House of Eratosthenes

This is our blogger friend Sonic Charmer, CEO, Chief Cook and Bottle Washing of Rhymes With Girls and Cars talking. We subscribe to his RSS feed, and you should too. Not because he’s the guy who came up with a realistic theory about why it’s so hard to burst drinking straws out of their wrappers with one hand lately…although he did do exactly that, and nobody else has. But because he looks at movies in a very intelligent and useful way — which is to say, he looks at them the way I look at them. As a menagerie of over-used, underly-creative tropes.

Like for example: You know that trope where a kinda-sorta-bad-guy, but not completely evil bad guy, a bad guy who shows lots of promise for being redeemed into a good guy, is coerced into holding up a bank or cracking into a safe because a really super-duper-rotten-to-the-core-bad-guy has kidnapped his daughter and is holding her hostage? Well…Sonic has not written too much about that lately, to the best I understand. But he does have something to say about the plot device where a sexpot female has just the bees’ knees excuse for cheating on her husband or boyfriend.

What he’s writing about, specifically, is…

A guy, due to some strange circumstances, is thought to be dead.
His wife starts sleeping with his best friend.
Then he comes back.
At first, he doesn’t know, as she hides it from him.

He came up with:

1. The Walking Dead
2. Homeland

And then I threw in:

3. A Very Brady Sequel
4. The Dead Zone
5. Face/Off
6. Darkman
7. Rob Roy

After which, I thought of

8. Multiplicity

Now, what SC is looking for falls within a tight scope of decent women of healthy conscience who thought their husband or paramour was dead, dead freakin’ dead. Some of these skirt this perimeter and some fall well outside of it. In Rob Roy, Mary has no way of knowing whether her husband Rob is alive or dead, and has no reason at all to suspect he’s on the far side of the sod, in fact she is taken, in a memorably graphic scene, against her will. Andie MacDowell in Multiplicity, likewise, has no reason at all to think her husband is dead; she’s unwittingly seduced by his clones. But they do fall within the definition of what Sonic Charmer is describing, in that these are women who enjoy the benefit of some flimsy excuse, interwoven with the movie’s main plot, for engaging in The Act outside of monogamy.

The trend is perceptible, if not outright-objectionable, because if for no other reason it isn’t reciprocated across gender lines. It is awkward and distracting to cobble together a story about a man being taken against his will…although it’s been done, like here and here.

But Sonic’s query concerns a tighter class as well as a looser one. He is thought to be dead; she is despondent, bereft of solace, finally finding it in the arms of another man, most likely his best friend. Meanwhile, he emerges from oblivion, not dead after all. Has that happened in a gender reversal? I cannot think of a single example. Well..maybe just one, which was a made-for-TV sequel of something that came before.

Commenter Severian came up with some decent observations, I thought.

[O]ne could go so far as to say “woman receives the complete devotion of two hunky men but never really has to choose between them” is the plot driver behind umpteen movies these days, and behind chick lit in general. It’s certainly the case in those awful Twilight movies any male in any kind of relationship in the past five years has had to endure….

I guess it boils down to: a wom[a]n with two or more men on a string is somehow a heroine (and a victim, because they keep trying to force her to choose), whereas a man with multiple women on a string is a player and a jerk. And since women control the bucks, that’s what we see.

Now, here we have a paradox: Women like attention. They crave it. Not all women; but the kind of women being discussed here, the kind who nurture all these unstable emotional demands, who command all the purchasing dollars that mold and shape the movies the rest of us see — they want to be valued. If they must go missing for any length of time, they want to be missed. They want attention, lots and lots of attention.

You could be forgiven for thinking that if they do have a fantasy about someone disappearing, being thought dead, and miraculously reappearing again — it would be about them. But that is not the case. The fantasy has to do with the husband or boyfriend disappearing…the waifish despondent widow finds comfort and solace in the bed of his best friend, and then the dead guy comes back again and now we have a love triangle, oh dear. What to do. But — in real life, if that were ever to happen, the two-timing slut-widow wouldn’t be getting a whole lot of attention. Weeks, months, maybe years after the reappearance, the whole community would be focused on Lazarus. Wow, how awesome that he isn’t dead after all. Too bad his wife is such a tart.

It’s clear to me the entire exercise is all about sympathy. Women in movies can be indecisive about their partners in the mattress-dance, because they can do that and still remain sympathetic. Dudes can’t do anything like that. The cold, hard truth is that nobody’s going to feel sorry for a guy if he loses his woman…his wife, girlfriend, sister, mother, daughter. He’s certainly not going to be given any kind of license to fuck around. That would be violating the memory of whoever. But things work out differently for the honeys; they need someone to keep them warm at night, and they need their bills to be paid. Plus, they’re all sad what with their hubbies being drowned or blown up or whatever. Need a strong shoulder to cry on.

But then again — nearly all of these examples come from the 1990’s.

Interesting, isn’t it?

The idea I was groping for over at Sonic’s (but didn’t spell out, because I didn’t really think it through until now), I think this is mainly a problem of affluence. The 1990s, of course, were an embarrassment of riches, so much so that Francis Fukuyama was proclaiming “the end of history” and suggesting that henceforth all our problems would be technocratic ones, to be worked out in the liberal-democratic electoral process (how’d that work out, Frankie?)

People are simply not set up to handle affluence. Humans are actually great at gun-to-the-head choices, paring down a few options to the least-worst while under pressure and then going all-in. It’s the “butt-load of sorta-ok options” situations where we seemingly make not just bad choices, but the worst possible choices. When it comes to romance under these conditions, guys tend to go all-in on the wild and crazy ones, subconsciously figuring that if it doesn’t work out with Cathy Chugalug or Patricia Partyhearty, Stable Sues and Boring Bettys are a dime a dozen (the 1990s were also the heyday of movies about Manic Pixie Dream Girls, as I recall).

Women, on the other hand, are coalition-builders. Since no guy will ever live up to their 463 bullet-point mental checklist for the ideal mate, they snag the most alpha guy they can find for the boyfriend and get their emotional, intellectual, artistic, etc. needs met by a group of beta orbiters (what bookish young swain hasn’t heard some version of “I wish my boyfriend could be more like you!” sometime around his freshman year of college?). The situation in “Walking Dead,” “Homeland,” etc. is just a variation on that — she gets the emotional/devotional stuff from the ex-dead husband (who, after all, went though umpteen trials and tribulations just to get back to her, so strong is his devotion) while getting her other needs met by the best friend (who is also an alpha hunk in his own right, of course, which sets up the “let’s you and him fight…. over ME!” situation that at least younger girls seem to crave and which must be the denouement of the Twilight series).

Most of 90s culture was like that, actually, come to think of it. If you watched the movies, read the literature, or especially listened to the music of the Clinton years, you’d think mid-90s America was this horrible grim gray angsty place where dead-eyed “slackers” wandered like automatons through their meaningless jobs and worthless, cycle-of-pointless-but-conspicuous-consumption existences like something out Fritz Lang’s worst nightmares. Nietzsche himself would have overdosed on the nihilism of your average freshman composition class. In reality, of course, we were fat, prosperous, and secure, and looked to remain so for the foreseeable future. Contrast this with, say, the Fifties – they were constantly under the very real threat of nuclear annihilation, and they rocked around the clock.

It’ll be interesting to see what Great Recession romance movies look like after fifteen years or so….
- Severian | 12/03/2011 @ 09:06
Didn’t Cast Away have this trope too? Can’t remember 100%, as it’s been a while…
- Daniel | 12/05/2011 @ 17:59

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“I Tried to Think of a Third Example…”Friday, December 2nd, 2011

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Friday, December 2nd, 2011