For a trip that was mostly taken for the purpose of meeting and, in that, shadowing various exclusively online acquaintances around their favorite neighborhood haunts and eats, I ended up spending a significant amount of time doing the one activity I said I’d like to not engage in if possible: watching movies. My reasoning was that, though I’d been to New York City once before (in ’97 with my family after selecting it and D.C. for my high school graduation trip) and had seen many of the tourist landmarks last time, I wanted to experience as much of the city from a native resident’s perspective, to the extent possible. It didn’t take me long, though, to come to the conclusion that since most (well, make that all) of the people I planned on meeting out in New York, it would’ve been naïve of me to expect any other outcome. As it was, I ended up watching no less than five full-length films in my six days there (three in theaters), and two shorts on top of that… to say nothing of the five screeners, seven videocassettes (many with a couple films each), and eleven burned DVDs that weighed down my backpack on the return flight.
10.20.04
Said backpack, a black Kipling vinyl flap of sack with an embroidered Martin Guerre dead center that was given to me by my father (who played winds in the pit orchestra at the Guthrie for the show’s premiere), was completely empty on the morning that I left from the Minneapolis airport, save for a few stenographers’ notebooks, my non-charge-holding iPod and a paperback. I was trying to remember the most recent airplane trip I’d been on and had settled on the solo ride to Syracuse I’d taken my senior year of college for a curators’ film festival (where I met Leonard Maltin wearing possibly the tightest, most unflattering undershirt in my wardrobe and surreptitiously stole away in shame after shaking his hand to hang with the rest of the convention’s rough trade demographic), which, in retrospect, was actually wrong. I had flown to Florida in the spring of ‘02 with the rest of my family en route to my sister’s choice for her graduation trip: a Carnival cruise around the Carribbean. I don’t know why I would’ve blocked it from my memory, aside from the ugly, freshly post-9/11 experience of waiting in a line of no less than 500 passengers waiting to go through security (and having our luggage opened and inspected twice: once there and once again at the departure gate, presumably because we’d requested standby seats on a flight that would be leaving earlier).
I didn’t realize that I’d spilled a few drops of my Fi-Berry fruit smoothie (that’s one more berry than “fo,” fyi) on the front of my Rembrandt-white polo until later on board the plane, when my eyes were drawn down to my chest after spilling some of my orange juice in nearly the same spot. As I attempted to read David Sedaris’ Me Talk Pretty One Day (the middle-aged male flight attendant to me: “Enshoying dat book? It’s hy-ster-ical!”), I couldn’t help but notice the little Asian girl sitting next to me, one of two whose waspish parents had overbearingly made her work on her homework while they were on their way to Orlando. When I glanced over to see what subject she needed to attend to before learning about how Disney Dollars bought you eclairs in France for breakfast and tacos in Mexico for lunch, I noticed that the headline at the top of her worksheet asked “What is Idolatry?” and the title of her text was something along the lines of Footpaths Towards Christ.
As soon as we were closing in on Newark Airport, the devout father of the group asked me if we were looking out on Staten Island, already stoking my delusions of vicarious residency, and I nodded yes, even though he was actually pointing towards New Jersey. No sooner than I had taken three or four steps out of the gate than one of my tote suitcase’s plastic wheels dropped its globby center axle and swayed obstinately back and forth behind me until the ring that used to be a wheel started overheating from the friction, smoking and ultimately reshaping itself to look like its vehicular counterpart of a flat. (I duly noted that Newark’s moving sidewalks were switched off on this Wednesday afternoon.) But nonetheless, I picked the suitcase up like a pro and trudged forth to tackle my transportation between the airport and Weekawken, NJ, where I was going to be generously given a place to hide while in town. I was determined to show my hosts Ed and Sal my preternatural understanding of their public transit by miraculously showing up at their door earlier than scheduled and without even having had to call for assistance once. It did not happen as I’d planned, and after buying a ticket from a NJ Transit kiosk to the Hoboken station and being told it was essentially useless as there were no more trips for the remainder of the day, I found myself sitting on my crippled suitcase in the Newark—Penn station unsure of what to do with the PATH trains. A few upset phone calls (and a trip to the information desk that left me with even more questions than I had before), and I eventually did end up finding my way to the apartment.
Ed would later claim that he pulled one of those classic “I thought you’d be a foot shorter” neck cranes when he opened the door, though that could be because he was sitting on the floor playing Metroid on his Game Box. As soon as I’d placed some phone calls to confirm the next few days’ worth of appointments, Ed and I took what I guess was called the cucaracha bus to Manhattan. At the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel, there’s a massive American flag and a banner that reads “Never Forget,” which led me to wonder exactly how many in New York actually were planning on forgetting. I received my initation to the NY subway system and then we emerged in, I believe, Greenwich Village. While Ed was on the phone with Sal (he was busy searching for Halloween costume ideas), I touched base with my father, who was more or less busy packing for his trip to Maine the following day. We got to the Angelika Film Center, and I ordered an apple from a tray from the café, as I hadn’t really had anything to eat at all since the smoothie some nine hours earlier. Convinced that it would cost something like three dollars, I was surprised that it was a reasonable buck-fifty. (… Wait a minute.) Ed warned me that subway trains occasionally passed more or less behind the screens at odd intervals, we settled back and suffered through the Stella Street preview. Only Ed suffered through Anatomy of Hell, as I thought it was grood.
We left the theatre, not really sure what to do with the film. It was an odd note to begin a cohabitation upon, and I’m wondering if we both didn’t slightly underrate it as a result. I still don’t embrace Breillat’s reactionary heterosexism (even if, as Jeremy Heilman suggested, it’s in service of what is possibly a horror story at its heart), but I will admit that she certainly knows how to light and frame vaginas. We returned the way we came, and when we got back to the apartment, Sal was there watching the newest episode of America’s Next Top Model. Moving from the erotic academicism of Anatomy of Hell almost immediately to the glossy commercialism of Tyra’s reality show campfest, I somehow finally felt initiated into the core Slant ethos. We finished the show eating rigatoni garnished with mozzarella, basil and sun-dried tomatoes and, after I had met the apartment’s third roommate Nancy (and her boyfriend Sharif, and I hope I spelled that correctly), we watched Altman’s O.C. & Stiggs before calling it a night.
I’ll admit that I’ve already more or less forgotten many of the minute details and verbal clues that Carruth only half alluded to in the first place to form what is, I suspect, a strategy on his part to get his audience to let go of the scientific end of his film’s equation and focus instead on his read of any number of concerns that tap deep into the psyches of men caught between their quarter- and mid-life crises: male camaraderie and distrust, fear of physical decay, and the fiscal-patriachal constraints that undercut the inventive enterprise. As for instance, when one character is asked what his capital-D goal is, he muses that he’d like to get the chance to punch his boss right through the bridge of his nose – a response I take to be far more limited and pathetic than liberating, as we are never shown his boss and, thus, his fixation on retribution is as esoteric as the mechanics of the duo’s invention. And I mention patriarchy because their invention, something of a time machine though I guess the closest corollary is TiVo (it allows whatever enters into its chamber to essentially put itself on pause for hours at a time while simultaneously exiting seconds after entering), more or less allows them to create or at least elongate life – the only 100% clear narrative clue comes when the two inventors are told that the fungal discharge that develops on the inside of their box (… um… never mind…) is developing and maturing at an exponential rate against its species capabilities, thus tipping the creators’ responsibility towards them). You get the sense that their mental descent is actually in response to the new burden of engendering life or something like it (they do mention the word “faggot” at one point, and the film’s wife character is a total wash, a Yes woMan bearing the scars of having had to adapt a latent tomboy façade just to play ball), and so naturally their first instinct is to use the box for a transparently chivalrous gesture: saving a female friend from her vengeful boyfriend. Carruth has mentioned wanting to obliquely harness some of the societal residue of the abortion quandary here, but if that’s the case, he’s as timorous as his protagonists are in dealing with women. Still, there’s no denying that the limestone-dissolving-in-concentrated-stomach-acid cinematography and laxly unprepared response of the characters to their own capabilities resonate deeply.
Given the first shot of the film is of a man sucking another man’s cock, I was almost prepared to dismiss all the critical gynophobia as completely speculative, but on the other hand, excepting for possibly the very first instance, all voice-over narration (first person) is spoken by Breillat herself, confirming that for all the presumed dissections into the minds of the two lead characters (a morose, sclerotically brusque emotional-dominatrix and a gay überstud perpetually dressed in creamy beige and strutting with a gait that resembles a rooster with fully-fluffed plumage), the philosophy is really the director’s own. (Which is to be expected, as her film is an adaptation of a novel she wrote earlier: Pornocatie.) After attempting to take her own life in the bathroom of a gay club – or, rather, putting on a staged approximation of the act (note that she cuts parallel to the wrists in a gesture that most other movies will follow up with the punchline “she cut the wrong way, if she really wanted to kill herself”), “The Woman” is discovered by the object of her desire… or loathing, or pity… or all three: “The Man.” She gives her gay liege an unwelcomed-but-tolerated blowjob in the alley and proposes that he come out to her sparsely appointed chateau for a series of nights with the intention of teaching him the majesty and mystery of her feminine orifice. A filmmaker whose interest in distaff cinematic sexual frankness, Breillat’s almost anthology-structured film then becomes a series of breakthroughs, both emotional-psychological and sexual-physical. Early on, flashbacks show little girls being introduced to the sexual puerility of malekind via bush-cave rounds of “Doctor,” and gay-to-be little boys are shown stomping on the “deceptive hardness” of baby birds in defiance of the maternal order of nature, and it’s probably safe to say that if you’re not with Breillat at this point, it’s only downhill from there, as The Man (played with all the puffy diffidence that makes Breillat all hot and oratorical by Rocco Siffredi) is increasingly taught how to go from objectifying the vagina (the lipstick and garden rake episodes), thereby making it all the easier to reject, to discovering with great awe the metaphysical superiority that comes from cootchie blood. (As though gay anal sex doesn’t also release blood, Cathy!)
Finding that trench of cognitive dissonance in “our nation’s” identity and laying a nice long shit log down the lengh (i.e. the film’s contradictions) seems to me to be it’s most salient benefit. (Merely calling it nihilistic as Ebert and others have done is too easy, and though the best satires can succeed on their astringency, it’s not all that’s at work here.) But at the same time, Parker and Stone could’ve delved into the contradictions a whole lot more and the film would’ve been stronger for it. For instance, the fact that most of those fag actors (I’m not acronyming it, because those two really mean that shit) have, y’know, actually played the Team America roles at various points in their real careers (which is a much more interesting hypocrisy, especially if we’re supposed to believe that this movie is a satire of the Bruckheimer propagandae — and how they swear, love, salute, fuck, and vomit bigger and harder than any other goddamned movie — and their role in perpetuating a culture of arrogance) is never really delved into at all, aside from Helen Hunt wielding a sword and purring “I’ve done a few action movies.” Yessir, it’s a real swing voter movie, in that you rarely hear swing voters talk in terms of being torn between how much they like both candidates.