Me & Jon & the romantic comedy

A couple of years ago, I put up a rare post containing one of my own poems. It contains the line, "I find it humbling that I'm the same dumb fool for love I was 10 years ago." That might be the most unmitigated moment of autobiography I've ever included in a poem. And my poems tend to be not much more than heavily coded navel-gazing. So maybe it's merely the least obfuscating line of autobiography I've ever written.

Most of the time, I feel like I've pitched my emotional pup-tent somewhere approaching the more neurotic end of the self-awareness spectrum. Like anyone, I miss stuff and feel side-swiped when someone makes an astute observation of me that I did not anticipate. But I suppose I feel so knocked asunder by those observations because it's my own lack of anticipation itself that is rare. So, because I plumb my own psychic depths with some regularity, you'd think I'd have an easier time breaking problematic behavior patterns than some folks who can't or choose not to even see their own metronomic zigs and zags. But this is not the case. In other words, I find it humbling that I'm the same dumb fool for love I always was and probably always will be. I also find it comically ironic that I consider my snarky, bitchy, irreverent self to be no kinda romantic.

Last night, Jon and I went to go see 500 Days of Summer on opening night of The Nashville Film Festival. This little movie's going to have a smallish roll-out in July and, if it catches on, it may well pick up a wider distribution. And it might well catch on. It's a tilted, wistful romantic comedy of the Garden State/The Last Kiss/Wristcutters ilk. It's the sort of film for which I can't really help but begrudgingly offer up my affection, despite my knee-jerk dismissal of its genre. It has a happy-ish ending that still allows for more romantic strife in the offing. It has a skinny, brown-haired, unconventionally sexy male lead who can play soulful without coming off as effete (A Frankenstein's monster made from Zach Braff, Patrick Fugit and Joseph Gordon-Levitt parts would probably be not all that far off from adolescent me's masturbatory fantasy of all that is desirable in a boy.) And it has the overall tone of a Matthea Harvey poem: amused despair at the human condition. I don't know. Something in that salmagundi is what makes a romantic comedy palatable in my estimation. And so, I pretty much hearted this movie in spite of my much-cultivated scoffing cynicism.

Admittedly, it's Gordon-Levitt who works me over for everything I'm worth, in this movie, as in all others. Whether he's fucking a john up the ass as a rent boy in (the near-flawless) Mysterious Skin or slurring through his luscious drunken squint to give us a karaoke rendition of "Here Comes Your Man," (a song that pulled me from the depths of many a funk my senior year in high school) he inspires more affection in me than I knew I could have for a total stranger. I think it's his deep-down command of his physical instrument that I find so compelling. Few men as young as he (seemingly instinctively) understand their own bodily rhythms so well as to be able to shape them to each character's specifications without losing that great settled-into-the-bones aspect of real man. 500 Days in particular really does make the most of this gift. Oh, yes, we are treated to a tonally spot-on "I just got laid" choreographed dance sequence. Not since Ferris Bueller has such an ebullient expression of a character's physicality worked so well. Because sometimes it really is okay, even necessary, to let your movie indulge in that sort of celebration, even if you are a "serious actor."

However, what is truly noteworthy about this cute little film (and it is cute-- whether you interpret that word to mean something complimentary or derogatory) is that it seems to have found a wormhole in the art of making a narrative character arc. It's plot, according to the tagline, is this: "Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love. Girl doesn't." But that's only the half of it. It's more like: "Boy meets girl. Boy projects soulmate fantasy onto girl. Girl knows better. Boy gets heart broken. Boy suffers. Boy gets drunk. Boy makes an ass of himself. Boy quits his futureless job. Boy refuses to give up hope in spite of girl's straightforward rejection. Boy malingers. Boy begins to heal. Boy hits on new girl. Boy projects soulmate fantasy onto new girl. Boy hasn't learned a damn thing." In landing Tom, Gordon-Levitt's character, squarely back where he started, the film does something really fairly unusual. It shows us an example of such a deeply ingrained, problematic behavior pattern that does not get resolved and yet this ending is no less satisfying for doing so. In fact, it contains the thing that is absent from virtually every happily-ever-after ending: an acknowledgment that even the smartest, most self-aware folks are pretty much resigned to being the same dumb fools for love they always were forever after. In terms of genre conventions, this ending is notable because, really, it subverts the usual model in which the hero learns, grows and changes via the vehicle of plot-driven conflict. In terms of being a reflection of the human experience, this ending most certainly feels like home, if your home was a stylized land, populated with people wearing nostalgic Doris Day dresses and in which you get to make out on the model beds in IKEA, that is.

So, watching this movie with Jon was a complicated experience. Jon and I have had a rough year in the history of us. Last year at this time, I was dating someone and trying to forge a distance from Jon and this year, he's doing the same to me. Which isn't to say that I'm not dating anyone this year-- it's just that trying to keep him at bay was so harrowing that I figured I'd be better served henceforth by keeping a slot open for him on my dance card. A late-in-the-evening, hair-unfurled, heels-kicked-to-the-sidelines slot, but a slot nonetheless

And, nonetheless, we rail against each other and we cling to each other. This jackass (a term of endearment. I think.) has been my closest friend for the last 5 years. However, we did not speak, email, text or gchat for nearly three months in the very recent past. And until Thursday night, we had not set eyes on each other even once since last April's film festival. (Ahem. Unless you count a couple Skype-related indiscretions, that is. *cough* Skype is evil.) Simply put, we are not a couple. We've never been a couple. We could never be a couple. And yet we cleave to each other through petty argument after petty argument, through other lovers, through senseless beat-your-head-against-a-wall frustration that we simply do not process emotional information in similar ways. And the unspent sexual component hangs heavy between us. Yeah, surprise. There's that.

So, upon our first in-person meeting in a year, we went to see a sweet romantic comedy about unbreakable behavioral patterns. Our conversation afterwards was tense and a more than a little mournful. We both know we can no longer reach the level of intimate connection with each other that we've come to depend upon and yet we are utterly flummoxed in trying to delineate the parameters of how our friendship will continue from here on out-- if it will continue at all. Our post-movie conversation also had an ironic twinge that did not go without notice: hilariously, we both identified, to a certain degree, with Tom, with regard to each other. At different moments, I think, either one or the other of us has been the willing supplicant, wishing the other would just go ahead and fall in love already. At the same time, though, we've both always been aware of a element of wrongness about our closeness. We pick at each other too much. We are too quick to find ourselves annoyed with the other. We lug a list of past slights and fights into each new skirmish. There is some underlying fundamental level on which we just don't get each other. We know this. We've exhausted our capacity to discuss it, rationally and irrationally.

So, why, then, can we not just knock each others' names off that damn dance card? Why can't two not-idiotic, thoughtful (if neurotic) people jump off this Ferris wheel of relatively self-defeating patterned behavior? Because we're the same dumb fools for love we were five years ago, that's why.

Learning the lesson that identifies your foibles is one thing. Deciding whether to embrace those foibles or eradicate them is something different. Completely. So then, it is, no doubt, that moment at the end of 500 Days, when the decision washes over Tom's ever-expressive face, his choice to own his peccadilloes rather than transcend them is what earns him, as a character in a completely not-earth-shattering movie, my respect. To do otherwise would be swimming upstream. Or so I tell myself.

N.B. Sorry, Jon, for airing dirty laundry. Please don't kick my ass.

post without a cohesive theme

As a rule, romantic comedies get the least respect of any film genre. That may well be a somewhat dubious distinction. After all, plenty of other shlocky movie genres produce their fair share of filmic excrement. Horny teenage boy comedies, for instance. Movies that are little more that montages of cars crashing into things, for instance. Moralistically propaganda-ish ensemble pieces posing as politically incisive artish things, for instance (think Traffic, Crash, Babel, et al. Yawn.) But somehow, these kinds of movies don't seem to draw the same kind of snorting, repulsed derision that romantic comedies do. Not even from, um, me.

Plenty will argue that the reason your average romantic comedy represents so much despicable-ness is because they fill women's head with unrealistic ideas about love and couplehood and relationships that are both endless and endlessly passionate. And that they are all the more horrendous because they are targeted specifically at women in the first place-- a largely sentimental and impressionable subset of the population who are unable to recognize the achingly obvious fantastical-ness of the rote happily-ever-after ending. Such arguments often end with their authors throwing their hands up in bafflement, deploring the fact that so many of us girls will collectively fork over millions for so much drivelly, drooly, lovey-dovey dreck. And those arguments are not without merit. Truly, it is amazing that all Hollywood can feed the cock-less portion of us is a bunch of brainless, un-nuanced, blindly optimistic, hokey hooey. And even more amazing that we will devour it (SATC, anyone? HJNTIY?) And most of them are formulaic and un-funny and they really are at least as bad as say, The Ballad of Ricky Bobby*.

But just for a second, let's entertain the idea that we cannot dismiss the entire genre without consideration. Although few of us guilty of this sort of generalization will want to admit it aloud (myself included), I worry sometimes that half the reason we all scoff at romantic comedies is not because they are, without exception, terrible, but rather specifically because they are geared towards women and are therefore less "serious." Or something. This article from Salon.com discusses assorted feminist theories that wonder if the reason there are so few female novelists in the canon of English-language prose is because of their subject matter. In other words, it asks whether we don't give adequate credit to women who may well possess remarkable wordsmithing talents because they choose to write of motherhood, wifehood, domestic life and sexuality over things like war, international politics, or professional life-- the stuff of which a preponderance of the most widely-taught literatures are made.

To me, it's difficult to compare "women's" literature or film by these criteria because so little of the work I love written by women pertains only those "female" topics-- most good ones are still politically situated; they can't help but be. And because so few of the books I love that were written by men address only these so-called "male" topics. With regard to literature, this argument presents a classic false dichotomy, as far as I can tell. With film, however, it's true the producers get together to plot out their marketing schema along gender lines. Pretty much every major Hollywood vehicle is designed specifically to appeal to one demographic or another, rather than to comment luminously on humanity and life and culture (a silly ambition best left to those sissified indie freaks with their digi-cams). Chick flicks are, in fact, aimed right at the greater Pussy Posse. And for that reason, it's kind of all the worse that they are, by and large, so bad. It's patronizing. But also, their intended target audience is also part of the reason, I'm afraid, that it's hard to take them seriously. They're meant for silly, frivolous girls. Which means that liking a chick flick is tantamount to proclaiming one's frivolity and intellectual (effeminate) feebleness from the hills. Well, sign me up for that! Wait. Don't.

So, just for a second, I'd like go back to the source and remember from whence the grand tradition of the romantic comedy sprung. When we were all in the 6th grade and had to read Romeo and Juliet for the first time, we were all taught the primary difference between a Shakespearean tragedy and a Shakespearean comedy. Anyone remember what that was? At the end of a tragedy, everyone important is dead. But at the end of a comedy, what happens? Yes! Everyone gets appropriately matched up and there's a big ol' festoony wedding. Nobody ever scoffed at A Midsummer's Night's Dream. Or Taming of the Shrew. No one ever assumed the The Tempest was fit for chicks and chicks alone. However, in terms of narrative arc, those plays really aren't tremendously divergent from whatever the latest unmemorable Lindsey Lohan venture might have been. Now, I'm not comparing quality of text or even depth of characters here--I'm just saying that the plotty skeletons of Shakespeare have an awful lot in common with the bare bones of your average chick flick. And in that light, their tradition seems touched with just a little golden grandeur, doesn't it?

Now, that brings me to a one rare gem of a romantic comedy that I think does just about everything right. I've been known to say, every now and again, that Secretary is the only chick flick I really and truly love. Often, folks raise their eyebrows at that assertion, avowing that Secretary ain't no kinda chick flick at all. But come on! It's got all the genre hallmarks. Sad mousy girl meets well-dressed, if awkward, man in a position of power over her. Man and girl exchange some signs of sexual interest in each other. Man and girl progress towards a sexual relationship until some obstacle arises and they have a falling-out. Girl sacrifices pride to win man back. Man and girl get married. The end. Isn't that the same plot (roughly) as Two Weeks Notice? Classic romantic comedy format. Except...

For all the times Secretary follows the rules, it breaks just as many. It's a story of two fucked up people who just happen to have matching baggage -- which is why I find it legitimately touching, rather than corny. Plus, it lends credence and autonomy to the choice to be a submissive woman. Lee isn't an abused woman. She isn't the enemy of female empowerment. She's just a girl seeking sexual transcendence through what are, for many of us, the necessary vehicles of degradation and ravishment. And bless her heart for that. In our post-Girl-Power era, it's still tough for even the most pluralistic feminist definitions to account for a character like Lee-- much less for real-life women who identify both with her and as feminists. Admittedly, I get her. Man-o-man-alive, do I get her. And I don't think I ever found James Spader so sexy, multiple kinky movies though he may have done (Sex, Lies & Videotape, the other Crash, et al), as when he jacked off onto the back of her silk blouse. Gnuuhh. Regardless, all their kink and all their hot, twisty battles for power don't change the fact that theirs is essentially a sugary, tender love story. With a happy, sexually fulfilling marriage at the end to boot. We should all be so lucky. (Ugh, Marjorie, even this romantic comedy is still a fantasy. Snap out of it.)

And now I come to my recent reading of Mary Gaitskill's first short story collection, Bad Behavior. Gaitskill's getting almost as much publicity as Flannery O'Connor right now, due to her upcoming release of another collection, entitled Don't Cry-- but I'd had Bad Behavior sitting on my shelf, unread, for a while now. It's the book that contains the short story on which the film Secretary is based. And I must say, it really is a lovely little book. The film diverges rather drastically from the short story "Secretary"-- which is not comedic at all, but rather stark and unmitigated in its description of that luscious sexual margin that wavers between that which arouses us and that which horrifies us, territory that resides squat in the middle of one of my favorite cerebral terrains. In my opinion, this disparity detracts from neither story nor movie. I recall, at its release, the movie took some shit for being touching, romantic and sexy while the story is difficult, ambivalent and ill at ease. But really, they are two very different entities. Both good, just not in the same ways.

In general, though, I found myself feeling oddly at home in this book. Gaitskill's got a reputation for writing characters on the sexual fringes. Her books are populated with part-time whores, folks with STDs, submissives, public masturbators, and people who osmose back and forth between the all-too-porous membrane that exists between the homos and the heteros. And though these narratives are suffused with a sort of angsty, uncomfortable sexuality, she has a very light, very frank touch when it comes to actually describing sex. No, these are not stories of sex. They're stories of social awkwardness.

I think I've probably written a little here and there about my distrust of the self-identification model of literature appreciation. Every once in a while, I've caught a clip of one of the Oprah's Book Club discussions-- you know the ones: all the women sit around and say they liked the book so much because they really saw themselves in it. Um. Yuck. This always rubs me the wrong way. Looking to literature to be a mirror of the reader is such a solipsistic-- though occasionally unavoidable--project that I think it really cheats the text of a proper discussion. Besides that, most of the stuff I read is, by design, fairly outside of my own frame of reference, so identifying with fictional character is just not something I do often. So, when it does happen, it's pretty unnerving. Enter here my experience reading Bad Behavior.

I grew up the younger sister of probably the most socially adept, golden charmer ever. When my brother graduated high school, he got voted "Most Likely to Succeed," "Class Favorite" and some other superlative like "Most Congenial" that he had to turn down because he was only allowed to accept two. The superlative that appears in my own yearbook hurt my feelings so badly that I can't quite bring myself to repeat it here-- not because it was true (it wasn't-- far from it) but because its lack of truth reflected just exactly how little my classmates knew me. Years beyond my adolescent gracelessness, I continue to feel edgy at family gatherings as the inevitable comparisons between the my brother and I play out in my own head, even if they aren't happening in anyone else's. He's the laughing, assured goofball and I'm the sullen, moody, self-absorbed troll. In other words, regardless of table, you can always find me sitting behind the name card reading "Socially Awkward Kid Sister." This seems to be an intractable part of my self image.

So, when Gaitskill writes of people who bear much contempt for arty pretentiousness and yet can't seem to help participating in it themselves, I think, "oh god, I know." When she writes about the aspiring writer/prostitute who gets off on her lover's ascribing to her a certain "exoticism" and outre charm that she herself knows she does not possess, I cringe a little with recognition. Some characters talk a little too loudly, some overshare, some default into annoyingly psychologizing dialogue. And none of them seem to feel particularly comfortable in the company of other humans.

All of that is itchily familiar. So much so that I'm barely aware of Gaitskill's lilting and exact writing. Her artfulness is subtle to the point of subliminality and yet it is no less arresting than some of the best language-forward poetics I've read. It feels like it's been quite some time since I've read much fiction that didn't fall within somebody or other's definition of "experimental." As such, this 20-year-old books feels refreshingly straightforward in its diction and style.

I did try to read Gaitskill's novel Veronica a couple of years ago, and though I responded to its style, I put it down-- it was winter and that is one bleak book. I think it's about time I try again, though, and I do hope to find the same taut muscularity in Don't Cry as there is in Bad Behavior. Short stories are preferable for on-the-metro reading anyway. To that end, I've also just finished Rikki Ducornet's new book, One Marvelous Thing and am currently picking through Etgar Keret's The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God. Both entirely entertaining, both parceled out in blessedly brief bursts.

Unlike this weird, meandering post. *sigh*

* N.B. The blogger behind this post would like to acknowledge that she has never seen The Ballad of Ricky Bobby and is quite likely to be talking out her ass. To the fine folks behind the production of that film, this blogger sincerely apologizes if you have, indeed, made a film of the highest artistic caliber. It's just that she has her doubts that this is the case.