Irresponsibility

Arnab told me to post this. Probably so he can comment meanly about it, or more to the point me. Boo hoo.

Is this the blog yet? I was going to right you all [right after complaints about "Sideways" started zipping around via email], to share some of my opinions, but my child–whom I call Eugene, although his name is allegedly Max, but whom I call (as I mentioned) Eugene as a part of an experiment, to test a theory of mine [My theory is: Kids are stupid. So far, this has been borne out, by the constant jabbering of gibberish and the tendency to fall down.]–my child was running around with an axe, and I had to protect him. This anecdote may also count, for those in need like Bruns, as teaching tips: no axe-running. Call ‘em all Eugene.

Three–no, let’s say four–of my favorite films of last year were about men grappling with the consequences of their irresponsibility… or maybe it’d be better to say that their irresponsibility was not the object of scorn nor the subject for didactic rehabilitation, but in true generous comic spirit, each film is about the more complex pleasures of taking responsibility. (Even as we get–hurray!–the simpler vicarious joy of watching them behave really, really badly.)

I’d suggest that “Anchorman” is about the airiest and most absurdly celebratory display of childish sexism and ignorance I’ve ever seen. Will Ferrell, trying to make a subtle pass at his new co-anchor Christina Applegate, sprouts an enormous erection–and then, slightly embarassed but even prouder, yells to everyone in the room that he has an enormous erection and they should not look at it. Watching the film, we get to nod at the consequences–he loses his “lover” and his job, before finally saving her from Kodiak bears and regaining everything he’d lost–but this is almost an afterthought, a redundancy –there’s really no need to punish this man for his misbehavior, as it is so riotously ineffective. He makes patently obvious prank calls to her, and congratulates himself on what seems to him like successful hoodwinking. And his worst insult, among the many tossed at her, is to call her a “pirate hooker.” Even his dream sequence–while they make sweet, sweet love–envisions the two prancing on unicorns and sliding down a rainbow. “Anchorman” is happy to let us wallow in the childish realm of the id, and generously never, ever tries to make us grow up. (And a sidenote, off the motif I’m beating you with: Brick Tamblyn, the weatherman, is more than childish, he’s … well, a brick. He rarely knows what’s going on, even when he’s killing a man with a trident, but keeps a gleeful smile and glare on his face.)

And growing up, so the songs say, is painful. Which is where the other two comedies come in, recognizing the pain–even the need to experience the pain–but resisting, absolutely [well... possibly] refuting the call for punishment. In “Sideways,” the sidekick Thomas Haden Church gets to play the rascal, the one who unleashes his (again, like “Anchorman,” patently ineffective) desire and aggression all around, and he causes pain … but I don’t think we’re asked, and nor should we want, to punish him for it. Instead, as he crashes his best friend’s car into a tree, but fails to cause enough damage, we (like his friend) want to join in and help him crash it again. Or to rescue his wallet from the home of his most recent botched conquest, and to risk being chased by an angry nude biker-looking guy. Church’s character–and the badly-behaved character in all of these films–invites us to risk desire, to not stifle or abstractly rationalize our pleasures, even as in this example (unlike “Anchorman”) consequences are occasionally real, direct, dire. In fact, precisely because of the consequences, the rewards of risking and relishing desire become more complexly wondrous–we should all drink our cherished bottle of wine over a burger, then knock on someone’s door, just to see if they’ll answer. How can one fault a film that invites us to accept both our irresponsibility and our responsibility, in one fell swoop?

“Eternal Sunshine” offers the same story, but it’s got an even sharper sense of the interdependence of pleasure and loss. While the characters in “Sideways” and “Anchorman” seek a return to childish behavior, “Sunshine” points out–pretty clearly–that being a child was just as hard, just as tinged by shame as by gleeful dismissal of boundaries. If we kill the bird, we keep remembering it; even as we wait under the table happily spying on Mom, we wonder why she won’t pick us up. I won’t go on (and on) any more than I have already, except to say that once again this film invites us to consider how acting on our desires can liberate us, even as it binds us to others, to ethics, to our past. We can’t–and wouldn’t want–to retreat into the past, but breaking away from it, into adulthood, is a more painful kind of loss altogether.

Blah blah. I said a fourth film, right? This is a stretch, but the Korean revenger’s tragedy, “Oldboy,” opens with a man drunk and shouting and crying in a police station. Moments later, he’s abducted and placed in a solitary room for 15 years of his life. His bad behavior–we sense immediately, and then learn more fully as the film progresses–is very completely punished. And in this way “Oldboy” seems a radical shift from the other films; but set aside what happens to the characters (who cares? they ain’t real), and how they suffer–and instead consider how our experience of the film sends us through the same affective cycles: we relish the violent revenge (yes, we do, even if we say we don’t), we feel horrified at the rationale for the hero’s suffering and the consequences he endures,…. and I’m probably the only person who’s seen this, so–go to eBay and get a hold of it. You’ll see, once again, that I’m right. But (here’s another teaching tip) I don’t think I should spell it all out for you.

Okay, Eugene calls.