You Don't Need a Man, You Need a Champion

... like a hole in the head, to let the air in. That way you don't have to go farther than your own backyard to find God, by which I mean ass. Forget it, Julia Roberts, it's ELIZABETHTOWN (2005)... Ladies, don't get me started.

The image all across the bus stops of the city this month is Julia, perky as ever, her artificially-smoothened face resolute, determined to eat by herself or with a rich, gorgeous male, or not at all. She's a one-woman Sex in the City minus sex, city, or clue, smiling across an exotic table-cloth at herself. Look at her looking off at left. Oh if her friends back home could see her now! They wouldn't even recognize her, she's thinking. A smile forms at a distant corner of her mouth, pink spoon to the right, imagining their jealous eyes widening.

Javier Bardem is in the cast, presumably playing the same smoldering artisan from Woody Allen's VICKI, CHRISTINA, BARCELONA (another three word conjunction free title). And there's nothing wrong with that except that Woody's film was full of subversive critiques of the bourgeois mindset, while EAT PRAY--in its advertising at least--is a championing of that mindset, a pro-bourgeois message to the spirituality-seeking single women who ride subways and walk past bus stops, a message that the pathetically 'human' and self-absorbed men in your immediate environment are a waste of time, and you deserve better--a 'champion' in white linen slacks and rosewood necklace, a bronzed statue in lands where the dollar stretches and every man exists only to give you flowers and keys to their private piazzas. And it's only a plane ticket and a Xanax away. Go girl! Find the courage to quit your job and drain your savings in holy pursuit of the housewife pipe dream.

Hey, you know what paradise is? It's a lie

a fantasy we create about people and places
as we'd like them to be.
You know what truth is? 

It's that little baby you're holding 
and it's that man that you fought with this morning

the same one you're going to make love to tonight, 
that's truth, that's love!  ---Charlene
("I've been to Paradise 

[but I've never been to Me])

I haven't read the book or seen the movie, so what gives me the right to criticize? Exactly! Yet I can't avoid Eat Pray Love anymore than I can avoid seeing taxi cabs, bus and park bench placards, or subway walls. This week the media barrage that entombs NYC is all about Eating, Praying and Loving, and selling same. So I can write about it because I've been force-fed it, maybe even wrote some of it. I'm new age enough that I hope the movie or book is different than the ad campaign, truly I do. I bought the book for a girl I once loved, kinda; I'm also feminist enough that I listen to the Charlene song quoted above and I think, "Hey Charlene you know what truth isn't? It's that conservative anti-feminist agenda you're shilling and that man who bought you $500 shoes this morning is the same man you're going to accuse of sexism tonight. That's shallow, that's so 1980s!"

Me, my formative years were the 70s. Cracker Factory! Goodbar! Billie Jean King vs. Bobby Riggs! It stretched all through my Knapp Elementary School experience. So if single middle-aged women want to seek paradise without first having been to me, well, I'm 100% for it, as would Gandhi be, or Red Foxx, or Fox News. But the ad campaign of EAT PRAY stresses the opposite of spiritual paradise, i.e. the Pray portion of the trifecta. Instead of simple and true grace--as seen in the humility of Bresson, Ozu, McCarey, and Rohmer--the spirituality is really just a carny attraction, an obscene promotion of all things Eat Pray and Love-ish. Paradise deferred! When you're through shopping for prayer beads, ladies, step over this next tent, the truer enlightenment is waiting behind the curtain, and it's only a hundred dollaahz!

It's a cagey kind of trap, the spiritual shell game, and antithetical to feminism's and spirituality's original purpose of being 'free.' Instead of experiencing love and prayer in this moment (the only one there is --and you just missed it) and endeavoring to love everyone unconditionally, you're reminded that if you don't lose ten pounds, get your teeth fixed, and find a rich Barcelona artist to pay for dinner and another one who knows all the best hang-out spots in Goa after dark, then you will be a loser no matter where you are. Pray only in a very clean Indian ashram that's got lots of white flowers or you might catch Hep-C from the incense.

If you do all the right things up front however, and fly first class all the way, then you merely have to pretend to silence your monkey mind a scene or two and I'm sure the cute yoga instructor with perfect teeth will duly fall.

Most of all you must love yourself: see always in your mind's eye the vision of how cute you must look with a sky blue spoon hanging out of your mouth and your eyes alight with mischief.  Instead of cultivating awareness of these kinds of traps the EAT PRAY LOVE behemoth assures us that this new trap is guaranteed to be the real thing, step right up! The ticket booth is closed but the 'machines' are working.

Want to know if you're already enlightened? Ask yourself if you've ever ignored or blown off someone who wanted your assistance or friendship; ask yourself if you've ever not stopped to help a needy traveler just because they were poor, ugly, depressed or annoying and you were late for a lunch with someone literate and attractive.

The true saint turns away no one who asks for help, and in that sense they are like a prostitute. Julia Roberts rose to fame playing a prostitute and whatever lesson there is that irony (I looked for it here), Roberts assumes her character in Eat is more of a spiritual being than that high-steppin' ho. I hope after this film Julia realizes that prostitutes are the true saints of our age. Think about it: they give away their money in the name of love (to Jesus, their sulky pimp) and they accept all comers-- be they ugly, old, deformed, crippled and/or leprous--washing even their feet if the price is right. Whatever kind of love you want baby, how much cash you got? Enough to buy ticket? Enough to buy Julia Roberts cookbook? Soundtrack CD? Ticket to Goa? prayer beads? Cheap cheap! You buy! Hot rock on back mean hot time in town!

That's what stopped me when I was on my own spiritual road to perfect union with the almighty: God told me to befriend this annoying, obnoxious kid in my AA 'home group,' and I just couldn't, I wouldn't! And I knew even as I made that choice, the choice to not befriend a snot-nosed obese, stuttering sociopathic loser, I was already off the path, a fallen angel, a rogue samurai, Lancelot in the rushes --lost and thorny. God was already looking around for another saint to lavish love and orders upon.

That's why I can look at the ads for EAT PRAY LOVE and see in Julia's face a vacant emptiness that I recognize as the budding Kundalini serpent of awareness brought up by mediation class and yoga but then all-too-soon halted in mid-bloom by capitalism's innate sense of carny pitchmanship-- the stopping short from going all the way into full awareness wherein the unconscious is all fully conscious and your head glows like a beacon in the galaxy. Stopping short to gloat over lesser mortals because "this far is good enough!" My buddy Sabrina and I went to yoga every week for over a year together, but then one day we went to Urban Outfitters instead. In some ways, I'm still there, rummaging through the denim sale bins, my homeroom angel waiting for me to get my head out my ass so we can resume the climb. That's why I can spot the entitled 'humbler than thou' yoga chic when I see it: I am it. And I see my own sad consumerist clown cluelessness in every image of Roberts in EAT PRAY LOVE.

So Julia, as I creep broken and bloody past your smug and beaming poster on my way to and from my unholy job on this wheel of woe, I can only sigh and wish you'd awaken for real and stop trying to be this blandly petit-bourgeois everywoman that exists only in the minds of overly cautious Hollywood producers and Vogue editors. I wish you would become instead and forever the vengeful Kali you played so well in various parts of ERIN BROCKOVICH and MY BEST FRIEND'S WEDDING... I want you to play the role of the Magdalene, of Grace in the third Lars Von Trier DOGVILLE movie. Isn't it time you put down the fork and picked up the butcher knife? Have no mercy, Kali Sister Jesus! Instead of Eat Pray Love say what it's really all about: Consume, Breed, Buy...Kill! Kill! (Go, baby!) Now! There's never been a meal but the one in front of you, never a land more exotic than your own front yard, never a love but that which you have, and self-aggrandizing prayer is cosmologically uncool, mere narcissism in a kaftan, mere oblivion... sans beautiful eyes... straight white teeth, sans cosmetically altered face, sans... everything. So break thy inner bonds and rampage loose upon the land, as your colonialist forefathers did and be not so unaware of your contradictions and tourist coarseness as you shop and eat in the lands they once exploited and taxed unmercifully. Celebrate thy age, get thy whiplash mascara groove back on, and bring home thy hand-crafted Siddhartha! Six Dollars! Two for ten! Eat! Buy! Now!

Barbara Stanwyck in "Ten Cents a Dance"

TCM had another one of their Stanywck days today, and Tivo saved me TEN CENTS A DANCE (1931). Mighty Babs starts out a naive--though world-weary-- dance hall girl and ends up a wizened (world-wearier) dance hall girl, with a slow burn from cheery can-do happiness to furious ranting. And the dialogue sizzles with half/double entendres, as when a new dancer is explaining what the stern matron of the dance hall, Miss Blanchard, told her about dancing with the guys: "She said be very careful, but not so careful. She tole me to be inna... inamit..intimate but lady-like. To feel my way along until I got the hang of things..."

Hmm, re-reading it now, it's not so tawdry. But it's how she says it, and where she says it... in a crowded pre-code dance hall. "Feeling your way until you get the hang of things" is not only a double entendre, it's site-specific! We all snug at home and spread out in something called the suburbs don't have this problem today, but there was a time when people lived with no privacy, a time when several generations lived under the same roof and unless you were married there was no bed, however small, that wasn't guarded by at least some embittered gossipy virgin equivalent of an East German Stasi. You do the math, especially when you hear Babs explain Mrs. Blanchard's job as "keeping it hot enough to avoid bankruptcy and cold enough to avoid raids."

The whole issue of censorship codes and codes of conduct for ladies and gentlemen itself was, these films slyly reveal, once not fixed in the stars. Nowadays we're so trained by moralist abuse that we never even think, for example, to whip off our clothes and have sex in public, or grind up against a sailor during one a' dem slow ballads, leading to him perhaps climaxing right there on the dance floor. Apparently sex once surrounded us from all sides in ways long forgotten, as in 1934 the mangy Bigfoot of "the code" dammed the river of Hollywood history, obscuring both sides of what should be an uninterrupted stream of sexual how-to's and do's and doesn'ts.

Take the loser Babs weds, for example, played by the odious Monroe Owsley. Babs hasn't been schooled in how to spot a social climbing drifter, so she passes over the amiable, slightly soused rich business guy bachelor who "sees something very special in her," and marries a talentless Mr. Ripley who proceeds to insult her cooking, belittle her choice in wall colors and insult her dresses as she scrimps and saves on the nickels he throws her from the job she got him. Naturally when he embezzles money for his social climbing (he's a terrible bridge player) it's saintly Miss Stanwyck who goes back to the bachelor--now her husband's boss--to "earn" her husband's freedom.

This old warhorse must have been traveling up and down the states for years in that old version of pre-code cinema, roadshow theater, because every situation is played exactly how long it should and in all the right places to get maximum laughs and steakless sizzle. Personally, I love early sound theater-cinema like this, 1929-1931; the boxy static sound carries an oceanic charge; it always feels like everyone is underwater, like the oxygen is richer. It probably was. They have energy to go through long scenes without getting tired... or bored. Amphetamine flowed wild and free.

What makes TEN CENTS so good, too, is the complexity of Stanwyck's character and the importance of not judging by appearances. We're all set to moan and groan through a standard soap opera plot (Owsley is introduced with typical 'student' style nobility and ambition) but as the film goes along it seems to catch wise to itself; our innocent Owsley turns very slowly into the vilest of townies, all the while becoming more and more enjoyable as an actor. Stanwyck rises up through the classes, buoyed by moxie and a lack of attachment to material things... that's right you dumb social climbing townie, in order for the hot air balloon to rise, you got to let go of all the crap your clutching. If you can do that, you can be like Stanwyck and fall asleep while waiting for the rich drunk to come home so you can borrow money for your no good husband, and you can fall asleep in a threadbare old crackhead dress and wake up in the same dress gone double knit and cleaner and even satiny, just in time for a long near-seduction scene... like the fairy godmother spiffed her up between takes.

Stanwyck makes it all work; she's the Kali goddess of modern sound cinema, dispensing hope and sweetness with the right hand and smacking you down with the left. The film starts out all stiff and jerky; all the actors (excluding the "born smart" Babs) seem microphone conscious, and slow to enunciate, trapped in dorky types - the bachelor good guy shoved into the model of a straw hat college boy slummer; the weasel Owsley starting out one of those frazzled Odets-ianly earnest strugglers. But as the film creaks along, the oil slowly starts to take hold in the gears and the creaking grows almost inaudible. As it does, and these suitors switch their stripes, Babs morphs blissfully through the six stations of the Zen soap martyr--never lapsing from her perfect love into selfishness, tears, tantrums or even a frown--and then finally, from this silent film histrionic pupae, she bursts out with that barrelhouse Babs temper at last, letting her soul take wing and giving this Ripley the what's-what in no uncertain terms!

The censorship people's mistake was in thinking ignorant equals innocent. TEN CENTS A DANCE is practically a training manual for the battle of the sexes. It might show you the "plans" for some sketchy operations (the censors were always afraid of criminals "getting ideas"), but it also makes those operations public, so they don't work anymore anyway. That's called education, you grant to-someone else giving tartuffles!

Anyway, back to the past. When those brave hippie hunters finally scared the Breen Bigfoot out of the aforementioned love stream, was the current able to catch up with itself? Were we able to catch up with sex where we left off after thirty years of incarceration? No, we forgot everything. We ran wild, like the Lord of the Flies. Then, a decade or so of free love and everyone was dying; the 1980s came rising up on the crest of foamy institutional grade soap, Nurse Ratchett played by Meg Ryan, that was our half-shelled Venus!

But my friends! Now thanks to DVD and TCM we can begin to remember when we truly had a chance to be free. While the conventions that films like TEN CENTS were mocking have come back, we can at least begin to recognize them as conventions (enforced by a controlling elite) and not human nature. Even watching the film now it's easy to be mislead by its dated surface into thinking its all grandmotherly and proper, that it's gonna bore you or try and peddle some churchin'. No! Sonny, daughter, listen up! There was a time when Grandma and grandpa did things you'd never even think of doing (thanks to the code you don't even know you can). In the pre-code era they didn't fall for the wizard of Oz smokescreen; there was no easy placebo stopgap bullshit measures, no endless retrials and postponements. Come what may, come hell or high water, (and the water came hella high in 1931) you were gettin' a legit 'happy ending.' It's that endless delay of gratification that your giant capitalist conglomerate Miss Blanchard is counting on; she ain't your mother for free you know, and sexual frustration is the cornerstone of her wobbly edifice. Now is the time to topple it! Come and get some, and watch her Ratchet-y jaw drop like a '29 stock market... until you get the hang of things!

Drunkards of Borneo (1931/2008)

Ladies and gentleman! May I present my uber-gonzo/metatextual commentary on Cornell's ROSE HOBART (1936) and EAST OF BORNEO (1931) and cinema, and love, and the bible? It's not very long, and it's called DRUNKARDS OF BORNEO!