Weekend Roundup

josiah,

thanks for the film roundup. can't comment on the dead, really, though i rented 28 days later simply for the intro, in which godspeed you black emperor's music serves as backdrop. gorgeous.

interesting thought on eternal sunshine. i've often wondered how much i'll remember about my single life after being married. being 29 now, i imagine it'll be different than someone who married in his early 20's. part of what worries me is that i will, as with most other things, allow my single life to turn nostalgic, and thus, to idol. which is what Lost in Translation did to me. i agree that it was largely about "authenticity," which has become, in my mind, the prime virtue in our culture (The Big Kahuna is my favorite example of this), but it was also, more basely, about having an "experience." as a single person, i watched and thought, "damn, why can't i have an experience like that? i feel like charlotte after visiting the buddhist temple and not feeling anything. my life is not good. i need to go to a foreign place and hope for an experience." so when i think about marriage, i automatically think that married life negates the possibility of "experiences." which i know is bunk, but so powerful, still.

"I'm prone to think it had something to do with wanting a Kate Winslett of their own or something..."

Damn, my friend, that's a cynical take on me and my single ilk. Eternal Sunshine and Lost and Translation are both films about isolation, disorientation, and the aching need for another person. And I think I understood them. (They're about girls, right?)

Lost in Translation's strongest emotional pull for me was the feeling of discovery upon meeting someone new in a strange place -- almost the cliched summer-camp romance, but surrounded by the compromises of adult life. Marriage certainly provided a crucial backdrop for the characters, and I don't think I'll understand some of the relationships until I experience them, but I'm sure I understood, at least on some small level, the central one. And so would anyone who has met another person who made them deleriously happy for a time (especially in an awe-inspiring locale), "authenticity" be darned.

Eternal Sunshine, on the other hand, felt to me like a slow, cautious acknowledgement that love can work no matter how much you know about another person, no matter how much the fresh sense of discovery had vanished from the Lost in Translation mood. It's about starting anew in a relationship even with old baggage still sitting in the room. I suspect that, again, married couples will know more about this sort of committed fervor for another person than I do. But that's a difference of degree, not of kind. Anybody, married or not, can have regrets about a relationship, anybody can keep striving to make it better.

Anyway, I suppose I'm engaging in all this film crit to say that LIT and ESOTSM portrray two strikingly polar ends of the relational spectrum. One is mostly about a fresh spark, the other about slogging through difficult issues. But neither of these experiences are inherently foreign to single people. They may not even be foreign to shallow people. They may be (gasp!) universal.

You know that I'm fascinated by your observations on marriage, Josiah. You're experiencing something that's completely obscure to me. But I'm just arguing here that your fuller understanding of life via marriage doesn't mean that the rest of us don't "get" it.

Mesh, I wasn't talking about you, and you should know that.

But to get into it...

If you want a movie about - isolation & disorientation & the aching need of finding another person - of the type you're talking about I think All the Real Girls fits the bill to a T, but Lost in Translation does not. I think central to the angst-concet of the film is the fact that both Murray & Johansesn's characters were MARRIED and alone and alienated inside of that context.

Didn't mean to imply that you didn't get it, but only that I was surprised at my initial "singleness" reading of the film and the later um, "matrimonial" or something reading of the movie. Its not that I think the "singleness" reading is wrong, its just that its not the whole story and I'd argue (and I'd hafta ask Sophia for a definitive answer) that its not even really the focus of the movie.

And further, I didn't mean to sound like I think I have a fuller understanding of life or whatever 'cause I'm married. I don't, and in one sense I think I get less and less of an understanding each day. See above: I remark that I'm loosing the ability to remember what it was like to be single. Hence, I'm lacking the ability to understand what it means to be single.

You know that I don't think one is better than the other, just 'cause some might want one more than the other doesn't make one better than the other either. (again, not talking about you).

But on to the Kate Winslett thing. Seriously. C'mon. Just admit it, you kinda really wish you ran into Scarlett Johansen in Tokyo right? U kinda wish a funky haired Kate Winslett would eccentrically stroll into your life. Its ok to admit it. I just think its likely that the desire for those characters (or character types) is perhaps subconciously being read into the male leads and then being used to interpret the film as a whole (see your thoughts on "aching need for another person"), which I think may be wrong, in part.

I mean, sooner or later we're going to have to recognize our testicals as epistemic categories.

Josiah, of course I know you weren't talking about me, but you have been vague in your derision, and I shall drive you to specificity. My apocalyptic tenor has not been dispelled!

I would, quite frankly, give my left testicle to run into Scarlett Johansen in Tokyo. Or Kirsten Dunst, for that matter. (Kate Winslet, not so much: she's a castrating bitch in "Sunshine." I like my women a bit more sane, thanks.) And I think we'd agree that there's nothing wrong with falling in love with somebody on the screen. Anthony Lane describes such crushes as one of the great benefits of being a movie critic.

But where I'm still disagreeing with you is on your contention that my falling in love with Scarlett is my chief reaction, as a single person, to the movie. My reaction to both LIT and Sunshine was actually a sort of wistful regret, a memory of encounters and relationships I've had that have slipped through my fingers. The movies didn't make me feel longing so much as a sort of peace about the past, a certainty that my experiences too were beautiful. And Sunshine did something even more important to me: it suggested a way in which I'm not doomed to repeat my own mistakes, and how I might learn to commit to someone, and work through shit with that person. I suspect that I would understand that more if I were married, but I do "get" it, and it's the main emotional reading I had of the film.

Here's my point: Great movies apply to all of us. We can all "get" them, because they talk about emotions that everybody has: isolation, thrill with a new lover, pain over failure, etc. There are degrees of understanding: You get LIT's marriage context, and I understand the feeling of being lost on a grey day in Tokyo, all alone. But the only way that a person can't get a movie at all is if they're being shallow ("Scarlett Johanson is freaking hot!!!") or being pretentious ("I saw my own alienation reflected, and knew true sorrow"). But I think a married man (you) and a single man (me) can draw close to the same comprehension of the most important parts of these movies. Or at least equally thoughtful, edifying comprehensions.

And Scarlett Johansen is freaking hot.

I love you ye Jewish Bearded One. I will tickle your belly twain we meet again.

Mesh, my contention was not that you, as a single person, would singularly read the entire film through your right testical, only that I feel that a certain romantical whimsicalness hasn't been adequately addressed by many, in a self-reflecting fashion, in their appreciation of the film. A film like LIT for some (regardless of gender) is nigh emotional pornography is it not? There's nothing wrong with that mind you, but a spade a spade and all that, right?

Which, in light of my contention that central to the film is the marital tensions of the characters involved my suspicions that this is being missed and therfore sacrificed on the altar of hormonal cool might have a bit more weight.

To keep digging answer me this: what is your immediate and honest reaction to the scene where Murray puts his hand on the foot of Johannsen when they're lying in bed?

First reaction (visceral): to remember times in my life when that simple a touch communicated more than a book of words. This is accompanied with a sudden, complete affection for both of the characters. They've been where I've been.

Second reaction (the one I think you're hunting for): to sorta wish I was having that kind of connection with someone these days. Third reaction (with reflection): to admire Murray's perfect gesture, one that shows both affection and restraint. Gets me to thinking about what's going on in his head, with the wife and all, which -- my turn to be dismissive -- is so much more interesting than what going on with Sophia's little doppelganger Charlotte, who is young and dull like me.

I've descibed my reactions, and now a question for you, my beloved slayer of pretense: Are these emotionally pornographic reactions?

It's a serious question, because if the answer is yes, which it could fairly be, that means that every time we experience a vicarious emotion on the screen, that experience is pornographic. Because we aren't gaining the full measure of being lost in Tokyo, or jumping of a cliff onto a helicopter; we're getting a light peep at the feelings in these moments. We're being reminded of our own regrets, affections and fears, we feel that lightness in the stomach, and it feels good to remember we're alive. This is not all that movies do, but it's a big part of it. They use nearly pornographic techniques to remind us that we're alive. The best directors are constantly doing this: Spielberg, Cameron Crowe, Wong Kar-Wai, Wes Anderson, Jean Renior, and heck, even someone as cold as Tarkovsky is looking to evoke a quick emotion.

So the question isn't whether LIT is emotional porn -- hell, yeah, it is. The question is whether it's also something more than that, whether it's justified emotional porn, whether its portrait of characters says something worthwhile or just wants to jerk us off. And I'm convinced that even if a movie's message is something as simple as reminding us that emotional connections can exist between people, that justifies the pornographic nature of evoking emotions.

I see now that I've answered my own question to you. Clearly, you have me flustered, you old Socrates, you.

I think what I'm trying to say in the confused jumble above is that emotional pornography isn't such a bad thing, especially if it helps us understand ourselves better, which real porn never does.

There. Now I feel better.

The comparisons of LIT and ESOTSM are intriguing me. Hopefully Paige and I can see the latter soon. Kauffman is great, although I felt like Being John Malkovich was too sexualized for me to appreciate it. I don't really think I know what LIT was about, necessarily. The summer camp crush seems to fit, though. I can't help but read Jonez and Coppola's failed marriage into it, though. That's the one strange thing about LIT - I felt like I had to accept a premise upon which the movie was founded. That is, that the marriage was so utterly smothering and had caused Scarlet to lose herself. The thing is, I'm sure it did. Marriage did that to me, and my wife, and different points. At times, we've been each other's antagonists, and you could've made a movie about it and it would've been extraordinarily sad. That was one thing about LIT that was troubling for me. I felt like Coppola wrote it in the context of watching her own marriage fall apart, but knowing like I do the difficulty of marriage, I felt threatened by the characters' drifting towards one another and away from their spouse's. I told Paige afterwards, "I know I suck, but please don't fall in love with Bill Murray."

It's killing me, incidentally, that you're already getting to watch this season's The Sopranos. It'll be ages before it comes out on DVD. Is Edie Falco great? I thought her performance at the end of the last season she and Tony were separating was genius. I couldn't recall to mind a performance quite like that that had seemed as powerful. It's a shame that audiences apparently are having trouble seeing her in anything other than Carmelle. I read that she is only getting offers to play Italian wives. Of all the characters, though, she strikes me as the least overtly Italian character. I can understand Tony and his crew being typecast, but it's strange to me that Edie Falco would have trouble finding work. But apparently, that's the deal.

Mesh, sorry it's taken me so long to get back to you, but alas, other responsibilities, but onwards:

No, of course, certain emotionally pornographic things aren't wrong, of course not. But again, I never made the assertion that it was always wrong to engage in emotional pornography, only that some where doing so in their viewing of LIT to the greater detriment of the deeper story, at that point I'd consider it negative emotional pornography. It's sorta becomes a geek version of a Hugh Grant romantic comedy.

But to deal with the issue of Murray's hand on Johannsen's foot: I think Coppola is doing a great deal there with, well, fidelity. Consider that Murray's sleeping with that dork lounge singer wasn't really a betrayal of Johannsen (she got over it real quick), but was instead was, well, a character flaw that I think we see Johansen judging him for in her ever so slight & nuanced eyeballing of him at the door at getting a drink later.

It's almost as if she's calling him out for being inconsistent.

But onwards: I can't help feel that given the unbelievably potent context marriage provides (in general) and did provide (in particular) for the characters in the movie is a much neglected paradigm for understanding the film by our contemporaries and therefor a cheapening of the entire movie. Whether or not the elements one takes away from the film are universal is, well, kindof irrelevant I think if they aren't viewed as part of the whole.

But anyways, we've gotta run to small group.

You guys are both idiots. LIT is obviously about ungratified sexual appetites.