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.
i’m sorry, i stopped reading after “didactic rehabilitation”.
I didn’t catch the Pink Floyd reference the first time ’round.
Um, isn’t every movie–with the notable exceptions of those made/written by women–about men being irresponsible?
Ummm…. Nikki’s point is well-taken. And it might even be a bunch of the movies made by women, too. (I’m thinking about Campion here, or Kasi Lemmon’s “Eve’s Bayou,” or… Maybe all movies are about men behaving badly. That’s great!–I have no more need for hermeneutic sophistication. We’ve found the grand unified thesis.)
“Max,” “Eugene”–what is he, a 1930’s Bolshevik? Does he feel that Russia is ready for revolution now or must first go through a complete capitalist phase? How does he feel about the withering away of the State?
but, seriously…many of my favorite movies are about male irresponsibility: The Wild Bunch; Five Easy Pieces; McCabe and Mrs. Miller, etc. Or…are they less about irresponsibility and more about how the conventional responsibilities “we” are offered come with such a high price that many are compelled to choose differently, even badly? eh? Of course, I can’t deny that there’s much truth to what Nikki says. Are there movies as compelling as the ones I’ve mentioned about the taking of responsibility? and Is there a genre of Women Acting Badly?
Everyone here keeps mentioning Jane Campion. What did she do after The Piano? That was such a pretentious mish mash that I was unable to see anything by her since then. perhaps I just didn’t get it and was too distracted by the onslaught of Harvey Keitel’s nudity in every movie I saw at that time? bless him and his wang!
Why not? I could do a new post (called “I’m going to kiss you on the mouth, Kenny Rogers!”) in praise of the new Ferrell-male comedy Step Brothers, or I could track down Arnab recommending The Brothers Solomon to me, or I could put this any number of places… but it seemed worth returning here.
I quite liked Step Brothers, for its ridiculous commitment to its central premises. I love its vision of rage — as with many comics, rage bubbles continually under Ferrell’s surface, is a wellspring of so many of his creations, yet unlike many other comics, his rage is furious, foolish, and ineffectual. It’s asinine as much as aggressive. Adam Sandler seeks our identification; the same could be said for any number of other of those comics, where the boy wonders’ rage spills out onto all kinds of deserving folks around them — even Larry David, whose rage is honed to a finer grain of levels of indignation, even when most boorish, is sort of an audience channel for such sputtering disillusionment with everything around us. But Ferrell (and this film’s co-conspirator John C. Reilly), while playing on similar comic turf, plays the sport with a disregard for adulation that I think shifts the game in intriguing directions.
At first, the two 40- (or almost-40-)year old morons here do resemble the boys unwilling to grow up in most every Apatow, Sandler, etc., etc. film ever made. (As Nikki said ‘lo so many years ago, almost every film ever made?) They’re living at home; they’re concerned solely with their own foolish obsessions (masturbating to aerobics video the minute Mom leaves for work; playing Guitar Hero in your room, or talking to Dad about making beef jerky). But quickly we realize that Brennan and Dale are not men acting like kids. They’re not impish Peck’s bad boys, whose antics thrill. They’re fucking irritating. There’s a dinner scene between the two families, and the “boys” get in each other’s faces, and if you switched actors to any two current tweener stars from Disney channel playing these roles, you wouldn’t have to rewrite anything, except maybe to tone down the language. The film quickly cues you that this is not men playing at being kids. Their humor isn’t childlike, or even childish. It is children’s humor, but more potty-mouthed. The closest thing I’ve ever seen to it is the much-underappreciated genius of Martin Short playing an actual boy in Clifford.
Further, the adults don’t get off much better. People certainly act like adults. In fact, Brennan’s nemesis younger brother, Derek, *does* resemble the boy-men of Sandler films, self-obsessed and childish but also strangely successful. I’m digressing but his “adult” success is a mockery; the film’s counterpoint to Brennan/Dale is a nastier vision of the id convincing itself it’s achieved superego status. Even the parents (the reliable Richard Jenkins and Mary Steenburgen) behave childishly, concerned with retiring to a boat, with getting what they want. The movie doesn’t set up its two central yokels as points of identification, nor does it provide a realist/responsible context against which we read their antics — either to watch them learn valuable lessons or to reaffirm their foolishness.
I think the whole notion of the childish/adult, irresponsible/responsible gets blown to smithereens here. This movie seems to be like so many others we’ve seen in this template, but it is a parody of such films, amplifying the viciousness of childish behavior, dislocating the anchors in identification (with the kid) or transformation (to accept responsibility).
I laughed quite a bit, and I am always happy when my id can run off its leash at the most blatant and ridiculous aggressions. And there’s the patented Ferrell/McKay lunacy (“I’m going to kiss you on the mouth, Kenny Rogers”), a strange form of non-sequitur-driven rage that inevitably makes me laugh. It is, though, not as inspiringly strange as Anchorman, and its “thesis” about childishness is… let’s say unblinkingly performed, without much cuing or explication. (I.e., it’s less interested in making an argument than in fully exploring the dimensions of the world implied by that argument. Its satire is oblique; its silliness central.)
more mumbo, less jumbo
this may be as good a place as any to place a brief response to the hangover, a film which does not seem to have been discussed elsewhere on the blog (unless i’m somehow missing wherever it happened). we watched it last night and were diverted enough. it is nothing special. most of the pleasures are minor: ed helms is consistently good; zach galifianikis if often good, though too often synthetically quirky. the one really major pleasure is actually on the special features menu: an outtake reel titled “the madness of ken jeong” which compiles a series of improvisations by jeong that were not used for his character. other than that the film has nothing new to add to the genre of child-men behaving badly, and for the most part reproduces the genre’s casual misogyny, complete with a hooker with a heart of gold (hard to believe heather graham was once the next “it” girl).
I need to come back here and sell Kristen Wiig’s Bridesmaids, which I loved, and which lets her make her cupcake and eat it, too. I’m also watching Breaking Bad, which seems to be about a family man, kneedeep in responsibility and seriously ill, forced to do increasingly bad things to protect and provide. . . but is slowly emerging as a story about a good milquetoastish man’s propensity for, maybe even his pleasure in, doing bad things.
The second half of this post would have been quite enticing in 2008. You don’t know the half of it. Great series. Enjoy.
seriously? the best we could do by bridesmaids is a brief comment by mike in this thread? it’s true: this blog has issues with women. this is the funniest movie i’ve seen in a while–funnier than all the apatow movies added together–and i’m not even 40 minutes in.
and that was before i got to the out-of-control shitting scene! this movie has everything! it works on so many levels!
I gushed praise about Bridesmaids in a brief comment in the Cowboys and Aliens thread. But yes, the film deserves more. I agree with Arnab, and I may go further and call it the best film of 2011.
I’d go further and call it the best film of 1945. Take that Mildred Pierce!
mildred pierce was no lady.