Dystopian Parables for the Masses: DIVERGENT, CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER

Jump, baby, Jump! Jump into the Uncanny Valley, where chicks and hunks in black and silver body suit--kissers slicked over with CGI-bearing golden-brownish glow airbrush make-up--pretend to fight an onrush of enforced digital sameness, until the snake eats itself, the Uncanny Valley fills with ones and zeros and is so level the need for actors disappears altogether. They just float on the surface, newly born. And then mom starts singing "Clash City Rockers" (1) because it turns up on a car commercial, "nothing rocks the town like the Clash City Rockers... except the new Toyota Camry." 

Then, and only then, I'll know it's too late... even for me.

I'm old enough, even too old, to accept the brutal truth, which is that the kids today don't know there's even a brutal truth left to accept, which means there's no longer a truth at all, just the brutal. "Clash City Rockers" isn't cool anymore it's 'grampa's music' and hence undesirable, unless kids today are cool enough to realize their generation's music is the kind of squaresville Glen Miller nonsense that rock was invented to counteract. now grown to anthem size, filling stadiums rather than ballrooms. In the70s-80s, we punks and poseurs didn't have to decide if we were goth or emo or strait-edge or hardcore or Edward or Jacob or Erudite or Dauntless. or closeted or 'out' or bisexual: we were all just punks or (more likely) poseurs, smoking ourselves dizzy at City Gardens waiting for The Ramones or Replacements' All-Ages show to start. But today you need to pick your clique and must abide by its rules and brush off the rest, and if you jump bandwagons no one will talk to you and your reward for being a stunted in all other ways but artistic is the agony of another Saturday night spent alone in your room reading manga, until you turn to the make-up table and tart yourself up for Nerdtown.

This here's real

In both the recently released to DVD 2014 films, DIVERGENT and CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER, there's a dude who's been brainwashed by the fascist dystopia and ordered to kill the one he loves. And in each, the one he loves doesn't give up on him, even risking their rebel coterie's lives while trying to break through to him because, damn it, you don't give up on your old army buddy or a cute guy who respects your virgin boundaries. Each brainwashed buddy is programmed to kill all those who pose a threat to a deranged Kate Winslet or brilliantly-against-type Robert Redford. But by now you've guessed that even buddy love is stronger than military-grade brainwashing. Love is able to survive even lame 'sensitive' male Subaru voiceovers, it's deeper even than behavioral programming or the ping pong balls of motion capture technology. Even Redford--the goddamned Sundance Kid!--can't change it. 

Taken together these two films paint a nice portrait of where we are today as an eternally teenage wasteland nation, and how it's our obsession with health that makes us sick, how it's our longing for security blankets that leaves us most exposed. Our presumption is that kids today already know who Neville Chamberlain is because they've been to high school or read a book. But we presume in vain. Kids today have no idea who he is, and so never glean the importance of the lesson his liberal utopian pipe dream folly teaches us.

Chamberlin, a pacifist dumbass

For old Neville Chamberlin is history's most glaring example of what not to do when every fibre of your national being wants to make peace at all costs, to live safe today and let tomorrow fed for itself, to waste valuable ammo-gathering time trying to get extra comfortable in your peacetime bubble.

Neville Chamberlain (in case you're one of those kids) was the British prime minister who let Hitler sweet-talk him out of sticking up for Czechoslovakia in exchange for Hitler's solemn promise to not invade any more countries. He came back to England waving a piece of paper guaranteeing "peace in our time."

This was supposedly because Britain was still recovering from the previous world war, but really it's because Hitler wouldn't let Chamberlin smoke in the Reichstag (according to INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS). If he just sparked up anyway, man, right there, he maybe would found the chutzpah to stand up for the Czechs. Well, I saw a picture the other day of a bunch of members of the 101st Airborne at a dance with some dames in the mid-40s, and every single one of them had a cigarette. They're the ones kicked Hitler's ass. Do you think ISIS would even exist if Obama was allowed to smoke in the Oval Office? Instead he's a Bluto-battered Popeye stripped of his contraband spinach at the door. Gotta be healthy, man. No spinach. Popeye's spinach-guzzling youth has left him with a bad case of chronic iron poisoning. 

So now you know about Chamberlin, and how our collective all-consuming horror of illness, death, and decay extinguishes the flame (and smooth filtered taste) of our own shortened life span and conversely poisons the Earth with overpopulation. Resources and living space get scarce and lack of security blanket options gives angry idiots the balls to not mind getting killed toute de suite by our noncommittal drones in the name of some fuzzy cause.

Luckily there's always movies and movies about teenagers fighting back against the hypocrisy of dystopia overreach are big bucks, and that, my friend, is what irony sufficiency is made of.

Nurse, all that glowing stuff is going to have to be removed

But if grooving to a nine figure-budgeted movie spinning in your hardware can make you feel that you're part of a vox populi juggernaut revolution, a Churchill not a Chamberlain, even if only for two hours and ten minutes, facing danger on the screen, dissolving into the breathless pace and riveting action like a true hero... then just remember that while you were so motionless on the couch, six more species died in the rain forest.... and you could have prevented it, for just fifty cents a day. That's less than the price of a cup of coffee.

Keep your logos round and burning

Conversely, here's a little-advertised truth about addiction I've learned the 'hard' way: drug and alcohol withdrawal is brutally painful, terrifying, even soul-crushing, BUT it can bring sexual pleasure as exponentially intense as the pain, exhilaration as intense as the terror. But few know this because a) so often this withdrawal is done in a hospital, where opportunities are scarce; b) first you must truly suffer, convulsing, screaming, vomiting and rolling around on the cool tiles, riding an endless terrifying roller coaster that's all vertical drops and torturous climbs, for like three long days in one endless loop. In a similar way, perhaps, enduring the intensity of withdrawal from the media's cozy hypnosis brings true liberation, but who would be fool enough to know it unless forced to? Stretching your limits is just a nice way to say being stretched on the rack. 

And no one suffers like a teenager, whose stretching is involuntary, a werewolf transformation that takes agonizing years instead of a night or two under a full moon. The one part missing from the TWILIGHT movies that the (last) book went into detail about: the great flaming agony stretching on for timeless weeks that Bela endures in her transition from dying anorexic pregnant teen to hip, naturally-toned rich mom vampire. When you don't endure the trauma, the basic training breakdown, the post-marathon soreness, or the primordial terror of the final few bardos of death or deep meditation, then your transformation, your evolution, is not permanent.  Teenagers trapped in the torturous cocoon of braces, acne, dandruff, virgin angst, and clumsy self-loathing, can't imagine how the much their future self-confidence, straight teeth, clear skin, will depend on it, and how quickly the pain will disappear once theb benefits are known. This counter-intuitive need for trauma, coupled to our fear of it (inseparable from the fear of pain and dying), makes a good dystopian parable for the masses, and why teenagers resonate with them so strongly. Old men need no more dystopian parables, only escape from their oldness in the chimera of myth and chimera of youth. And it is the same resonating myth and escape into (and from) youth that brings old and young together.  No one wants a teenager in their living room, but onscreen everyone can be teenager just for two hours, or--if already a teenager--a hero whose diamond anguish is at last given the properly operatic golden setting.

It is the duty of any nonconformist or outcast in a conformist society to subvert that society, the force of the social repression on the nonconformist forming the response and creating the spatial form of the future: Jesus on the cross, Mandela in the jail, and Gandhi on the hunger strike; but if you want to avoid that pain, you can stay addicted to to the virtual pleasure of the simulacrum and just write a Young Adult dystopia novel or superhero comic or screenplay wherein your protagonist subverts an even more conformist future or alternate reality. And if it sells, and catches on with the teens everywhere, and is adapted into a big budget movie, conformity expands to envelop it, then shrinks back as it digests, and then the trappings from that parable are spit out a decade later in a lame car insurance commercial, as drained of its original meaning as a Times Square New Year in the post-Giuliani era.

On the plus side, by entering the collective fabric it will serve to caution the power elite about going too far in trying to repress and restrict the freedom of the masses. Certainly the power elite fear from these tales the fallout that would come with restricting freedom of speech, for any speech---no matter how anti-authority--can be subverted to power ("Clash City Rockers ride the streets in the new Ford Freedom") Truly it is written in Situationist theory books forced on liberal arts undergrads the world over: a reigning social power can find no surer way of survival than incorporating critiques of itself, ushering in an era wherein compliance as the 'reality' is never even noticed behind the simulacrum screen. In HUNGER GAMES, Donald Sutherland's nervous military dictator thinks suppressing the symbols of rebellion will suppress the rebellion itself, but a media savvy ruler doesn't outlaw symbols, he mass markets them. He flashes the Girl Scout / Revolution gang sign at press conferences. Anything--even Sid Vicious snarling "My Way"--can be digested, incorporated, and eventually spat out into a car commercial. No revolution can win against a government that burns itself in effigy every night on the evening news. What are you going to do to protest, put out the fire?

In order to be free from our addiction to the cathartic thrill of battling Hollywood-conjured dystopia, we must learn to love the pain deprivation brings, which goes against everything capitalism stands for. No expensive wine ever tasted half so sweet as warm canteen water to a dehydrated ocean castaway. Is this not the the core truth of meditation, or stereograms, or the rapturous freedom of the starving, tortured artist hallucinating sausages and flagons in his swirling oils? And nothing's more disillusioning than realizing the spiritual crisis that cost you years of suffering and depression but resulted in artsy growth could have been solved with Effexor, and just as quickly turned into a raving maniacal sociopathy by adding Abilify. By extension, anyone with the right technology, drugs, or patience could turn you into their automaton. With the flick of an artificially-implanted cerebellum switch you could feel your friends are your enemies, and vice versa. Raymond, why don't you play some solitaire?

Thus the brainwashed super-conductive Winter Soldier (above) doesn't flinch or protest when his keepers want to give him an electric shock memory wipe. He just leans back into the chair and opens to receive his rubber mouthguard like an angry boxer thinking only of the kill. The captain meanwhile is thrown into a dilemma when he doesn't quite know who to trust within the NSA-Homeland Security-ish conspiracy web known as S.H.I.E.L.D. He himself is doomed to be incorruptible, no matter how many perish as a result of his principles. I simply cannot give more away, but it's this 'question authority' theme that gives the film its emotional resonance. Fifth columnist academes can say what they want, in Captain America's heyday (he was frozen in 1945 so he could miss becoming Reb Brown -left) we had a genuine uniform-wearing enemy to fight, and that we might actually lose was a real fear that brought Americans together and cured its Great Depression quicker than an Effexor / Neurontin / Wellbutrin cocktail.

And in DIVERGENT, the brainwash comes via a remotely activated chip air-injected into each 'Dauntless' member's neck as part of an alleged location tracking program, a process woven so seamlessly into all the other initiatory processes that no one can hardly complain--any more than an army recruit can complain if forced to do push-ups. The big fear for our plucky DIVERGENT heroine, Tris (Shairlene Woodley) isn't being brainwashed, it's that her friends will find out she's not one of the approved types of persona which act as fascist-brand masonic brotherhoods that all young citizens of this society must join, being allowed to pick for themselves at a big ceremony, because not doing so, not fitting a socially prescribed 'type' means being 'divergent' - i.e. a natural-born nonconformist, the type who must subvert the dystopia, write a book about subverting a worse dystopia, or die a death by slow closeting. Perhaps it's natural to have subversive artists in any society that gets larger than a few thousand people. Native Americans treated their gay tribal members with reverence, for they were signs the tribe was flourishing and needed to slow its population growth. A dystopia would of course not go for that display of difference, and with subversive artist types it's perhaps the same... no room for 'decadent' art in a dystopia. At any rate, Tris fears becoming cliqueless and alone by daring to say no to peer pressure, but can't help being chip (brainwash) resistant and so forced into the capacity of heroine. She's the type of person who, like myself can't connect for some reason to the giddy rush of 'mob mentality' (2). In the big picking ceremony she goes for the daredevil mesomorph soldier brigade (i.e. the jocks or the Wermacht) the 'Dauntless' group, but she's way too independent and peaceful. She's also too athletic and dopey to be an Erudite (the fretful nerd group, or Gestapo); too Erudite to be Abnegation (the Red Cross), etc. But this is a dystopia where your friends literally jump off a roof and if you don't follow them then you're not cool anymore. And you have to succumb to paranoia to not be suspect (if you're Erudite). And you have to let yourself get exploited and scapegoated if you're Abnegation (see also VIRIDIANA).

Sure it's a little trite, but I like DIVERGENT mainly because the twisty high school clique-as-metaphor-for-fascism stuff displays a keen savvy to the way initiation rites are incorporated into the lure of the popular clique. Here institutionalized initiation is conformist just enough that both the personal and political seamlessly interweave, like joining the Riffs, the SEALS, the Heathers, getting your ears pierced, your first tattoo, drinking your first beer and smoking your first cigarette all on the same day. Feeling like you finally belong somewhere is an intoxicating high, especially if you've never felt it before. The dissolution of apartness, of singular lonely ego subsumed into an inclusive group whole, is exhilarating in exponential ration to the amount of lonely bedroom angst you've suffered.

But that high has a price and you're suddenly being shipped off to Vietnam, like Treat Williams at the end of HAIR.

The thing DIVERGENT doesn't get is that having a weak central girl throws off the curve- Kristen Stewart is Antigone-stubborn in TWILIGHT; Jennifer Lawrence genuinely mythic in HUNGER GAMES; the kid in ENDER'S GAME spookily self-confident, but this chick Tris is perhaps--to her detriment--the most 'normal' teenager-like of the bunch. Rocking a terrible poker-face, she lacks the inner fascist to succeed as a Dauntless. She doesn't have a grasp of 'war footing.' She's not Artemis-esque or Antigone-determined or a math prodigy; her puffy face dilates and registers every emotion, which is not good if you're gay, I mean "divergent" in a world hostile to any sort of difference. If you show your true face they will get you. The same ones who urge you to be yourself are the ones who will attack you if your actually do. The core of every teenage fear lies in this idea, that the joy found in belonging to a cool group will soon give way to the terror of being abandoned by them once they see your face register the joy you feel at being accepted at last. This is part and parcel of the feeling teenagers never get over into adulthood: that the parent or god that watches over you is just a trickster demon awaiting the right time to remove its saintly mask to expose that which your whole life was a shield against seeing--his hideous giant demon face coming forward to consume you like one of Kafka's devouring industrial vaters--all the while encouraging you to take off your own mask, to be yourself, at last, to finally show your soul just in time to see it ripped to shreds... 


 In WINTER and DIVERGENT, the moment of exposing the demon face behind the mask is when what was once just rumor and conspiracy theory starts to lock shut (SEMI-SPOILERS AHEAD) around you, too late to resist it, no time to plan a defense, no access to yourself, no chance to catch your breath. What you didn't see coming suddenly comes, not on the horizon ahead but behind, next to, within, and in all directions, making its move only when its sure all resistance has been pre-demonized as terrorism, disarmed, isolated, and confused. Then the NSA takes off its mask and the Sixth Reich Paperclip draconian totalitarian future-present is right there, and has been, in disguise all this time, and the Homeland Security emblem turns out to be a scrambled up swastika, and it's too late to do anything about it because we've signed all our freedoms away in the name of order, because we got all scared when the news waved some Muslims at us. God help us, we activated SKYNET just to deal with a couple of dudes with AK-47s and cell phones. General Ripper was right! They've infiltrated our precious bodily fluids! Little tiny Stalins swim in our blood. They're even in the money...

Masks on / masks off 

Now I don't really believe in a massive global conspiracy per se --I imagine the world to be far too chaotic for that--but I don't rule it out. What I do know, though, is that-when it comes to running Hollywood--the industry guys can tramp around their fancy desks high on all the megalomania-infusing coke they want, but deep inside their drawers they know who the real boss is, the capricious Middle American teenager. Their ample expandable income, their drivers' license, their need to get away from parental eyes even for a few hours, the crushing relentless sameness of suburban boredom, all bring them time and again to the multiplex. Why not tie high school subjects like social science and literature to cafeteria mores and social hierarchy to teenage hormonal angst and deep mythic dystopian allegories, so that the films they see double as Cliff notes to the classics in class and of their lives? Maybe the kids are reading Plato in fifth period or leaning about World War Two for the first time, so hey, if you commingle these big historical and cultural currents in with the high school threat of cyber bullies, peer pressure, and the rush of the first law break or sense of belonging to a clique, then you have hooked onto an iconography of coming-of-age mythic suburban metaphors, each multi-layered signifier keyed into a hormonally pained demographic. 

That's myth. At it's purest. In myth there's a way to apply what's taught in school to real life, to do it in a way where the result is fantasy on a larger more 'real' level than mere reality. 

Thus these teen dystopia parables become more and more urgent as the real and public sphere shrinks. Science tells these kids that their future is all used up but as long as their present is spent texting and downloading violet ray dystopian fantasies, they can live without anything so banal and limited in scope as science's concept of time line futures. These kids know that watching someone else fight the power isn't the same as fighting it themselves. But how do you fight a phantom who monitors your every move before you make it? Just trying to get a gun into high school or threatening Congress via your Tumblr will get you all sorts of expelled. But watching someone else fight a raging battle against a CGI windmill version of all the old American evils? That's doodle dandy do or die. 


I know it's cliche to say but, for my generation, things were different. The dystopian-spurred life-or-death need to assert your individuality and face the dreaded finality of conservatism was totally lacking in the John Hughes (and Arnold Schwarzenegger) 80s. There were no cell phones or internet by which to stay constantly connected. As a result, that connection never felt threatened, that was our burden and our blessing. We had no faith to lose, and we knew it. Not no more. If you win a teenager's heart today by expressing their queasy post-digital angst, they'll come back for the sequels, then they'll buy the DVD (even after they downloaded it illegally (you hope), and in 20 years they'll buy it again in a deluxe commemorative edition, and it can run in perpetuity across a spectrum of cable channels... until that car commercial tie-in wrings the last dollar out.

Starship Troopers (1997)

And of course, there are the girls, the ladies, all locked into the golden gloss that makes all them all now look like they're CGI avatars slick with softener, every frame of their face Maximed to abstraction, all the better inject them into the video game vein. But hey, the good news: boys have picked up some slack to become objects, which is like, so like, finally, you know? It's the baby steps, man. Before women can be free of objectification they must first choose a replacement way for us to look at them, and there's but one traditional gender left to objectify. There is a reason, burn, turn, worm, but don't say I didn't warn you about that Uncanny Valley crossing, ladies. This is John Connor coming to you from inside Crystal Peak: let the revolution commence broadcasting on UHF, on the Emergency Broadcast System, on the HAM radio, anywhere it can be safe from the digital detection. Analog only, No digital, man. Analog got the warmth and the resonance, 'cuz nothing stands the pressure of the Clash City Rockazz!

NOTES:
1. The Clash, in case anyone doesn't know, were a prime example of politically left-wing, anti-Thatcher English punk rock, hence their use in car commercials is the kind of thing that runs counter to their message.

2.  I've been there at the start of three riots in my life -- and each time I walked away before the violence began, horrified by the way all my friends seemed to transform into bloodthirsty animals, and feeling strangely abandoned, as if they all disappeared right in front of me, just as would happen later when cocaine came back in vogue in the '98. I simply could not catch the mob or coke mentality anymore than I could 'get' the Grateful Dead. I guess that makes me... Divergent!

It's only real if it wrecks your life: HER, THE WAY WE WERE, LOVE AFFAIR

O Love, thou coaxer of dopamine and norepinephrine through miserly neruological alleyways, you can cure illness, reduce obesity, turn blue meanies into pink happies, sound trumpets and sport horns like the satyr Pan, Zeusishly cause lightning that the thirsty soul imbibes like wine as it zaps the chains from the mind and the sleeping corpse beneath it to electric life. You make once dumb love songs on our car radio suddenly profound. Our old life and crusty ways in rear view mirror fade as you drive us into the warm and final Aerosmith shot of Dazed and Confused dawn sunshine.

But then evening falls- the car stops, the door opens, and you too fade in the rear view mirror after dropping us unceremoniously off in the middle of highway nowhere. "This is where you get off," you say. There's only so much lightning our Frankenstein shell can take and you've got bolts to throw before you sleep, not that you ever do.

Love in the age of digital communication has led to something so instant it's impossible to internalize and therefore no change in the persona has been possible. We can't sit down at ye olde desk to write to our distant love with Ken Burns' fiddle music mournful in the background because there's never a time when our lover's voice can't be there, here, wherever... Verizon... 4G. No distance or mountain high enough; you can be Tom Hanks on coast-to-coast radio Sleepless in Seattle and wow a nation of ladies with a moment of near-but-not-all-the-way tearful sincerity in your voice, have them all fall in love with you, without even meeting you, because of course they've all imagined a perfect animus-reflective ideal via your sincere tinge. But that's what you are, right, Tom? A sincere tinge? Don't lose the octave-dropping edge of grief in your voice, or not be what they dream when you're seen, and you're gonna wind up with a Meg Ryan atop the Empire State Building, ala the end of Love Affair. 

I hated Sleepless in Seattle because it was the reminder my own relationship in Seattle had been a lie; the sex stopped and we began to gnaw at each other because hot as she was, and cool as she was, we were just not 'in love' in that special thunderbolt way, because I was a poet and my true love became a hybrid of Joni Mitchell singing how she wanted to shampoo and renew me again and again while I drove past a Virginia Slims billboard of a girl with long blond straight hair who looked like one of my best friends back in Syracuse whom I loved in a platonic courtly way. She, Joni, and the giant Virginia Slims girl swirled together into what I even knew at the time was an anima ideal, having studied Jung, with her, back in Syracuse. So now, alone in my car on that route I learned to cry again; my anima began to finally talk to me, using Joni and a colossal-size model with a cool white cigarette, and letters and thoughts of my friend back east, through which to project. My real life / 3D girlfriend in Seattle sniffed this out and thought my being platonic with a cute smart blonde back in Syracuse was impossible. When we saw When Harry Met Sally at the $2 theater in Edmonds she felt proved right and we broke up during the credits, and I still hate that movie.

This is the power of the signal, which is part of our unconscious too, the part neuroscientists and Amazon basin psychonauts are gradually coming to realize: the unconscious core of the soul doesn't come from within the mind or heart but rather is beamed into the pineal gland from an outside source. We are a signal ourselves, from some far off planet or even deep within our own, some fathomlessly long DNA serpent dreaming us from within the structure of the world. We can catch glimpses of its scales in the reflection of neon off the bathroom tiles or at night in the streaky painted light on the blacktop after a rainstorm, but we can't see it directly, or hide from it ever, and either way the voice on the radio singing about love or talking about it is a combo of two signals that are connected at both ends - receiver and transmitter- both just old Svengali talking to himself again. True Love is literally written on the wind, a billion cellular coded mash notes coursing through our atomic structure every second, a net of support so intimate no mask can survive it. No Walter Mitty can have his fancy flights, nor an American keep his Hustle once this signal strikes. Only in Her does it meet a receptive transmitter, and then only because it is a pure signal and it's found a dude who wouldn't know a mask if it came up and spooked him.

Like the less successful film Surrogates (see: The Wringer of Ringerhood), Her takes place in a Catfish future wherein everyone can be whomever else they want in virtual reality, and for some reason choose they selves. Meeting other 3-D real time people has lost much of its feigned jocularity in Spike Jonze's succinctly imagined future; no one smokes or makes wretched small talk or goes on benders; bluetooth sex chats with strangers are as natural as Ambien isn't. If Don Draper could see what his Madison Ave sincerity carousel would lead to, would he ever had turned against Luckies? Better to smoke indoors at the martini bar of masque-on-mask artificiality than be healthy in a bubble of self where a computer voice validates your every movement like a conductor on baby's first potty train.

As a Pisces born during the psychedelic free love eclipse of 1967 I am late to the party or far too early most of the time, so I know too well that when you go out dressed as someone else your old self may not be there when you come back, but accepting that and disguising anyway is something called maturity. I've had my soul shaved into nothingness by transdimensional clockwork gorgons so I also know too well the self is not a constant, anymore than a tornado or polar vortex is separate from the air around it. But I've also known the loving rush of brain exaltation and excitement that can come just from love e-mails, IMs and phone calls, and a mix tape. I vividly experienced how the absence of pictures in those early days of the internet (c. 1995) worked to boost the endorphins. As when we imagine a character in a novel, our love stayed a haunting gorgeous screen of fluid features in our mind. No purer form of anima projector screen has e'er existed. No face-to-face meeting has ever surpassed that giddy rapture.

My first realization of this, the aghast misery of 'the big reveal,' precipitated what AA would call my 'bottom' --after a few months of bliss via long letters and amor-fou-phone calls she sent me a care package: a photo, a watercolor with a romantic original poem, and a mix tape. The poem was... okay, the songs super sad like I love (it was the early 90s, so lots of grunge pop), but her photo was from when she was a child of about twelve, with a cat.

Hmm. From when she was a child... with a cat.

You can guess the rest if you've seen Catfish, or know how internet dating works, and the way alcoholism fuels clinical depression and vice versa. Now there's no excuse but back then the World Wide Web was almost exclusively AOL chat rooms, all the Catfish tricks were still brand new, and I was a prize chump. I flew to Denver to meet her anyway, too drunk to figure a way out. It was the spring of 1997 and the arrival gate bar was serving doubles for the price of singles. Within ten minutes of getting off the plane I had parked us there until she came out of focus. Denver, man, was a blur after that.

Flash forward ten years, falling in love with a fellow writer on the phone from 3,000 miles away.  I wrote this post on Coming Home (1979) for her; photos galore to vouchsafe her mad hotness, twelve hour stretches whisked by breathless on the phone, me hardly daring to switch my phone to the other ear lest I miss a second. A bad cold had brought my voice down an octave and an opiate-enriched Tussianex prescription made me self-assured, our voices merged like two sinuous serpents. Then Christmas came, dragging us apart to our separate families. I went from slithering through the warm, whispered waterways of our shared vocal embrace to shouting into elderly phones just for a single mundane pleasantry to be heard by my 95 year-old granny. My self-assurance withered under my dad's heat ray glare.

My new phone love didn't return my call for almost a month. Really it was just four days, just long enough to break the whispered waterway connection. I had mailed her pictures, you see, in the interim, along with a poem, a watercolor, and a mix tape...

Blood of the Lamb Lenses

Five years later I finally did find a true love that managed to begin on the internet via long long letters of adoration, this one a big Rilke and Thoman Bernhard fan, and it ended in real life cohabitation. And last year during a three month flash of blissful enlightenment brought about by pre-apocalyptic euphoria and galactic alignment, I got to experience the literal reality of the 'everything looks rosy' or 'rose-colored glasses' or 'washed in the blood of the lamb' effect. I was seeing an actual rose-tint over the world and everything seemed to be infused with a healthy crimson, a flush in the world's cheeks. It didn't last of course, and I had forgotten about it until seeing Her. The whole damn film is rosy. But maybe that's the problem. Any acting teacher or therapist would surely weep with joy over Phoenix's sublime and constant state of emotional nakedness, his wrenching honesty, his palpable joy and heartbreak. But that's all we really see of this guy - his heart-sleeve vulnerability and grueling honesty. It's a such a lonely word and everyone is so / untrue, for a reason. A man without a mask unnerves even his gooiest friends sooner or later. He's not even really a man, just a crossroads between tears and doofus grins.

On the other side of the manly coin, consider The Way We Were (1973): Robert Redford's final goodbye to Babs at the end, an accidental run-in after not seeing each other for years--is the first real emotion he has in the film and maybe in his whole career--is so powerful, I cry every time... or would if I had seen it more than once. Redford ("the Natural") can't act in the emotional naked Phoenix style and that is his strength. When he finally does crack the mask, the walls come down where you didn't even know walls were. That's what art is supposed to do: break down walls where you didn't know walls were. Redford's entire stone-faced oeuvre is worth enduring for this one crystal-like clear water fountain / to the sea / moment. Is this single vulnerable crack equivalent to, or equal to, all of Phoenix's performance in Her? I think so. At what point does an unmasked man go from touching to douche chill-icky? Answer: when he had no mask to smash in the first place.

A true story memoir about a beautiful golden WASP Adonis lured out of his quail and ale club by a bohemian Jewess intellectual socialist played by Barbara Streisand, The Way We Were is a star-crossed romance that goes on far longer than most, across acres of history, the lovers crossed as if forever. He initially shacks up with her against all his better judgment and friend advice, partially because, let's face it, WASP girls don't take lovers, only husbands. Babs ain't so brittle. For the progressive socialists, shacking up's no big deal. I can vouchsafe from experience that intellectual Jewish sensuality is totally terrific, a shnozz or some physical imperfection fades in the mystical connectivity of their spirit and electromagnetic heat. And Bab's got such a light spirit you can see why he comes to see her as more than a booty call. There's a complex layer of completion-seeking added when a bronzed Adonis not in touch with his feelings melts for a heart-on-sleeve Brooklyn motormouth. Opposites attract for a reason, it's a polarity thing. A north needs a south for a proper axis.

That's why you can tell the love affair in Her isn't real, not that it matters, which is the point. Minds meet, excite each other, enrapture and engage and then they are no longer the same minds. You can't expect them to stay with the person their previous mind chose as a lover, that would be cruel. Love is an accelerated learning process, absorbing the other persons likes and dislikes and philosophies, and then what? Moving onto the next lesson. But TRUE love is cruel, a teacher who never lets you out of first grade. Opposites can change all they want, but since there's no overlap they can never make each other's input redundant.

Redford and Streisand's characters grow apart not because they've outgrown one another but because around each other they've stopped growing, period, and only later, at the end of the film, when they run into each other on the street, all betrothed to proper class and religiously affiliated spouses - and only then, after it all has happened - does Redford finally crack, because he had stopped growing for so long with her and even without her and now, crack goes the mask - the naked self spurts forth ungainly but true. In Breezy, for example, a whole fifty years of hardened crust cracks right off Bill Holden when he spontaneously bursts into a child-like smile of rapture on the beach with younger girl Kay Lenz, and it's beautiful and makes me weep for joy because he spent those earlier decades being tough. It's the epiphany moment of the hopelessness of love, that impossible star-crossed fate where even if you each ditch your old life and together make your grab for the gold it will never survive, just as it can never die, and so you do it anyway, and ten years later you wonder if it even ever existed (as in Before Midnight), but this one moment on the beach stands tall as a reminder of the vast acres of self you could have claimed that are now forever lost no matter which road you take. But this is at least one road being taken, now. Where it leads to is irrelevant, and you proved to yourself that given the chance to smash your mask, even knowing you'll never get a mask that good again, you smash it? That's bravery...

But in Her, Phoenix the actor stands naked before us from the get-go, hitting these painful notes that are masterfully honest and Jones' script backs him up with eloquent moments like being crouched on the subway steps while a rush of commuters file around him while hearing of how his digital love is having intimate conversations with thousands of other operating systems, juxtaposing how cut off we are from even the surface of our fellow man--streaming past in that commuter rush. All we have when in the Catfish-verse of virtual perfection is the illusion of connection, and the hope of one day uniting with the machine reflection, the 'what we wish we were' vs. 'how we are,' the hope we can one day merge so well that our Frankenstein Skynet Robbie the Robot This is for Pris, Cherry 2000 Absolut vodka Demon Seed love child shall stand as proof that Lady Skynet and John Conner can unite the Capulets and Romulans after all.

 A man moseying along the crowded bubble of his electric navel / real world destroyed

The woman looking outside the bubble at the real world  /  Communist

Two souls alone together in the shipboard bubble / real world inaccessible

Then there's Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne in Leo McCarey's Love Affair (1939). Now as a man who now only cries when he passes a liquor store window display, I don't care for Irene Dunne in most things. Studs like Cary Grant and Charles Boyer are too good for her, sez I. But in Love Affair her prissy ball-busting schtick is needed because it is so unlike Charles Boyer's nostril-breathing sensualist --she's the Redford, he's the Babs. But they're the only first class passengers traveling alone on a trans-Atlantic cruise, brought together by their miserable separate tables, so opposites sizzle. Director Leo McCarey is peerless at matchmaking, using precision walk-ons to break down all walls and hardness: a talkative chipper landlady, a trio of weird little girl harmonizers (with Irene Dunne on ukulele), an endearing orphanage manager the kids call Picklepuss, a charming art gallery owner, a smitten club manager, a drunk guy carrying a Christmas tree all the way up to 182nd Street, a heavenly orphan choir singing not too loud there's a baby upstairs, gathered around Dunne's sick-bed, and the celestial Maria Ouspenskaya in her greatest role as Boyer's Yoda-like grandmother. Not a single mean word or ill will in the whole film, just two people cautiously reading the signs that fate's throwing at them and quietly slipping free from all their original plans. And we worry about the final big meeting like saps, because everyone else in the film is also aware of how vital these meetings are, the one thing that can cut through all the crap and yank us right out of our lives, even if it's for the worse, is the one thing worth doing. Fortune favors the bold but love doesn't give a shit about fortune or anything else. In Before Sunset, Hawke misses his flight, doesn't cancel or change it, just outright misses it, because Delpy's smoldering to Nina Simone; Amy Jolly kicks off her thousand dollars shoes and barefoot marches off to follow the Legion. It's the grand gesture, so make it while you're high.

 

And in that height of highness, it's not just the lovers themselves but the romance of light and shadow and sound caressing Boyer and Dunne over glistening rear projection seas that has to pound its board against the surf of uncertainty; the landlocked future already preventing them from being together, like some poison chocolate pink champagne aphrodisiac. You only know for sure it's love when it wrecks your life. If your favorite thing was golf, love will ensure you can never play again; if you loved to touch, your true love hates being touched; if you like to ski, your true love stabs you in the kneecap. You are giving up the shiniest cheap car collection in the world for one battered but sturdy BMW to last you the rest of your life. Before in relationships you would just mark the hours 'til your escape, even if the girl or boy seemed perfect for you, but when true love calls even a Boyer or Redford becomes just a smoov version of Emil Jannings in The Blue Angel! But dig, the trick is 'becomes' not already is, Phoenix! Now crow! Crow into the empty screen for a chance to glimpse your soul's secret norepinephrine stash! Crow before the charm's unwound and your sockets empty of all but stray current. Crow damn yo... (end transmission)