Living the Romantic Comedy

The Family Monkey

Finally caught up with The Family Stone -- I know, I know, I'm so last year -- but it helped me to comprehend why I have this peculiar like/loathe relationship with TV's Love Monkey, which means now I'm like, totally this month.   So work with me here, okay?

Given its bevy of actresses I love (Diane Keaton and Claire Danes is already a dream cast in my book, but throw in Sarah J.P. and Rachel McAdams and be still my, um, heart) the only reason I didn't get to Stone sooner is that I had read Thomas Bezucha's script long before the movie sleighed into town for the holidays.   I'd liked it, but I wasn't in a hurry (that's what often happens when you know the ending).

Anyway: not a great movie, not an awful one.  In my last post, I talked about how any given movie establishes an Acceptable Level of Manipulation (ALM), meaning how much you’re willing to let your emotional buttons be pushed, before you cry foul.  In these terms, The Family Stone has an ALM that veers dangerously high for its genre, but it kind of gets away with it.

What is The Family Stone selling? Family, of course, and not just any family, but look!  Diane Keaton as the smart and lovable matriarch, that guy who played Coach as the understanding mensch of a dad, one successful son who's as handsome as Dermot Mulroney (he is Dermot Mulroney), the other an affable pot-smoking-but-well-adjusted slacker, one daughter a snarky beauty, the other beneficently preggers, and piece de' politically correct resistance, a gay son who's deaf, no less, with an African-American lover whom everyone accepts and adores. And they all love each other very, very much, and they live in one of those big bucolic New England Perfect old houses that would fit just fine in an antique snow globe.

Amazingly, writer-director Thomas Bezucha pretty much makes it all work.  The sell is a fun hang with an idealized big, close-knit brood of liberals, and what makes it bearable, what creates the Acceptable Level of Manipulation is a neatly amusing notion: when Sarah Jessica Parker, playing a sort of anti-Carrie Bradshaw, comes on board as Dermot's fish-out-of-water fiancee-to-be, the entire lovable family Stone... acts like assholes.  Liberal-shmiberal, they're as intolerant of She Who Doth Not Fit as any stereotypical passel of rednecked hicks.

[*SPOILER ALERT!* You might want to skip this and the next para if you're planning on seeing Stone.]  The various ensemble romantic comedy contrivances that ensue in Act 2 threaten to cross the ALM line, since we're expected to buy a mate switcheroo involving brothers and sisters that would have seemed dicey even in Shakespearian times.  But interestingly, the movie's use of what could be a major ALM-buster -- Mom's dying of cancer -- turns out to be the very thing that anchors the whole enterprise in credibility.

It's partially Keaton's great work and partially good writing, but one brief intimate scene between her and hub Craig T. Nelson in which the heart-wrenching reality of her situation is acknowledged is manipulative in the best sense -- it gets us in touch with a depth of emotion that tacitly justifies all the "high jinks ensue" around it.  And the whole issue is handled with a deft grace that keeps the movie from sliding into bathos.

It was thinking about how moved I'd been by this otherwise lightweight comedy that made me understand why Love Monkey makes me crazy.  Monkey's wish fulfillment fantasy sell can be more or less summed up as: how would you like to live the life of a young music biz exec who's the acme of hip but humble about it, has issues with women but is catnip to the hot ones, and has such integrity up the wazoo that he gets to stick it to the Man, on a weekly basis?

Monkey is a show that is cannily (or sickeningly) calculated to cash in on three demographics: young folks who'd like to live such a cool Peter Pan fantasy when they grow up, working stiffs who'd like to think they could do this gig, and aging boomers who used to be cool and can nostalgically relive their fantasy life.  In other words, they've got us coming and going, at least in theory. 

Having actually been a working musician and on a record label, back in the day, I should be just the kind of viewer to get sucked in.  Instead, I found myself watching the show with a mixture of amusement and revulsion.  All its detail work is so calculated, so blatantly designed to make its viewers feel knowing, inside, hip-to-the-video-clip -- it's got things just almost right enough, and just terribly wrong, to make me want to throw things at the set. 

Because please, it’s bad sitcom fare: the show’s passel of PC male friends for Tom, one of them black (Larenz Tate) and one of them Jason Priestley, is completely clunky.  And the lovely Judy Greer is wasted in the tired role of the girl-as-friend-who-should-be-girlfriend. Yet undeniably, the Ed in the Music Biz fantasy of it all, the “regular, kind-of-mixed-up guy with good intentions gets to be music industry super-hero” idea, exerts a strong pull. 

Still, the uneven writing is slick and involving at its best, and "huh?" level tin-earred, at its worst.  And it betrays a certain insecurity.  Case in point: in last week's episode hero Tom Cavanaugh got upset because a rival exec at his label called him "a suit."  He then went on to show everyone how music true-blue he really was, by pulling off a coup in which he melded corporate candy-pop with cool alt-rock, for a good cause (don't ask).  After which love interest Ivana Milicevic sidled up to the rival exec and said of our hero, "He's really good, isn't he?"  Rival exec agreed.  Well, any time a show’s secondary characters tell each other on screen how great the lead protagonist is, you know you're in trouble. 

But this show does have its version of Stone's dying matriarch to ground it: its villain, the evil corporate label head played by Eric Bogosian.  Devil-like Bogosian is on board to tell Cavanaugh that the two of them are really only two sides of the same coin, and well... he's right.  And so long as Bogosian, who clearly relishes his role, is in the room, he's a walking ALM meter for Monkey.  He's a welcome reminder that on some level, bullshit is bullshit.   

But letting the viewer know that is a bit different from confronting your viewer with painful emotional truths about death, and what it means to know you’re leaving the ones you love.  I guess what I’m saying is that Family at least makes an honest attempt to move me, whereas Monkey seems more honest in its attempt to move units.  Its featured “discovery,” singer-songwriter and John Mayer sound-alike Teddy Geiger, is not in fact a bracing new talent out of alt-left field, but an artist already signed to mega-corp Sony/BMG.

Most of the time, the show’s blatantly transparent attempts to sell me an idealized version of my own wish fulfillment fantasies are merely annoying, but last week, they really went too far.  Ivana, asked to name her five favorite songs, led with Dylan’s Visions of Johanna (a Clash tune was in there, of course, to insure rock cred).  Well, Johanna is in fact my favorite Dylan song – mine and who knows how many thousands of other Dylan lovers.  Johanna was the perfect Monkey choice because it’s far hipper than say, Like a Rolling Stone, thus forcing its target demographic to think “you get me, you really, really get me!” and Tom (the surrogate us) to immediately lose it. “You had me at Dylan,” his voice-over sighs. 

And for me, the prospect of a woman who looks like Ivana Millicevic and moves to the beat of Visions of Johanna – it’s not an impossibility, but talk about a writer’s fantasy! – is both unbearable and irresistible.  Can’t pretend I wouldn’t mind hanging out with her and my surrogate super-hero self, even though the level of manipulation is TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE.  You fuckers, you manipulative network/corporation-sucking whores, you’ve really done it this time.  ‘Cause in truth, there is no way I’m missing Love Monkey next week.

Against Truthiness

We're all storytellers.  We tell ourselves and each other stories about who we are and why we do what we do.  But unless we're being paid to make things up, we're expected to stick fairly close to the so-called truth.  Well, last week the relationship between "lying for a living" and living honestly got a fascinating workout that raised all kinds of questions.  Here's one which may not seem immediately apropos, but hang in there.

Why do we go to movies?  A multitude of reasons, of course: to relieve us from the stress, angst and boredom of real life, to give us a healthy outlet for having our feelings, etc.  And clearly one of the big draws, in psycho-sociological terms, is that they function as wish fulfillment fantasies.  At the movies you can vicariously be say, an ice skating princess, or a stud who beds bridesmaids.  You can use the powers of positive wizardry to ward off heinous evil.  Or hang out with penguins!  Haven't you always wanted to hang with the penguins?

When a movie offers us an alternate reality that's fun to live in for awhile, we make a tacit deal with it: the old suspension of disbelief thing (i.e. I'm willing to set aside much of what I know about life in the real world, so long as you continue to entertain me).  It's the work of a movie's creative team to make that reality credible.  And it seems to me that each wish fulfillment fantasy comes with what I'll call an Acceptable Level of Manipulation, meaning: I'll let you push my emotional buttons, to a reasonable degree, so that the story remains involving.  But if you go too far -- manipulate my feelings too obviously, to the point where I feel jerked around and/or my intelligence is insulted -- I'm outta here, I'm no longer a happy audient, and I want my money back.

Every genre has its own Acceptable Level of Manipulation (ALM), relative to its credibility.  Thrillers and horror movies, for example, have an unusually high ALM, because in watching them, we want to be manipulated.  We've come to be fooled and messed with and scared out of our pants, so go ahead, feckless heroine -- open that door to the basement in the middle of the night, alone (as if you've never like, been to a horror movie in your life).  We know it makes no sense but we don't care.

On the other hand, most adult dramas have a fairly low ALM.  We don't want to feel the manipulation too acutely -- the strings have to be pulled subtly, or we sense that things have gone too far and the dream is over.  It's the difference between Robin Williams as a believable shrink helping a troubled kid work out a problem (Good Will Hunting), and Robin Williams as an absurdly mawkish doctor who puts on a red clown nose to cheer up terminally ill kids (i.e. the unacceptable L of M in the dismal Patch Adams).

One way of assessing the ALM is to look at what a given show is selling.  What value system, what lifestyle, what sensibility is the wish fulfillment fantasy asking you to buy?  On TV, the aptly-named Friends sold the idea of friends-as-uber-family, an ideal aggregate of like-minded people who would always be there for you; similarly Sex and the City sold the family of girlfriends, and neither show could countenance the idea that a healthy human being might be happier alone.  The premise that "grouping is better" was the tacit sell. 

But both shows established an ALM by allowing differences and fallings-out between friends to occur, from episode to episode, earning credibility by at least admitting that being part of a friend-family isn't always a piece of cake.  This is what we've come to expect, in the unwritten contract between entertainment and viewer: we will buy the premise you're selling, so long as you don't exceed an Acceptable Level of Manipulation.

Now: last week, Oprah, our beloved American icon, took writer James Frey to task for having fabricated huge swatches of his supposedly non-fiction memoir.  And I believe it's the most high profile instance to date, of the fictional storytellers' Acceptable Level of Manipulation principle being applied, publicly, in the realm of real life.

What Oprah, on behalf of millions of Americans, was saying in essence was: so long as the story you're telling us really happened -- is verifiably true -- we're willing to accept its excesses,  its most emotionally manipulative turns.  But once we discover that the story is fiction, and its excesses contrived... you've broken the contract.  Your level of manipulation is unacceptable.

Reading a book is an intimate act, and what happened to Oprah and the rest of Frey's readers was a personal experience.  Frey had come right into their homes, into their heads, so to speak, and lied to them where they lived.   That's why I don't agree with a few media critics covering the event who sounded bemused that such a fuss and furor should erupt over a book, when there are surely so many other betrayals of truth to react to, in real life.  I think what happened on the Oprah show was the opening sally in what may well become an ethical battle of far-reaching real-life consequence.

With the lines between fiction and reality rapidly dissolving (see: everything from The Real World to... well, almost everything), we've become lulled into thinking that a certain amount of dishonesty is simply "the way it is" or "the way things have to be" in daily life.  When a politician plays upon cheap emotions, to distract us from a difficult, complex and uncomfortable issue (see: "they hate us for our freedom"), that's an Acceptable Level of Manipulation.  Happens every day! 

Comedian Steve Colbert has coined the term truthiness, as in, can we assess the truthiness of a given so-called fact?  The laughter this engenders is pained laughter, coming from our common perception that the current administration, boasting that it doesn't operate on a "reality-based" playing field, takes a sort of preemptive parental attitude toward truth.  It believes that having the facts isn't good for the public, that "we can't handle the truth."  It wants us to go along with this ALM norm, to shrug off moral inconsistencies and outright incompetence in the name of "so it is and has ever been so."

The wish fulfillment fantasy we're being asked to buy is: They know what's best for us, and we're being taken care of.  And the storytellers are banking on the myth that withholding information, misrepresenting facts, and spinning perception is a necessary evil -- that's the Acceptable Level of Manipulation inherent in the pragmatics of politics.

But I don't find it coincidental that this lead story on the front page of Sunday's NY Times tells of a prominent scientist whistle-blowing on NASA for trying to suppress his truth.  That he's been threatened and muzzled may be de rigeur, but his going public about it is not.  I don't think it's a huge stretch to draw a line from Oprah, as a representative of the public, saying "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore" when she's been lied to, to this man pointing the finger at a government agency that's been thuggishly trying to shut him up for speaking the facts.

I think we're starting to see a lot of this phenomenon, and higher powers-willing, we'll see and hear a lot more.  I think  what happened on the Oprah show signified what I'm hoping, praying, might just be a zeitgeist tipping point.  Call me kinky call me crazy, but I believe Oprah's accusations have helped to open a door, to bring the question of "truth or fiction?" into public debate, and this could lead us into a real emperor-is-naked situation.  The Acceptable Level of Manipulation in the stories we've been asked to buy, from weapons of mass destruction to... don't get me started, has been way too high, and it sounds to me like we're verging on a cultural moment where the manipulations are finally declared unacceptable.

In all this, I'm perversely tickled by the overlap between "entertainment" and "real life."  I loved it when David Letterman, of all people, told Bill O'Reilly he was full of crap.  Maureen Dowd has pointed out that it was book critic Michiko Kukatani's article on the Frey phenomenon that finally helped convince Oprah to reverse her stance and call Frey on the carpet.  It seems that just as comedian Jon Stewart has become one of the nation's most seriously listened-to news anchors, it took a member of the literati to light a fire under what's become a major news story.

So, has the amount of bullshit being slung in the public sphere finally created too much of a stench to ignore?  Oprah set a grand example, by admitting on national TV that she'd been wrong in first giving Frey a free pass, and apologizing for her actions, thus earning herself the moral ground to stand on as she called each lie of his a lie. 

I'd like to follow her lead, because I've had my fill of truthiness.  These days I'm hungry for the real, pure and simple thing.  I find myself singing that old John Lennon tune:

I’m sick and tired of hearing things
From uptight, short-sighted, narrow-minded hypocritics
All I want is the truth
Just gimme some truth
I’ve had enough of reading things
By neurotic, psychotic, pig-headed politicians
All I want is the truth
Just gimme some truth

But as my friend from Texas, Nan O'Byrne is wont to say, "You do what you did, you get what you got."   So it seems to me that to get to the truth, one has to give it out -- which means I'll have to do things a little differently, if I want to get a different result.  Ultimately, what happens next begins with what you and I do in our private lives.   When it comes to letting go of our own accepted manipulations -- when whether we'll be liked, or get what we want, is what's at stake -- I wonder how honest we're capable of being with each other, with ourselves.

Just Say Yes

 

When I started out this blog, I had simultaneously started a bout of internet dating -- or rather, I had joined an on-line dating service and was ready to give it a good shot.  As it happened, the women I was interested in asking out ignored me, and women I didn't want to know came after me in droves.  Or at least, in steady dribbles.  So sadly, I must report that with my good shot having landed way wide of its target, I'm ready to take down my profile and slink off out of cyberspace.

I blame Maria Dahvana Headley, because where was she when I needed her?  This enlightened woman decided to say "yes" to every man who asked her out, and only now -- way too late to have influenced the women I was approaching last spring -- is her book on the experience in print.  As this intriguing post about Ms. Headley's methodology reports (courtesy of Bill Sebring), "Hollywood is calling" on The Year of Yes -- I can see the movie, can't you? -- because damn if she didn't earn herself a happy ending in real life, having snagged an unlikely husband out of the endeavor, a guy she claims she never would have dated otherwise.

Take that, oh you ladies who ignored the eligible me!  Fie on you and your ridiculously high standards.  And meanwhile -- I smell a trend -- my studio has recently purchased the saga of a woman who literally went globetrotting to find a soulmate.  Jennifer Cox took her own pro-active approach, and chronicled it in Around the World in 80 Dates, which certainly bespeaks a similar openness to new experience... and true to form, she ended up hitched as well.

Clearly I'm not hanging out in the right circles, or perhaps, on the right continent.  Maybe I should get cracking on a memoir (Around the Web in 80 Nays?), since having a movie made out of my misadventures just might increase my chances of getting to a yea.  But in the meantime, as one of the commentors on the above link suggested, I plan to promote Headley's yes book as much as I possibly can.

What I Believe

Favorite old Steve Martin routine: Martin stands alone on stage in formal wear, and as syrupy "inspirational" orchestral music plays, he recites, in his best mock-serioso stentorian tone, a litany:  "What I believe.  I believe in rainbows and puppy dogs and fairytales... I believe in the family... and I believe sex is one of the most wholesome, natural things that money can buy... I believe in equality.  Equality for everyone, no matter how stupid they are, or how much better I am than they are... And people say I'm crazy for believing this, but I believe that robots are stealing my luggage."

He goes on from there, declaiming in his punch-line, "I believe that of all the evils in the world, there is nothing worse... than the music you're listening to right now," but it's that robots line that's always had the most resonance for me.  The reversal in the gag points up a quality that's so human: the person who strikes you as perfectly credible in every way (they're kinda... just like you!) until you find out that every alternate Tuesday, they sacrifice wombats to an alien god.

When it comes to what we believe in, sometimes it looks like we're all of us not much more than a sum of our contradictions.  I've been thinking about beliefs of late, and how -- at least, speaking for myself -- every day can be like running a gauntlet between the story I'm telling myself about what my life is, and what my life actually appears to be, from outside me.

Writers naturally make up stories about their lives -- these days, even when they're claiming to write non-fiction.   And maybe it's because the fine line of "truthiness" is getting so smudged of late, but these days I'm into questioning beliefs, especially my own.  Thus I was intrigued to come upon this blog post (courtesy of Jennifer Garnett's 100 Blogs List) in which Jackie, a waitress from Chicago, questions "a myth about myself."  And I was reminded of a nightmarish experience I had last week, wherein one of my fundamental personal myths got busted.

As a writer, a writing teacher, and a professional screenplay reader, I'm called upon to make judgements on a daily basis.  Especially in my capacity as a studio story analyst, I don't have the luxury to second-guess or excuse my opinion by saying "that's just my taste," no -- I'm being paid to judge, as objectively as may be possible, the commercial merits of a given piece of material.  In this job, I've been right on occasion (I passed twice on the script for last year's big tanker, The Island) and at least once, I was infamously wrong (I passed on the script for Independence Day, not having comprehended that it didn't matter that the screenplay sucked; those Really, Really Big Flying Saucers were a legitimate hook, and at that cultural moment, way pre-9/11, people really did want to see the White House blown up).

Meanwhile, in my capacity as script consultant and writing teacher, I've gotten fairly secure in my ability to analyze a given project's problems, and to come up with some viable suggestions for how a story's problems might be solved.  I had never, in fact, encountered a script that flat-out stumped me, whether it be a studio project in development or a neophyte screenwriter's pitch.  I'd become so used to being able to troubleshoot and "fix" any script thrown at me, that I guess you could say my belief was: I can solve any story problem.

Well, I'm sure you can see where this led me -- right to a personal Waterloo, in a screenwriting workshop.  A student presented an outline for a screenplay rewrite, and it was soon apparent to all of us in the room that it had some fundamental problems, but as to solutions?  Maybe my moon was in Stupidity, I dunno, but for once, I could not for the life of me see the way out of this particular hole.

My credo in such workshops is: don't try to rewrite someone's story for them, but get them to define their intentions.  Once these are articulated, then one can speak to whether or not they're being realized.  I'm fundamentally interested in supporting the writer, and trying to help her find her own way to a viable solution, based on what she -- not me -- wants to do. 

But for once, I slipped down the slope into the Dark Side.  Before long I had the entire class, led by me with brain-freeze, playing my least favorite game in such situations, the Useless Executive's gambit (Q: How many useless studio executives does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: Does it have to be a lightbulb?).  We changed character genders, changed plot ploys, pretty much ripped the thing up until the poor writer was left with just confetti... and we were left with No Solution At All.

Post-class I was mortified and apologetic.  The writer, thankfully, was graceful and resilient.  I pledged my extra-curricular attention to her issues, via e-mail, and we corresponded.  I made some more carefully considered suggestions that spoke to the core idea of her story, and how that might be addressed. And she... listened or didn't and continued to do her own thinking, and has recently come up with, if not The Solution, at least a viable fresh way to come at the material -- which may, in fact, involve setting aside what had been the most problematic aspect of the story, as presented.

Kind of a happy-ish ending.  What it's led to, for me, is a revision of my belief.  I still believe that Any story problem can be solved -- just not necessarily by me, alone and immediately.

And aren't I a better human for this?  (Place pats on back here, and here.  Thanks.)  Humility is a beautiful thing, however one comes by it.  It's the subtext of self-help guru Byron Katie's work, which is becoming quite popular, at least on this coast.  Called in fact "The Work" it primarily consists of asking oneself four simple questions, which when applied to a given issue, help you to see that issue in a new light.   

Say you believe, "My life sucks."  Katie's first question is, Is it true?  The second question is, Can I absolutely know that it's true?  Even before going further, you can imagine the kinds of healthy land mines that can be detonated in the grounds of one's belief system, if you really try to answer the questions honestly.

I was initially resistant to even hearing about Katie, since I generally abhor self-help stuff (and what the hey kind of name is Byron Katie?), until a friend told me that she's married to Stephen Mitchell.   Now there's a name, and because I believe that beloved translator Mitchell posesses one of the great minds in writing-dom (I absolutely know that it's true), I dipped into her book. 

Now, based on The Work and my screenwriting workshop crash-and-burn last week, I've been lately inclined to forge a new belief, i.e. It's a good idea to question my beliefs.  But then, only today, I came upon a fabulous discourse that holds that belief up to question, and in fact may cause me to contradict myself completely (love it when that happens).

"What do you believe is true even if you cannot prove it?" is the question posed by Edge's World Question Center.  In this fascinating piece (courtesy of kottke.org's Best Links of 2005), 120 scientists and science-minded people in our culture answer this provocative question, and a through-line in a number of the responses is the notion that it is, in fact, a healthy thing to base one's belief in... well, belief, period.  According to the best minds in the world, an intuitive conviction that can't be backed up can actually be the cornerstone of living a happy life.

So I guess it's a good idea to question my beliefs... except when it's like, not.  Or something.  I dunno, I'm still working on it and I'll have to get back to you.  In the meantime, I believe I have a lot of thinking to do.  And I need to get my stolen typewriter back from those pesky robots...

(robot by Gordon Bennett)

What Can't Be Shown

Last week, media pundits dutifully noted that the movie awards season had begun with the Golden Globes (to be followed by the Directors Guild Awards, the Screen Actors Guild, the Writers Guild... sorry, I dozed off for a moment, where were we? oh, right, the Spirit Awards and the Oscars).  But they got it dead wrong.  Nope, this January the movie awards season began a week earlier, with a star-studded spectacular in Vegas, and this was a show where the comments weren't about how revealing some of the actresses' dresses were, but about the fact that the actresses were wearing dresses. 

I'm talking of course about the 23rd Annual AVN Awards, known as "the Oscars of adult entertainment."  This is the awards show (oddly enough, not telecast nationally) where among the statuettes handed out are those for Best Oral Sex Scene and Best Anal-Themed Feature (Ass Worship 7 was this year's winner, perhaps disappointing fans of Big Ass Party). 

But where was the media love?  Despite porn's thriving longevity (or shall we say, its powerful, throbbing hot staying power) this genre is truly the willfully ignored pink elephant in the room of moviemaking.  A NY Times article on the event notes that adult entertainment generated $4.3 billion in sales and rentals last year, not that anyone in the legit side of the biz likes to notice it.  But 4.3 billion is a mind-boggling figure (that's more dollars than there are blogs!), and it does say something about our famously puritanical country when porn's profits are about half the size of Hollywood's box office receipts of nearly $9 billion -- box office receipts that are ominously on the decline.

Meanwhile, I do wonder what's it like to have one's AVN award for Best Group Sex Scene on the mantlepiece for dinner guests to admire.  I found it both endearing and bemusing to hear that Tyla Wynn, who in fact won for best group-groping, admitted to some stage fright in her speech.  "Speaking in front of people is hard," she said (as opposed to...).   But what seems like an ironic disjunct here actually speaks to a moral schizophrenia that's central to the American arts and entertainment experience.  People who earn AVN awards must be used to the notion that while it's nice to get formal respect from their peers once a year, for the most part they are meant to be seen and not heard about. 

We like our sex out of sight.  We love to hear about it -- sometimes the entire celebrity gossip industry seems like a glorified hot line on who's shtupping who -- but we don't want the actual dirty deed in front of us.  It's fine (at least, if you're of liberal bent) to study others' sexuality in private, strictly for the purposes of self-abuse.  But try depicting it honestly and explicitly outside the realm of pornography, in a movie with aims of art and entertainment, and you might as well tattoo a "kick me" sign on your forehead.

Roger Ebert is only one of the more vocal critics who've decried an ongoing madness in the MPAA film rating system.  The level of accepted graphic violence in a PG-13 release can be appalling, but throw in a bare breast or a few expletives and you're whisked into R-land.  To be blunt, Americans seem to be far more comfortable watching a guy get his head blown off than with watching him give head or get blown.

These ruminations on the odd double-standard-ness of it all were brought on by my finally having caught up to "the most explicit British film ever made," Michael Winterbottom's Nine Songs.   Some 35 years ago, filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard mused in an interview that he wished a film could be made "about what really goes on between a man and a woman in the bedroom" but noted that it would be impossible.  Well, Winterbottom has made the attempt, and while it's not entirely successful, it's certainly a noble effort.

Released in 2004, when it caused a sensation at Cannes, and only out in the U.S. this past year on DVD, Nine Songs tells the story of an affair almost entirely through a depiction of the lovers' sexual relationship.  The film features both male and female full frontal nudity, and explicit, un-simulated sex acts, and to call it controversial is to really put it mildly.  I found taking a gander at the reviews Songs has received to be almost as fascinating as the movie itself, in terms of what they revealed about the rest of us.

Skim a bit of this one and you'll get the idea.  It's typical of the darkly, unintentionally amusing "doth protest too much" strain of criticism that Winterbottom's creation has endured.  Those who hate the film -- roughly half of its reviewers -- come at it with such vehement vitriol that you'd think the filmmaker had personally shot their dogs and then sodomized the poor dead pups. 

Apparently these critics, who think nothing of sitting through an obscure Eastern European filmmaker's four hour treatise on say, life among the donkeys in a village near Irkutsk, are shocked, shocked and mortified that this Brit auteur would expect them to sit still for some 70 minutes' study of two people in bed.  Ironically, a great many of them fault the film for not being erotic -- in other words, if it did aspire to pornography (i.e. a work specifically engineered to arouse), they just might stomach it.  But if the movie seems to have some other agenda, it's an abomination that must be put down, pronto.

To me, the "well, it certainly didn't turn me on!" angle smacks of suspicious defensiveness.  Something has evidently put a bug up their butts, and I suspect it's an effect of Winterbottom's very premise -- sexuality as an expression of character, of emotion, of story, and the express taking on of sex as a vehicle of exploration, not titillation.  But the funniest reaction of all has to be a number of negative reviews' complaints that the movie is too short.  That's like Woody Allen's gag from the opening of Annie Hall:  "Two elderly women are at a Catskills mountain resort, and one of them says, 'Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.'  The other one says, 'Yeah, I know -- and such small portions!'"

My reactions to the movie are mixed.  I'm well aware that Winterbottom's task is formidable.  His depth of focus is limited almost exclusively to two arenas: the couple's sex life, and nine scenes showing them enjoying live performances by contemporary alt-rock bands.  And what could be more difficult than trying to convey what it feels like to make love, than what it feels like to enjoy music?

Given that, I find Nine Songs fascinating.  I've long professed (in my rom-com book, here and elsewhere) that truly intimate acts, i.e. fully dimensional human beings exposing who they are to each other, as opposed to merely exposing naked skin, are in woefully short supply in cinema.  You can find passages exploring sex as a means of exposing character, philosophy, even spirituality, in literature; Henry Miller's two Tropic books come to mind, and (feminist readers can put their guns down) in the works of his colleague Anais Nin.  But there aren't many films that really use sexuality to explore the human condition (I'll cite Last Tango and Unbearable Lightness, noting that no strictly American pic springs to the fore).

Nine Songs doesn't quite get the job done.  But it's an honest attempt to tell the story of what goes on between two lovers while they're being lovers, understanding that humans do not stop being who they are when they get between the sheets; they often become more of who they are.  The performances of Margot Stilley and Kieran O'Brien are brave, and especially in the case of Stilley, occasionally revelatory.  She's utterly convincing as a narcissistic, fundamentally selfish creature who totally gives herself over to the experience of the moment... until she's ready to move on.  (Stilley's interview on the DVD is required viewing, and in this one she sheds additional light on how the movie was made and what it all felt like.)

Yes, there awkward moments, and some tedious stretches.  O'Brien's voice-over is often clumsy, and the Michael Nyman piano music occasionally betrays the realistic mode of the material by spritzing scenes with a faint scent of Euro-Hollywood schmaltz.  Nonetheless, I found good portions of the movie compelling, and thoughts about it have lingered with me long after the viewing. 

It's precisely what's left out of porn movies (not that I would know, of course) that makes this one interesting: a moment of tenderness and humor in the midst of a repositioning, a sudden abrupt shift in mood and intensity at the end of an orgasm, and through it all, Real Life Human Bodies inhabited by real people in the realm of sex, hanging out, having a bath, at ease with their nudity, saying the things you might say, falling into the random odd behaviors one does, when you're that close to a lover and enjoying them.  Though ultimately, just what Winterbottom was after -- the essence of our ineffable inner experience of what's erotic/romantic, which maybe can't be shown on screen, after all -- finally remains elusive. 

Fair warning: if you are offended by and/or uninterested in nudity and graphic sex of any kind, DO NOT go near this movie.  But if you're curious about the endeavor (and/or fans of Franz Ferdinand, whose pre-big time performance is a musical highlight, along with a nice Dandy Warhols number) by all means add Nine Songs to your Netflix queue, hopefully to be perused with a lover or friend, as it's bound to engender some interesting reactions. 

Bottom line, the idea of telling a story through a couple's lovemaking strikes me as a sound and worthily adventurous undertaking, and that so many people supposedly interested in the art of filmmaking would dismiss this movie out of hand seems to me more the fault of their prejudices, and not Winterbottom's supposed prurient interests.   What makes me incredulous is many reviewers' assumption that the filmmaker must have made the accursed thing for sheer self-aggrandizement, as some cheap and tawdry exploitative grab for publicity.  What other motivation could he possibly have in mind?

Winterbottom, in fact, is a filmmaker with an illustrious resume (Welcome to Sarajevo, 24 Hour Party People, etc.), who has no need of such PR.  You can hear his reasonable, clear-headed rationale for the film's inquiry in a special feature on the DVD, and in this brief interview.  He's a perfectly legitimate artist, and a born risk-taker  who clearly takes a perverse delight in filming what's generally considered unfilmable.  His latest project is an adaptation of Tristam Shandy, a famously anti-novelistic novel that no one entirely in their right mind would attempt to make a film of (Winterbottom's strategy is apparently to make it a movie about a movie crew being unable to make the movie).  Into the breach again, and I say, bravo.   It opens here in America this Friday.

In the meantime, courtesy of Bibi, here's a fun little quiz to see if you can tell the difference between art and pornography.

The Soul Romantic

Wilson Pickett 

(3/18/41 -- 1/19/06)

Passed away Thursday, at age 64.

How many loves born

to the sound of that voice? 

How much lust celebrated

busting moves to Mustang Sally,

singing along to desire's own phone number

634 5789?

How many courtship steps danced

down Funky Broadway?

How many men's awed amens were heard

How many women's sighs

when you gave a little howl

a joyful gleam in your wicked eyes?

Beacon of my youth

Deacon of garage bands and avatar of juke joints

With a smiling cry

oh sinful preacher what you taught us

of the Essential

in two minutes and thirty-five seconds

of priceless Stax-Volt gold.

Now rest in peace, your tiger's roar

so sweet and raw

etched into the grooves

eternally inspiring us

with your anthem of the unrequited...

I'm gonna wait 'till the midnight hour

That's when my love comes tumbling down

I'm gonna wait 'till the midnight hour

When there's no one else around

I'm gonna take you girl and hold you

And do all the things I told you

In the midnight hour

Yes I am, whoa, yes I am

(One more thing I just wanna say right here...)

I'm gonna wait till the stars come out

See them twinkle in your eyes

I'm gonna wait 'till the midnight hour

That's when my love begins to shine

You're the only girl I know

That really love me so

In the midnight hour

Oh, yeah

In the midnight hour

Yeah!  Alright -- Play it for me one time now...

I'm gonna wait till the midnight hour

That's when my love come  a-tumbling down

I'm gonna wait, way in the midnight hour

That's when my love begins to shine

Just you and I, oh baby

Just you and I

Nobody around baby, just you and I...

In the midnight hour

(Music and Lyrics by Steve Cropper & Wilson Pickett)

A Few Good Words

President Calvin Coolidge (1923-29) wasn't prone to conversation.  He refused to use a telephone while in office, and his taciturn nature was so well-known that once, a guest at a White House dinner made a bet that she could get him to say more than two words.  When she told the President of her wager, he replied: "You lose."

It's not that I'm obsessed with the concept of Less Is More, but it has been on my mind of late.  Maybe this focus on verbal economy and compression is due to a recent decision to cut 50 pages out of my 350 page novel.  Or perhaps it's a reaction to the incredibly longwinded roll-calling our great God-fearing nation had to endure last night during the Golden Globe Awards telecast (I pretty much stuck with 24, where the dialogue tends to be bracingly terse; there's not much time for chatter when you're saving the world from terrorists, again).

There's something so satisfying about succinct.  Brevity is still the soul of wit, now more than ever in our high-speed, information-overloaded culture.  Rhetoric and word-glut is too much with us (just mention the word "blog" to some people and you see them recoil in horror), which is probably why we derive so much pleasure from the effective one-word ad campaign ("Zoom, zoom, zoom!") and the clever, carbo-packed news headline, like Variety's legendary report about how movies that condescended to rural characters were tanking, not surprisingly, in rural areas: "STICKS NIX HICKS PICS" (although that one has a lot to do with Mel Brooks's dictum that words ending in "k" sound funny).

Our current need to cut to the chase is clearly what accounts for the popularity of a website that specializes in four word movie reviews (their top-voted Brokeback Mountain review is of course, "Homo on the range").

But the idea of saying the most with the least recently arose for me when I was filling out Fun Joel's scribosphere meme.  The questionnaire requested "two favorite lines" from movies, and as I thought about it, I found that quotes that were literally one line long weren't instantly easy to come up with.  So I got into a sort of perverse quest to find the shortest memorable movie quotes extant.  (This is what it's come to, while that 350 page manucript sits on my desk, glowering.)

With movie quotes, context is if not everything, quite a lot.  To simply say "Plastics" is to say next to nothing -- but that's precisely what gives the line such a sardonic, ironic charge when it's delivered to young Dustin Hoffman as the one word that will supposedly illuminate his future, in The Graduate.  Nonetheless a few words that really work, in context, can conjure up an entire movie experience.  At any rate, here's what I found in my search for Memorable Movie Quotes of 3 Words or Less.

Greetings:

Hello, gorgeous.  (Funny Girl)

Yo, Adrian!  (Rocky)

Bond.  James Bond.  (Goldfinger, et al)

Battle cries:

Attica!  Attica!  (Dog Day Afternoon)

Toga! Toga!  (Animal House)

Stella!  (A Streetcar Named Desire)

Announcements:

Heeeeere's Johnny!  (The Shining)

They're he-ere!  (Poltergeist)

Character motifs:

As if.  (Clueless)

La-dee-da...  (Annie Hall)

Ack-ack!  (Mars Attacks)

Miscellaneous  Declarations:

We rob banks.  (Bonnie and Clyde)

What a dump.  (Another Part of the Forest)

It's alive!  (Frankenstein)

I'll be back.  (The Terminator)

I hate snakes.  (Indiana Jones)

Nobody's perfect.  (Some Like it Hot)

Question You Don't Ever Want to Have to Answer:

Is it safe?  (Marathon Man)

One-Word Quote Which, as is Annoyingly Typical of This Movie, Would Top Most Cinefiles' Lists of "Most Memorable":

Rosebud.  (Citizen Kane)

Inevitably I turn to my bailiwick, for a sub-category worthy of screenwriting craft study: Greatest Romantic Comedy Lines of 1 or 2 Syllables.

Given that romantic comedies tend to be verbose -- witty banter is actually what we expect from a rom-com -- I'm fond of citing the opening of Richard Curtis's Four Weddings and a Funeral as a model, a paradigm of great romantic comedy dialogue.

The movie begins with a wordless montage of various characters getting ready to go to a wedding.  We find protagonist Charles (Hugh Grant) still in bed, sleepily picking up his alarm clock and then reacting, eyes widened:

Oh, fuck. Fuck!

Charles runs into housemate Scarlett's room and thrusts her clock at her sleepy face.  Scarlett reacts:

Fuck!

Cut to Charles getting dressed in a hurry.  He bends to tie his shoes and his suspenders pop off the back of his trousers.  Charles:

Fuck.

Cut to Charles and Scarlett in the front of his Volvo.  The engine won't start.  Charles:

Fuck!!!

Now that's great dialogue.  I'm not being facetious here -- it's truly impressive how much the sequence accomplishes, in terms of story set-up, character and tone, using one four-letter word.  But Curtis is also a master of the long speech, which he demonstrates in the closing scene of this classic (and for those of you who keep disparaging 4 Weddings because you can't stand Andie MacDowell, I say get the fuck over it, already; you try writing a rom-com screenplay this good, okay?  Please go ahead, I double dare you!).

Sorry.  Anyway -- Boy has met, lost, and is getting girl, romantically in the rain, and his pitch is true to Charles' stumbling, twistedly conflicted anti-marriage persona:

Do you think... after we've dried off, after we've spent lots of time together, you might agree... NOT to marry me?  And do you think... not being married to me might maybe be something you could consider doing for the rest of your life?  Do you?

Girl uses the two most irony-laden syllables conceivable, in reply:

I do.

Runners-up in this category would include the fabulous "just-just-just-just--"/"don't-don't-don't-don't--" duet between Dustin Hoffman and his panicked live soap opera TV crew during the climax of Tootsie (fans of this movie, and we are legion, will know what I'm talking about), and one of the most moving uses of a commonplace word that I've ever heard, in the closing lines of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind -- two syllables repeated by two devastated lovers (He: Okay?  She: Okay.)  that bring tears to my eyes, every time.

Of course the above list is anything but inclusive, which is where the rest of you come in.  What pithy or profound, priceless couple of words have I left out?

Since You Asked...

I'm it.  I thought I dodged this, but no: Fun Joel tagged three people, they tagged three people, they tagged three people, and one of them tagged me (thank you Kristen) which means, according to Lee Thomson, that I'm in the fourth tier.  Clearly my goal for 2006 is to move up from the cheap seats to at least the Third Tier for the next round, or to forget the whole thing and go to a movie.  At any rate, Fun-Joel's screenwriting questionnaire (meme, meme, we all scream for Joel's meme) has spread, virus-like, through the scribosphere, making every other movie/writing blog post one sees read like a film crew job application for the latest Coen Brothers project, and as I'm now infected, here goes...

My Earliest Film-Related Memory

King Kong nightmares.  Growing up in New York in the late 1950s, a staple of home life was a TV program called Million Dollar Movie.  It was here I encountered the original big black and white ape, a primal and profound thrill, though I can't remember the specific "first time" -- it's as if he was always there, beating his breast and bellowing from a dark corner of my house, totally unreal and mysteriously believable -- probably because I saw the movie over and over again. 

As if mimicking the perverse schedule of some slacker revival house, Million Dollar Movie repeated each week's film (one that cost, ohmyGod, a million dollars!) daily, late in the afternoon.  Kong scared me shitless, but torn between fascination and terror, I kept coming back for more -- after all, he was waiting for me after school every day.  So like a willing lab rat participating in an imprinting experiment run by a mad scientist bent on terrorizing tots, I gave myself nightmares (my big brother unlocks a gargantuan forbidden garage door that slides open to reveal Kong, busting chains, we run, I get my sleeve caught on a car door handle, Kong looms...) which like a bad Freudian gag, persisted into early adulthood.

2 Favorite Lines From Movies

That's impossible.  Two?  TWO?! 

Okay, since I've already covered romantic comedy dialogue favorites in a prior post, I can at least cite other genres, and here's the first two that come to mind:

You and I are gonna meet here... without knowing anything that goes on outside.

Marlon Brando to Maria Schneider, initiating their first illicit tryst in Last Tango in Paris (his speech continues: "...Because we don't need names here.  Don't you see?  We're gonna forget everything that we knew.  All the people, all that we do, wherever we live... We're gonna forget that.  Everything, everything.") [Bernardo Bertolucci & Franco Arcalli, 1972]

What a world, what a world!...

The Wicked Witch of the West, of course, in the midst of her magnificent death aria from The Wizard of  Oz, a near-throwaway mutter in context:  "Ohhh — you cursed brat! Look what you've DONE!  I'm melting!  Melting!  Oh — what a world, what a world!  Who would have thought a good little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness!?" [Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, half the writers in 1939 Hollywood]

3 Jobs I'd Do if I Could Not Work in the Business

Because I'm completely useless, worthless, in terms of any livelihood that doesn't involve the written word, I'm going to interpret this to mean "3 jobs I fantasize I could do..." e.g.:

Secret agent

International surfing champ

(And, in tribute to Woody Allen's remark that if he was able to come back in another life, he'd like to come back as Warren Beatty's fingertips:)

Fulfiller of Scarlett Johansson's every wanton desire

4 Jobs I've Actually Held Outside the Industry

This was tough to come up with, considering I've been making a living as a writer since age 16 and will only stop when they pry the keyboard from my cold, dead hand.  But along the way, my Not Writing-Related Gigs have included:

Teleprompter

Vocal coach

Educational Research Assistant

Keyboardist for Pink Lady

3 Book Authors I Like

No way.  "Voracious reader" doesn't even begin to do justice to how sick I am, having read in 2005 alone (I keep a log, of course) 82 books.  So if I get started on my favorites we'll be here all week.  Let me tweak it to be 3 Book Authors Who've Inspired Me in the Past Few Years:

Haruki Murakami

Mary Robison

James Salter

2 Movies I'd Like to Remake or Properties I'd Like to Adapt

Mitchell Leisen's Midnight (1939), one of Billy Wilder's first American scripts, starring Claudette Colbert as an American dance hall girl down on her luck in Paris and unlikely romantic lead Don Ameche as the cabbie who helps her out, has long struck me as ripe for remaking as a contemporary rom-com... and my own studio, Universal, has had this in slow-motion back-burner development for awhile.

Silk, a pitch-perfect jewel of a short novel by Alessandro Baricco, would make an exquisite film, though all of its elements are a recipe for disaster.  It's period (1861)... has no Americans in it (features a French merchant seeking silkworms who falls in love with a Japanese woman)... a tragic ending... and I only wish I had the wherewithal to secure the rights.

1 Screenwriter I Think is Underrated

I'm gonna cheat and cite one deceased, one who's alive and kicking:

Leigh Brackett wrote The Big Sleep, Rio Bravo and a bunch of great Howard Hawks movies, then amazingly, at the age of  65, penned the best Star Wars movie, The Empire Strikes Back.  Which includes one of the best dialogue moments in the entire franchise, mainly Han Solo's face-off with Princess Leia as he's about to be frozen:

Princess (tearfully):  I love you!

Han:  I know.

Danny Rubin wrote Groundhog Day, which means that even if he never gets another movie made (his additional credits, truth be told, are meager), he is a God (not the God, as Bill Murray says of himself in that movie, but a God).

Finally, Scott the Reader has added on this category: Favorite Line of Dialogue I Have Ever Written.

Has to be set up to make any sense, but in my black comedy thriller The Trouble With My Sister, the woman of the title's younger brother comes home from school, finds he's tracked bloody footprints through the living room, and recognizing this as evidence that a murder's been committed here, cries:

Oh, Sis...  Not again!

Cracks me up every time, which tells you a little something about me, I guess.  Which I guess was kind of the idea.

Oh, hey I nearly forgot: I tag the Purgatorian.

Small is the New Big

When I first heard about this contest for the best thirty-second movie shot entirely with a cell phone, I had to laugh.  It's just so... 2006 of them, you know?  We can now look forward to the best fifteen-second movie shot entirely with a digital wristwatch, and eventually, the best 0.5 second movie shot with a quarter-inch belly button piercing: you don't actually see it when it's projected, because it's subliminal-fast, but it's judged on how it makes you feel.

The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that they -- and by "they," I guess I mean the minds of the culture at large -- are actually onto something.  The idea of Doing More With Less has been, after all, the necessity-as-mother-of-invention premise of the entire independent film movement.  The kick-ass energy and ingenuity of some of the best movies I've ever seen is rooted in just this kind of aesthetic impoverishment.  Call it the Look Ma, No Budget! school of moviemaking.

Beyond that, we have the current renaissance of Short.  Film shorts made by aspiring auteurs have become so ubiquitous over the past 5-10 years that they're already being declared "over" in some circles, with a preponderance of festivals and TV slots for shorts a commonplace.

There's no denying that some fantastic filmmaking is being done in the short form.  I was blown away by Gary Lundgren's short Wow and Flutter on the DVD (#19) in Paste Magazine's most recent issue, which more poignantly encapsulated adolescent angst in 17 minutes than half the full-length features ever released on the subject.  The McSweeney's gang's new DVD magazine Wholphin, as Elizabeth Crane recently pointed out, is big on small goods.

And as a longtime unapologetic fan of the music video form, I can point to any number of under 4-minute lo-fi creations more memorable than many of the 3-hour big-budget bonanzas I've dozed through.  I've been savoring my way through The Directors Label's latest DVD foursome (the collected videos of Mark Romanek, Jonathan Glazer, Anton Corbijn and Stephane Sednaoui), where big production values are often exactly not the point.  Some of my favorite music-vids use next-to-nothing to great artistic effect (the Yeah-Yeah's video of Maps comes to mind, with its single set performance done in one long take).  Check out this collection of 2005's crop of indie music videos, many of which take the Less Is More approach to intriguing extremes; you might start with (#9 ), Beck's Japanese robots fan-dance, if you haven't already enjoyed it.

But I digress.  What the thirty-second cell phone movie contest got me to thinking about was a simple principle: limitations foster creativity.  Whichever movie wins that contest is going to have an Inspired Idea at work.  Playing with such a reduced field demands inventiveness -- the use of a big idea that can make maximum impact in minimum time. 

And I only wish more of the screenplays I read would take such an approach -- because all too many of them are just too damn long.

I don't mean long in total amount of pages, necessarily.  I mean long in the writing on each page.  So many of the scripts I see written by pre-pros are guilty of over-writing.  Too much time is wasted on painstaking set-ups for obvious pay-offs.  Too often the young screenwriter forgets that he or she is writing for the smartest audience in the world. 

That's us: raised on not only books and stories and plays and musicals, but movies, television, videos, video games, commercials, music videos, et al, we have literally and figuratively seen it all -- more than any other generation a storyteller has had to deal with.  So we get the message by now, whatever it is, with amazing speed and acuity.

Say you want to let the reader know what a female protagonist's relationship is to two different men being introduced in a scene with her.  A novice screenwriter is apt to spend paragraphs on the interactions between these three characters, more often relying on exposition-laden dialogue to get the whole story across.  Here's what I saw a pro screenwriter do to accomplish the same task, in a script I read yesterday.  The female character enters a room where a party's in progress, and:

She kisses Robert on the cheek and Daniel on the lips.

Done.  In one short sentence.  I now know essentially all I need to know about who Daniel is to her, as opposed to Bob.  And we're moving on.

Deft, compressed and vivid visuals are of course a key component to good cinematic storytelling.  But there's other ways to go.  Say I want to get across the idea that our story is set in Los Angeles, and define something about the city's character.  I could do a montage of visuals, from the palm trees to the beach to the traffic on the 405, throw in a shot of a Laker Girls practice, a film crew at work, et al.   Or I could simply quote this real-life dialogue, overheard by a friend of mine who was visiting from New York --  Two 30-ish women greeting each other on Ocean Front Walk:

1st Woman: Hey, how ARE you?

2nd Woman: I'm GREAT!  I changed my mantra! 

There you are and there you have it: L.A. in 5 seconds flat.

Working small and quick requires the creative writer to think big, to dig for the inspired single thin brush stroke that will suggest a mountain -- the way old Japanese masters did it, in both ink drawing and Haiku.  That's what gets a reader off, what excites an audience.  That's what I'm looking forward to in seeing the winning short of that Ithaca contest, while wishing that the writers I read had the courage and conviction to do more with less.

Why say more about it, having already gone on so long?

Big Head v. Little Head

[For reasons that will soon become clear, the quote I'd like to have accompanying this photo of Democrat  Senator Joe Biden (though he's evidently reacting to Judge Alito) should read: "Get thee behind me, Satan!"]

So my friend Uh-Jim and I (you may remember artist Uh-Jim, whose My Beloved was a favorite of early visitors to this blog) go to a party in Laurel Canyon: great hostess and host, fine and friendly company, good food and drink...  The only thing lacking, from my own myopic point of view, is a high ASW quota: there's a paucity of Available Single Women. 

This doesn't like, bum out my pot trip (that's an expression, I hasten to explain, meaning "doesn't cripple my enjoyment"; I could never really be stoned in a social situation among relative strangers, as it would end with me moaning quietly in the back of a closet).   But it does mean that I'm relegated to smiling at children and talking to fellow writers for a good portion of the evening, until I find myself in conversation with a convivial couple.  He turns out to be a journalist and she, I don't know yet, but we're getting along and making funny in that way you fall into sometimes with seemingly kindred spirits, when the penny drops and I learn: they're not a couple, they're just good friends.

And now I'm thinking: score!  Because the woman -- there is no other way to put this than to use appropriate colloquial parlance -- she is fine.  African-American, shapely, gorgeous, possessing the sparkling eyes and winsome good humor that'll turn any healthy hetero man's fancy to well, you get the picture -- and she's liking me.  Yes!  Oddly enough, she's laughing at things I say, she's actively pursuing the conversation, she seems to want to get to know me. 

Let me note in sidebar that this probably has something to do with the entree.  When you meet an attractive woman who's already part of a couple, you may be mildly flirtatious if you're so inclined, but you're not in pursuit -- not out to impress and charm et al, but just being yourself.  So this intro has been optimum, I've been caught in the act of not being an asshole, and it's not in fact until we've moved away from her friend and into the next room on our own, ostensibly to sample some pasta, that I'm even thinking, you know, what a single man in my position thinks at such junctures, mainly: What will it take...?

Because it's going well, this surprise assignation between me and (let's call her) Charlene, the one comely ASW extant -- she's doing that thing where she touches my wrist to emphasize a point (voluntary cross-gender physical contact, I note, as my anthropologist readers nod knowingly), and she's not dropping the ball for a moment as we continue to talk...  Only, that's the problem: the nature of the ball.

What does Charlene do for a living, this seductive vision of loveliness?  She's a speech writer for one of the most prominent Republican senators in America.

I'm not naming names, as I'm still licking wounds from my encounter with the surprisingly thin-skinned denizens of 126 Rivington Street (see comments).  But suffice to say, Charlene's boss, while not the Anti-Christ, is a person who does strike fear into the heart of a liberal Democrat Jew from New York.   And I'm flirting with the person who puts words in his mouth.

I am now, for all intents and purposes, a functioning schizophrenic.  My head is struggling gamely to keep pace with the conversation, in which sweet Charlene is presenting a very convincing case for why her boss is not my enemy and why he and she herself -- not a registered Republican, she assures me, but an Independent Conservative -- would really welcome a substantive liberal candidate from the Left to wrestle with in the coming election, as after all, we're not really so far apart as it seems in the matters that really matter, etc.

And meanwhile, my, um... Little Head and I are carrying on another dialogue altogether.  What the hell do you care? he's saying, and Politics-Shmolitics! and Would you just look at that soft baby blue cashmere sweater which has gotta be hiding the most fetching lingerie to be found inside the Beltway?!

That's the thing about the Devil: just when you think he can't come up with something new and even more effective...  But we're hanging in there, me and Little Me (I'll insert the obligatory "though not so little" gag here and move on), when, as if she senses she's got me on the ropes, Charlene does a full-on forefinger slide down my forearm -- probably in conjunction with making some "why it's okay that we're in Iraq" point, but who remembers the specifics: I'm barely able to hold up my side of the congenial debate with her, so soul-frazzled am I by the battle that rages within. 

Big Head: There is no way you'll be able to sustain this, outside of this room.

Little Head: She's only in town for four days!

Big Head: Besides, she's prob'ly just being knee-jerk seductive, that's How They Get You...

Little Head: With this much latent hostility the sex will be fantastic.

Big Head:  She embodies everything I've ever stood against!

Little Head:  Let me stand against her, dude, she smells good!!!

And did my moral code evaporate in the face of true romance, or to be honest, true lust?  Did I throw caution and conscience to the wind?   

Reader, I did not.

Not that I'm happy about it, mind you.  I'm reminded of the final episode of last season's Curb Your Enthusiasm, in which Larry David, given a free pass by his indulgent wife to have one-time-only sex with another woman, is about to consummate his lust with his Producers' leading lady Cady Huffman, when he looks up and sees she's got a framed photo of George W. on her dressing room table... and makes a hasty retreat.

At the time I saw it, I was totally with Larry's best friend Jeff, who, told of Larry's decision, said:  "What the fuck were you thinking?  A picture of Bush, who gives a flying fuck?  I'd fuck her with a Bush mask on!"  But when the analogous  situation came up for me (so to speak) in this real-life instance, I couldn't... go for it.

Now, I'm fully prepared for Charlene to pop up in the comments section here and tell me I live in a world of fantasy and that I never actually had a chance in hell with her.  But nonetheless, I'm curious: Any of you cats and kittens ever face this kind of moral test?  And did you pass or fail? 

(c) 2006 (B. Mernit) all rights reserved; Devil graphic by George Coghill.