Romance in the movies
Monaco, Jerry
It wasn't good, but it was harmless." "Harmless and popular." Thus went an exchange after the movie Sleepless in Seattle. But, I wondered, could there be harm in sentimental romantic...
...Crying is reserved exclusively for the female characters...
...Becoming a neoconservative, then, was the high point of my cold war...
...Though I try to remain skeptical and detached, I am entangled in the net of Hollywood...
...So why is the movie so popular...
...It was very satisfying to predict this ending...
...There are references to An Affair to Remember, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Casablanca, North by Northwest, Philadelphia Story, The Dirty Dozen, and Fatal Attraction...
...This movie defines a kind of backlash against feminism...
...The New York Times quoted Indecent Proposal's director Adrian Lyne as saying, "The idea of being a whore for a night is kind of exciting for women...
...The leading male characters share the same, profession, both movies alternate between the consciousnesses of the male and female leads, both make reference to Susan Faludi's Backlash and seem to align themselves against Faludi's feminism, both are built on references to old movies, and both claim that love is destiny...
...What better way to get it than to borrow $5,000 dollars from Dad and head to Las Vegas to make the rest...
...The FALL • 1993 • 555 Notebook Woody Harrelson character is inadequate because he has lost his job and is not as rich as the Robert Redford character...
...But, I wondered, could there be harm in sentimental romantic pabulum...
...Both reactions ignore something important about ourselves and the movies we watch...
...it made me wonder what Bertolt Brecht or Bernard Shaw would have done with all of this...
...David throws the money at her, a handful at a time...
...Terrence McNally's beautiful film The Long Day Closes movingly shows a boy whose only relief from a dreary and brutal life in working-class Liverpool is the romance of movies...
...We either let ourselves sponge up the sentimentality or we become cynical about all sentiment...
...Grief unhinges him, and the facile solutions suggested to him by his workmates—therapy, vacation, work—don't appeal to him, so he chooses another facile solution—he moves to Seattle...
...It is a cold war that, for the last twenty-five years, has engaged my attention and energy, and continues to do so...
...Of course it's the boy who engineers their meeting—on top of the Empire State Building, on Valentine's Day...
...Jonah is worried about his father, and around Christmas calls up a nationally broadcast radio show to share his worries...
...These movies teach us that love is magic or else it is nothing...
...Apparently men have a "fatal attraction" and women have "an affair to remember...
...The money itself is a sex object...
...The woman behind me said, "The boy leaves his backpack and Sam will come back to get it...
...What is wrong with liberalism is liberalism—a metaphysics and a mythology that is woefully blind to human and political reality...
...They need $50,000 quick...
...No—liberals were wrong, liberals are wrong, because they are liberals...
...The movie would have been a tragedy of sorts...
...I no longer had to pretend to believe—what in my heart I could no longer believe—that liberals were wrong because they subscribe to this or that erroneous opinion on this or that topic...
...There is no "after the Cold War" for me...
...I was taken in by both of them and yet kicked myself for being taken in...
...Gage pursues Diana, wins her, and then magnanimously gives her up because he sees that she loves David and David loves her more than he could ever have known...
...Irving Kristol, the National Interest, Spring 1993 q 556 • DISSENT...
...If work is meaningless, and solidarity with our fellow humans seems impossible, then what else is there but the simple solidarity of love, the explanatory principle of romance as a destiny to live for above all others, the love that will save us...
...Ephron herself told Premier magazine that Sleepless in Seattle was about love in the movies...
...The movie alternates between Annie and Sam...
...The first night they win $25,000 and, surprise, the second night they lose it all...
...Exactly...
...At the end of Sleepless in Seattle, atop the Empire State Building, Baldwin's son waits for Annie, who doesn't show up...
...Annie's unsatisfied because there's no magic in her love—her fiancé is boring, allergic, sexless, a mere function of the plot...
...In each of these movies the happy endings are unconvincing...
...And who can believe that Demi Moore would leave Robert Redford, with all of his charm and billions, for Woody Harrelson...
...They mortgage everything and hire contractors so that he can build his ideal beach house (which looks something like a stable with a silo attached...
...The movie is popular because it provides us with easy wishes that are fulfilled as soon as we make them...
...Sam finds him and 554 • DISSENT Notebook they leave together...
...And this is the trick, the real reason for the movie's popularity...
...Shaw would have made it into a comedy illustrating that prostitution is what capitalism is all about...
...A rich man is hard to find, but once a gal has found him that's all that matters...
...q What began to concern me more and more were the clear signs of rot and decadence germinating within American society—a rot and decadence that was no longer the consequence of liberalism but was the actual agenda of contemporary liberalism...
...All the big dreams happen to be his, but the film-makers don't seem to notice this...
...Diana lies on the water bed in her underwear...
...Curious, the similarities between the light-hearted cynicism of Sleepless in Seattle and the creepy insidiousness of Indecent Proposal...
...Without significance in the overall plot, grief is meaningless...
...Risky Business was about capitalist success: a teenager meets a prostitute, opens a brothel and makes $8,000...
...At first the couple says no, but after a sleepless night they say yes...
...So far from having ended, my cold war has increased in intensity, as sector after sector of American life has been ruthlessly corrupted by the liberal ethos...
...In the past decade three movies about prostitution captured something of the spirit of the times: Risky Business, Pretty Woman, and Indecent Proposal...
...Every scene is two or three minutes long and swells to aching emotion, with the help of some old standard sung by Nat King Cole or Louis Armstrong—in other words, the scenes are structured like AT&T commercials, with a small story line and a set-up leading to a sentimental punch aimed at the viewer's lumpy throat...
...Baltimore reporter Annie Reed (Meg Ryan) falls in love on first listen...
...As a screenwriter once told me, "If it can't be overdone then it shouldn't be done at all...
...This, at least, was my first hypothesis, but there's more going on here...
...Indecent Proposal is more convincing about money than it is about sex or love...
...Indecent Proposal does a good job of playing to middle-class anxiety and male feelings of inadequacy...
...The camera focuses on the money as much as on the actors...
...Architect Sam Baldwin's wife dies, leaving him alone with his eight-year-old son, Jonah...
...Why think about two movies that are negligible as works of art...
...Anything can set off the tears: listening to a radio show, watching an old movie, or merely talking about an old movie...
...David becomes insanely jealous and the couple breaks up under the strain...
...It must be due to the complete lack of romance in current Hollywood movies: a movie that merely refers to romance is eaten up as the real thing...
...One way Hollywood sells its commodity of images is by sexualizing the images...
...Sleepless is a cut-and-paste job composed of old movies...
...It keeps insisting that greed is bad and money can't buy love, while letting the romance of money steal all the good scenes...
...The observation deck closes just as Annie arrives...
...The director, Nora Ephron, has the integrity or temerity to expose her method—one of her characters talks about how Bell telephone advertisements make her cry...
...At one point Annie's best friend says, "You don't want to be in love...
...Woody Harrelson and Demi Moore play a middle-class husband and wife, high-school sweethearts with big dreams...
...Sleepless in Seattle is such a saccharine confection that its popularity puzzled me...
...Indecent Proposal is a didactic film...
...Unfortunately it is more like a Hollywood version of socialist realism...
...Because both movies are popular Hollywood standards, and both illustrate something about those of us who watch them...
...They are serious...
...The makers of Indecent Proposal are not playing this scene for a joke...
...He's an architect who wants to be great, and she becomes a real estate agent to help him fulfill his promise...
...You want to be in love in a movie...
...It doesn't evoke emotion, just alludes to it...
...Is there anything wrong with this...
...But the recession hits, he loses his job, she's unable to sell property, and the loan on the half-completed masterpiece is coming due...
...I don't think my divided reaction was unusual, but it's easier to ignore one or the other...
...The teenager is a Reaganite hero and the movie is a true emblem of the go-go eighties...
...With its mish-mash of allusions, it winks at the audience, one of those in-jokes that everybody is in on, flattering us that we're in-the-know, superior to all of this romantic hocus-pocus, while at the same time allowing for acceptance of the sentimental...
...the two principals don't actually meet until the last minute of the last reel...
...But the movie deserves more credit than this statement allows...
...If tears fall for nothing then what are they worth...
...She lolls around in the money, bathes in it, rubs it on her body and gives him a come-hither look...
...No matter how hard I try, I can't separate Bringing Up Baby, Spellbound, Casablanca, Astaire and Rogers, Bogart and Bacall from my everyday experience of love and lust, sex and sensibility...
...The lost individual need only find the magical other to transform his or her life...
...The plot is harmless enough...
...I'm not sure Marx had this in mind when he wrote about the fetishism of commodities...
...The universe of Sleepless in Seattle consists of late-night radio talk shows, sentimental television commercials, mediocre Hollywood movies, and old pop songs written by Hoagey Carmichael, a never-never land of magical romance...
...it is pleasant but hollow...
...Pretty Woman is a Cinderella story where the prostitute finds a rich prince to lift her from the streets...
...Soon the father is on the line talking about his grief and his magical life with his wife...
...It is an ethos that aims simultaneously at political and social collectivism on the one hand, and moral anarchy on the other...
...David counts the money he has just won in the casino downstairs...
...But why do we need the magic of romance...
...And the more contemporary, the more candid and radical was this agenda...
...Because in a society that is spiritually bereft— diminished in family feeling, community connections, and class solidarity—it gives significance to life, it explains our suffering and separateness...
...In the best scene David and Diana are in a hotel room in Las Vegas...
...My first encounters with romance and love were in the Hollywood movies I watched as a child, and I've never recovered...
...Love conquers all and the couple gets back together in the soft focus of the fog-shrouded pier where they proposed to each other...
...For me, then, "neo-conservatism" was an experience of moral, intellectual, and spiritual liberation...
...What are the consequences...
...Soon they're making love, crunching the money between their bodies...
...See Nicolaus Mills's sharp review in the Spring 1984 Dissent...
...Since money is the most desired object in our culture, then why not make love to it...
...But John Gage, famous billionaire, as lonely as Charles Foster Kane and with a habit of paraphrasing Citizen Kane and The Great Gatsby sees the wife, falls in love on first sight, and offers the husband a million dollars if she will sleep with him...
...The utter predictability of the film is part of the film itself: the audience is flattered by its ability to see through it all...
...I have never seen so many actresses cry so many times in one movie...
...The happy ending is pasted onto a movie that does everything it can to convince us that money can buy love...
...Or perhaps the movie is about how many allusions to other movies the audience can catch in one viewing...
...Brecht would have given us a view of the larger social system and wouldn't have pretended that the middle-class world of the couple is the only one that is normal and real...
Vol. 40 • September 1993 • No. 4
