This weekend, I caught the end of one of my favorite movies of all time: Grand Canyon, the Lawrence Kasdan film about interconnectedness, community, responsibility and the psychic pain we all inflict upon one another while grappling towards the interconnectedness, the community and the responsibility. I hadn't watched this movie in a while and I'd forgotten Mary-Louise Parker's oration to Kevin Kline (her boss, who'd fucked her and then refused to do so again, on grounds of, uh, being married) about how, despite the fact that he was kind and caring and well-meaning in virtually every aspect of his life, he was still an asshole because he'd created a situation in which he was oblivious to the inevitability of her very particular hurt. I suppose what I love about this scene and the movie in general is that the characters are continually putting themselves in positions where they transgress social boundaries--and sometimes they face consequences for those transgressions, and sometimes they don't--but the film doesn't ever demonize them for doing so. Neither the homewrecker, nor the cheating husband, nor the otherwise-occupied wife could ever be wholly exculpated or wholly blamed because these events are, in the context of this film, just part of negotiating the world as an adult. Interestingly, though, Parker's character is the one to bear the deepest wound from the aforementioned transaction, because she is the one not chosen--and the wife never knows. This, I find to be the saddest thing about this movie--and one of the most interesting things because the pain of the interloper has been so minimally explored. But wouldn't we always consider it a "best-case scenario" when The Other Woman is the only one who gets hurt, no matter what? Certainly, she is awfully low on the morality totem pole (on which we also find innocent children, innocent wife, and fallible-but-well-meaning husband in descending order), poor girl.
Coincidentally, when I arrived home on Friday night, I had a long-ago-ordered box from Amazon (man, that free super-saver shipping option didn't always take this long, did it?) which contained, among other books, Daphne Gottlieb's (queer, post-punk, guttermouth, San Francisco poet) anthology entitled Homewrecker: An Adultery Reader (see my new subheading quotation above). Though I haven't yet had much time to read a whole hell of a lot of the stories and poems therein, there seem to be quite a few accounts of already unstable marriages, rendered more so by the inevitability of extramarital desire. Really, though, I particularly interested in Gottlieb's own introduction to the book. She rather succinctly sums up pretty much all my reasons for being interested in and buying this book to begin with:
After Homewrecker's call for submissions went out, I received a number of fevered, upset emails. Over and over, they said: You're not in FAVOR of it, are you? I want to believe (but rather doubt) that this same question would be asked of me as the editor of an anthology on motherhood, cancer, or swing dance. But mothers, the ill and dancers do not have to lie to nurture, heal or perform. (On a side note, if cheating is as rampant as even the moderate statistics suggest (Earlier in the intro, she mentions that "statistics vary widely, from a marginal 15 percent to a whopping 80 percent of married couples cheating."), it strikes me as odd that we're still blaming the "homewrecker" rather than questioning the system. What would it look like if we prized honesty and love instead of pair fidelity?)
OK, so, what WOULD it look like if we prized honesty and love instead of pair fidelity? Well, firstly, it's not at all as simplistic as that. And I think part of the faulty system is that we do, in some problematically idealistic way, prize love above all.
For myself, I tend to see marriage as a rather futile endeavor. Much research has shown that the average lifespan of a pair-bond between two human animals is roughly four to seven years--i.e., the amount of time it takes to raise a child out of infancy. In other words, we're biologically predisposed to feel the proverbial 4-to-7-year-itch because any given sexual attraction is designed to peter out somewhere within that range. That's how it WORKS! This idea that we're supposed to be in love for life is one devised purely by the heavily restrictive social mindset. In this way, how can marriage be anything but such an extreme uphill battle? It is not what our bodies' instinctual drives to propagate the species want for us.
And if my belief system about the unnatural-ness of life-long companionhood-contracts is too antiseptic, skeptical or extreme for you, how about the fact that we've invented a legislated civil institution, that once was originally devised as nothing more than a way to manage personal assets and to sanction certain bloodlines, but is now based solely on what we must admit is often a whimsical predilection for one person over another. Sure, marriage is still quite often about nothing more than money, convenience, and/or stability for the children's sake (and there's certainly nothing wrong with these things--or, really, even basing a relationship on these things), but if we want to marry for love? Love is tenuous, fragile and flighty. Love is irrational. It would be a problem for one such as myself, who is made uneasy by such irrationality, to make a lifelong commitment based on a state that I have only known in its temporary aspect. As Gottlieb says, "Love does not conquer all."
My skepticism about marriage did not, however, prevent me from attempting one such commitment. Nor does it prevent me from believing in falling in love. My longest relationship to date was with a woman, and because our government has deemed such relationships to be unworthy of tax breaks, property rights and power of attorney (thus, incidentally, reinforcing the notion that the civil institution of marriage remains little more than a financial arrangement--and one not afforded to all citizens--which, in my opinion, renders our lofty aspirations of "sanctity" and "love" within marriage wholly secondary, thus devaluing the system entirely. Thank you, U.S. government, for commodifying love, along with everything else!), I was not able to make my commitment official. Do I see some silver lining there, because I would obviously now be divorced? Well, no. The creation of a second class of citizens through denial of civil rights is nothing to celebrate... but, yeah, I guess I am glad I never married her.
However, I must admit, I entered into that relationship with every intention that it would last me a lifetime. Never had I met someone with whom I could laugh and cry in equal share. Never had I met someone who opened herself to me with such abandon and ferocity. Never had I doubted my own lovable-ness less. Never had had I encountered someone of whom I did not get bored or annoyed. I do not doubt that I was in love with her. But love doesn't conquer all. I can confirm that this is true because I was still in love with her the night I left.
I will spare my readers the sordid details of why I had eventually had to leave her, this woman who was supposed to be the love of my life. My real point in relaying any of this is just to say that there is no greater feeling of failure than that which one experiences at the moment at which one realizes that one can no longer abide by a commitment that was intended to be lifelong. It does not compare to failing a class in school and it does not compare to getting fired. When you, once and for all, abandon a pair-bonded relationship in favor of sex with another or singlehood or whatever it is that has led you astray, you feel utterly irredeemable. And strangely enough, this horrible feeling is not great enough motivation to stay.
And some might ask me, in this post that is supposed to be about adultery, was I unfaithful, there at the end? Sure, in some ways, I absolutely was. Sometimes, when you need to get out, you engage in activities so as to force your own hand. So, there's that.
And now I can come 'round to my recent viewing of Little Children. Man, I could never make it as a real movie critic. I just want to talk about myself too much, now, don't I? Well, anyway, I should just say that I think this movie is one of the best I've seen in a couple years. Really, I watched it a couple weeks ago and it's gotten so under my skin that haven't been able to wrap my head around how to write about it.
One review that I read discusses how, early on, when the two main characters, Brad (the knock-out, despite receding hairline, Patrick Wilson) and Sarah (Kate Winslet), kiss in a park in front of several other soccer-mom-types, despite being strangers. The review says that the horror of the soccer moms establishes that we are not in the landscape of the swingin' suburbs, such as is portrayed in movies like Ang Lee's The Ice Storm, wherein there is still a sort of detached discomfort that accompanies one of those parties at which all the husbands throw their keys in a fishbowl in spite of the social bravado implied by writing such a scene into a script. In a movie like that, sex is not intimate and no one is expected to fall in love as a result of it. In Little Children, though, it's a different story. Sarah, the former English lit PhD candidate, is bored and disenfranchised with her little domestic life. And Brad, the football star and would-be lawyer who can't pass the bar, is emasculated and a chickenshit, while his gorgeous, creative wife (still uber-hot Jennifer Connolly) is the successful documentary filmmaker that their son insists upon favoring. In other words, these two are ripe for the distraction and drama of falling in love with each other. Brad is still probably in love with his hot wife, even though he despairs at his life with her, but once Sarah finds her husband jerking off in front of the computer with polka-dot panties stretched over his face, well, I just don't think she was really feeling it anymore. Regardless, these two seek refuge from the lush-suburban-cum-bleak-and-vapid narrative landscape of this film in each other. And, maybe because we do not want to associate ourselves with the prudish suburbanites, we are glad for them.
But, though it would be great for the purposes of this post if this movie was really about nothing beyond adultery, it isn't. Adultery is, by far, NOT the most sinister of the topics broached in Little Children. Jackie Earle Haley plays Ronnie McGorvey in probably the most disturbing portrayal of a child molester in the annals of cinema. He is both sorrowful and repugnant. And the thing is, you want to love him and forgive him, until you just can't love or forgive him, not even remotely. Most indicative of the heinousness of this character is the sequence of scenes in which he goes on a date with a young woman. As it turns out, she's depressed to the point that she's made a couple attempts on her own life and, during their dinner together, he listens to her confessions of craziness and despair in such a way that he leads her to believe she's finally found a sympathetic ear. After their date, however, he asks her to drive him to a quiet street where he has a view of the neighborhood playground. While staring at her lap, she tearfully begins to tell him how he seems to be such a nice person and how she's so glad he listened to her, but when she looks up at at, he's gazing out the window of the car at the top of a swingset, vigorously masturbating. And he tells her that if she tells on him, he'll punish her. It's horrendous. It's horrendous, not only because he's given into his destructively deviant drives but because he's used this broken sad-sack of a woman to do so. After all, he's not allowed within 100 yards of a playground, unless he's hidden in some stranger's car!
Really, throughout the movie, it is McGorvey's story that serves as context for all the psycho-sexual unrest amongst all the characters. I'm particularly curious to note, though, that here, American suburbia is portrayed as a place simultaneously so full of castration-anxiety and so full of castration-lust. Male and female characters alike profess a desire to lop off McGorvey's dick. And yet all the men are stymied by their own in ability to live up to the expectations of their gender. Their sadness and frustration about all this is palpable. As are the resulting sadness and frustration the women. And in the face of all this batting around of this castration-as-a-metaphor-for-the-futility-of-domestic-life, it is finally McGorvey who takes the initiative and LITERALLY performs the gruesome deed upon himself. And so, in the end, none of the characters have dicks. And none of them are particularly good at performing... anything.
And so, if these ineffectual folks are representatives of those who've achieved the general American goal of upper-middle-class privilege, I gotta say, I'm both trepidatious and disappointed. I mean, I'm interested in the idea of male virtues being valued in and of themselves, so long as they don't denigrate or infringe upon female virtues, right? (And I guess so long as any virtue can be considered applicable to either gender...) But what of the men who wrote and directed this film? Tom Perotta wrote the novel on which it's based, and co-wrote the screenplay with director Todd Field. I wonder, are these men feeling these sorts of anxieties? What cultural rivulet of thought have they tapped into? I mean, is the fear that men are no longer entitled to their gender identities really so prevalent? I'm thinking back, now, to when I saw Byron Hurt's documentary, Beyond Beats and Rhymes, which talks a lot about the overcompensation inherent in the hyper-masculinity of hip-hop culture. So, surely this concern regarding metaphoric and literal castration is not one specific to rich white guys... and surely it is not new, but nonetheless, does it not point to some great societal illness? And because women are often both direct and indirect receptacles, if not victims, of this sort of psychological unrest in our male counterparts, well, shouldn't we have equal vestment and cause for concern?
I suppose, Little Children is not really a movie about adultery at all. It's a movie about how helpless people are when faced with their own unadulterated fucked-up-edness. And what does the movie present as the cause for said fucked-up-edness? Why, the frustration and demoralization that accompanies our inevitable inability to live up to whatever it was we were supposed to live up to, whether that be society or self-inflicted expectations-- of goodness, of tangible success, of beauty, and of course, of fidelity.
So, why, exactly is it that we just want so damn MUCH from ourselves? What would it look like if we valued questioning the system and coming to terms with our nature as human animals over aspiring to some obsolete American Dream?
UPDATE:
(Disclaimer) I don't suppose I can really stand 100% behind all the anti-marriage assertions I made in this post. It just seems that I'm getting bombarded with an awful lot of information about this topic lately and, apparently, I've got some processing to do. I don't know. Maybe I do mean it. But maybe not. Too soon (young, unattached, out-of-love) to tell yet?
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