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?

BURLESQUE

Just when you think nothing could be better than life’s four fingers inside you—here comes the thumb. Pop sensation Christina Aguilera plays a country girl who comes to Los Angeles to find love and sing and dance at a burlesque-themed burlesque club, which maybe is the sort of place where people in L.A. still like to go? Do they still do the swing-dancing thing in San Francisco, I wonder, with the Betty Page hairdos and the, um, Betty Page tattoos? I was in the Castro when Ray of Light dropped, but imagine when “Song for the Lonely” blew up. Bill sweetly refuses to believe Cher’s had any work done (and later refers to a famous L.A. street as “Sunset Avenue”), but Mad and I don’t push it, I look across at her after the Alice in Wonderland reference, and also when Xtina scores the Louboutins, just like Kristen Bell wore in When in Rome, and here’s Bell herself dressed up like Cotillard in Nine, and looking unexpectedly fulsome and depraved. What’s the cruel existential joke of the movies? You’re in the dark, no one sees your hands shake, you can let your idiot jaw go slack, you’re finally permitted to stare and stare at the thing and then… cut! Cut, cut, cut!

My sole interest in fame would be in having everyone know the gods prefer me. And getting special treatment. Everything one knows of the Law says that the wealth and power to pile pleasure on top of pleasure could add nothing to one’s humanity—but hey, rules are made to be broken. The only problem with stardom: you’ve got to want it so bad. Got to break out of the all-reality-dance-program-veteran kickline, save the old diva’s club, land the cute bartender—as in Singin’ in the Rain, the weight of salvation all falls to the ugly (no, but interestingly bow-legged) duckling because the rest are too-complacently lip-synching away. Presence takes a round from pastiche, pure voice=air rights, a column to outer space, a direct line to the music of the spheres. And the melisma rumbling up from that small but mighty diaphragm quivers the cosmos, and makes the very heavens cream.

MORNING GLORY

Daybreak, gentlemen! The daily five-ay-em pitch-meeting of the self. Rachel McAdams plays a 28-year-old aspiring morning-show producer hired to revitalize the sinking program on which Annie Hall daily demeans herself. The clincher, at the job interview: “I know a shitload more about news than someone whose daddy paid them to smoke bongs and talk semiotics at Harvard!” Come on, everyone knows semioticians prefer blunts. Is she just trying to get us not to read the shot that has her eating her lunch-salad from its little plastic clamshell while sitting next to the Gertrude Stein statue in Bryant Park? I mean, I only went to state school but the significance seems clear: language nibbles, rabbit-like, or laps, lover-like, at the event, it is not what is new but what is news, the for-some-reason plural (=hyperactive) nature of our encounter with the present, by which I mean that each morning we apply to our only face, or in McAdams’s case her really cute legs, the cold razor of the now, and that razor has not one, not two, not three, but four merciless blades.

And whose face has been there, who growls when aroused? She forces Harrison Ford (Extraordinary Measures) to co-anchor the show, and in return he tells her she has “father issues” and “repellent moxie,” and makes an uncalled-for crack about her bangs. Does he suspect she’s a replicant (she is, after all, a Plastic)? You’re watching t.v. and a wasp lands on your arm. He’s mad he’s not getting to do the serious television news. Huh?

You see what I’m getting at? Patrick Wilson tells her to meet him after work for drinks at “Schiller’s on Madison Avenue.” And then a little later we see the exterior shot of Schiller’s—the lemondrop-yellow “LIQUOR BAR” sign—which is of course on the Lower East Side. And why try to get away with that? Or rather, since they know they won’t, what’s the ploy? I love the mother, who at the beginning of the film tells McAdams that her career dream, by this point in her life (28!), is getting “embarrassing”—“I just want you to stop before we get to heartbreaking.” Raise your hand if you’ve ever done one of those Working Girl commutes, Carly Simon surging in your mind. Raise your hand if you’ve ever done one of those last-reel runs across New York towards the thing you really want. Or were you just running to catch a film? Actual conversation’s tail-end, overheard on the ticket line: Young woman: “So why are you doing it?” Young man: “Because you only live once.” So what if you run all the way over to Madison Avenue, only to find that Schiller’s isn’t there? Oh God, what the hell am I doing with my life?

UNSTOPPABLE

The only true genre—train movie—The General, Runaway Train, Under Siege 2: Dark Territory. And The Train, with Burt Lancaster, in which the flower of French art is loaded onto train cars by the Nazis and Burt has to stop it leaving France until the Allies arrive to save the day. All the while asking, are these paintings and stuff worth losing lives? With the implied, more pressing question, is anybody’s life worth as much as these artworks? “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” was always really about the aura of persons more than paintings. I caught Burt on TCM the other night, this time in The Swimmer, based on Cheever’s overwrought story of a man crossing the suburban landscape of his corruption and failure by going from pool to neighbor’s pool. Interrogating his soul along the way, or having it flayed for him by everyone he encounters. Swimming pools—shimmering, silvery rectangles, placed at intervals, into which he plunges in succession. Still a little ways to go.

If Train 777 leaves Fuller yard in northern Pennsylvania at 6 am, and travels south at 70 mph, then how long before it etc. Set rolling unmanned, by every mischance, the behemoth surges to its fate, or it’s better to say, brings fate like so much hazardous cargo to where it’s preordained. Rust red, steel gray, blue-collar blue, swing-state dun. So what’s unstoppable? The climate-change those coal cars evoke? Or Chris Pine’s temper—he’s got a restraining order keeping him from his wife. Or is it the working-man’s will of Denzel (The Book of Eli)? He’s just been laid-off—our ruin, too, rolls merrily along. I remember one night Aaron and I were totally baked, and he swayed over to ask me what was clearly going to be a big question: “Dude, do you think Whitman was smart?” Jeez, admit you’re turned on by power and people will forever question your brains. Chill out, dude, and relax, Eliot, and back off, Sontag. I’m sorry it’s too late to give Susan Sontag a big, reassuring hug.

HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS (PART 1)

“I’ll take a small popcorn.” “Would you like to make that a medium for just fifty cents more?” The origin of surplus—which is to say, jouissance—is bound up in this extortion, the way that what threatens to disappear is exactly what cannot be refused. As the poet said, nature is a language, can’t you read? The world wants hearing in the ear of you, it winks your eye. Don’t you agree that to call an orgasm a “little death” only perpetuates the fiction of its singularity, and thus simple exchangeability in the marketplace of satisfactions? As if it doesn’t have parts: the spotting of it, like seeing a man on horseback from miles off, the presentiment, like the one that signals a flock of birds to all take flight at once, the clarion-call of inevitability, the point of no return, like boarding the subway with a half-eaten apple, the rearing-up, like Secretariat, the flex, the break, like a cable snapping free of a tentpole in a gale, the rolling palpitation, like a python swallowing a pig, but speeded-up and in reverse, the final tugging loose, the ontological crisis typified by that question of questions, “Did you come?”, the primal grasp typified by that childish gesture of looking for just a little bit more jelly at the bottom of the jar, and a rush of thought returning like a dam breaking upon an unsuspecting town an hour after lunchtime. Thought replacing the grunts, as endearments will replace the thought. What’s that neat spell she does? “Obliviate.”

I read somewhere that this popular media platform for children was dreamt up by a homeless English lady. People in the audience are dressed in costumes and talking a bunch, as are the people on the screen, which is disconcerting as the film itself is disconcerting, meaning it has an avant-garde quality, meaning I have no idea what the fuck is going on. But I’ve never been more moved, both by and through the awesome. At the same time, it’s basically another internet fable: there’s a world inside this one, right, where one makes things happen by incanting words, where newspapers boast videos instead of photos, where teenagers learn to use their “wands” or “bottomless purses.” And where, isn’t it true, one fights with slithering death by testing one’s own tolerance for impermanence, for the part of life (all of it) that can be neither held nor even sniffed. Death’s avatar has no nose but a snout. I wonder who The Quibbler has published? That Luna is something else. And how have the principals fared? Radcliffe’s gone ratty, Grint broad, Watson hard. Why oh why must England age? Helena Bonham Carter, remember Room With a View, when he makes that question mark out of the leftover veg on his plate and tilts it up for her to spy?

THE NEXT THREE DAYS

It sure looks like what happens here is that Elizabeth Banks is convicted for a murder she didn’t commit and that when all legal options run out, with a few years gone by and her child slipping away from her and no conjugal visits allowed and a life sentence stretched out ahead of her, her husband Russell Crowe (Robin Hood) decides to bust her out of the Pittsburgh prison and initiates a series of complicated preparations that involve crafting a big Beautiful Mind-style wall chart and procuring fake passports and busting up a meth lab to steal a bag of cash and teaching himself to break into a car with a youtube how-to and using apps and finally carrying out the plan in a tense, no-room-for-error dance in which the breathless pair switch clothes and vehicles and on an impossibly tight schedule try to evade the law, grab their kid, and make it to the airport one step ahead of being put on the no-fly list and escape to a tropical haven and be free forever.

But of course, there is no prison. The need for cash, the bank-robbing fantasies, putting the house on the market, the elaborate plans and calendars and maps, the GPS, the apps, the packing-up to go, the close shaves and slices of luck, the running to make train and plane—this is a straight-up tale of everyday American parenthood. Prison=being busy as fuck. That’s why the turning point is when they realize, mid-escape, that they may be obliged to leave their kid behind, and she suddenly tries to jump free of their speeding car, and he pulls over and with the clock thundering away they sit by the side of the road together, in perfect stillness, for the first time, thinking why are we doing this if we’re missing the whole point. And then when they go back to get him what’s the biggest mistake Crowe’s made? He misread the children’s birthday-party invite, it’s not at the house but at the zoo. And the greatest moment: Crowe recovers their son at last and the mother gets out of the car to embrace him and he sees her and reels in her pure blonde immanence. How I sob!…I don’t care, let ‘em look.

The cops are great, reconstructing what happened: “This guy’s a teacher?” says the detective, of Crowe. And his partner: “At a community college.” Hey, what the fuck? That means he’s detail-oriented and dogged and can perform when it’s called for, and man, that’s saying a lot.

SKYLINE

Never underestimate the overdetermined—in the first reel, the Brooklyn artist visits his homeboy in L.A., the latter now a super-successful special effects expert set up in an opulent condo whose tackiness is only constructed to render the appeal of its creature-comforts more explicit. And so when the alien motherships (really, spellcheck?) descend and shine a blue light that hypnotizes all who look at it and draws them into the sky of their needfulness, of course it’s our Brooklyn guy who finds himself rapt, you don’t need a degree in semiotics from Harvard (see Morning Glory) to recognize that the blue light is the allure of the movie business itself, slurping up all the bagel-fed, Gorilla-juiced talent—so why resist? We’re not, we’re just waiting for the call, we’re not holding onto any pride or integrity here. Though by the same token I’m pro-slumming, that supposedly ghoulish act of fraudulent identification down the social ladder that every intellectual is supposed to deplore. Because what else besides erotic curiosity is going to make you shrug off your privilege? The privilege of loving everything.

But the motherships start sucking up thousands of people, and we see the bodies falling upwards, and automatically think, “reverse WTC” until one character actually says, “It’s like the goddamn rapture”—oh, duh—but a rapture of another sort. Because it comes out that the smaller soldier robots that fly out of the big ships each house, and use, a human brain and spinal cord, which explains the whole harvest. The fact that this is our fantasy—the true melding—is only confirmed by the way in which, at the end of all the chasing around, the hero and his girl don’t even escape as we expect but are sucked up, too, and his brain ripped free, and he becomes a robot-monster. I meant to say spoiler alert.

And then, the blue light is the light of the projector. Which makes the venetian blinds that our characters use for protection (and which, Foucault reminds us, Bentham hangs in the central tower of the Panopticon) the implied curtain that parts upon the stroke of the feature presentation. But this technology, for all its recent digital preening, was never really that robot/computer kind. The problem with cyborgs is that they’re expected to work all the time. Whereas the movies and the poor t.v. were always about a whole species taking a well-earned rest. It’s finally happened—the movies seem antique. One wishes to stay just a little while longer in the comfort of their semi-dark.

FOR COLORED GIRLS

Theater-envy, the other night, at the Beacon, baroque palace whose filigreed sunburst and pendulous omphalos focus attention through astrological channels back across which they may travel to planes of elevated awareness—hey, look! On the ceiling, two enormous nets bulging with balloons, and the airy realization: later, those are going to fall! On us! Amy and I got really high around the corner, we talk about productivity at the bar, applications we like, user-friendly web-design templates, and she: “How did we work before all this? At a snail’s pace?” I suppose—so how fast can we work? Fellow lab rats, we’ll soon find out. My paranoia boils down to one unanswerable question: Can everyone see what I’m thinking just by glancing at my face?

My second Tyler Perry production. A slice of life, in which a dance teacher is violently date-raped while her young student with big dreams becomes pregnant and is forced to get a back-alley abortion from alcoholic demon Macy Gray, because she was refused the money to do otherwise by slutty sister Thandie Newton who lives across the hall from a woman whose alcoholic, abusive war-vet husband not only dangles but drops their two small children from a fifth-story window onto the Harlem concrete below, an event witnessed by the wife’s boss, tough-as-nails magazine editor Janet Jackson, whose own partner is not only revealed to be on the down-low (“the pool-boy in the Hamptons, my driver, the guy at the opera the other night…”) but has now infected Janet with HIV. Can it have been lost on her, the echo of the image? For Michael, too, once got in a lot of trouble dandling a child from a high balcony. Her cat-mask the relic of those bygone vatic choreographies. We needn’t fear drama, or heed the voice in the back of the mind that whispers like a quivering child, asking, when oh when will those balloons be released at last? They come down bombs, or babies, or stars, or lotus blossoms. That lotus-strewn island no one can remember. The sirens go by in the street. I hope my wife waited up.

DUE DATE

My new friend Stephen’s got style—he stays at the bar while I go to the movie. And when I come out he’s still there, and I rejoin him as if I’d just stepped out for a quick smoke. But then, I’ve had quick smokes that changed my life. And Due Date changed my life. It’s like the Grand Canyon it celebrates—it was just another groove until someone named it, and now, wherever we are, we always feel we are on the side of it from which we desperately need to cross to the other. Addictions are, by definition, out of control.

I love trivia and quirk. But I don’t much care for Zach Galifiniakis’s web-based talk show, Between Two Ferns, in which he and his celebrity buddies wink and smirk at one another, as if it’s all a game. Fooling no one. Because how can Robert Downey Jr. not live for art, since he so clearly does? The absolutely gorgeous way he handles a Blackberry. Blackberry, blackberry, blackberry. The celebrities are gods, and when we see them—I saw Jake Gyllenhaal canoodling with Taylor Swift by the Key Food near Gorilla the day before it was even in Us—it’s like the old myth-time again, when they’d swing down to mingle, and under their darkling eyelids one stole glimpses of sparrow and sickle both.

Galifiniakis heads for “Hollywood” to become a star—the birth the title promises is his, from besotted liar to karma-king. Waking up in roadside America, that washed-out light, feet cold, jeans still unzipped. Seeking sleep, he braces footsoles on the windshield and rubs one out. Driving, exhausted, he gives in to sweet sleep and crashes big. Sipping the coffee brewed, by mistake, from his father’s ashes, and discovering the truth, he sips again. What a response, what pure courage. To be father to yourself!

CONVICTION

Journey: “The movie never ends/it goes on and on and on and on.” Motley Crue: “You know that I’ve seen/too many romantic dreams/up in lights/fallin’ off the silver screen.” Poison: “At the drive-in, in the old man’s Ford/behind the bushes, till I’m screamin’ for more.” Rock pays homage because rock gets it: the movies, like rock, are big, they don’t trade in those bargain-basement feelings like “satisfaction in a job well done” or “belatedness.” Time was one could speed fucking fast down Prospect Park West until one reached the theater/circle, then they put in that bike lane and yeah, sure, but it’s a whole lot harder to get your yellow light on around here.

Swank—not theater five (though it is) but the actress. Funny, I know a little boy named Oscar, I wonder if she’d like to meet him. It’s based on a true story, though I’d make the subtle point that if it were entirely real the Massachusetts accents would, well, they’d just be the way people talk. She puts herself through law school to argue against the verdict laid on brother Sam Rockwell, innocent of murder if not of the youthful trespasses through which they’d together dreamt of escape, not of unpredictable violence and excessive joyous hoots. A father. Where else can you stick ‘em, no one knows what to do with them, what’s a prison for, anyway? The DNA that exonerates him, finally, also damns him, passed on to daughter Mandy, a Leo—watch out.

The impassive face of the Law, struck at, may blink, quick as a shutter over a lens. So how fast can we move? And where hide, on a barren plain that extends to every horizon? The movie ends—reversal, he goes free, hugs daughter, thanks sis, cut to a photo of the actual siblings, statistics about the wrongly convicted. But no mention of what I heard on the radio—that six months later he was struck by a random car and killed. That they don’t tell you this! That we might sense it, instead, and understand we have but thought ourselves unblinking, when we've been too much and too often like children spared.