Growing Pains

This week's Album/Film of the week focuses on two masterclasses in wit and subversion from the 80s, both concerned with adolescent girls: David Leland's dramedy Wish You Were Here (1987) and Morrissey & Marr's The Smiths (1984).

Not even Ellen Page's Juno can quite prepare you for Lynda Mansell (Emily Lloyd), the heroine (or anti-heroine) of Wish You Were Here.  David Leland's film about a witty, rebellious 16 year old girl growing up in an English seaside town in the 1950s is of a kind rarely made anymore: a character study serving as a period piece that isn't about a significant historical figure, or what we call a biopic.  It's a memoir of sorts, but it's told in the third-person, where no narrator is available to tell you that what's unfolding onscreen has some sort of significance to the wise person telling the story.  Lynda is just a teenage girl with a series of tedious summer jobs she can't be bothered to keep, escalating sexual encounters, and a father who doesn't understand her.

A big part of Lynda's problem is boredom.  There just isn't much to do where she's from except go to movies with awkward boys, work at the hair salon or the food cart or whichever job it is that week, and ride up and down the boardwalk.  The other part of the problem is that her mother -- her only ally in the world -- is dead.   Her father, a civilian navy man and general prude, is concerned for her reputation, or more pressingly, his own, as she goes around town hiking up her skirt and cursing people out.  The primary source of humor in the film is her fondness for vulgarity, but even then it's tempered with irony, as vulgarity in the '50s wasn't likely to constitute vulgarity in the 80s, and it certainly wouldn't now.  Consider Lynda's trademark yet fairly innocent insult, specially reserved for her father on most occasions: "Up your bum!"

Herein lies the paradox of rebellion, for while Lynda's crudeness is certainly a cry for attention, it is also the heroic nature of an iconoclast.  In addition to her father, Leland pits his heroine against another crucial signpost of patriarchal order trying to reign in the "wild" female psyche -- that of the psychiatrist.  In one of the funniest yet disturbing scenes of the film, Lynda has to attend a session with Dr. Holroyd.  At his insistence, they begin to alphabetically chart all the curse words in the English language, until they arrive at a word that even Lynda refuses to say.  Not because she's embarrassed to say it.  But because Dr. Holroyd implores her to say it, and it seems his motivations aren't entirely professional.

The scene serves to show the ways in which the patriarchy fetishizes taboo even in its insistence on repressing it.  That is, behaviors such as Lynda's can be labelled "taboo" or "other" the better to manipulate and contro'.  This is precisely the definition of "perversion," and Lynda isn't having it.  At least not that form of perversion.

Which brings us to Eric (Tom Bell).  He is a friend of Lynda's father, meaning he's far too old for Lynda.  The rebellious side of Lynda finds him alluring for this reason, while perhaps the vulnerable side of her wants to find an intimacy that is wholly absent from her relationship with her father (another case of perversion).  Needless to say, this is where the "drama" in the "dramedy" enters to the story.  Lynda becomes a tragic figure as she bears the consequences of her relationship with Eric, but, to Leland's immense credit as a screenwriter and Lloyd's performance, at no point does she come across as a victim.  Even if she is one.

If Lynda Mansell is the girl next door smoking cigarettes in the backyard by the pool, Morrissey is the sickly boy in the window upstairs who's allergic to the sun. The Smiths, more than any other Smiths album, could've soundtracked Wish You Were Here, as it shares a similarly arch, not to mention feminine, sensibility.  Hazy flashes of nostalgia pervade the album, whether it be for the simple guitar music of the 60s that Johnny Marr dresses up in his own svelte flare, or for the startling moments of childhood introspection Morrissey references all over ("will nature make a man of me yet?").  Marr's songs, locked in alternate states of sighing wistfulness, pouting, and tempered euphoria, evoke the seaside towns of Wish You Were Here, frozen in time, caught in a timeless dance with mundaneness and kitchen sink drama.

For the most part, the songs find a perfect home in Morrissey's tales of awkward sexuality and social discomfort, but it's not like they fit hand in glove.  For one, there's an undeniable morbid streak running throughout Morrissey's rambling lyrics (see "Suffer Little Children").  The production, which both Morrissey and Marr have derided in recent years, is stark and modulated, a far cry from the more pristine sound of The Queen is Dead and even Strangeways, Here We Come.  And of course, we must talk about that voice.

Marr's guitar riff on "This Charming Man" may chime perfectly well, but to hear Morrissey wail, "I would go out tonight but I haven't got a stitch to wear" is utterly jarring, all of which is to say the song is riveting.  I imagine it was nothing less than shocking and then hilarious to hear a man who might as well be singing in the shower moan "I've lost my faith in womanhood" and take the forgone tropes of rock n' roll as sex and turn them on their heads with lines like, "She wants it now and she will not break/But she's far too rough and I'm too delicate" ("Pretty Girls Make Graves") in 1984.  If Lynda Mansell and Morrissey ever met... now that's a movie I'd watch.

100 Essential Film Performances Part 2

Dorothy Dandridge in Carmen Jones (1954)

...And as promised, here are the essential female film performances.

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/special/section/100-essential-female-film-performances/

What do you think of these selections?

100 Essential Film Performances

Paul Bettany in Lars von Trier's Dogville (2003)

Ah, this is why we love the folks over at PopMatters.  The process of retrospection and re-evaluation of popular art is of course essential in determining which tropes get carried forward into the future and which get left behind.  If it was up to PopMatters, however, nothing would get left behind.  If we witnessed it, it matters.

A year ago, they presented a list of "100 Essential Performances" from male and female actors, and they rightfully placed as much emphasis on thankless supporting roles as they did the heavyweight classics.

This year, they're republishing the list, with a slate of new performances to be added later.

Here's the list of "100 Essential Male Film Performances," broken down into a few different categories.

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/special/section/100-essential-male-film-performances/

The female performances to follow.

Enjoy!

Lessons in Failure

Don't worry, this isn't a review of The Last Airbender, as that would necessitate actually seeing it.  But it is worth noting that, three duds in a row -- this one a catastrophe of proportions significant enough to end a career -- and the spectacular implosion of M. Night Shyamalan's popular art continues to enfold like a star gone nova.


Unrepentant narcissist that he is, no one seems much concerned with the question of "why?" as much as "why does he continue to get financing to make more pictures?"


As something of an amateur storyteller, however, the Shyamalan case is frightening to me because it seems it could happen to anyone.  Indeed, it's happened to a number of a widely celebrated filmmakers, from FF Coppola to Woody Allen.  This "it" refers to what I can only describe as a loss of mojo.


It's fair to say that the downward spiral, regardless of your opinion of Signs, became more pronounced with The Village.  Abandoning all notions of character and settling instead for the monochromatic grammar of "allegory," the film revealed just how tenuous Shyamalan's tendencies always were.  He could still work up a scare and conjure casually charged imagery, but in the absence of recognizable characters, the mannered, self-congratulatory artifice that lurked behind the surface of his early work, not to mention the pretense of profundity in his films' conclusions, lurched to the forefront.


Shyamalan's more recent work has been cynical enough to cast doubt on his talents in the first place, which is only fair, I think, because he's such a dick.  That said (and a number of my peers would disagree here), I thought Unbreakable and Signs, though certainly lacking the novelty of Shyamlan's debut, were pretty good pictures.  Shyamalan, it seemed to me, was genuinely interested in characters and their struggle to find meaning in some capacity of their daily lives; this was explicitly true for both the Bruce Willis protagonists in The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable and Mel Gibson's patriarch in Signs.  He respected his audience enough to develop even the most minor of characters, regardless of how silly the picture's premise.  Ironically, he appeared to be very good with his actors, getting good to exceptional work from the likes of Willis, Toni Collete, and of course, Haley Joel Osment.  The respect was mutual in that the audience was willing to follow these characters to the ends of the arcs, regardless of how ludicrous or manipulative the ending.


About those Shyamlanian endings: I've always thought it a bit overly simplistic to characterize his movies as mechanical exercises solely leading up to a "surprise" ending, for the reasons I've described above, but then I am reminded of how conditioned we are as audiences to procedurals.  Just about every show on network television follows a pretty rigid template, leaving the audience little choice other than to impatiently guess who the killer is and watch the rest of the show purely to confirm whether or not they were right.  Producers understand this phenomenon perfectly, so rather than try to upset the template, they cater to the audience's need to be right.


Let's take a guy like Hitchcock, to whom Shyamalan, in his better days, was oft compared.  Didn't just about every Hitchcock film you can think of end with someone falling, or nearly falling, off of a really, really tall man-made structure?  Mount Rushmore in North by Northwest, the Statue of Liberty in Saboteur, a bell tower in Vertigo, a window in... well, Rear Window.  Clearly, he liked this idea of falling, so he used it liberally in his films.  Good for him, right?


Shyamalan certainly takes a more varied approach to his endings, but the reason his endings are more harmful than Hitchcock's is because they play on the notion that movies -- and by extension, storytelling -- are ultimately just elaborate, cruel cons, and since the ending is the last thing we remember, this is a risky approach to take.  


Of course, the revelation of the con can be immensely rewarding, as it is in The Sixth Sense, when it illuminates that which makes us so ready and willing to be conned in the first place.  That is, our greatest hopes and fears and desires are literally played out on the screen in ways we can only abstractly imagine, and with the more respectful movies, the emotional, intellectual journey is real, hokey endings and all.


Shyamalan is still working the con, except now he appears to be doing it with a kind of malice.  It's happened before: Herman Melville reeled off Typee and Moby Dick, but then he developed a terrible chip on the shoulder after the latter failed to sell through the first printed run.  His next novel, Pierre, is one of the most puzzling, ill-conceived novels of all time.  The New York Day Book published an article in with the word "CRAZY" in it to describe his downfall.  The aptly titled Confidence Man, his last novel, was equally mystifying, though not without merit.


Weezer fans know all about this phenomenon.  After Pinkerton, now widely regarded as a pop masterpiece, bombed commercially and perturbed the critics, Rivers Cuomo seemed genuinely angry at his situation and developed a chronic case of diminishing returns, troughing with the nihilistic Make Believe and coasting on a serviceable single here or there ever since.  I imagine a narcissist like Shyamalan experienced the same anger when Signs failed to convince everyone that he was the real deal, and The Village bombed.


As droves of angry moviegoers flooded the exits after experiencing the thoroughly self-deprecating yet no-less risible The Happening, I wondered to myself why I enjoyed it so much.  Some cons are executed with such impish glee that you can't help but smile and say, "OK.  You got me," even when you really, really don't appreciate it.  For even when you feel that the author is laughing at you for indulging him, it's highly unlikely that his art originates from such a place.  


When Shyamalan set out to make The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, he was also making them for himself.  Just as he was The Happening and Lady in the Water.  They are all products of the the ideas he cared about at the time that he made them.  Now if only someone could remind him that character, not genre, is his strength, he may yet get back on track...