Two worth-your-time 2013 films with similar themes, color schemed posters and even titles, recently made themselves, like whores, available at home: IN A WORLD is a semi-autobiographical female voiceover artist trying to make it in a deep-voiced man's game tale, written and directed by and starring Children's Hospital hottie Lake Bell; ADULT WORLD stars Emma Roberts as Amy, a Syracuse University undergraduate poet who finally realizes she's not 'too good' for her job at an adult bookstore and is written and directed by men (a detail I will be addressing) and bearing a tacky tag line (make it out in above poster if you want, but I warned you). Both 'girl' characters start their films living with their parents, rent-free, and the films chronicle their respective launches into the real 'adult' world, reaching down for the big brass rings, stooping to conquer, and finding help along the way, mostly from sensitive boys and/or male mentors.
But Amy is just the sort of girl a sexual anxiety-prone male closet-macho writer would create, i.e. a 'doesn't know how hot she is' naif who needs a smitten male bestie who's good at organizing to make exasperated sighs and treat her like a child. That's fine if you're not trying to show someone adapting to the real adult word, the reality of which is that there is no earthly or celestial way a girl as hot as Amy wouldn't get published, laid, and invited to endless readings, even if she shouts her stanzas like a sorority pledge on her third Molson.
Although it's never clear if Amy's in school or out of it, she latches randomly (by finding his book in someone's car) onto a disillusioned middle aged poetry teacher mentor in his -nth mid-life crisis named 'Rat' (John Cusack). This clown does his own sewing, wears a ski cap indoors (both sure signs of male 'capable' quirkiness), and uses the word 'cray' (for crazy). Luckily Cusack is a pro, and clearly had some input into his character; he takes a page from the Bill Murray playbook and modulates his usual aloof warmth to include a complete ambivalence towards towards nearly everything including his own sexual desires. The pleased smile that comes across his face after Amy trashes his apartment has few equals, you have to go back to the 1982 Betty Blue to find another guy as laid back.
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| He even sews / just like a woman |
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| The Hall of Languages, behind them, where 90% of all my classes were held |
At least that element of ADULT is not overly cliche. But alas, there's a tall drag queen who lets Amy crash at her/his squat, and teaches Amy how to smoke weed and dance. Thank God s/he also doesn't get AIDS 2/3 of the way through and give Amy a parting monologue about reaching for the sky. Even worse: Amy gets a job at a homey mom and pop XXX-rated video store (an idea lifted from an old Mr. Show sketch) with a cute stockboy (Evan Peters), allowing for the bait-and-switch sordidness of the title and tag line but without adding up to anything truly subversive. If this cute XXX store had at least one sleazy element the comedy might have had some bite. If there were rats in the squat, or she had to step over junkies to get up the stairs... something!
Adult World, yeah right.
True story: I applied for a clerk job at a XXX store when I was studying up in Syracuse and let me tell you, it was not a mom and pop operation. I remember filling out my application and talking to the fat suspicious owner, who loomed down at me from the tall counter, while what sounded like a woman reaching a lengthy orgasm or else being tortured with hot coals echoed from the back room. I knew I would go insane having to listen to that all day so I began to seem unreliable (not exactly a stretch). "Ever take a polly?" he asked. He meant polygraph test, to assess whether or not I had stolen from past jobs. I told him I would try anything once, but I think he could see I was turning pale after only ten minutes of listening to those shrill, echoing moans from the back. He probably had applicants stand there talking as long as possible to see if they could hack the toxic vibes and nonstop moaning from the peep booths for more than ten minutes (there's no such booths in this mom and pop place, don't worry, honey).
See, Adult World? That idea could have been a movie, call it "Ever take a Polly?" but every edge set up for cutting latent baby teeth in Adult World comes to us already sanded possibly through rewrites and second-hand sanitization: Cusack's mentor won't seduce her; the adult bookstore is really just a sweet homey place where everybody knows your name; the drag queen bestie (Armando Riesco) is just a droll nurturer ala that very first trans/gay/drag bestie John Lithgow in World According to Garp; the cute stock boy supports her and straightens her out as needed, patiently waiting to bust his move until at least an hour of running time and 'growth' has elapsed. The whole film is like a giant velvet crutch for a girl who is not limping.
I like a lot of things about Adult World, but it makes me miss another film, Art School Confidential, which is unofficially set at Pratt, where I reside now. Do you think Jim Broadbent or John Malkovich in that movie would have been so rude as to refuse m'lady's request for de-virginizing? The very idea of refusing such a hottie is hateful to Americans!
That's not a problem for Carol (Lake Bell ) in In a World. She goes right after fellow Children's Hospital star, Ken Marino, a successful voiceover artist who her father (Fred Melamed) has taken as a protege in some twisted effort to have a son (his only other child is played by the always amazing Michaela Watkins). Ms. Bell has always been my Children's Hospital favorite and here she ably carries the film in the tricky role of being both a success and a little disorganized, struggling to make it AND making it, getting by with a little help from her friends and dealing with a dad who desperately wants to keep her from being a success for reasons he is totally blind to. Dimitri Martin is nice guy sound engineer who helps her get breaks but is too shy to bust a move, though he in turn is helped by an actually cool lesbian wingman (now that's original), and when Carol does get a break it's from a woman producer (Geena Davis) who has her own problems with sexism. In short, it takes place in a genuinely adult world.
Many comedies are stuck on cliche auto pilot for women characters: either their ditzy or ball-busting career gals, vain actresses, or doting moms, and all idling around until some pasteurized thirtysomething hunk with soft eyes materializes in the midst of a shopping cart collision. But In a World moves forward three squares to capture the awkward phase past the 'ditzy klutz in search of a man' phase, to chronicle the 'what goes on between the lucky break and established success' period. Every time Carol wakes up in the film I found myself worried she had slept through some big gig or audition, because I've been so conditioned to believe that if a film shows a woman waking up alone on the day of a big career-making event, she will wake up late and have missed her chance. I won't spoil whether she does or not, but I think it's interesting that I assumed she would, due to movies.
Much as In a World seems remarkably astute in these areas, Adult World never feels quite real, quite set on a tone or era or even able to depict Syracuse as it really is: Amy's apartment is way too clean; there isn't adequate representation of how everything gets crusted over with salt, especially cars and shoes, or the way frozen slush rises up in a dirty brown wave in the wake of passing cars and stains your trousers, etc. I did respect that her walls just had a Sylvia Plath poster above a mattress on the floor and she was half-trying to commit suicide (very Syracuse), and I like Emma Roberts overall and she's game to go the distance here, but she's still coming into her own as an actress of real gravitas; even when smashing Cusack's guitar she seems like she's just trying on acting class emotions. Of course, at that age, all poets are too young to realize they can't bum-rush greatness, so either she's an amazing actress or else just perfectly imperfect. Her dad is Eric Roberts! Julia Roberts is her aunt. See, that kind of thing would be cool to see in a movie.
It's that sense of playing herself that makes Bell score so much more points de la resonance. She takes risks and shows us things that might make her friends and employers mad if they think the characters are based on them. Of course In a World has problems too: Carol must be making money, so why she can't afford her own rent in a place as cheap as L.A.? She winds up getting a windfall of work, which is exciting, but a subplot with her sister cheating on her husband with a handsome Irishman doesn't really add up to much compared to the riveting central drama of the father screwing over his own daughter, who in turn is screwing the guy the father's screwing her over for. But half-baked side plots are not something to holler over, and the bitchy voiceover artist party at Ken Marino's house is worth the price of admission alone.
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| There it is again! |
The year was 1987: I scored big at a Syracuse poetry reading, won acclaim and the plum spot opening for Allen Ginsberg when he came to town. Unfortunately my girlfriend got sick and sabotaged me. For my big debut the month before I had been drinking sangria with a lovely girl who had been letting me do all the talking - everyone before me at the reading was nervous and wobbly but I was a huge smash. I decided to always be drinking before readings from then on. In hindsight I realized it was the flirting that calmed me, not just the drinking.
Flash forward: I didn't just leave it at not getting the XXX job. I also tried my hand at an erotic novel, figuring money might be found there (as Amy finds in Adult World). Mine chronicled a disturbing vision I had the year before at a Rochester Dead Show, tripping and having a major 'too many people' bad one, of a gigantic carnival of S&M torture, where people huffed laughing gas while chained naked on a spinning merry go round with an array of robot claw arms around the axis, whipping and smacking, hour after Bob Weir singing "Not Fade Away" hour.
A housemate had an old LP called Tortura inherited in a stack of interesting old LPs from his uncle. It was a very disturbing thing to listen to--mostly just the sound of whip cracks and impassioned screaming and moaning, but while tripping your face off it became oddly hilarious. On acid such ceaseless horror takes its toll, but only in a PTSD sort of way, and since we always had guests who wanted to hear it and we were always on acid our worldview devolved from peace and love to an endless torturing jail sentence. I began to feel that, outside our thin bubble construct of space/time, there was no stopping this deeply-felt soul torture, and that I had been tortured in the past and would be in the future, physically maimed and buried alive and hung upside down for days, and the album just ripped open soul scars I'd had far longer than my current incarnation.
That uncle also had a lot of Zappa, and his song "The Torture Never Stops" made its way onto more than one long drive / late night mix tapes and when it came on it inevitably seemed to be confirmation and extension of the grim existential cruelty begat by the LSD-enhanced Tortura. Zappa's low-sung lyrics about "flies all green and buzzlin' / in the dungeon of despair" seemed to reach me at around 5 AM, trying to fall asleep on some parking lot tent floor in a moldy sleeping bag, the cheap weed from some far off latecomer mocking my 'out of it'-ness. Everyone here was having a great time but I couldn't get past some block - so the trappings of decadence--LSD, weed, booze--that once liberated me from myself, seemed ot be a quicksand trap in which I could not swim out of but could not drown in either. And like the "torture" of Zappa, it never stopped. I could never get to sleep, the electric bars behind my eyelids blazing like whip cracks. Together with the album Tortura, the song also formed an apt summation of the painful truth behind the 20th century First World's curtain of blasé painless consumerist decency. My cult-starting tract, Shroomsadoplasticism, was never finished, and typed on a manual typewriter, so there's only one original - with the first and last ten pages long ago fell away... and now the pages are even out of order... so symbolic, man... hell, I'm not even sure I still have those soul scars. I still have the novel though, if you're interested. Wait, where you going, man?
A few years later I realized I'd never be a real poet anymore than a real erotic novelist, because I couldn't get into Hart Crane or Marianne Moore, and didn't really like much poetry or modern poets. Trying to understand Hart Crane was worse than tripping to Tortura. I did a bunch of open mic nights over the years but all that came of it was that the long-haired hippy freak M.C. of the event stole my hot girlfriend out in Seattle when I was much the worse of alcoholic wear. Then after a night at the Nuyorican Poetry Cafe (circa 1992), I realized I just could not endure the terrible onslaught of bad poets SHOUTING / in this same /STYLE / every other / WORD / of their / POEM. I'd really hoped Adult World's Amy was going to rant her poetry in that style. I'd be TALKING and THINKING in that STYLE for DAYS after a poetry slam. Didn't Emma Roberts even GO to a POE-etry reading to reSEARCH how to SLAM like a BAD poet? Clearly NOT.
Then in 1996 I lucked into voiceovers, mentored by a cool older lady from an ad agency that shall go nameless. Then I was told I needed to join AFTRA to do any more. I joined (cost, $1000) - then my mentor lady told me they weren't using AFTRA people, because of the writer's strike. I was on the road again... Screwed!
So in the early 90s, after I'd been graduated and loose in the uncaring world for a couple years, (working as a freelance direct mail copywriter), I read that our beloved poetry teacher Stephen Dobyns was suspended from Syracuse for using 'salty' language in the classroom. His suspension was picked up in the NY Times as the exhibit A of the new PC fascism taking over college campuses everywhere:
No one suggests that he offered to trade good grades for sex. He is not accused of sleeping with or propositioning students -- one says he tried to kiss her at a drunken party -- or of the focused protracted hectoring we might call "harassment." The allegations all concern language: specifically, what the committee calls "salty language" used outside the classroom at graduate-student parties. They involve attempts to be funny, and to provoke. There was one cruel sexual remark about a professor who wasn't present, and the suggestion that another might benefit from a "salty" term for a satisfactory sexual encounter.
My fellow students from his class, Abbe and Laurie wrote a letter to the Times citing an example of Dobyns' scathing honesty all three of us remember: there was a seething frat boy in class whose poetry was so seething with misogynistic sexual frustration that even though there was nothing sexual per se in it, just the phrase "huffing and puffing to her house on his Huffy Spitfire" brought waves of douche chill torture to our liberal arts cores.Is this sexual harassment? Not in any clear sense, but those clear borders have been smudged by university policies that refer to "a hostile workplace," to "patterns of intimidation." "Hostile" and "intimidation" are subjectively defined, as they were by the student who testified (hilariously, I thought, though, again, no one seemed to notice) that he felt intimidated by my friend's use of a "salty" phrase. He felt he was being asked to condone a locker-room atmosphere that might offend the women present.
There was much talk of protecting women from blunt mentions of sex. And the young women who testified were in obvious need of protection. They gulped, trembled and wept, describing how my friend yelled at them in class or failed to encourage their work. Victorian damsels in distress, they used 19th-century language: they had been "shattered" by his rude, "brutish" behavior. After testifying, they seemed radiant, exalted, a state of being that, like so much else, recalled "The Crucible," which used the Salem witch trials as a metaphor for the Army-McCarthy hearings. --11/26/95
"What do you think?" Dobyns asked us. "Should we try to help this poem or just take it out into the hall and shoot it?"
With that phrase, we loved him.
Out of politeness we refrained from applauding but most of us laughed. Dobyns didn't need guide rails from some PC Volturi to uncover a misogynist frat boy when he heard one and his fangs came out, albeit with his same measured quiet thoughtfulness. Times were different and poetry, at least in his class, still had a violent, dangerous edge. We went to learn poetry, to write it and read it, not to have our hands held on the road to incompetency's supportive slaughterhouse. Tall, cold, like a Howard Hawks and Max Von Sydow mixture but with no accent or drawl, Dobyns also taught us Chekov in a measured way that showed us one might be both masculine and sensitive, serious but with a self-effacing deadpan humor, quiet but with the kind of deadshot aim that means you don't need to waste words (or bullets), and an inflexible personal code that meant tolerance for everything but a deep hatred towards unconsciousness, misogyny and mediocrity. And with SU's thriving 'Greek' culture, date-rape, which didn't even have a name yet my freshmen year, was finally acknowledged as a fraternity ritual as ingrained as hazing. Were they persecuting teachers for language rather than returning to traumatic freshmen frat party experiences? When naming names might get you smeared and humiliated by the boys' rich lawyer father?
Adult World is clearly a product of Syracuse University's Dobyns-less lockstep thinking; it takes place not in my dangerous, alive, edgy Syrause from 85-89 but a PC dead zone of safety bars and bloodless ambivalence. Promising sordid or 'authentic' real world experiences -- squatter drag queens, XXX video stores, older poet mentors living alone and with darting eyes, teacher-student trysts -- it steers well clear of the disgust, disillusionment, the soul scars, the Tortura on acid afternoons, Amy really needs to grow into a decent writer but her ordeals are hardly horrible enough to qualify as soul-sharpening. Some PC chaperone must have shaved it all down from an R to a PG-13 like a furious Olympic curler. The drag queen doesn't even smoke pot in a joint -- it's bad for the lungs! --but uses a vaporizer - and has to let us know that it's medical. The XXX video store is just a friendly family of genial eccentrics, they all but sing "Lean on Me" in perfect harmony to encourage Amy to run after Evan Peters as he saunters off into the midnight rain to catch a flight. And a guy named Rat refuses to take advantage of a willing, hottie protege as if his name meant nothing whatsoever. This, the Adult World ain't! Dobyns! Dobyns... come back!
In a World by contrast is blissfully matured past this kind of naïveté. Carol uses sex and the lack thereof with an adult's savvy of the world, knowing how it changes things for the good and bad every single time. Her scatterbrained aspects feel real rather than workshopped in some hack screenwriting 101 class. She still makes it to her big jobs on time, and knows how to not mess up good things by being 'flighty.' A real artist, she's fascinated with accents and determined to master them and to capture real dialogue and the naturalism of speech. Take the above photo for example: in it her sister's tearing her heart out like here is some big cry into your ice cream and talk about boys moment (hubby cheating caught on video) and Bell is quietly pressing play on her recorder to capture her sister's emotional tonality for future use in voiceover and dialect coach work. That's the real trick to becoming a success, not to keep your eye on the big prize but on each successive small one and to never put boys over art, to grant big emotions more power than your craft, to never miss an audition because you're expected by the male screenwriter to hole up in your apartment with a cat, an afghan, box of tissues, soap operas, wine, and chocolates. It's what I call the Keith Richards life preserver. A devotion to your craft--be it guitar, painting, writing--keeps your head above water even while the ship goes down all around you.
Cusack says as much in Adult World, but it's one thing to have an older man explain it to a young girl and another to see a girl just fucking doing it for herself with men telling her nothing of any value whatsoever. Cusack even tells Amy to make mistakes, to 'fail better' but Adult World in itself fails even the fine art of failing. There's something a little off about a joint written by a boy about a girl taking life lessons from another boy, and then not even following that advice, delivering a stale set of characters that only the strong acting of the players can freshen (unless you find the nurturing drag queen bestie of the frazzled heroine thing still subversive).
If not, well, PC chaperones can clean up 42nd Street all they want, can ban smoking and can nanny state a poet's life into irrelevance, but in a real adult world the torture never stops. Suicide isn't just a joke, it's a real option many artists take. If Adult World Amy ever wants to really want to find out what that sort of true life experience is, what true poetry is, she'd best make some genuinely bad decisions, fast, like suffering through the voiceover of Prozac Nation, listening to Tortura on acid, or dying accidentally of autoerotic asphyxiation (as out guitarist did, two weeks before the Lockerbie bombing killed 30 of my classmates - what a year!). Finding a career writing erotica before you even lose your virginity doesn't really count as truth, he said, knowing of what he speaks, gesturing vaguely at the 'world' from the vantage point of his filth-encrusted podium of flies (all green and buzzlin'), rose thorn whip welts, funerals, and whores! (my voiceover demo reel here --interested parties contact erichk9@aol.com -- and weep).
NOTES:
1. Strangely enough, those two films are very highly praised yet I can't stand them, but I love Jennifer's Body and Margot at the Wedding, which aren't.. hmmm
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