EASY A

"...the same way lovers leave their reputations..."—Rumi

The A-Team, Alpha and Omega, Easy A—so what does that letter stand for, anyway? She’s no adulteress, and Emma Stone confessed to New York she’d never cracked her Hawthorne (“My eyes fastened themselves upon the old scarlet letter, and would not be turned aside. Certainly, there was some deep meaning in it, most worthy of interpretation, and which, as it were, streamed forth from the mystic symbol, subtly communicating itself to my sensibilities, but evading the analysis of my mind.”). The tagline on the poster is that great withering phrase from youth: “Let’s not and say we did.” Weird phrase, because afterwards you neither did nor said. But in this case Stone does say, though her words collapse, the story shows, into the vacuum of the not-done. And yet isn’t our task, lately, to pursue the Act to its vanishing point, to make saying Almost All, to cede to the Avatar a reality nearly complete, and certainly more color-fast than the version it replaces? Unless the virtual doesn’t exist, now, either, because it itself has become too actual, in which case Let’s, and say we didn’t. The lie that gets the vicious rumors started involves a guy she invents, and since he’s made up he can’t really have taken her virginity, right? But what if she awoke, the morning after, to find, impossibly, the place between those long legs fucked? Not the cult of the Virgin Mary, exactly, but more like when you don’t go to the movie one night but then the next day you’ve seen it, somehow, and your wallet’s empty, and it’s already written up.

I like the way Tucci wears his bald. Clarkson can literally do no wrong. Ironic parenting, winking teaching, snarky teendom all swirl around the gravity of a few clips, on primitive stock, a black hole toward which they list. I refer to Cusack with hoisted boombox, Ferris upon his float, Judd departing the so-called breakfast club, Dempsey galloping forth on his mower/steed, and Jake Ryan, elbows grasped, ankles crossed, leaning all come-hither against the red Porsche. Mouthing “Yeah, you.” The shot that makes us melt. Is the glass table on which they sit and kiss, in the final scene, the same under which the Geek was, post-party, trapped? Carley says they don’t last—Samantha’s too smart. And those loafers below the khaki tight-roll cuffs can’t be cool forever. Then again, I just re-bought his exact plaid shirt. Breton: “The mind of the dreaming man is fully satisfied with whatever happens to it. The agonizing question of possibility does not arise. Kill, plunder more quickly, love as much as you wish. And if you die, are you not sure of being roused from the dead? Let yourself be led. Events will not tolerate deferment. You have no name. Everything is inestimably easy.” A is for Art—the one thing that isn’t hard.