I love the episodes when they go to the movies on Seinfeld. Some drama, tonight, because the wrong time was listed on the web, but the ticket girl: “We don’t control that, they control that in, like, Virginia.” I shoot back a withering look. The fight over customer service is worth having—a way to confirm our mutual commitments—but don’t try to win. Remember when Jerry realizes he’s Even Steven? Remember what Elaine wants to see instead of The English Patient? Sack Lunch. A whole family, on the poster, stands inside a paper bag, and she, looking at it, giggling, to her date: “Don't you wanna know how they got in there?” And then, pensive: “So d'you think they got shrunk down, or is it just a giant sack?”
Like all great boxing movies, this is less about punching than punch-taking. Surely the genre that allows all others to exist, the ur-genre that authorizes our shared struggle to archive the light reflected, on a handful of hallowed L.A. afternoons, from the bodies of a few spectacular persons. Marky Mark’s unreal shoulders and vast, gleaming back. Amy (Julie!) Adams’s snow-whiteness, Christian Bale’s gaunt wolf. We sure like looking at gritty Massachusetts, don’t we, and hearing its vowels of swallowed complaint. The ramshackle avocado-green crackhouse of our reveries. The problem with deploring addiction is that suddenly one finds oneself in the position of spouting every kind of false, awkward lie about life meaning something. Whereas the taste of the crack bypasses rhetoric to freak the opalescent lens.
The fight is with the head. The fight is with the body. The fight is with the brother. The fight is with the mother. The fight is with the story. Based on a true. As in Conviction, the last shot’s of the real Micky and his bro, mugging for a camera they don’t entirely trust. “You Hollywood people…” says Dickie, and it really, really feels like he means us, too.
The ramshackle avocado-green crackhouse of our reveries.
ReplyDeleteYeah, what is this with Massachusetts? Mystic River, The Town--all movies that make a certain desperate lost-ness seem gritty and real. There's not even nostalgia in these movies. Some movies of faded Manhattan invoke a faded glamour--ah, the glory that was Rome! But in these Massachusetts movies, it sucks there, it has always sucked there, it will always suck there. If they made Working Girl in Massachusetts, the ferry would run the other way.
But it's not as if rejecting the fakers makes anyone one bit happier. Despite its overt arguments, the Matrix compellingly demonstrates that we would all, all, all take the blue pill. I say this because despite the protagonists' virtue, the real is obviously in the Matrix, because that's where they fight the most important battles. Only Socrates would take off his glasses, and that so he could spend the rest of his life preening and hectoring the rest of us. But based on these recent movies, I have to give it up for Massholes, all of whom would fucking rather fucking live in fucking squalor.