Bad Timing and Love in New York

A small story about us all. Even if we don't display our neurosis as publicly as Woody Allen, its hard to deny that they are all in there. Are his own, any more or less than ours, keeping him from being happy? Do we each, at turns, undermine the possibility of our own happiness? Even if any match between two people is little more or less than an arrangement between colliding deranged personas, this need not marginalize the importance of the loves we share.

Sometimes it works out. Mostly it doesn't. And, really, romances that work are rarely funny, or interesting. Its a take on Tolstoy: all happy relationships are the same; every unhappy relationship is unhappy in its own way. It is the failure that makes them most interesting. But, sometimes, the failure is not of our doing. What if, truly, the time just wasn't right? Allen's Manhattan is mostly about relationships doomed by the intricate failures of time. One of you is married; or both. Someone is too old; or too young. You're going away and I'm right here. It may not be particularly romantic, and certainly undermines any notion of "soul mates," but relationships are also about making our lives fit together at the right time. What if we were always, just, missing the right time to find love?

"Everything ends badly - otherwise it wouldn't end."

So wise, Young Tom Cruise. So... so wise.

He is right, you know. And Cocktail is no exception. It ends badly: with Young Tom Cruise reciting crap, pub-poetry on a bar that he owns. Of course, the journey isn't much better. I was certain Young Cruise would be proven-wrong: that any ending would be a cause for celebration. A celebration we get, but it is on-screen, and I realize Young Cruise has stolen my long-expected moment of triumph. Though I am happy the ending has come, it still ends badly.

Damn you, Young Tom Cruise, damn you.

So.... let me get this straight: this would-be captain of industry (self-appointed) is precluded from proving his mettle by a society seemingly structured against his dreams, decides to become a vice-merchant, never stops lamenting his unrealized desire for monetary success, and finds a measure of happiness in his defeat and shotgun wedding? Supposedly he learns something about happiness when he finds Flanagan dead in his yacht (spoiler!). Tearing up $10,000 checks on his way to the middle.

How dated this pursuit of cynical success feels to the larger cultural milieu. We can almost see the last vestiges of Reaganomics gasping for air on the Manhattan sidewalk. Maybe Young Cruise feels the shallowness, but specifically by allowing him to seemingly succeed - when, in fact his dreams have come to naught - without exploring the ramifications of why he is so driven, or what it is that blocks his success, the film does little more than paint a thin veneer of wisdom gained upon the crushing of one's dreams in a society constructed to ensure that upward mobility is largely an illusion.

Who needs a drink?

"The War is Over; Rock Stars Have a lot of Feelings"

If Philip Seymour Hoffman is right (and, it seems, he often is), then the rock and roll war ended before '72 and there was nothing compelling, novel, or challenging left to do. When the outsiders become a larger part of the so-called "big, bad corporate tastelessness," when the central ethos of protest of an entire art form ceases to be its motivating spirit, then everything changes. It must. Was Mark Perry (later) correct: did punk die when The Clash signed with CBS?

And now its about cool. Or so Almost Famous  would dwell on. And that is what struggling rock bands (Stillwater) focus on. Controlling image in a media savvy world that they have not really begun to understand. This leads to, as might be inevitable of comfortable twenty-somethings, a lot of feelings. Yes, just like anything else in demand people will try to own what you have created. Tough. While it is nice to imagine that everyone leaves the tale more self-aware, what is the compelling reason why this type of story need be told? Ignored is how music continues to evolve and remains important, both to the creators and receivers.

For a movie ostensibly about rock music, people and rock remain highly foreign to one another. Beyond the assured nostalgia of a certain generation, there is surprisingly a lot of music over-dubbed, but little about why the music matters. Notions of "family" and "home" could be found in any other, attempted, counter-culture movement of young people. Why should we care about this, specific, movement? What relevance did it carry at the time? What does it carry still? Why did rock and roll continue to matter? What we have is comfortable people exploring a largely safe medium in which the accepted logic of retrospection is secure. David Bowie is hustled through a room of die-hard rock fans of different stripes and no one attempts to pontificate upon a distaste for Bowie? Really? Was the logic of taste and time so agreed upon in the moment?

Seymour Hoffman was only half-right. The first iteration of the rock war may have recessed from the mainstream, but artists continued to feel stifled by the limitations of the medium - and pushed it to new places. The music continued to speak to people because of the fierce urgency of the moment; this must breed dissension, or cease to speak meaningfully. The Clash and the Sex Pistols; Run DMC and N.W.A.; Nirvana and Pearl Jam; in essence, the song remains the same. Innovation continued to be explored; and innovation must always be at least partially uncomfortable.

How do music and personality integrate to form some semblance of a coherent life? How do people find meaning in someones else's art? What can this tell us about ourselves and the world we inhabit? I wonder.

Beyond Here Lies Nothin'

Jonathan Franzen writes of freedom, in his work of the same name. The question, seemingly, is how we are to make sense of ourselves in modern society. The great triumph of the liberal, democratic ideal, is that people should be free (within quite broad parameters) to create the world as they see fit. Unmoored from any sense of binding responsibility - save taxes - any non-legal morality is entirely of our creation. When social pressure is no longer adequate to keeping us in-line, how do we balance our actions?

Lost in Translation, in setting Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson adrift in Tokyo, makes all of these points eloquently, if not a touch heavy-handedly. With nothing else familiar except a like-minded stranger, is it any wonder that they become each-other's only grounding certainty? Which of us hasn't felt the world, and our lives, spinning out of control around us? Sometimes the only anchor-point will be a similarly confused, scared partner; when everything is foreign, even the smallest of common ground might bind us to each other. When everything else drops away, we can still have each other. Irresponsible? Selfish? Perhaps. But, at times, someone else may become our whole world. It is part of the vast panoply of human experience. The horizon disappears entirely and time and being is composed of this one relationship; this here and now. If we are unmoored, then we can likewise recreate our lives at any second. Before this: the past. Beyond here, lies nothing.