How to Make Sex Boring
WHO’S BEEN SLEEPING IN YOUR HEAD: The Secret World of Sexual Fantasies
By Brett Kahr
Basic Books, 2008
Writing about sex makes a person look salacious. I’ll bet you think I’m salacious right now. I must be a deviant drooling pervert to even touch on the topic.
Reading about sex is the same way. You’re clearly a deviant drooling pervert yourself, or you wouldn’t be reading this post.
There’s a way around this, however. Touch your subject with cold philosphy, range the proofs and figures in columns, alter it with science’s peering eye, describe it with long Latinate words, and you may be able to persuade your readers, and modern Comstocks, and, if you’re good, yourself, that what you’re doing is Science. It’s not smut, it’s sociology! It’s not prurience, it’s psychology! How can you not see that, are you some kind of sex maniac?
That was the approach Brett Kahr took in his television series and later book on Americans’ and Britons’ sexual fantasies. It’s a long book, though it includes the questionnaire used to gather data as an appendix, and a dull one, even though it’s about sex. My first thought, when I sought to explain this, was “well, of course other people’s sexual fantasies are boring.” But pornographic writing is popular on the Web, and popular in bookstores even with the advent of the Web (and even with the advent of the Web on devices you can bring into the bathroom with you), and that’s basicallly other people’s sexual fantasies.
I think, in fact, that the dullness is the result of a tacit collaborration between Kahr and his interviewees: they agreed that both the samples and the analyses would be bloodless and unarousing, lest this compendium of erotic fantasy be confused with something sexual.
Don’t get me wrong; I didn’t pick this up hoping for wank fodder. But Kahr’s intent seems to be to destigmatize, or at least grope towards destigmatizing, odd or unusual types of fantasies (an uphill battle given his obvious discomfort with non-vanilla sexuality, but an admirable effort). This goal is ill-served by cruel, disgusting, and clinical descriptions, which inspire at best curiosity that anyone can find this arousing, and more probably hostility towards those people. The presentation makes it difficult to empathize, difficult to see one’s own fantasies as the interviewees appear to see theirs–which serves to otherize them and their sexual tastes.
In other words, the style, and the boringness, serves only to make the subjects seem more like perverts. If they’d been depicted, even briefly and indirectly, as blissing out over their fantasies, rather than being described as case studies, in as detached a way as possible, it would make those fantasies seem far more normal than studying them as specimens does.
Because no one in Hollywood ever really goes away, even after death, it’s inevitable that Jennifer Lopez, whose career peaked for a gloriously brief moment around 2002 or so, is staging a comeback. I guess you can call it a “comeback,” though I’m not really sure what she’s coming back to, other than being known for what she wears, who she’s sleeping with and for starring in overhyped movies that rarely make more than a plug nickel. Still, given this era’s ever-decreasing standards for what makes someone a “star,” that’s practically on a par with Meryl Streep. Lopez is attempting to reclaim her celebrity status with the safest, most blandest of films, a romantic comedy whose title actually escaped my mind as I was writing, even though I just saw it on a poster in the subway less than an hour before starting this article. After a few moments of poking around in the dusty corners of my brain, it came back to me: it’s called The Back Up Plan, and given the poster, it doesn’t seem as though the studio releasing it finds it any more memorable than I did.
Looking like it was slapped together by some assistant art director in a hurry to leave for the weekend, it’s such a typically…typical, I suppose, rom-com ad that one hopes for a moment that it could be a sly parody. The 90s era black and hot pink font, the not terribly clever catchphrase, the curiously placed image of a baby hanging upside down like a chandelier, the stellar Photoshopping that has Lopez looking at neither her co-star or the baby hanging over her head but somewhere off to the upper right–if someone was paid more than $100 to design this ad they got away with highway robbery. You could replace Lopez’s head with that of Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, Julia Roberts, Sandra Bullock, or pretty much any actress between the ages of 25 to 40 and it wouldn’t make the slightest bit of difference. If it was a chick lit novel, it’d be a pair of legs stepping out of a New York City cab.
Without ever hearing of this movie before seeing the ad today, I’m going to take a wild guess at what The Back Up Plan is about. Jennifer Lopez plays a workaholic (or “career woman,” do they still call them that?), who, now in her thirties, discovers that she’s let her job get in the way of the important things in life, such as starting a family. Unlucky in love, however, she decides to skip the whole being in a relationship first thing, choosing instead to just find someone willing to father her child. She finds a suitable sperm donor in the blandly handsome, undoubtably charming Alex O’Loughlin, who appears to have been created in a laboratory with strands of Patrick Dempsey’s DNA.
They spend the first hour or so of the film pretending that this is only a business transaction of sorts, that O’Loughlin’s sole purpose is exchanging fluids with Lopez and then hitting the road so that she can raise the child they conceived by herself. However, it becomes evident, probably during an ultrasound, that there are Real Feelings there, and by the end of the movie, which will almost certainly involve Lopez going into labor at the most inopportune time, say, during a wedding or a business meeting in which everyone around her begins flailing around like Daffy Duck, they’ll be a happy couple with a brand new baby to fuss over.
Here’s the actual plot description, courtesy of the Internet Movie Database:
After years of dating, Zoe (Jennifer Lopez) has decided waiting for the right one is taking too long. Determined to become a mother, she commits to a plan, makes an appointment and decides to go it alone. On the day of her artificial insemination, Zoe meets Stan (Alex O’Loughlin) a man with real possibilities.
Trying to nurture a budding relationship and hide the early signs of pregnancy becomes a comedy of errors for Zoe and creates confusing signals for Stan. When Zoe nervously reveals the reason for her unpredictable behavior, Stan commits fully and says he’s in.
Never before has love seen a courtship where a wild night of sex involves three in a bed–Stan, Zoe and the ever-present massive pregnancy pillow. Or, where date night consists of being the focal point at a near-strangers water birth which does for kiddie pools what Jaws did for swimming in the ocean. The real pregnancy test comes when both of them realize they really dont know each other outside of hormonal chaos and birth preparations. With the nine month clocking ticking, both begin to experience cold feet. Anyone can fall in love, get married and have a baby but doing it backwards in hyper-drive could be proof positive that they were made for each other.
Indeed, never before has pregnancy gotten in the way of sex, except in every other comedy ever made about pregnancy. I hope they’re edgy enough to also include a scene where Lopez cries for no reason while eating ice cream right out of the carton, and one where O’Loughlin looks incredulously at how big her underwear has gotten. Because no one’s had the guts to go there yet, man! Okay, so I was wrong in a few spots. Her leading man is not the father of her child, and it seems that they don’t spend a large portion of the movie acting hostile towards each other in some weak attempt to convince the audience that the script wasn’t written like a game of Mad Libs. However, they merely exchanged one romantic comedy cliche, pretending to dislike each other for no discernible reason, for another, that being someone going to ludicrous means to hide something from a partner when it would be much easier to just tell them the truth up front.
Then, when that cliche is exhausted, they pick up the slack with another one, that of “Pregnancy is so wacky!” The much beloved, and almost equally maligned Juno (full disclosure: I’m one of perhaps four people left in the continental United States who hasn’t seen it yet) seems to have ushered in a revival of pregnancy comedies (or should I say “birthed,” hi-yoooo!). I think of comedies centered around someone’s pregnancy as similar to comedies centered around a wedding–they’re almost always labored (bazinga!), mostly unsuccessful attempts at finding humor in a situation that is not terribly interesting to anyone other than the people to which it’s actually happening.
That’s not to say that pregnancy doesn’t have its funny moments, because it does (though mine seemed to involve such things as vomiting in a Taco Bell parking lot). Nevertheless, the majority of pregnancies are so uneventful that it’s a chore to find enough laughs to keep an hour and a half long movie chugging along. Left with little actual content most filmmakers resort to a checklist of tiresome cliches that few real-life couples about to have a child ever face: hippie childbirth coaches and inept medical staff you wouldn’t let near a litter of puppies, let alone a small human, men who become woozy at the sight of a needle, manufactured conflict that compels the male half of the expectant couple to admit that maybe he’s not ready to be a father after all (occasionally helped along by a swinging bachelor friend who encourages him to shirk his responsibilities), a trip to the hospital that looks like a Ringling Brothers routine. And let’s not forget, the expectant mother invariably gets grotesquely fat, or, by Hollywood standards, gets up as high as a size 10 or so.
But, to be fair, I’m making assumptions based solely on one crappy poster and a poorly written plot description on the IMDB (I’ve been trying to parse what exactly the last sentence means and failing miserably). Let’s watch the extended trailer.
It appears that Jennifer Lopez and her leading man “meet cute” at least three separate times, which may be a new record for a romantic comedy. Set in New York City? Check. Male best friend of indistinct sexuality? Check. Cynical girlfriends? Check. Wacky doctor? Check. Cute dog? Check. Generic pop song on the soundtrack? Check. And that’s before we even get to the “oh, and she’s pregnant” part. Curiously, that’s but a very small part of the trailer. But I’ll be darned if I didn’t see Lopez eating from a carton of ice cream. Come back tomorrow for Friday’s winning lottery numbers.
Hell hath no fury?
Marriage for dummies
So, you know, NBC has had it pretty rough in recent times. They’ve been consistently last in the ratings for the Big Three networks, and of course there was that embarrassing business with The Tonight Show last month, resulting in the excruciatingly cutesy mass declaration of being “Team CoCo.” Now they’re trying to win back America’s favor with The Marriage Ref, a combination reality/game/comedy show created by Jerry Seinfeld, king of NBC’s heyday back in the 90s. The fact that it’s described as a combination reality/game/comedy show should raise a big scarlet flag to anyone with some shred of common sense, but, alas, it seems to be what the network is banking on to put them back on top, even interrupting the closing ceremonies for the Winter Olympics to run a half-hour preview last Sunday. I missed the half hour, choosing instead to immerse myself in the full hour experience, premiering last night.
Full disclosure: I was never a fan of Seinfeld. Now, before you begin indignantly pounding on your keyboards, yes, I “got” the humor. I got that the characters were perpetually failing to see the forest for the trees, and that their utter lack of self-awareness was what drove the show’s plot, or lack thereof. I just didn’t think it was terribly funny. If I wanted to watch a TV show about neurotic people becoming apoplectic over such meaningless things as TV Guide collections and the size of someone’s hands, I’d leave a camera running in my own home. Everything about the show is like nails on a chalkboard for me, from the sound of Jason Alexander’s voice to the tuneless bass riffs during the opening credits and between scenes. I didn’t join in the chorus of gnashing and wailing when it finally went off the air, I was relieved because I wouldn’t have to hear about it anymore, but of course I still do, because it invariably shows up on countless ‘Best TV Shows of All Time’ lists. So clearly, the fault lies with me.
That being said, I’m glad to see that The Marriage Ref is getting a sound thrashing from critics, save for The New York Times, which recently wrote such a glowing article about Jerry Seinfeld that one assumes if he starred in a series that just consisted of him drinking coffee and picking up his dry cleaning, they’d be watching in rapt delight. The A.V. Club described it as “odious.” The Newark Star-Ledger called it “excruciating.” Time.com refers to it as a “God-awful mishmash.” Faint praise though it might be, The New York Times gave it its highest accolades, declaring “it isn’t nearly as bad as it sounds.” Well, as much as I detest reality television, particularly that which is a combination game and comedy show, I also love a challenge, so I wanted to see if The Marriage Ref was, indeed, as bad as it sounds.
Spoiler alert: yes. But have patience and read on.
The idea of The Marriage Ref, if you’ve missed the countless promos and write-ups about it, is that couples with ongoing, generally silly and meaningless (one could say Seinfeld-esque) arguments are placed before a panel of celebrity “marriage experts” (people like Alec Baldwin and Madonna, both of whom I’d certainly run to for relationship advice), who discuss which half of the couple is in the right. The “laughs,” which are supplied in ample amounts by both the studio audience and the panelists, who guffaw at each other’s lines in true Hollywood masturbatory “You’re great,” “No, you’re great” fashion, come by way of the clips of the couples engaging in said silly arguments. The final decision in each argument is provided by the host, a comedian named Tom Papa, whose smug, “ain’t I a stinker?” delivery would be right at home in an episode of America’s Funniest Home Videos.
In the episode I watched, Papa and his panelists, Jerry Seinfeld, Tina Fey and Eva Longoria Parker, “mediated,” if you want to call it that, though it’s really something closer to just making a few cracks at the couples’ expenses and then weakly declaring someone a “winner,” four arguments. The first couple, the Raimundos, argue over the husband’s obsession with personal grooming, which leads to him spending much of his free time tanning, getting mani-pedis and refusing to do housework because it takes time away from making himself pretty. Metrosexuals, that’s up to the minute, cutting edge humor! An impressive three gay jokes, not to mention use of the word “tranny,” are made in less than ten minutes, and the “winner” of the argument is, curiously, the husband, despite that refusing to do housework business.
The next couple, Mr. and Mrs. Rios, are arguing over something even more ludicrous. Mrs. Rios wants her dining room used exactly once per year, while Mr. Rios would like to host the occasional poker party in it. I immediately sided with Mr. Rios, as I firmly believe that anyone who allows an entire room in his or her house to go unused should be forced to live in an efficiency apartment with only a hot plate and a ‘Hang in There, Baby,’ poster. They also argue over Mr. Rios’s lack of handyman skills, with Mrs. Rios berating him because he can’t accomplish the incredibly simple task of building a porch onto their house by himself. Before they can completely turn into a Hispanic version of The Lockhorns, the argument is declared a draw.
The third couple, the Wieses, their most pressing issue is that the wife insists on flossing her teeth in bed. I’m not entirely sure what one’s defense for flossing his or her teeth outside the bathroom would be, and if she had one I missed it because I had moved past “morbid curiosity” to “active boredom” by then. The winner of the argument is, not surprisingly, the husband.
The last couple, whose name I didn’t catch because I completely stopped giving a fuck by that point had the issue that was probably most worth getting into a legitimate argument over, that being the husband’s insistence on taking off his wedding ring before going to play basketball with his friends. I had some doubts about the story, mainly because the husband, who insisted that he had been playing basketball for some twenty-odd years, looked in the footage recorded for the show as if he had never set foot on a basketball court before that morning. But that’s silly, a reality show would never make stuff up, that would be false representation. Anyway, the winner of the argument is the wife.
The action is broken up by pointless facts provided by Natalie Morales of NBC News, such as “women are better at putting stuff together than men,” and putative “comedy” highlight reels featuring Marv Albert, who, right around the same time Seinfeld was at its peak, went on trial for biting and sodomizing his girlfriend. I think there’s supposed to be something humorous about that, just as there’s supposed to be something humorous about Alec Baldwin, who famously cursed out his adolescent daughter in a voice mail message, appearing in the first episode, but I’ll be ding dong damned if I can figure out what it is.
The A.V. Club, which reviewed the first, half hour episode, called The Marriage Ref “mean-spirited,” with celebrities taking sport in making fun of the little people. I didn’t see that in this episode. With the exception of Basketball Jones in the last segment, who really did have it coming (if he was for real, which I doubt), the panelists went pretty easy on the couples. However, it was also deeply, profoundly unfunny. In fact, the ratio of studio audience laughter to anything funny actually said remained at a solid 98 to 2 throughout the entire show, which is impressive. Listening to the audience dissolve into fits of spirited howling over Tom Papa making a Village People joke (more relevant, timely humor, how do they stay on top of these things??), you start to feel like you’re watching a televised version of the “no soap, radio” joke. Maybe it’s just you that doesn’t get it.
About the most positive thing that can be said about The Marriage Ref is that it’s, at this point at least, a limited run series. It’s rare that a network recognizes its limitations, so I’ll give praise where praise is due. However, even in a relatively short run I don’t expect it to get any better, particularly when one of the upcoming panelists is Seinfeld co-creator Larry David, whose show Curb Your Enthusiasm is to Seinfeld what a hard poke in the eye is to a soothing neck rub. Why not just add Newman and Costanza and make it a triumvirate of tediousness?
Video Vault Friday: 80s commercials
You know who my favorite YouTube user is? The guy behind 80s Commercial Vault. He compiled basically every commercial ever aired in the 1980s (and quite a few from the 90s) into a collection of over 120 videos. Watching the videos, though I haven’t even gotten through half of them yet, has been a pastel colored, lite rock, incredibly Caucasian drug trip through time. Seriously, at what point did they finally start putting African-Americans in mainstream commercials? I’m guessing sometimes around the late 80s, around the time that Yo! MTV Raps debuted.
This collection was recorded during a showing of 70s action flick The Deep, aired on February 10, 1980, when Yr. Correspondent was seven years old and some of you reading this were barely a gleam in your daddies’ eyes. Perhaps the most amusing thing is noting how many of the products, such as Trident, Contac, Mrs. Butterworth’s, Noxzema and Top Ramen are still around, though I’m pretty sure Contac cold capsules don’t contain those cool little colored beads anymore, if they ever did in the first place. Gone but mostly forgotten: the AMC Eagle (not to mention AMC itself) and Olympia Beer. On a timely note, it also features a promo for the Lake Placid Olympics, with the awesomely named Tai Babilonia.
I could be lazy and just keep posting these every week for the next two and a half years.
Endurance Test Theater presents: ‘Downloading Nancy’
Downloading Nancy, 2008
Director: Johan Renck
Screenplay by: Pamela Cuming and Lee Ross
Starring: Maria Bello, Jason Patric, Rufus Sewell, Amy Brenneman, David Brown and Michael Nyqvist
Two universal truths about movies: one, if a film’s title consists of ‘[Verb]ing [Character's Name],’ there’s a 75% chance it won’t be good. You could attempt to prove me wrong by mentioning Raising Arizona and Being John Malkovich, but I could counterstrike with the hat trick of Raising Helen, Saving Silverman and Guarding Tess. I could also mention Deconstructing Harry, Boxing Helena, Raising Cain and Drowning Mona, plus a bunch of other movies you’re not likely to remember, probably because they weren’t very good. No one knows why, but the gerund-name combination just seems to be a signpost leading towards lazy, derivative, generally poor filmmaking.
The second truth is that suburban life, even in lighthearted comedies, will always be portrayed as unbearable. Mind-numbingly dull, suffocating and populated by small-minded people who always have some sort of terrible secret to hide, suburbia as Hell on Earth has been the vivid setting of such recent releases as Little Children and Revolutionary Road, and even a few movies that don’t star Kate Winslet. It’s also a favorite cliche for independent films, mainly because a lot of independent filmmakers grew up in cities and really do view the suburbs as a sort of purgatory for people who can’t handle dirty water dogs and dodging vomit to get down the stairs fast enough to catch a crowded, overheated subway, which will undoubtedly smell like unwashed homeless person. I don’t know where Pamela Cuming and Lee Ross, the writers of Downloading Nancy grew up, but I’m guessing neither of them have spent a lot of time at potluck suppers and general stores, since their film makes deep-throating a double barrel shotgun a desirable alternative to the white picket fence lifestyle.
Downloading Nancy stars Maria Bello, and let me be fair by pointing out in advance that she’s really good in it. She looks believably despondent and as realistically shitty as a glamorous blond movie star can possibly look. She gives a performance worthy of a serious study in the oft-ignored psychological issues of women in their thirties, especially those who’ve suffered from abuse in the past. It’s a shame the movie she expended this performance on is a relentlessly ugly chore that one slogs through rather than watches. Bello plays Nancy Stockwell, a middle class housewife trapped in a miserable, loveless marriage with Albert (Rufus Sewell, who must have prepared for shooting every day by sucking on the sourest lemon he could find). In case you’re not certain what a dreadful human being Albert is, he’s obsessed with golf, constantly practicing his game in his basement putting green. He’s also a joyless stiff who won’t indulge Nancy’s attempts at playfulness and for no discernible reason refuses to have sex with her. We know nothing of these characters, other than the fact that Nancy is deeply disturbed and Albert is an uptight prick. No evidence that they were ever happy together, save for a necklace and a tiny, fake looking photograph of the two of them is shown, and thus we don’t learn to care about either of them or their failing marriage.
A victim of child molestation, Nancy deals with the pain of both that and her current unhappy existence by engaging in self-injury, as well as violent sexual encounters with shady individuals she meets online. One of these individuals is Louis (Jason Patric), who she leaves town to meet for the usual degradation, but with an added twist: she wants him to kill her. Louis, whose online handle is “Deep Pain” (which reminds me of nothing else but the “DEEEEEEP HURRRRRTING” routine from Mystery Science Theater 3000), is more than happy to indulge Nancy sexually, but he’s more talk than show when it comes to this killing thing, as evidenced by the numerous times he asks her if she’s sure she wants him to do it. Nancy means business though, when, sounding improbably like a character in a cop movie, she snaps “What, are you losing your hard-on already? Let’s do this.”
Louis seems to spend less time actually having sex with Nancy than in coming up with new and innovative ways to cause her pain, such as burning her with cigarettes, tying her to a bed and slicing her skin with broken glass and forcing her to walk across a floor littered with mousetraps while drunk and blindfolded (just when you think you’ve heard about every fetish, here comes a new one). Despite the initial intention of their meeting as a weekend-long hard BDSM fest, culminating in Nancy’s death, it’s pretty obvious that they have real feelings for each other, or at least, as much feelings as two utterly broken people can muster. It’s not terribly surprising to discover that Louis sees more of himself in Nancy than just his penis. We learn just as much about him as we do the other characters in the movie (that is, virtually nothing but the vaguest hints about his past), but what he has in common with Nancy is enough to make him even more reluctant to kill her, while she becomes all the more determined to die.
The film goes back and forth in time, between Nancy and Louis’s blossoming, yet ultimately short-lived relationship, then later when Louis pays a visit to Albert, ostensibly to torture him with his knowledge of what happened to Nancy, only to find the tables turned when Albert unexpectedly shows evidence that he possesses some shred of a heart. Dispersed throughout are scenes from past and present of Nancy’s fruitless sessions with her nice but ineffectual therapist (Amy Brenneman), her godawful relationship with Albert, in which every interaction is grim and stifling and, of course, Nancy hurting herself again and again, with anything she can get her hands on. Sorry for the lack of a spoiler alert, but Louis does eventually give in to Nancy’s pleadings and kills her, and at the end Albert is left an empty, hollow shell of a man, which isn’t much of a change from how he is at the beginning, though presumably he doesn’t enjoy golf as much.
The trailer for Downloading Nancy seems to bizarrely suggest that it’s a quirky love story with a twist. It’s not. I don’t know what kind of movie it is, other than unpleasant. It’s powered on nothing but hopelessness and despair, so much so that it was difficult to find anything funny to say about it. However, my dislike for it doesn’t stem from the fact that it’s profoundly depressing. I can take sad movies; in fact, I tend to prefer them over the “Hey, it’s all gonna work out, let’s go try on some hats!” type of movie. What bothers me is that it’s utterly pointless. Nancy suffers in life, and she suffers in death, to what end? We can only assume that Albert learned a valuable lesson, that being “Jesus Christ, don’t ignore it when your wife keeps slashing the shit out of her arms,” but since we never get to know Albert his “comeuppance” isn’t satisfying. We don’t feel relief for Nancy when she finally gets her wish, it’s simply an empty, violent end to a sad life.
It’s irritating when filmmakers don’t give their audience enough credit for understanding the message a movie is putting across, and go too heavy on the symbolism. In Downloading Nancy, symbolism comes by way of the lighting and set design. Everything is bathed in a gray-blue light, so that everyone resembles freshly deceased corpses–to show you that they’re dead on the inside too, do you understand? The sets look shabby and “suburban life” is represented by plastic covered furniture and Albert’s chintzy paneled basement–because it’s fake and plastic, like life in the suburbs, don’t you get it? It’s as if director Johan Renck is swatting you repeatedly in the face with a placard reading THIS IS AN IMPORTANT FILM.
The few positive reviews of Downloading Nancy praised its realistic portrayal of mental illness. That much is true, but the realism can be attributed not to the script, which has such ridiculous lines as “Let me be your pain,” but to Maria Bello’s performance. She gets every nuance of severe, crippling depression right: the body language, the occasional moments of lucidity in which even she doesn’t seem to realize what she’s doing, the irritating demands for attention, the maddening refusal to allow herself to be helped. She’s not a lovable, misunderstood “free spirit,” as so many emotionally disturbed people are portrayed as in Hollywood, she’s realistically hard to sympathize with, let alone like, and yet there are times when you just wish someone would give her a damn hug. If this was a better movie, she might have taken away a handful of awards from it.
Instead, her character seems to be a tool used to make a movie about a dysfunctional from the get-go couple’s kinky sex games seem artsy and “edgy,” and it becomes exploitative. Bello looks so believably miserable, so convincingly tormented and unhinged that it takes on the feel of a snuff film after a very short time. Whenever she lets out a humorless burst of laughter as she’s slapped or thrown about by Louis or Albert like a rag doll, it makes your skin crawl. You wish you’d learn Nancy’s fate from the beginning, because then you wouldn’t have to contend with the cheap, horror film suspense, culminating in such grotesque scenes as Nancy wandering dazed around a hardware store, helping Louis choose the objects that will end her life and hide her body. “Aren’t you going to need this?” she asks him brightly as she holds up a shovel. It makes you shudder, but for likely different reasons than was intended.
A title card at the end reads ‘Based on True Events,’ which is a neat little way for the filmmakers to avoid criticism. Some defenders of Downloading Nancy say that its detractors simply can’t take the fact that there are real people like the characters in the film. Oh, I can take that fact. I believe that people like Nancy Stockwell exist. I know people like Nancy Stockwell. They deserve a better movie than Downloading Nancy. It’s torture porn with psychobabble.
‘We Are the World 25′ released, world replies “The hell you are.”
Coinciding with the opening of the Olympics this past weekend, a remake of ‘We Are the World’ was released, with proceeds going towards Haitian relief. It was inevitable, really; in fact a remake had been in the works long before the Haiti earthquake even took place. It was inevitable not just because 2010 marks twenty-five years since the original was released, but because pop culture is constantly chasing its own tail, at an ever-increasing clip. Pretty much every song, movie and television show has been or will be remade, remastered, or, in a new darling term, “rebooted” at some point, even if it wasn’t all that great the first time around. Honestly, I’m surprised it took them this long to do a new version, having fully expected to see one for 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and the Indian Ocean tsunami. Disaster has struck somewhere in the world? Let’s sing a song about it!
What I’m not surprised about is that ‘We Are the World 25′ sucks. I mean sucks. It sucks enough that I don’t want to post the video here, because if you haven’t seen it yet I’d like to spare you the horror. It’s practically a parody of self-important, pseudo-celebrities taking a day away from buying $5,000 Vietnamese potbelly pigs and vacationing on private Mediterranean islands to encourage their fans to give to the poor and needy until it hurts. It would be funny if it wasn’t so mind-bendingly awful.
Now, before I go on, let me say that I’m not masturbating over the past or idealizing the original. I was 12 when the first ‘We Are the World’ was released, and, good intentions aside, I thought it was corny claptrap even then (though I wasn’t likely using the word “claptrap” yet). The lyrics were mawkish and seemed to promote charity as a mostly self-serving endeavor, and there was something incongruous about celebrities, many of whom could literally take out their checkbooks and write one for a million dollars, telling working class shlubs that it was up to us to make a brighter day for millions of starving African children. Now, that’s not to say that I’m not a fan of charitable endeavors. I donate quite often to charitable organizations, both my time and my money. Good deeds, helping those in need, yeah, I’m a fan. I just don’t like being told by rich people that I need to be doing more. Also, it was all but impossible to escape, played at least once an hour on MTV for several weeks running and nearly as often on the radio. If you’re older than 30, it’s likely you can do a fair impersonation of either Cyndi Lauper or Bruce Springsteen’s parts, but you will get no joy out of doing it.
What bothered me later was the discovery that, like Band Aid, Live Aid and the particularly ludicrous Hands Across America, despite sales of ‘We Are the World’ raising millions of dollars very little of the proceeds went to the people who actually needed it. Music business red tape and corrupt African governments ate most of it, and it seemed that everyone involved in USA for Africa was t00 busy patting each other on the back and flashing the thumbs up sign to notice. It was a major cultural event during the 80s, that much is true, but it was a major cultural event that accomplished virtually nothing.
Again, it’s not surprising that ‘We Are the World 25′ sucks. There’s no way it couldn’t have sucked. Pretty much any attempt at remaking something that was at best mediocre from the beginning by giving it a “modern,” updated flair is all but guaranteed to screw the pooch–this is how we end up with Alvin and the Chipmunks dressed like street thugs. Originally recorded by 45 music stars, all of whom had long, well-established careers with widespread audience appeal, ‘We Are the World 25′ ups the ante to over 8o performers, many of whom stretch the word “star” to its very limits. A fun party game, as long as you provide earplugs to everyone beforehand, is to watch the video and try to identify the various “stars,” or at least, those who manage to get more than seven seconds or so in front of the camera. Unless the median age of your party guests is 16, you’ll be lucky to be able to name half. Even after looking at a list of the participants, I still don’t know who many of them are: Jennifer Nettles, Orianthi, Mary Mary, Isaac Slade, Iyaz. And those are the soloists, the people I’m supposed to recognize, the chorus is an even bigger who’s who of “who’s that?”, including Ethan Bortnick, Zac Brown, Kristian Bush, Melanie Fiona, Sean Garrett, Taryll Jackson, Jimmy Jean-Louis, Verdine White, someone named Nipsey Hussle, and Julianne Hough. “Who’s Julianne Hough?” you may ask, which is fine, because I asked that too. Turns out she’s on Dancing With the Stars, another Hollywood endeavor that has an interesting notion of the word “star.”
It also features appearances by Justin Bieber, a 14 year-old who sings about lost love and the pain of not being with that special lady even though he’s only 14 and doesn’t know shit about that kind of thing, Miley Cyrus and several people named Jonas. It’s fairly obvious that there was a target audience in mind when the “singers” were collected for ‘We Are the World 25,’ even though that audience doesn’t tend to have their own credit cards to use for purchasing songs from iTunes and donating to charitable organizations online. Us oldsters in the listening audience, those who were around the first time, who do we get to represent our generation? Barbra Streisand, human sleeping pill Josh Groban and the always unwelcome presence of Celine Dion. There is no middle ground, it veers wildly between Nicole Scherzinger, lead singer of the Pussycat Dolls, an entirely manufactured pop group based on a Vegas burlesque show, and Tony Bennett, who looks as baffled and dismayed as those of us watching it.
Those who’ve praised the remake claim it’s an accurate representation of today’s music scene. If that’s the case, then holy shit it’s in worse shape then I thought, because it’s represented here almost entirely by bubblegum pop shipped in from Disney Studios and rap. It’s also been complimented for having a more polished sound than its predecessor. Sure, if by “polished” you mean computers were used to tweak the thin, nasal vocals of people like Miley Cyrus so that they sound somewhere near listenable. If that’s what you mean, then I agree, this shit was more polished than my grandmother’s dining room table. Nevertheless, that, not to mention the unforgivable use of autotune, makes the absence of actual singers with actual talent like Beyonce, Mariah Carey and Christina Aguilera all the more glaring. None of them are my cup of tea music-wise, but one wonders if ‘We Are the World 25′ would have been slightly more bearable if roughly half the participants had been dropped (including Vince Vaughn, what the fuck?) and even just one of them had taken part instead.
The high moment, or low depending on how you look at it, though it’s hard to top the autotuning, Jamie Foxx’s smirking impersonation of Ray Charles, Wyclef Jean’s bizarre caterwauling or Celine Dion’s banshee wails, is the inclusion of Michael Jackson’s performance from the original, complete with a clip from the video. It’s a high moment because he’s one of the few voices on the recording that doesn’t make you want to shove chopsticks deep into your ears, and yet there’s just something undeniably gimmicky about it. It seems to be suggesting “If Michael was alive, he’d have participated in this.” I’m sure he would have, but his appearance in the new video, appropriately faded and lens flared so that he looks like a benevolent, sparkling ghost, is morbidly tacky, like Natalie Cole singing with her long deceased father in her cover of ‘Unforgettable,’ or David Spade appearing in a DirectTV commercial with the late Chris Farley. The fact that that may not necessarily be the worst part of ‘We Are the World 25′ says a whole lot about it.
Still, white people praising something for its “hip hop flavor” will never not be funny. At least they’re not spelling it as “flava.”
Video Vault Friday: Holiday Edition
Valentine’s Day is almost upon us, with the usual amount of gnashing and wailing from both the single and those who want you to know that they’re not going to be suckered into some corporate nonsense to prove to their partners that they love them. I’m relatively indifferent to it myself, but I can understand why it’s a bit of a downer if you’re alone. However, take heart, my friends, because my gift to you for the holiday is this collection of snippets from 80s era video dating ads.
It’s really easy to see why most of these men had to turn to video dating services to find romance: it’s because they look like serial killers. Seriously, I think the one guy who talked about wanting to take a bath with someone showed up on an episode of Dateline NBC several years after he filmed his ad. It’s over four minutes of bad mustaches, acid wash clothing and profoundly awkward attempts at trying to make one’s self sound interesting. It rarely gets any deeper than “I like to have fun,” which is pretty much the most meaningless thing anyone could say about him or herself, right up there with “I enjoy breathing” and “A good bowel movement can make my whole day.” Fun is arbitrary, depending on what you like it could mean anything from playing skee-ball to kicking a puppy to death. Or, in the case of some of these poor unfortunate souls, killing hookers and burying them in landfills.
Still, the guy dressed like a Viking was pretty awesome. I’m sure he found his special someone eventually, most likely at a Star Trek convention. So a happy Valentine’s Day to him, and to you too, particularly if you’re interested in most phases of data processing.
Save Me from the Nothing I’ve Become
THE BROKEN AMERICAN MALE AND HOW TO FIX HIM
By Rabbi Shmuley Boteach
St. Martin’s Press, 2008
Men suck. Men suck because their wives don’t do anything about it. Men suck, and its all women’s fault for being married to them. Men suck because women are too independant. Men suck becase their wives are too bound up in them. One of these is the message of a tome by Michael Jackson’s personal rabbi, the author of Kosher Sex, Shalom in the Home, Hating Women (surprisingly not a how-to guide), Kosher Adultery, and The “Shalom in the Home™” Cookbook and Feng Shui Desk Calendar: It’s The Broken American Male by Shmuley Boteach, Michael Jackson’s personal rabbi (a name he drops every 50 pages or so).
So what would Shmuley do? Well, get men married, for a start. While Boteach takes pains to note that broken American males’ wives are not at fault in their husbands’ brokenness—”one sinking ship cannot save another,” he says—he’s very clear that it is a wife’s responsibility to fix her husband. A wife has quite a few responsibilities to her husband, in fact, and a rather hard life overall, which is why it’s puzzling that he seems to find a woman leaving her husband (as is the case, he notes, in two-thirds of divorces) to be a fundamentally selfish act (particularly given his stated sympathy to feminism in general). His idea of “leaving” may be different from yours and mine; he seems to suggest that Hillary Clinton has done it, for instance, on what authority I know not; I tried to check but for some reason the State Department wouldn’t return my calls.
Now, as with many books of this sort, it tells us more about the author than about society in general. Boteach’s bête noir seems to be money. He is openly, obsessively jealous of rich people, and seemingly unable to imagine himself, or anyone, having enough money, and according to him everyone else feels the same way. Any man who’s self-pitying, emotionally unavailable, depressive, or otherwise troubled is beating himself up for not being Donald Trump (including Donald Trump himself, cited twice as “the most broken man in America”). This is what causes divorce, this is what causes drug use, this is what caused the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007. I’m not sure the last one is quite the same thing; I’d say the Collier Township gym shooting is a better example. One wonders what Boteach would say about that. In fact, I did wonder. Answer: nothing anyone ever mentioned to Google. Then again, that shooter’s problem wasn’t money, and Boteach’s problem isn’t social maladjustment.
His other problem is with porn, although of course he knows nothing about it (he even uses the phrase “or so I’m told” nearly verbatim). I can readily believe he has no experience of porn, actually, because he describes it the way PSAs in the 1980s described drugs. Just as those spots were made by people who had never used drugs, knew only the bad about drugs, and didn’t understand why people did drugs—and were consequently unconvincing—Boteach’s approach to porn is that it’s a horrible, disgusting, anti-erotic thing that no one could possibly enjoy (ignoring the fact that millions of people do enjoy it). I know this because he says it over and over and over. I suspect his knowledge of porn comes almost exclusively from people for whom is is a problem, and so naturally he can only conclude that it too is a problem for everybody.
Now, I don’t think I’m nearly as jealous of my peers’ financial success (or their success in general, except Jessica Valenti’s, a high-school classmate) as Rabbi Boteach thinks I am. I’m not trying to display my virtuousness here—you’re not as envious of your peers’ success as he thinks you are either; I suspect my experience is closer to normal than his is. I’d say “good on him for recognizing that Avarice is his particular vice” (mine’s probably Wrath, or perhaps Sloth) except I don’t know that he does. He clearly thinks he has normal levels of avarice. It’s worse than the psychiatrist who declares “everyone’s neurotic” based on a sample consisting of their patients; Boteach declares “everyone’s overly materialistic” based on a sample consisting of Shmuley Boteach.
Don’t get me wrong, he does more than carp. In fact, roughly the last half of the book is his solution. I think. I’m sitting here trying to remember what the solution was and . . . I got nothing. And the book’s actually in my lap (nonetheless, I’m certain it’s halfway in, both because it makes logical sense and because that’s where the chapter “A New Definition of Success” begins). Perhaps it’s me; after all, as noted, his new definition of success looks a lot like a lot of people’s current definition of success. Still, after diagnosing most American men as emotionally withdrawn, American women as unloved career women, and American children as brats who need love (Boteach endorses the so-called “helicopter” approach to parenting), he offers very little in the way of a concrete solution.
Readin’, ritin’ and righteous indignation
FROM CRAYONS TO CONDOMS: THE UGLY TRUTH ABOUT AMERICA’S PUBLIC SCHOOLS
Edited by Steve Baldwin and Karen Holgate
WorldNetDaily Books, 2008
When you become a parent, people just love filling your head with nonsense. No one ever tells you “Parenting will be endless bliss from one moment to the next,” choosing instead to focus on all the unpleasantness that lies ahead: sleepless nights, endless dirty diapers, teething, potty training, the terrible twos, temper tantrums, cleaning up hot dog laced vomit, not getting a single moment to yourself for at least ten years straight, stretched finances, snotty adolescence, the sullen teenage years, and in the end your child will grow up needing therapy and blaming it all on you, no matter how hard you try to be a good parent. However, what they usually fail to tell you about is the one true, inescapable hindrance to fully enjoying parenthood: other parents.
While childfree people can sometimes be smug, self-satisfied asswipes, parents are an altogether different breed of cat, self-righteous, judgmental, hypocritical and downright hostile when it comes to the choices other parents make for their children. When you become a parent, no, scratch that, when you become a mother, prepare to have every decision you make about raising your child scrutinized by other mothers aching to feel above someone. Breastfeeding, circumcision, cloth or disposable diapering, whether to let your child cry himself to sleep or not, attachment parenting, when to introduce solid foods, it’s all up for discussion, particularly on the internet, and more often than not the women whose parenting skills are being questioned find themselves lacking somewhere. It’s not all that different from the trial General Zod and his cohorts go through before they’re sentenced to the Phantom Zone in Superman II.
Alas, it doesn’t end once your children start school. In fact, children reaching school age seems to be when a lot of mothers’ previously dormant neurotic, control freak tendencies kick into maximum overdrive. It’s at that point that they become convinced that any outside influences on their offspring are potentially destructive, that no matter what they always know what’s best. What’s more, they not only know what’s best for their child, but for your child as well. This is when women with way too much time on their hands start going on “crusades,” often using faulty science such as “vaccines cause autism” and “peanuts will kill everyone” to back them up. Their weapons are e-mail lists and cell phones, and they’ll insist that if you really cared about your child, you’d join her in her crusade to remove Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl from school libraries because it mentions the word “vagina” in it.
From Crayons to Condoms is a book for these women. It’s a book for misguided, gullible schnooks who believe those urban legends and tall tales that are sent to them in e-mail forwards. They believe that their children will get stabbed with a hepatitis-infected needle if they play in the ball pit at Chuck E. Cheese. They believe that there are thugs hiding under their cars just waiting for the opportunity to hamstring them with a straight razor. Hell, they even still believe that Marilyn Monroe was a size 16. And, of course, they believe everything they read and see in the media, particularly if it’s bad and/or salacious. In short: the typical Fox News viewer.
The book is essentially a collection of fairly ludicrous horror stories about the sins public schooling inflicts upon innocent children. You know public schooling, that insidious boogeyman decent people have been battling since time immemorial, even though millions of kids have gone through it for decades now and turned out pretty okay. From Crayons to Condoms suggests that ever since God was replaced by political correctness, children who attend public school end up drooling, illiterate cretins who can’t put a sentence together, because the teachers are too busy encouraging them to accept people who are different from them. Supposedly submitted by upset parents, here’s a sampling of some of the unspeakable tortures our young, impressionable minds have been subjected to by these so-called “educators.”
- A high school teacher encouraging her students to come to her if they had any problems they needed to get off their chests.
- Being shown a film that encourages children to keep money on their person so that, rather than having to ride home with a parent who’s been drinking, they can call someone else to come get them. Says the parent who submitted the complaint: “A child in this predicament might actually be in less danger riding with the inebriated parent than defying him.”
- Having to study the book Ordinary People, about a teenage boy’s struggle with depression. The parent’s complaint? Her son had been having his own issues with depression, and the school should have changed the entire class’s curriculum to accommodate him.
- Having to study a unit on female genital mutilation.
- High school age students reading literature that makes even indirect references to sexuality, violence and/or rape.
- Taking part in a lecture on suicide prevention. The parent’s complaint? Merely hearing about the concept of suicide drove her teenage daughter to become suicidal.
- Being encouraged to embrace the concept of “multiculturalism.” The parent’s complaint? Teaching children diversity is un-American and suggests that there is more than one way to worship the Lord.
Then of course, there’s the inevitable “They taught my children evolution!” “They taught my children about sex!” “They let my child read a Harry Potter book!” “They taught my children about other cultures and religions without emphasizing that America and Christianity is number one!” and so on and so forth. Naturally, the largest amount of pearl clutching and monocle dropping is over our good buddy The Homosexual Agenda, which is worming its way into our children’s brains through such wily tactics as The Laramie Project and high schools allowing gay students to form support clubs. In virtually all the stories, the parents claim that their attempts to question what the schools are teaching their children were either shrugged off, laughed off or met with outright hostility, because public schools just don’t respect those poor, oppressed white Christians and their values. The insistence that educators are “biased” against Christians is repeated so many times that it becomes a mantra of sorts, until it becomes as absurd a claim as the idea that atheists are trying to take Christmas away from salt of the Earth believers.
So what’s a “concerned parent” to do if they don’t want their children to be taught that a world exists outside their own home? Well, the book suggests that you become one of those annoying people who refuses to sign documents and school forms and constantly demands meetings with teachers, administrators and school board members until they change all their policies to suit your beliefs, even if those beliefs don’t likely mesh with the majority of other parents. Most of the parents who contributed stories ended up taking their children out of school altogether, before they could sink any further into the godless, degenerate quagmire of public education. That’s often suggested as a “solution” if you feel that your little Max or Madison is just too much of a delicate, special flower for public school, just send them to private school, or better yet, teach them yourself, that way you can be assured that they’ll learn only what you want them to learn, which for these people is probably limited to Jesus, basic math skills and maybe some reading, though only what pertains to the Bible.
Gentle Readers, I have a confession to make: I didn’t read this book all the way through. I read some of the stories, charting their progression from the merely questionable to outright steaming horseshit. I had to flag myself when I got to one mother’s claim that her son was told that not only could he not read his copy of the Bible in school, he was ordered to leave it at home, even though his classmates were being “indoctrinated” into Islam. It’s a myth that the Bible is not permitted in public schools, just as it’s a myth that students are not allowed to pray. Students can pray all they like, they can pray before the math final, they can pray before the big game, they can pray that the cafeteria isn’t going to serve meat loaf again. The only thing that is not permitted is teachers or administrators leading students in prayer. Yet naive parents who have their heads filled with scary stories about Christian oppression and the destruction of family values by people like James Dobson and Pat Robertson continue to operate on half-truths and misinformation.
From Crayons to Condoms is one of those books, implausible as much of it sounds, that reminds me of just how far from the same page I am with conservative Christians. It’s story after story of hysterical parents and their pussified kids who were supposedly traumatized by the sight of a bare breast or at the realization that the world may not always be the Happy Fun Bear Awesome Time they were raised to believe it was. When would it be a good time for a young person to discover the existence of such unpleasant aspects of life as rape and suicide? When it happens to someone they know? Or to them, perhaps? If any of these people suggested that they’d rather be the ones to have those difficult discussions with their children, rather than teachers, that’d be one thing, but the message that comes across is that they don’t want their children being exposed to that kind of thing at all. After all, look what good came out of their patron saint Sarah Palin’s refusal to allow her children any other sex education but abstinence-based. Pretending things don’t exist–gays, premarital sex, people who worship God a different way–is the most important lesson of all.
