they feel so stranded and without recourse when those primary relationships wind up NOT being the be-all-end-all? Would they feel so alone, were they not so protective of their own emotional fidelity? If they put a couple of eggs in other baskets? Who's to say?

I would like to understand more about men's emotional lives. Though male actors continue to dominate the screen, rarely do we find filmic plumbings of male loneliness, detachment, estrangement, and ache for simple human connection of the nature found in Reign Over Me. I won't say that it goes this distance flawlessly-- it occasionally waxes maudlin and, frankly, it overshoots in terms of subplots and connectivity of narratives-- but at least it's trying. At least it's attempting to represent the ways in which the conventional social institution of marriage fails these guys in terms of their rawest, simplest emotional needs. It's supposed to be another diary page from the post-9/11 New Yorker. Ultimately, national tragedy is just a backdrop here. Because I came to this film with Kipnis in my head, I'm having a hard time seeing the real subject matter as other than how these men fight for stability in a landscape in which the bedrock of relational love swims in and out of their reach.

Another concession: the time-change has hit me like a brick. I'll acclimate soon, surely. But for now, I've had a week of imagined heartbreak and utter listlessness. Oh, sunshine! Oh, serotonin! How I miss you. This Seasonal Affective bullshit is a bitch. Time to fire up the Happy Lite again. So, apologies if I, too, am waxing overly maudlin. It's been a weird and weepy week. At least I can blame it on body chemistry, rather than real problems.