LOVE AND OTHER DRUGS

“How should a person be? I sometimes wonder about it, and I can’t help answering like this: a celebrity.”—Sheila Heti

Gyllenhaal’s always at the coffee shop, lately. And the other night, blind drunk, I staggered over to where I saw my cousin Luke and two others sitting in the corner of the bar we’d needed a password to get in (he had it) and only after I’d slid into the banquette—deep swallow of vodka, lime-meat stuck in my teeth—finally looked up and saw, across from me: one of my table-mates was none other than Dunst. Dunst inscrutable. Like finding Athena’s taken a seat in the bow of your storm-pitched boat. One wants to ask, of course, if when she’s up on screen she can feel the flicker inside, the way the 24 frames per second hiccup through her, filling (emptying) her with the gaps across which her form and visage must ceaselessly leap. Not the autofill of becoming but the possibility that one’s ghost already walks the earth, trying on completion like a stiff wool coat. I look up and she smiles her sly smile: Yes, it’s me all right, your stumbling was a stumbling-into, you must have given your dour alterity the slip…unless he slipped you. When a tray of drinks arrived, everyone looked at me, and I emptied my wallet into the waitress’s outstretched palm.

And how better theatricalize that flicker than to cast Hathaway, the nerve-queen, strip off all her clothes, hand her a video camera, and have her act the victim of rare early-onset Parkinson’s: tremors upon tremors, a quake whose epicenter is both her right nipple and the film-within-a-film she makes. Madeleine: “Why is the signifier of the artist overalls?” Don’t forget a claw-foot tub and a loft with amazing light. She falls for Jake, the charming young Pfizer rep with intimacy issues who pushes Zoloft and then that little blue pill. Has anyone wondered, is that a viagra in Morpheus’s left hand? Raising the question, does a hard-on in the matrix, since it is the essence of the material itself, by its presence re-actualize the virtual? I loved the 90s, driving to Scranton to see the Spin Doctors in my cuddly polar fleece. Because the American project is to depoliticize experience, anything intractably political bugs us—like health, like care. So why won’t this movie take a stand? But then, can we really afford to dismiss it? Because its hero hates himself and is lost and afraid to give over his life to love and nurture? Honestly, who among us would such a situation prick?