Boner Killer
I’m a proud feminist, but I’m no Sady. I don’t quite get cisgender versus transgender. I took film theory in college, not gender studies. Even so, when Katherine Bigelow used the term scopophilia in an interview I had to look it up to remember all the layers of meaning it has. I remember talking to my film theory prof after a class on Silence of the Lambs and the backlash from gay rights groups about Buffalo Bill and how it angered me that women didn’t band together and complain about negative portrayals of us in the media. That was more than 10 years ago, and we still aren’t complaining and the image of women in the media hasn’t gotten any better. In places, it’s gotten worse (like The Bachelor, where women fight over a man like hungry jackals over a carcass).
I’ve caught a few episodes of Buffy recently, and was again annoyed by the fact that Buffy always needed to have a boyfriend. She may have been The Slayer, with the power to take out vamps and demons all on her own, but she would have rather been a popular cheerleader dating the quarterback. I prefer Veronica Mars, who was usually dating someone, but because she wanted to, not because she felt incomplete without a man. Veronica was awesome, whip smart and snarky, creative in her vengeance. Of course she barely made it three seasons.
I was reading Entertainment Weekly’s Summer Movie Preview issue, and was about halfway through the article on the Angelina Jolie movie Salt when I wanted to throw the magazine across the room and scream. See, originally the main character in the script was a man, but Angelina had been looking for a “female James Bond-style franchise,” so Sony changed the character from Edwin Salt to Evelyn. But they couldn’t just change the gender, because in the original, Salt saves his wife from danger, and having a woman save her husband “seemed to castrate his character a little.” And that sentence was when I started screaming. Because, really? Having Angelina fucking Jolie save a guy emasculates him? I could see a man feeling a little wussy if he had to be saved by Paris Hilton or an Olson twin, but Angelina? She’s hot, and the fact that she can kick most guys’ asses is part of her attraction. She famously enjoys doing her own stunts. And in real life, she flies the family plane, and Brad carries the luggage and herds the kids. I guess that means he can hit those high notes now, if the studio suits are right.
While the studio suits are worrying about women in film and TV getting too strong, the men are devolving into eternal adolescents. Fucking Judd Apatow. I liked The 40 Year Old Virgin, but I think that was mostly because of Steve Carell. His character was the most mature of the bunch, and I kept waiting for him to point out to his friends that their ideas about going for “drunk bitches” are tantamount to saying, “Date rape is a great way to get girls in bed!” But he never did. Superbad would have been an episode of SVU if it had been about jocks trying to get girls drunk enough to have sex, but since it was geeks, it was a comedy! The women in these films are thinly written and serve mostly to keep the boys from having any fun. Katherine Heigl got mean flack for speaking up and saying that her character in Knocked Up was shrill, and everyone wondered why she didn’t complain during the film. Seeing as Apatow cast his own wife as a boner killing shrew so uptight her husband has to lie to hang out with his friends, I doubt he would have listened to her ideas on character development. It’s a boys’ club, and they’ll pull up the ladder if a girl wants in to the treehouse.
The worst insult for these guys is to be compared to a girl. In Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Mila Kunis tells Jason Segel that she can see his vagina when he’s hesitating to jump off a cliff into the ocean. An act that she, a tiny vagina bearing woman, has already done. He makes a similar joke in I Love You Man when Paul Rudd can’t let loose and scream like a man. This is our new style romantic comedy leading man? His tits are bigger than Kate Hudson’s. If an actress wrote and starred in a film based on how she’d been dumped by someone years before she’d be seen as neurotic for dwelling on it. Segel does it and now he’s writing the new Muppet movie.
I have seen one movie that goes against all these trends. Of course it’s not American. I finally saw the Swedish version of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and loved it almost as much as the book. Lisbeth Salander has been misunderstood and mistreated by the system her whole life but she refuses to be a victim. She’s brilliant, prickly, and anti-social. Noomi Rapace does an amazing job with a character who doesn’t speak much and who hides most of her emotions. The original Swedish title of the book and film was Men Who Hate Women, which should give you an idea of how brutal it can be in places. I’m careful about recommending the book since it gave one friend nightmares. Hollywood is doing a version, and I’m sure they’ll ruin it with changes. First they’ll have to get rid of the scene when tiny Salander rescues her big, strong man of a partner Blomkvist from the killer. Because that could seem to castrate his character a little.
Up in the Air with Sisyphus (and spoilers)
Up in the Air got such great reviews, comparing it to the great old screwball comedies. I was excited to see it, expecting to finally see Clooney do a Cary Grant role with Vera Farmiga as a worthy foil. I’ve loved her since the American version of Touching Evil on USA. The trailers and ads looked great and funny.
I was depressed for days after seeing the movie. The thing should have come with a warning label, “Do Not See This Film If You’re Currently Un- or Underemployed.” (Though my friend whom I saw it with is fully employed and she was down for days as well.) Comedies are supposed to make you leave the theater feeling better, not worse, right? I read a quote by Farmiga that gave away that her character dumps Clooney’s before I saw it (thanks nymag.com!), so I knew that part didn’t end happily. I didn’t know just how unhappily until it started unfolding and my stomach started knotting up in dread.
Maybe I was expecting too much. I mean, a movie about firing people isn’t going to be laugh a minute, it’s going to be hard to watch at times, especially when real people are used to play the people getting fired. By the way, it was odd that no one started crying while being let go. In those situations, I cry like a girl, even while my brain is totally logical and trying to process what is going on and stop the waterworks while asking pertinent questions. It is mortifying, because once you start crying you become A Girl, not a professional woman in charge of her emotions. It’s nothing I can control though, and I try to make light of it if I can. I know I’m not the only woman this happens to, so I expected to see at least one woman cry while asking about her severance package. Didn’t happen, though the woman who got hives was amazing.
I think my problem with the movie was that I couldn’t figure out what Ryan Bingham’s journey was, what he had learned at the end that made him different from at the beginning, what he had gotten along the way. He had fallen for a woman, but he’d been rejected as a partner by her and it seemed clear he wouldn’t be happy going on as before knowing she was married with kids. He’d gotten his ten million miles, but it seemed like a hollow victory in the end. He had accustomed himself to the idea of being grounded and doing his job from the office in Omaha, but then he was sent out again. He ended up in the same place he began, just more aware of what that place was and what it meant.
That might have been the journey, it could have been the journey. Like Sisyphus Bingham rolled the rock to the top of the mountain, only to watch it roll back down. He got his ten million miles, only to realize it was worth less than he thought. He was working for it for so long, yet when he got it he didn’t realize it would be on that flight because he had found something else, someone else, to be interested in. You could see he didn’t know what to talk about with the head AA pilot, and looked almost embarrassed at the fuss being made over him. He looked out over all he had achieved and saw it wasn’t all that much. Then it rolled back down the hill, leaving him to start over again.
But if that was the story, I didn’t see the moment when Clooney’s shoulders dropped, when he realized that he would be doing the same thing over and over again, when he shrugged and put his tired shoulder under the rock and started pushing it up the mountain again. I think that moment was supposed to be when he looked up at the departures board in the airport, but it didn’t read for me. Almost, but not quite the level of resignation you have at that moment. Because it is resignation, resignation to the knowledge that your fate is set and will not change, despite your having changed and now being aware of how hollow your life is. I think Clooney is a strong enough actor to convey that awareness, so I fault the director. Jason Reitman has never slept in his aunt’s closet while trying to make it, he’s likely never struggled that hard in his charmed life. I heard one reporter refer to the director of the film as “Ivan Reitman,” an interesting mistake. I wonder if Jason Reitman has ever been fired; I doubt it as he hasn’t told such a story in any of the press he did for the film and it should be the first thing anyone asks him about. I think the movie was good, but not great. It could have been great directed by someone who had done some real suffering, who had slept in a closet and had been fired from work that was important to him. Someone with less knowledge of airports and more knowledge of the poor schlubs stuck in them.
