The Face Knife

Director Mike Mills’ first film Thumbsucker fails to gel as either a comedy or a “slice of life”, and it’s hard not to fault the directorial choices. A decent cast including the always fabulous Tilda Swinton cannot bring the material life with the flat, affectless way the film is shot, save for a few interludes like a rip-off of Rushmore’s deathless “You Are Forgiven” soundtrack moment. Compared to other low-budget indie films like You and Me and Everyone We Know, Thumbsucker looks awful, and with the story, such as it is, in service of a pedestrian idea about solipsism and the frailties of human life, there’s not much about the film to recommend.

Thumbsucker is yet another indie-ish movie about the desire for and inability to attain true intimacy or recognition, but fails to get off the ground by establishing any sort of relationships between the characters. The teenage subject-position is thrust into the standard adolescent alienation without any sense that he’s at all in the world. When compared with a film like last year’s I Heart Huckabees, Thumbsucker is lifeless and draining. David O. Russell’s film, which is destined to become a classic, stirs in moments of high absurdity with it’s questions about human connections, which I think is what Thumbsucker is trying to do with the Keanu Reeves character, an new-agey orthodontist who goes through some sort of metamorphosis to a nihilist, trying to cover the Dustin Hoffman/Isabelle Huppert poles of Huckabees with one character. But one receives few clues on how to take the Reeves character - the stuff about Power Animals is of course ridiculous but the audience isn’t inclined to laugh.

Thumbsucker makes some obvious and facile points about drug addiction and, well, coming to terms with your thumbsucking (ie, in the words of the film, not judging your inside against other people’s outsides) but the appreciation and discovery of the Other’s private world still seems as remote as ever. If only I could find my power animal….

Tell me how in the comments, dear readers.

I haven’t read wunkerkind Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated, and after seeing the Liev Schreiber directed film version, I have even less desire to. That’s not to say that the film of Everything… is utterly without merit; it’s just that most of the most annoying parts of the film seem to stem from the literary nature of the source, and that Schreiber was not a mature enough filmmaker to realize that faithfulness to a literary source is not a virtue.

Schreiber takes great pains to highlight the fact that his film has a literary pedigree - the film is divided into “chapters” which we see written by the narrator, a comic Ukrainian enthusiastic about negroes and “being carnal,” who is played by the frontman for infamous multicultural NYC party band Gogol Bordello, Eugene Hutz. Hutz is fabulous in a role that could very easily have been a disaster; supplied with idiot malapropisms by Foer which may be amusing on paper but are just repetitious and grating when spoken, he nonetheless maintains an aura of wide-naivity coupled with the knowingness of the slightly crooked huckster. It’s amazing that he can make this walking joke of an Eastern Bloc homeboy into a believable and sympathetic character, but he does it. I’m looking forward to seeing him in other films.

Elijah Wood is all glasses and pale skin in another role that’s more like an aggregate of quirks than an actual human being. He plays Jonathan Safran Foer, a deranged vegetarian who collects the detritus of his families everyday life so that he won’t forget where he came from.

This is my main problem with the film. It’s a philosophical problem and maybe I’m wrong, but Foer’s main thesis is that in order to live an engaged and moral life in the present we must be mindful of the past, yet his characters cannot engage with the past without a physical connection. The Collector’s Ziploc reliquaries are an extreme literalization of the desire to not let memory disappear, as if a person didn’t really exist unless someone remembers them. My life and your life should not be dependent on leaving something behind to be remembered; life is not to be lived for posterity, even if the goal is so noble as to preserve the memory of a village which has been wiped from the face of the earth. The fact that one character is more or less shamed to death because he has refused to remember and then is confronted with an all-too-physical reminder of his past is very nearly despicable - the frailty and tenuousness of the human enterprise is not acknowledged in any serious way. Our lives may be illuminated by the past, but they’re still our lives and not in servitude to our ancestors or spawn.

There’s this piece of montage in Wedding Crashers (2005) that would make Eisenstein and Company blush. No, I’m not talking about the flotilla of bridesmaid breasts hitting the sheets, but rather a series of closely edited shots of Vince Vaughn stuffing his face -and indeed, the faces of anyone fortunate enough to be caught within his formidable wingspan - with cake. In a series of weddings - WASP, Jewish, Indian, etc., Vaughn’s character proves once and for all that despite our differences, we all love frosting, and oh yeah, outrageous and egregious consumption. It’s gooey, crumbly propaganda for all that’s thrilling and disgusting about late capitalist society, embodied in the antics of an overgrown, aging party boy.

The tragic man-child comedies of Vince Vaughn, Owen Wilson, Ben Stiller, Will Ferrell, Judd Apatow et al. can be seen as the consequence of a society where gratification is immediately and overwhelmingly available. An overabundance of commodities imbued with value far beyond their utility retards self-sufficience and maturity, and sublimates all the concerns of adulthood with the mere appearance of it. It’s not surprising that the naked female breast is the calling card of this family of r-rated comedies, as what could be a better symbol of infantile gratification?

While Wedding Crashers and its ilk are ostensibly coming-of-age narratives for not-so-young men, into what society are they being initiated, and what’s the initiation ceremony? Why it’s that ancient rite of commodity fetishism, the Wedding. Even when Owen Wilson’s character isn’t playing Kreskin with a wrapped Fondue Set or when Christopher Walken isn’t pontificating about how his daughter?s fait accompli marriage would unite two of the oldest and most powerful families in America, the film is obsessed with symbols emphasising on the transactional aspects of love relationships. Walken’s other daughter is into bondage (and eventually ensnares swinging, dancing bachelor Vaughn in marriage), and his son, who looks like the singer of My Chemical Romance, gives Vaughn a painting (which he keeps) as a token of their unspoken connection.

As always, it’s up to Will Ferrell to save the day with a movie-stealing performance as an echt sleazeball who has advanced to praying on the grieving. The connection between capitalism, sex, and death has never been so scabrously funny as Ferrell with two hot mourners on his arms.

The Forty Year-Old Virgin is a funnier telling of the same theme, but this time the protagonist has completely sublimated his sexuality in commerce - he’s that sad species of human, a Collector. Collecting, the syphilitic version of commodity fetishism, is central to the plot of “maturity” in the film, and it cleverly centers around E-Bay as a metaphor for the arbitrary value we put on our possessions, and also, our relationships with other people (e.g. Paul Rudd’s rather plain ex with whom he’s obsessed. No one else quite gets it).

Just as it’s more or less assinine to keep a toy in its original packaging, it’s an error in values to “put the pussy on a pedestal,” to quote a callback line from the film. And it’s sort of true, if crude, particularly because the characters in both Virgin and Wedding Crashers are more or less terrified of any female who’s demonstrative sexually. Both films eventually normalize the uncontrolled female id within a conventional relationship, so the audience won’t think the character is a “slut,” but the point is well taken.

And where would capitalism be if we didn’t care what other people think about us. Would we buy the same things, enter the same relationships, if no one was watching? Probably not. There are public dimensions to consumption and sex that are very similar, and in the case of contemporary society, out of whack in the same way.

Readers looking for recent snarkiness are directed to Fluxblog’s Annual MTV Video Music Awards play-by-play. While I am contractually obliged to keep mum about which bits I contributed, it has to be said: I am one funny motherfucker.

Vince Vaughn and the Dialectics of Cake soon, I promise. Now that I am safely ensconced in my new office, perhaps I can get some writing done.