Myopia and...*squints*...uh, you

Because I am a sad little man, I spend a lot of time poking around on the internet in search of random bullshit which amuses me momentarily. I realize, of course, that this is the 21^st century equivalent of wasting your life away doing the Junior Jumble; it’s just that every so often, this process leads you to something inadvertently transcendent, and that’s good enough for me. Yesterday, for instance, I found this:

Feel free to stare. A few concessions: yes it’s a joke, yes it’s in poor taste, and no there’s not anything intrinsically wrong with you if you don’t get it. But I have to admit that it made me laugh out loud (in the literal sense); of all the uses that I could have come up with for my copy of Echoes, photoshopping Terry Schiavo’s head onto the cover was never one of them. (I’m aware, incidentally, that Amusing Photoshop Edits are situated in the hierarchy of comedic sophistication somewhere between a Tim Allen routine and hippie protest signs, but we all have our things. I laughed my ass off the first time I saw the one of Lee Harvey Oswald with the guitar, too, so I just have to conclude that I have a weakness for the form. I am, after all, from North Carolina.)

Anyway: Seeing as how I was already on the internet, I figured I’d post a link on a forum where I tend to hang out. Now, keep in mind this is the internet, possibly the only space (real or imaginary) in history where one would face more difficulty trying to find the phone number of a pizza place than trying to find images of people eating poop. Then take the next step and consider the fact that the forum where I posted the link exists mostly so that lonely dorks can congregate and devote an excess of attention to professional wrestling. Suffice it to say, I figured I was in the clear.

Well, no. A few minutes later, I checked my email and found that my account had been temporarily suspended; for the rest of the week, I wouldn’t even be able to access the message board. The irony, of course, is that I’d never been suspended from the board for any reason before despite going way beyond the Echoes parody on occasion. By way of contrast: A few months ago, a sex tape involving ex-WWF wrestlers Chyn@ and ><-Pac surfaced (ah, sweet google-proofing). One of the many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many reasons to avoid this particular sex tape forever is the fact that the viewer is (apparently) forced to confront Chyna’s gargantuan clitoris; it is (allegedly) the approximate size of a mason jar. For weeks and weeks and weeks on this same forum, you could barely read a thread without someone referring to said monstrosity and someone else inevitably linking to pictures. It’s more than a little funny that laughing at the delicious irony of Terri Schiavo on the cover of an album with the song “Sister Savior” is somehow out of bounds. If my suspension from this pro-wrestling internet message-board hadn’t accidentally afforded me an arcane summation of one of the chief problems facing modern existence, I’d probably be a little pissed.

Because my friends are, by and large, not gigantic dorks like I am, most of the conversations I have about philosophy take place entirely within my head. As you might imagine, these exercises tend to be somewhat reductionist in nature; I inevitably find that the best answer to whatever question I’m posing to myself is the one that uses the fewest words. This is of course only occasionally productive – most of the great pithy philosophical soundbites are taken – but every so often I’ve actually gotten results. Like this:

ME: Okay, I got one – what’s the most basic flaw with modernity?
ME: Easy. If I say “cat”, you know what I’m talking about, right?
ME: Uh, I guess – do you mean “cat” like housecat, or like a tiger, or what?
ME: Like a housecat.
ME: Oh, okay. Got it.
ME: Okay, describe what a cat is.
ME: Uh – four legs, furry, tail…erm…can be loud…uh…
ME: That sounds about right.
ME: Okay, so what?

Well, me, it’s simple: The problem is that even though we can both make reference to the same template of cat-ness, there’s absolutely no guarantee that we’re talking about the same cat. My first cat ever was a stray named Max who’d lost his tail in a fight, apparently right before wandering up to my family’s house. When my counter-ego throws “tail” in among the terms he associates with “cat”, it is therefore completely plausible that I could have leapt up in my cubicle and loudly called him (me) a myopic jackass with no practical knowledge about the term itself. I will assume that you have at least passing familiarity with The O’Reilly Factor and can therefore figure out how productive this approach is.

This is, of course, hardly news; postmodernism has a (paradoxically) long and storied history throughout the course of human consciousness, to the point where we’re all so familiar with the term that we don’t even blink when we hear it mentioned on the E! network. What we’ve lost contact with, however, is the fact that although postmodernism may be a philosophy, it happens to be a philosophy with profound practical applications. It’s one thing, after all, to split hairs with yourself over the difference between two different conceptions of a term like “cat”, but replace “cat” with “evil” and “yourself” with “the President” (or depending on your political alignment, "bin Laden") and suddenly you’re dealing with (overrated yet still relevant) real-world issues. I don’t think that my definition of the general linguistic category of “evil” is all that much different from that of George W. Bush, but there’s a real-world split between us due to the fact that the events and causes that he plugs into that category differ wildly from the ones I would choose. Or, for an even more immediately concrete example, consider the issue of love.

Up until last year, I always thought that my only reason for defending the Farrelly brothers’ There’s Something About Mary was that it reflected my own experiences as a catastrophic failure with women with unspeakable clarity, and then sent me home happy with exactly the right ending. (I had similar misconceptions about the genius of the Kaplan/Elfont masterpiece Can’t Hardly Wait, and I say that without irony. As you might imagine, 1998 was a great year for movies tailor-made for James Cobo.) Now that I have owned the DVD for some time and have watched it (1) apart from a crowd, which is essential if you want to determine what your particular relationship is to a movie, and (2) a thousand fucking times, which is essential if you want to determine if a movie still has substance once you’ve wrung all the freshness out - now that all of that’s happened, I can safely say that There’s Something About Mary’s status as one of the all-time great films in the Hollywood canon has less to do with what it says about my life than what it says about life in general.

I always get nervous whenever I hear the phrase “stalker comedy” applied to Mary, which means I get nervous a lot since the film might as well have employed the phrase in its press kit (it actually might have, but again, I am a lazy person). Usually, I’m only discomforted by critical terms when I don’t have a clue as to what they mean, which is why I run screaming in the opposite direction from anything pitched to me as “realistic” or “classical” or “-ian” (usually “Brechtian”, but you can fill in whatever). “Stalker comedy”, however, I can grasp with shameful ease, because that’s basically the way I look at my life. I hate the internet for a vast array of reasons, but if you invent a chip to be implanted into the brain that gives the subject uninterrupted access to the internet, I will fight my way to the front of the line to be the guinea pig. This is due to the fact that in the real world, I am by far the worst conversationalist you will ever meet (aside, perhaps, from Terry Schiavo) because I am governed by the impulse to Not Be Sleazy And/Or Intrusive, and I am sick enough in the head that asking someone – lord, especially girls – even the most banal personal information feels to me like a profound breach of etiquette. This, in turn, comes from the fact that I generally decide the extent to which I like someone within the first split second of meeting them (and I am rarely wrong); given that I already know whether or not I like someone, asking follow-up questions seems like a useless pretext, and I like being straightforward (or failing that, drunk). My general attitude towards people’s personal lives is that if I need to know something, it’ll be made known to me.

You begin to see, of course, why calling Mary a “stalker comedy” would make me nervous. Ben Stiller is tortured by guilt over whether or not he’s intruding too much on Cameron Diaz by hiring Dillon and so on; meanwhile I live every day of my life willfully denying myself the right to Google-spy every girl I’ve ever had a crush on. “Willfully denying” may actually be an understatement; my relationship to the internet’s power to provide me access to people’s personal information without being broadcasting my intrusiveness to the world at large (until now, I guess) is pretty close to that of a crystal meth addict, insofar as that I want to do it constantly but cannot shake the awareness that it’s ruining any chance I have at being a human being worthy of respect. As such, when I watch Mary I usually find myself understanding Stiller with perfect clarity as a stalker and a helpless idiot for Diaz.

Now obviously, a lot of the credit for this has to go to Stiller, who to be fair really does nail a lot of little things about the profound shittiness of this particular schism to within three or four decimal places. But Mary isn’t The Usual Suspects; if they’d made Mary exactly the same but replaced Stiller and Diaz with, say, Joshua Jackson and Tea Leoni, it would still be a movie worth watching, and credit for that has to go to the Farrelly brothers. Mary is a deceptively tight movie; it has no shortage of extraneous “stuff” (the dog, for instance), but overall there are surprisingly few moments in the film that you can’t trace to the actions of Stiller. About a fifth of the way through the movie, for instance, Dillon goes down to Miami in search of Mary; what’s striking isn’t so much what Dillon does as it is his approach to Mary. Stiller inadvertently zips his nuts up to his neck in an effort to demonstrate the purity of his intentions towards Mary; this is of course in sharp contrast to Dillon’s switching to higher-powered binoculars in order to scheme a better peek at her rack. The closer you read the actual shot-by-shot text of the film, the more apparent it gets – compare Dillon’s interactions with Mary to Stiller’s, and you’ll see that Dillon and Diaz are frequently kept separate by conversing in shot-reverse shot form, whereas Stiller and Diaz have a number of nice little moments in a quiet, restrained two-shot (my favorite probably being the conversation they have sitting on the car after dinner). You can even point to a number of jokes which visually hinge on Stiller or his actions occupying the center of the frame, which I was taught is where you’re supposed to put the action that you want the audience to focus on. You’d be surprised how nuanced a movie Mary really is, considering that most people remember it for Ben Stiller wrestling a dog.

On one level, of course, this is just textbook “good filmmaking”. I, however, no longer care about that level; I think that the skill involved in getting the audience to comprehend the way Stiller understands his world is far less interesting than the actual feat of, y’know, getting the audience to comprehend the way that Stiller understands his world. And this understanding is crucial if you’re going to “get” the drama of the film’s closing; if you can’t see both how Ted sees himself and his life and his chances of being a worthy companion for Mary AND how Mary might see virtue and value in Ted, then the ending is roughly as sophisticated as the last reel of a silent movie (although if that’s what you think, you should probably watch more silent movies). It’s the kind of understanding you can only get from only being presented with the opportunity to identify with one character, and that in turn is exactly the way human beings live their real lives. The pleasure of Mary, in other words, comes from the revelation that in spite of everything we know about the world, both of the main characters – both the one we understand and the one we idealize – have the same definition of “cat”.

The opening essay in Chuck Klosterman’s Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs deals with the idea that all scenarios of love promised by cinema are inherently artificial, and I can’t say I disagree with the sentiment that if you sit around waiting for things to work out like they do for Ted, you’re in for a lifetime of bullshit. But there’s no shortage of movies about losers who end up getting exactly what they want and the audience feels they deserve, and yet There’s Something About Mary towers over all of them. The idea, after all, that there may in fact exist complementary subjectivities to your own – complementary subjectivities that you want, even – is infinitely more valuable than the idea that you can get the impossibly hot girl after all’s said and done. It’s telling that although critics can debate the aesthetics and the social weight of Mary until the cows come home, the film remains nearly universally respected among ordinary people (which makes me want to compare it to Goodfellas, but this is long enough already) who actually pay money for tickets and DVDs and such. To me, that says that this approach works on ordinary people because this is how ordinary people live their lives, and the fact that it works gives me hope for humanity. Which isn’t to say that Mary offers a glimpse into some Candyland of linguistic clarity and shared humanist values – it’s not Mystic River, thank fucking Christ – but rather speaks to a frustration in the modern person about the limits of experience, and to a hope that this frustration isn’t insurmountable. There’s Something About Mary hasn’t and won’t change the world, but (at the risk of LiveJournaling it up) if we can at least all agree that a better world is possible, that's a start.  And hopefully - hell, by definition - this world will be completely devoid of Chyn@'s nether thumb.

(bonus content for making it this far: Here is the link to the entire photoshop thread. It is even funnier/more horrible than you could have possibly imagined.)

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Comments

[Joe Friesen]

"Then take the next step and consider the fact that the forum where I posted the link exists mostly so that lonely dorks can congregate and devote an excess of attention to professional wrestling."

HEY! Some of us hang out there for tits and baseball too y'know.

[tinna]

I'm still waiting for the day that I'm added to your mailing list of obscure, but wonderful music. :)

[poserplastic]

That was interesting . I laughed out loud in a literal sense. But the Descardian mumbo jumbo.

Nonsense

[Cheatsgame]

i like your blog.