Here's To You, Mrs. Robinson

In 1967 The Graduate, made cinematic history with a young man’s affair with a much older woman. Today, the figure of Mrs. Robinson remains iconic (with the help of the eponymous Simon and Garfunkel song, and the indelible image of Dustin Hoffman framed by that stocking-clad leg- as alluring as it is ominous). It was a groundbreaking story, told very much from a male perspective. Not to say that Mrs. Robinson – a glamorously embittered alcoholic housewife – wasn’t a compelling character. But the audience knows her only as far as Hoffman’s Benjamin does. We can only speculate about her feelings and motivations based on the information that Benjamin is privy to.

            The Graduate is about a young man who is seduced, not a middle aged woman who seduces. If Hollywood was hesitant to address issue of an older woman’s desire head-on, then consider the casting choices Exhibit B for their discomfort. Anne Bancroft was a fantastic Mrs. Robinson. She was also thirty-six, to Hoffman’s thirty at the time of filming. Hardly the gaping generational gap suggested by the script. Ava Gardner also auditioned for the role, but at forty-five was considered too old to play the world-weary mother of an adult child.

            In 1967, even a movie that sought to push the envelope with a forty-something woman sleeping with a barely legal man couldn’t bring itself to cast either age accurately. Fifty years later, the envelope is more or less right where it was. When older women take up with much younger men in real life, eyebrows still raise. In movies (at least American movies) the attitude is “ok, but only if it’s kinky”. It’s remarkable that this remains a taboo, especially considering the ubiquity of the reverse situation.

The upcoming movie season features a number of couples that pick up where Hoffman and Bancroft left off, but through a female gaze and with age-appropriate actresses. In Adore, lifelong female friends start sleeping with one another’s grown sons. In A Teacher, a high school teacher beds one of her students. In Bright Days Ahead a married woman spices up her retirement with a May-December affair. Movies like The Lifeguard and And While We Were Here feature thirtyish women taking up with teenage boys. 

Two things are at work here. First, it’s an important (if ludicrously delayed) step to have movies portray post-menopausal women as sexy and libidinous. The absence of older women in erotic situations implies that a woman’s sexual relevance expires along with her reproductive capacity. There are a whole lot of problems inherent to that mythology, so any film that combats it is making some kind of progress.            

            Secondly, and equally progressive is the notion of a woman as the more sophisticated, powerful partner. The one who can pick up the check. The one who knows how to behave at a fancy dinner party. Couples where the woman is older, more educated, and makes more money, and the man is young and hot and happy to be there. We’re so used to the dusty old paradigm of the men dating vapid teeny boppers instead of their distinguished female peers. Here it is flipped, with women finding themselves drawn to callow youth despite the availability of men their age and older. 

In all of the movies mentioned above, the romance is illicit. Rarely (if ever) do we see a love story between an older woman and a younger man carried out in broad daylight. Mrs. Robinson was married, a friend of Benjamin’s parents, and (eventually) his prospective mother-in-law. Her 21^st century counterparts are likewise often married, or inappropriately linked to her young lover. As in The Graduate, the affair is complicated or cut short when the young man abandons his folly to pursue a serious romance with a girl his age. So the love stories are steamy but unethical, ardent but doomed. 

In Defense of Female-Driven Toilet Humor

Lowbrow humor is all about the body. From Rabelais to Apatow, there’s something irresistible about poking fun at what hungry, horny, embarrassing bags of filth we are.The world (as embodied by many a coed social situation) has long felt it necessary to protect women from some of the more explicit references to all those laughably unpretty bodily functions. This doesn’t make a ton of sense, considering that the gentler sex is just as familiar with the nasty stuff below the brain as their male counterparts. Not to mention those other messy female mysteries the slightest mention of which still cause some men to recoil in shock and disgust. Fortunately, it looks like we’re all starting to get over it.

Recent years have shown a burgeoning trend of female driven contributions to some of the more ribald, male-dominated movie genres. The success of these movies demonstrates that women hold their own in the realm of potty humor, while simultaneously combating that other regrettable stereotype that women are not funny.

We’re taking over all the Old Reliables: the “last hurrah before the wedding” shenanigans of “Bridesmaids” and “Bachelorette”. The buddy cop movie in “the Heat”. And most recently the desperate-to-lose-your-virginity-before-college romp in “The To Do List”. Sometimes they are done well, hitting the optimal balance of raunch, wit, and heart. More often, they are gratuitous. They are adolescent and needlessly gross, losing laughs along the way. Just like when the guys do it.

You won’t hear much from these genres during award season, because they aren’t built to make it past Friday night. At best they're an enjoyably forgettable one night stand. When such movies are made for-women, by-women, stereotypes are challenged and progress is made, inspiring Sundance-ready phrases like “ground breaking” and "fearless". On the flip side, when one such movie is a critical failure, it is judged much more harshly.

Most movies that roll around in the mud of sex and potty humor are likely to be dismissed as insipid and offensive regardless of how they do at the box office. But when such movies are made by women, the criticisms dig a mite deeper. The implication seems to be that women, even when they’re dealing with the trashiest of topics, should maintain a certain measure of decorum. If they refuse to do so then they should make sure that the movies have some wit and insight to offer beneath their noxious exterior, as an act of contrition for stooping to the level of poop jokes. This is like saying that gay couples who can now legally marry have a higher responsibility to not get divorced than their straight counterparts. As though, because they are finally given the right to do something, they have to earn it by doing it exceptionally well.

I believe that women are just as entitled to produce offensive movies with no redeeming qualities as men are. Sure, it would be better if all movies were good, but that’s not going to happen anytime soon. In the mean time, it’s important that women be allowed to make tasteless, humorless, pointless sex comedies. Because women can do anything. Otherwise, the pressure to be “feminist” will be the inhibition that replaces the pressure to be “ladylike”. In truth, when women feel free to express themselves however they want (even appallingly) then feminist work is still being done.

Granted, it doesn’t look like feminism, at least not as it was envisioned. (Would Mary Wollstonecraft shed a joyful tear at the sight of a Vera Wang clad Maya Rudolph shitting herself on the side of a highway? Maybe not.) But what does feminism look like? Feminisim looks like a world where no woman is denied the opportunity to do something she wants to do simply because she’s a woman.
To hold female driven R-rated comedy to a higher standard is to impose an unfair tax on a hard-won victory. Equality is not meant to be a shrill schoolyard taunt of “anything you can do I can do better”. It’s “anything you can do I can do, period”.

So let them have their yuks, their fucks, their drunken brawls, their sexual disasters, and their farts. Feminism has never been a pretty fight.

I Laughed, I Cried: The Sticky Wicket of Onscreen Tragicomedy

The mask of tragedy, without its partner, is nothing more than a crudely drawn caricature of the human face. And vise versa.

            Misfortune is fecund terrain for laughs, and tragedy thirsts for levity where it can get it. Consequently, comedy is often most effective when it plays off of something an audience relates to as unpleasant or even miserable. Any point on the spectrum of human emotion is incomplete without top notes of one and bass notes of the other. So “art” must take this into consideration in its quest to accurately imitate “life”. Of course, like anything habitually attempted by the art world, it is done to varying degrees of success.

            The “dark comedy”, “comedy-drama”, “dramedy”, “tragicomedy” or however you want to hybridize it, is a popular genre in TV and movies. Every awards show season brings a new crop of projects seeking to tickle our funny bone with one hand while tugging at our heartstrings with the other. So why is it such a sticky wicket pulling it off? When done well, the two blend and heighten each other’s effect. When done poorly, they cancel each other out.

            When it comes to doing tragicomedy well, the principle is pretty straightforward: it’s an accurate mirroring of a familiar phenomenon. Those in the grips of tragedy – the sick, the grieving, the oppressed, repressed, and depressed – need a good laugh more than anyone. And the laugh (though it may be irreverent, even insensitive) goes farther, like the difference between turning on a lamp in a sunlit room and lighting a match in a cave. Bringing successful comedy into a sad situation rounds out the human element, adding nuance and making the whole situation more relatable.            

            50/50 is the story of a young man coping with a cancer diagnosis. It does not shy away from the realities of the disease. It is written by Will Reiser, based on his own experience. Adam (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) undergoes chemotherapy, confronts his mortality, watches his personal and professional life suffer, and looks sick (not Hollywood sick, but actual sick). When he breaks down on the eve of a life-threatening surgery, it is heart wrenching.  Yet when it comes to the overall tone, director Jonathan Levine eschews maudlin cliché and goes for laughs. Not punchlines or yuks, but full bodied moments of naturally occurring levity.

             When Adam receives the diagnosis, he protests that he can’t possibly have cancer because, among other things, he recycles. When his mother (Angelica Huston) hears the news, she immediately goes to the kitchen to make him some green tea because she read somewhere that it reduces cancer risk. These moments are funny because they show the silliness and irrationality engendered by unexpected misfortune. The brain retreats to a place of foolishness when the news is too big and too bad to handle. It’s devastating, and the whole theater laughs.

            Not all films can keep their balance on this tonal tightrope. Many of the more ham-fisted attempts at tragicomedy sell themselves with terms like “fearless”, “irreverent”, “unapologetic”, “unflinching”, which is really just a sneering safeguard. Implying that those of us who don’t like it simply don’t get it, or are too square, or too naïve, or too weak-stomached to appreciate what they’re going for. This kind of premature critical prophylactic is an indication that what they produced doesn’t have two legs to stand on and they know it.

            Perhaps some black humor is so black that nothing can, should penetrate it, but I think that a really deft comic can glean guffaws from just about any subject matter. There are cases when it feels like the “dramedy” approach is used as an excuse to produce something that is neither affecting nor funny.  It’s like the viewer is led into a pitch-black room, and assured that she’s in the midst of something really amazing. Eventually her eyes adjust to the darkness and she realizes that there’s nothing in there. In these situations, comedy is not only expected to be funny, but also redemptive. It is neither.   

            When a filmmaker sets out to make a “dark comedy”, or “dramedy”, or “tragicomedy”, then the project is almost doomed to veer too far one way or the other, eventually plummeting into something either offensive or insipid or both. When a filmmaker sets out to tell an honest story about people (with all the dimension and complexity that every human innately possesses) then the action mirrors true life and the perfect balance of tragedy and comedy strikes itself.