Jackie Brown, Kings Row, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me: Men Critiquing Men in the Movies

I've complained on this blog (in which post or posts I can no longer remember) about male indie directors taking no interest in making films with female protagonists, but maybe I haven't looked hard enough. At the moment there's Noah Baumbach's Frances Ha, a character study of a woman in her late 20s who in type is a cross between a rare female loser, a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and a hipster Bridget Jones (with the desperation for a man thankfully omitted; or perhaps it's rather that the clinginess essential to the character has been changed into a homoerotic dependency on a more grown-up female friend instead). The movie's effect on the viewer will largely depend on whether one is susceptible or allergic to Greta Gerwig's brand of fey charm – see also Giulietta Masina and Anna Karina, both of whom I adore; my reaction to Gerwig was complicated by identification with a present-day actress/heroine, albeit one almost decade younger than me. 

There is also of course Cassavetes, who has made movies with female protagonists and one specifically about the experience of being female. There's Todd Haynes, a major exception; unfortunately, I don't like his movies. Lars von Trier – another exception whose movies I also don't like, but by this time it's starting to look like I don't have much of a case, even before I add David Lynch, whose movies I do. Directors who truly have no time for women like Scorsese, Coppola, and Kubrick may have gained enormously inflated reputations in the initial burst of American independent films, and indie auteurs from Cronenberg to Kaufman to Anderson may be gender literalists about their author avatars, but perhaps 25-50% percent of high-profile male indie directors are more adventurous in their approach to gender. Does that arbitrarily made-up percentage sound correct? Sure!

And there's Quentin Tarantino, who, for all the pulpy macho violence of his films, can't be accused of taking no interest in female protagonists given the Kill Bill movies. But also given Jackie Brown, which I finally watched yesterday. 

Please note: all discussions of films below INCLUDE SPOILERS.

Jackie Brown's Deconstruction of Machismo

Jackie Brown belongs to that category of crime film that quietly deconstructs the machismo that belongs to the genre, like other female-lead members such as Cassavetes's Gloria. Gloria, however, is considerably more conventional in its portrayal of gender, with the former gun moll played by Gena Rowlands standing up to the ruthless gangsters in order to protect a little boy – the mother-tiger archetype. As far as its examination of gender goes its most interesting aspects are Gloria's fierce independence (of Cabiria proportions) – she's a loner-cousin to Rowlands's character in Minnie and Moskowitz – and the way it seemingly depicts men in relation to women through the character of the scrawny prepubescent boy whose distinctly romantic love for Rowlands leads to comic attempts to act “like a man” but actually leaves him overwhelmed.

While sort of vaguely admiring Tarantino on a few fronts, I have never exactly been a fan, which is why for me Jackie Brown, which I only just saw for the first time, stands out in his oeuvre like another low-budget triumph by an auteur better-known for bigger films, Tim Burton's Ed Wood. One flaw I did find in the film, in common with many reviewers at the time of its release, was its pacing and length, although not due to the talky scenes and incidental episodes that serve little purpose but to allow actors of the calibre of Samuel L. Jackson, Robert De Niro, Bridget Fonda, Pam Grier, and Michael Keaton to interact in warped, hilarious, and frightening ways – as if once upon a time Tarantino could have become the Preston Sturges of crime films. I was bored because the movie didn't ratchet up the pace the nearer we came to the quadruple-cross (or whatever the number was) climax, instead alternating between peaks and valleys of tension in a way that made it seem as long as it is. I had the same problem with Pulp Fiction: by the time it enters its final act I'm snoozing.

Something I don't share with the critics whose reviews I've found online is their complete disregarding of the film's gender and racial politics. Yet surely the only reason we're expected to sympathize with Jackie is that by double-crossing both the cops and Jackson's criminal she's simultaneously sticking it to the White Man and the macho culture that transcends race and that results in the death of Fonda's character, shot by De Niro for needling him about misplacing his car after a money exchange. In fact it's hard to know how this film would have played if the lead character were white, as in the Elmore Leonard novel it's based on, although there's a specific discomfort in reflecting on the fact that the plot involves a black woman stealing the life's earnings of a black man, whether or not she's in danger from him and he's put her in danger from the police.

There would be ways to make Jackie's betrayal of Ordell seem much less uncomfortable, and both Tarantino and Jackson know what they are – instead of which they choose to portray him as relatively complex within the film's cartoonish terms. Just let him be the one to kill Fonda rather than De Niro; even let him strike her (rather than just recommending it to De Niro as a course of action preferable to murder) or Jackie and he would easily earn his betrayal and death by most audiences' standards of fictional justice. But Tarantino wants things more interesting and Jackson, thanks to his masterful comedic abilities, is up to that challenge. As a study of betrayal within a macho criminal universe it's not nearly as harrowing as Elaine May's Mikey and Nicky but should perhaps be considered its distant relative (especially given the gift for dialogue and love of talk he shares with May).

What a Man's Gotta Do

Charming and generally affable and reasonable but also practical, Ordell kills associates only when he must, to protect himself, and maintains a not-very-well-run patriarchal household with Fonda's stoned and insolent Melanie. Melanie sexually solicits De Niro's Louis, an old associate of Ordell's who was recently released from prison, and it briefly looks like they might form an alliance to rob Ordell. But in a scene at a bar with Ordell and Louis afterwards it becomes clear that Melanie is a mere object of exchange in their homosocial bonding: Ordell “lent” her to Louis and only bonds the harder with him over his friend's sexual betrayal. Moreover, Melanie is one of several women he has set up in houses. Having had her and feeling guilt over it that feeds his disgust at her own disloyalty to Ordell, Louis increasingly turns on Melanie after this exchange, becoming irritable, threatening her with violence, calling her a “bitch,” and finally killing her when she refuses to shut up and stop making fun of him. When Ordell learns of this he's not sentimental but he is nonplussed; after a few protests, however, he concludes, “If you had to do it then you had to do it,” a line that Jackson could have made much more chilling – instead what's chilling about it is that it's completely matter-of-fact. In his warped perception, killing a woman for no reason at all is sometimes what a man's gotta do.

Melanie perfectly matches Simone de Beauvoir's description, in The Second Sex, of a certain kind of woman who accepts her place within the patriarchal structure and therefore accepts that men are masters of the universe, but spends all her time mocking individual men for their failure to live up to this ideal. Given the value set on femininity in the macho criminal world the film depicts, the way she ends up is hardly surprising. Jackie Brown is something else: economically self-sufficient even if she is a black woman nearing middle age in a low-income job, she uses her wits to first set herself up as Ordell's “manager,” demanding 15% of the cut, and then, in a huge gamble, to take it all from him as her last chance to forestall a dismal future. She's one of Tarantino's cherished underdogs, but in that respect Ordell isn't far behind her, and the way she uses his trust of her to accomplish her own ends and betray him makes him vulnerable and sympathetic at the human level no matter how dangerous and ideologically despicable we know him to be, much like Claude Rains's villain in Hitchcock's Notorious.

De Niro, incidentally, also gives a masterful comic turn: Tarantino (of all people) gets a rare restrained performance out of him, all low-key mumbling and shuffling until at last he's called upon to turn on the sickening menace, but even then Ordell thankfully shoots him before he can get into Cape Fear monster mode. The restrained De Niro performance is in keeping with Tarantino's uncharacteristic handling of violence in this film: the shootings mostly (all?) take place off-screen and have at least some emotional cost for the killer, the audience, or both.

By the way, in case you ever thought gender doesn't affect the way you interpret a movie (because I'm tiring myself out with these endless gendered viewings of media), Variety critic Todd McCarthy, in a positive contemporary review, gets this out of Melanie's fate: “De Niro plays a seedy, relatively uninteresting sideline character for most of the way, only to erupt in the late going in ways that are both insanely violent and touchingly honest and loyal.” I spent a solid thirty seconds wondering what he could possibly be talking about before I realized that he must have approved of the homosocial loyalty that makes De Niro so irritated with Fonda that he shoots the “bitch” with no provocation except teasing. Touching? I don't know about you, but it brings a tear to my eye!

Interestingly, like the "undateable" Frances (as a semi-infatuated male friend dubs her), Jackie Brown ends up alone at the conclusion, not because she has no opportunities but rather seemingly because the male filmmaker doesn't want to diminish her by making it seem like her goal in the movie was a man all along or that now that she'll have one she'll be fulfilled. Since of course nearly every movie, commercial or indie, with a male protagonist ends with a romantic pairing, this means that our image of self-sufficiency is still gendered feminine, although only in the rare feminist movie that goes counter to the prevailing trend. At least I can't think off the top of my head of any representations of male self-sufficiency in movies to counteract the sociopathic loner image, but if you know of them let me know.

Kings Row and Progressive Gothic

Odder still than the fact that I'd never seen Jackie Brown is that I'd never even heard of Kings Row, Sam Wood's Oscar-nominated 1942 melodrama about class, mental illness, and sadism in a Midwestern town. David Lynch's cinema has a lot of disparate sources in lesser-known corners of American cinema, but this is one of them. (I recently saw another for the first time, the 1962 no-budget zombie mood-piece Carnival of Souls.) It seems like more than coincidence that this forerunner of Peyton Place made a star of Ronald Reagan, during whose 50s-throwback presidency Lynch made his masterpiece about uncovering dark secrets in a white-picket-fence small town, Blue Velvet. I found the film remarkable for both its open depiction of the love between the two male best friends who are the movie's central characters and its proto-feminist theme of patriarchal sadism and silencing of women who know the secrets of powerful men.

Best friends embrace.

Although the young psychiatrist-hero ultimately decides to take the side of the troublesome “hysterical” woman, in a rather better reaction than Jake's in Chinatown, one gains a strong impression between three of the four young female characters of thwarted female sexuality: even Ann Sheridan's lively lower-class character, who has enough social leeway to be a tomboy as a child, ultimately has to sublimate her attraction to her husband (Reagan) after his legs are amputated, although at least the speech where she talks about her new “calm” love for him seems nearly as awful as the scene where he loses his legs. Although set at the turn of the 20^th century, the film depicts both male and female premarital sexual activity with due Code-evading ellipses but without judgement; in this Freud-informed fictional universe everyone has a sexual appetite.The movie is also a rare example of a male melodrama, a genre known to literary fiction, it seems, but not well-regarded by movie producers; another example cropped up recently in The Great Gatsby. Of course plenty of movies about men are melodramas but try to disguise this fact by a focus on violence and "rites of passage" rather than assuming the traditional, relationships-focused form of melodrama. 

David Lynch and the Fantasizing Protagonist

The silenced woman, kept captive by patriarchy, becomes an overt theme in Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, which I've described on this blog as “one of the worst films I've ever seen.” I don't really want to deprive Lynch of that honour, since he's also made some of the best films I've ever seen – Mulholland Dr. has frequently occupied top spot in my favourites, with It's a Wonderful  Life and Vertigo as its only serious rivals. However, I'm willing to concede that I may be wrong about FWWM, for a number of reasons: because it was important enough to Roberto Bolano for him to namecheck it in 2666, and while this may be the result of cross-cultural misunderstanding on par with Godard's admiration for Jerry Lewis, it may also be the result of an artist from another culture understanding an idiosyncratic auteur work better than critics at home... like Godard's admiration for Jerry Lewis; because for the first 20 minutes of my first viewing of Mulholland Dr. I was ready to declare it the worst movie I'd ever seen, which tells me something about the reactions Lynch can provoke due to both subject matter and style.

Most of all, however, it's because in the comments section of online reviews of FWWM I noticed that more than one woman claimed from experience that it was the most realistic representation of sexual abuse she'd ever seen. This made me reflect that perhaps what disturbed and angered me about FWWM was not that it treated the subject of incest exploitatively but that it treated the subject at all. It was something I didn't want to think about or see, which one could argue is my contribution to our cultural silence on the topic, which is also a silencing of victims. We seem to be much more uncomfortable as a culture with depictions of incestuous sexual abuse of minors than with depictions of rape in general, perhaps because the specter of sex in the nuclear family is something we all work very hard all of the time at repressing. I mean, it was bad enough for Oedipus when he realized he'd married his mother, but combine the family romance with unequal power relations and patriarchal proprietorship and you get something as nightmarish as – well, as FWWM.

My discomfort with the subject matter, which Lynch makes as emotionally and viscerally unbearable as it should be, is not, however, the only reason I've rejected FWWM on my two or three viewings to date. Like Henry James – a fellow American genius whose prurient/puritan keyhole approach to adult sexuality Lynch shares – in “The Turn of the Screw,” Lynch plants a story about sexual abuse in a supernatural setting, as though they feel obliged to treat the subject obliquely. But whereas all we know about the ghosts in “TTOTS” is that they want to take possession of the children, Lynch creates an outlandish mythology with Black and White Lodges, suffering that takes the form of creamed corn in a demon dimension, and on and on. While some fans of the movie – to go by YouTube comments – love it for exactly these surrealist sci-fi flourishes, I have no idea how to process a movie that's at least as impenetrable as Eraserhead while also having a lucid, tragic plot about a high school student who's beginning to realize that she's being abused by her father, but not in time – as we know – to prevent him from murdering her. In any case, beneath the layer of weirdness Laura Palmer is a Christ figure in the Clarissa Harlowe line, relentlessly terrorized and abused by her creator in a way that Lynch would return to, more abstractly, in INLAND EMPIRE, in which Dern's anxiety is still sexual but also existential.

It may have been when he came up with the Leland/Bob solution to the “Who Killed Laura Palmer” that Lynch first got two ideas that would become central to his later work: the idea of interdimensional or alternate universe doubles (isn't Leland/Bob just like Betty/Diane?); and the idea of a movie that is entirely the fantasy or dream, but in any case the nightmare, of its protagonist. I see no indication in FWWM that the Bob portions are intended as Laura's fantasy; on the contrary, they're objectively presented, which is obviously not the case in “The Turn of the Screw.” However, it certainly makes sense of the Bob story to view it as Laura's “cover story” for her father's abuse. Of great importance to Lost Highway and Mulholland Dr. is the idea of a fantasy concealing an emotionally unbearable reality (in FWWM, “My father sexually abuses me,” in the other two movies, “I have killed the person I love”); and in FWWM and MD, in very different ways, the horrifying reality “peeks through” the fantasy. Lynch's fantasies of interdimensional evil and beleaguered innocence place him in a tradition that's not only Jamesian but also Blakeian, although it's by using the vocabulary of pulp and pop culture that's he's intermittently spoken to a wider audience and both tapped into and created archetypes that resonate even when his intentions at the narrative level are unclear.  

Gender, Misogyny, and Body Humour/Horror in the 70s Films of Elaine May

I had a little Elaine May film festival last week, rewatching Mikey and Nicky and A New Leaf and watching The Heartbreak Kid for the first time. I'd been avoiding The Heartbreak Kid because of its Neil Simon screenplay – a former playwright, I believed the longstanding critical consensus that Simon was a middle-of-the-road comedic playwright, which didn't appeal to me, and gave him a miss. I also have my moments of skepticism about auteur theory and, since I knew May as a writer-director from Mikey and Nicky and a writer-director-performer from A New Leaf, I wasn't certain that she would be able to assert herself over the material as a director alone. In fact, I liked The Heartbreak Kid somewhat more than A New Leaf, though it still has to take second place to her suis generis (although, or because, it's a Cassavetes imitation) masterpiece, Mikey and Nicky. (Regarding what this means to auteur theory, Grodin's account of the filming quoted in the article I linked to above suggests that the director and actors had a great deal of input in what we see onscreen, to the official screenwriter's chagrin.)

I've watched A New Leaf three or four times now, and my problems with it remain: Walter Matthau seems miscast as the main character, an upper-class cad who speaks like a character from Oscar Wilde, occasionally via Joe Orton (as in a line about a hostess's “erotic fixation” with her carpet), although I can't be sure because I've never seen Matthau in anything else. (I may have watched Grumpy Old Men when it came out when I was a teenager.) The movie neither satirizes anything recognizable (what do fortune-hunters mean in the 1970s, and what did fortune-hunters who prey on clumsy, socially inept botanists ever mean?) nor quite succeed in creating its own world. Nevertheless, it has its pleasures (May's physical comedy as the heiress) and points of interest (the Matthau character's repulsion at women and the idea of marriage, and his initially unconscious discovery of a purpose in life as he reluctantly finds himself taking care of his helpless wife), and the subversiveness, suspense, and irony would have been greatly increased if the film hadn't fallen victim to censorship, as Jonathan Rosenbaum recounts in the excellent piece that introduced me to May as a director. (I had previously known her as half of the 50s satirical improvisation-based comedy duo she formed with Mike Nichols, who more famously went on to direct films).

Like A New Leaf, The Heartbreak Kid is a dark comedy about a fastidious man, whose point of view the audience occupies, who is revolted by his wife – here played by May's daughter, Jeannie Berlin – and wants to get rid of her. The deeply uncomfortable moral dilemma on which the plot turns is that the protagonist, Lenny, meets the woman of his dreams on his honeymoon, even as he is discovering all of the things he hates about his new wife. Does he do the morally and socially conventional thing, or seize his chance and ditch his new wife?

Two things render the direction of The Heartbreak Kid masterful: first, May's neutrality with respect to the characters, which nudges the audience's sympathies but leaves a great deal ambiguous as well; and, not unrelatedly, the marvellous performances she gets out of Charles Grodin as Lenny, Berlin as Lila, and Eddie Albert as the father of Lenny's dream girl (played by a breathy, vague young Cybill Shepherd). May encourages identification with Lenny's disgust with his gauche new wife's tics – her insistence on singing along with the radio loudly and tunelessly, her clingy behaviour, her need for reassurance, her gross eating habits (chocolate bars in bed after sex, egg salad all over her face) – while leaving room for us to wonder whether Lila's really that annoying or whether Lenny is a bit of a jerk with an overwhelming case of post-marital jitters. “Bit of a jerk” becomes “enormous jerk” when Lenny ditches Lila, who's ended up with a horrible case of sunburn after refusing to take his advice and use sunscreen, to pursue Shepherd – a coy, sadistic WASP cocktease in half-Temple Drake fashion, who first appears, epiphanically, above Lenny in a halo of sun and fine blonde hair, hovering above him as he lies on the beach, informing him that he's “in her spot” like a bitchy toddler.

The Heartbreak Kid deals more directly and openly with WASP fetish (still going strong, without self-awareness, in Eugenides' The Marriage Plot of last year) than any other film I know. The dream Lenny decides to chase, thrown into relief by his disillusionment with marriage (which is to say, mundane closeness to another human being, perhaps the theme responsible for the choice of "Close to You" as ironic pop commentary), is that of marriage to the blonde WASP bitch goddess and entrance into her exclusive world. It's not just a question, then, of whether or not achieving his life's dream is worth committing the morally vile act of leaving his wife for another woman on their honeymoon (although that's how he sees it, in the speech he gives Lila), but whether this dream, in particular, is worth the cost. It's not, of course, but that doesn't matter. What matters, dramatically, is Lenny's absolute conviction that he knows what he wants now, which overrides ordinary moral concerns, and his determination to get it – which overrides the objections first of the shallow Shepherd, who understandably thinks he's crazy, and then of her overprotective father. He gate-crashes the WASP elite through the sheer force of his belief that that is what he wants to do; never mind that this world is depicted as satirically, and revealed to be as repulsive in its own way, as Lila. In Lenny's eyes it is, and remains, sheer glamour.

I then watched the 2007 Farrelly Brothers critically derided remake of The Heartbreak Kid (or as much as I could get through before I was too bored to go on), which made May and Simon's achievement seem even more remarkable in comparison. For the record, I thought Dumb and Dumber was hilarious when I saw it as a teenager (and a teenage cinephile, though just getting started) and also liked There's Something About Mary when I saw it the year of its release. I don't recall much about the former, but the latter I remember as spectacular humiliation slapstick given a vulgarized shock-comedy update: to win his ideal (WASP) woman, Ben Stiller has to be subjected to an endless series of excruciatingly painful accidents and humiliations (although in the notorious cum-in-hair scene, the ideal is desecrated – or, perhaps, brought down to the adolescent Everyman protagonist's level – by receiving a humiliation of her own).

Another reason I was reluctant to watch the original Heartbreak Kid is that I generally dislike 70s movies, timebound in a decade whose cinematic and sartorial style grates on my optic nerves (including the few I make exceptions for, mainly horror films like Don't Look Now, Carrie and Videodrome). But May's film has a classicism and restraint that makes it seem timeless, unlike the remake, which seems absolutely bound to its era – which says nothing good about American comedy in the first decade of the 21^st century. It's not even the worst of the remake's crimes that the Farrelly Brothers jettison the original's satire of social climbing, although it does render the remake incoherent. The protagonist, now called Eddie, is a 40-year-old bachelor who seems unprepared for the reality of marital life, since he breaks up with women for minor infractions like not sharing his taste for dumb comedy. Whereas the original starts with the Jewish wedding of Lenny and Lila, here we get a bunch of pointless background, including a meet-cute (with a typical gratuitously vulgar twist) where Eddie tries to stop a man from stealing Lila's purse and ends up with a pair of her panties. (The gratuitous vulgarity – designed for instant cheap laughs – continues when Eddie and his dream girl meet cute when she mistakenly thinks he's renting a porn video.)

May leaves it open to the viewer to both sympathize with and feel revolted by both Lenny and Lila. It may be ambiguous whether Lila is really that irritating and disgusting, or whether we're seeing her through Lenny's neurotic viewpoint, but when he leaves her to recuperate from sunburn in the hotel room on their honeymoon while pursuing another woman, there's no way not to sympathize with her. As in Mikey and Nicky, May proves herself a master of creating and sustaining discomfort in the scene where Lenny dumps a shocked and devastated Lila at a restaurant, speechifying at her about the importance of living one's life. May spares the audience none of the excruciation of the outrageous premise. Yet we are never pressured to either condemn or condone Lenny; nor, at the ending, are we decisively guided to think that he'll be either hollowly happy or fittingly unhappy. He's got what he wanted, and if that's what being happy means, he'll be happy – or perhaps “happiness” is immaterial. As he mingles with guests, repeating the meaningless, rote phrases of the unsophisticated Midwestern business elite he's entered (even to a couple of kids he ends up with on the couch at one point), we understand that this world is risibly dull from his New York perspective, as if Hildy Johnson went to live with Bruce in Albany after all, but neither May nor Simon tip us off that his marriage with Shepherd will be either blissful or otherwise. (Despite this comparison of the choice Lenny makes to the choice Hildy doesn't make, I think Jonathan Rosenbaum is incorrect to suggest that Lenny leaves an "overpowering" woman for, presumably, a less threatening one – although he's right that The Graduate must be read this way. I don't think May and Simon suggest at all that Lila is “complicated” or more interesting than Shepherd's character, who is not treated especially unsympathetically, as Lila is not treated especially sympathetically. If Lila is overpowering, it's only in her insistent corporeality, not her personality, which is rather meek when she's not singing. Lenny doesn't leave the right woman for the wrong woman, or vice versa; he leaves a woman for the woman he thinks is the right one – the irony lies not in the fact that she's really the wrong one, but that she's neither right nor wrong. She is also just a woman.)

In the remake, Lila isn't simply gauche and irritating – she's a monster: both stupid and crazy, as well as jobless, with a former coke problem that's left her with a deviated septum that causes liquids to spurt from her nose and scarily aggressive bedroom habits (the cheap homophobia doesn't stop, as everyone from pubescent boys to his new wife in bed accuse Eddie of being a fag, pussy, etc.). Anyone would be within their rights to get an immediate annulment, so why the movie takes time to set Eddie up as overly picky is mysterious. Eddie then falls for a definitely less "overpowering" woman: sporty, laid-back, not-insane Miranda, who, in the movie's sexual subtext, appeals to Eddie because her sexual differentiation is less pronounced. (The movie's adolescent homophobia is due to Eddie's adolescent homophilia: sexually aggressive women make him feel emasculated, whereas what he really wants is a “pal.”) There's no moral dilemma: obviously, Eddie should leave the nightmare and marry the nice girl. But since there's no moral dilemma, there's also no movie – no point to the plot, except as a vastly mean-spirited (to both of the female characters, no matter how negatively or positively portrayed) farce premise. But even describing the movie's plot as choosing a nice, subdued, boyish brunette over a sexual blonde hottie (this version's Lila) gives it too much credit for coherence: Lila is never set up as Eddie's false dream girl; she's just the girl he happens to meet in the street and marry, who happens to be hot and blonde, and then happens to turn out to be crazy.

I gave some consideration to my reaction to the Farrelly Brothers' remake of a classic satire, because I would go to some lengths to defend Frank Tashlin and Jerry Lewis's similarly maligned loose remake of the Preston Sturges classic The Miracle of Morgan's Creek as Rock-A-Bye Baby. Although Tashlin is widely regarded as a satirist by his revisionist cinephile fans, there's no doubt that Sturges's biting satire of small-town mores, including taking aim at single motherhood and premarital sex, is completely jettisoned in the remake's remoulding of the material into a Lewis vehicle, and a great deal is dumbed down and sweetened up – including going to the length of cutesy songs and broad ethnic stereotypes. But Tashlin and Lewis replace Sturges's satire with something equally interesting, employing aspects of Lewis's persona that Tashlin was even more interested in exploring than Lewis in his self-directed films (with the exception of The Ladies Man): a subversive attack on gender essentialism from a male perspective that predated second-wave feminism by five years (if you date that from the publication of The Feminine Mystique). Lewis's character, Clayton Poole, goes to court to prove that he can take care of female infant triplets by himself, arguing not that a father is as good as a mother but that you don't need to be a woman to be a mother – which brings him up against the prejudice of a small town's biological essentialism on the sacred subject of motherhood. What's more, Tashlin and Lewis don't just tailor the material for Lewis's gender-transgressive persona, but offer an intelligent reading of a neglected aspect of the Sturges film: the problems of a widower raising two teenage girls, which is how one of the girls manages to go wild and get pregnant out of wedlock.

In other words, sometimes it's possible for a remake of a classic comedy to stray from its source and offer an apparent dumbing-down that has its own interest. Maybe 50 years from now, the Heartbreak Kid remake will look like a brilliant, subversive take on gender politics and a shrewd exploration of its source's subtext. Right now, however, at least to me, it looks like the best exploration, or exploitation, of whatever comedic persona Ben Stiller has happened in Zoolander, which played on the Jewish movie comedian's tension between narcissism and self-loathing that Stiller inherited from Lewis, specifically in The Ladies Man. But while I liked Zoolander, it's not half of half the movie The Ladies Man is.

I don't object to gross-out comedy in principle, either. During the 90s, up to and including the first American Pie movie, some gross-out comedies had a sweet charm that shone through the body fluid jokes (a type of comedy revived in the enjoyable Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, in combination with the new stoner comedy that took over in the 00s). Although admittedly, as someone who's idea of great movie comedy is Buster Keaton, Jerry Lewis, Tati, and the screwball comedies of the 30s and 40s, the best I can say for any movie comedy of the 90s or 00s is that I didn't hate it. I also didn't hate Meet the Parents, where Owen Wilson stole the movie from Stiller in a performance of daffily winsome charisma reminiscent of the screwball heroines. However, aside from his likeable comedies with Jackie Chan, the case of Owen Wilson proves that no performer has enough eccentric charisma to survive the terrible writing and direction of the standard modern movie comedy – such as the tedious Wedding Crashers. I'm sure I'd be happier with the state of contemporary movie comedy, and the things it gives interesting performers to do, if I could like Wes Anderson, but unfortunately, I find his precious quirkfests at least as unfunny as mainstream gross-out comedy. To be sure, I've only tried The Royal Tenebaums, but from what I've heard it's an accurate sample of what the rest is like. The answer is not quirky indie comedy; the answer is better mainstream comedy.

As someone who's tried, and hasn't always hated, dumb gross-out comedy, I think I've got the cred to say that the obligatory inclusion of crass body humour in mainstream comedy, however necessary it may have seemed to catch up with modern sensibilities, has been detrimental to American movie comedies, which have totally foregone the virtues of subtlety and restraint. In The Heartbreak Kid, May can still get comedic mileage out of the mild exaggeration of traits that provoke disgust in partners, like sloppy eating habits, with the piece de resistance being Berlin's sunburned appearance, covered in blisters and cream. The inclusion of urine, farting, diarrhea, and, since There's Something About Mary, semen jokes hasn't become obligatory yet. And remember this was the 70s, where “restraint” wasn't a trait prized in movies, particularly in the horror genre for which the decade is perhaps most remarkable, where bombast and boundary-transgression flourished in movies like Carrie (which took on menstrual blood), The Exorcist (vomit, snot, and pus), Videodrome (stomach vaginas), and Eraserhead (unidentifiable baby-things).

The 70s was, notably, the decade of horror films based on abject femininity, which, as Kristeva famously argued, blurs the boundaries that separate bodies and categories, as well as the decade of Anglo-American radical feminism. This is the context of May's three 70s films, all of which feature a male protagonist as the primary audience identification figure, although he is a sort of unreliable narrator, whose vile behaviour makes him as repulsive as the female character (or, in Mikey and Nicky, characters) he victimizes. In the two comedies, the female victim is a figure of abjection to whom the male character objects on that basis, and in The Heartbreak Kid, May's combination of classicism and the subject of disgust is faintly reminiscent of the sensibility of Cronenberg in Dead Ringers. Since both deal with abjection and boundary-blurring, a study comparing body humour and body horror would be interesting, and the ur-text might be Jerry Lewis's Nutty Professor, a comedy-horror film that brilliantly examines the unnerving abjection of the Lewis persona, with its source in the unruly body. Female biology is abject by definition, at least from the normative, Apollonian male perspective that Cronenberg deconstructs in Dead Ringers; but the male adolescent body is equally unruly, and the adult male is capable of identifying with it – and the shame associated with it – at any point.

With Mikey and Nicky, May suddenly, violently swerved from comedy, although the film (with its titular allusion to “Mike Nichols”) also seems to be a more direct attempt to grapple with the idea of a friendship so close that it blurs the boundaries of identity than her dark comedies about heterosexual couples. Playing one of the most unpleasant main characters in cinematic history (at least outside the annuls of villain protagonist), Cassavetes gives an uncompromising performance, all edges and jittery nerves; what May does to him, and gets him to do, in this film may be comparable to the tales of “sadistic” male directors getting performances of arresting self-exposure and emotional rawness from their actresses, from Dreyer and Falconetti in Passion of Joan of Arc to Lynch and Naomi Watts in Mulholland Dr. and Laura Dern in INLAND EMPIRE. Since the paradigm, or myth, here is gendered, it's worth noting that although he's the most aggressive, volatile, and violent of May's unpleasant male main characters, Cassavetes' Nicky is also the most “feminized,” which is to say pathologized: he's an hysterical, paranoid hypochondriac who's obsessed with, and openly terrified by, the idea of his death. And only in this film does May exhibit no sympathy – through performance, context, or otherwise – with the character who is betrayed and victimized by the person closest to them. The viewer may be magnetized and riveted by Nicky, and the question of who first betrayed whom and how may be left ambiguous, but the ending leaves no doubt that the writer-director, at least, thinks he gets what he deserves – however horrifying the actual act of betrayal remains. In other words, it's only in the film where May imagines herself strictly as a man, rather than dividing identification between a male and female character, that she fully indulges her masochism.

Despite this personal loathing for (and adoration of) her main character, May's direction in Mikey and Nicky, as in The Heartbreak Kid, is remarkable for its neutrality: she unflinchingly records the things that are unpleasant (physically, socially, morally) about her characters and their environments and leaves the audience to draw their own conclusions. (This seems to be the main point of continuity with her prior career: many of the Nichols and May sketches damn the characters with speech that's a mixture of the closely observed and the gracefully stylized.) In Mikey and Nicky, May extends the ambiguity of her direction to the writing: just as we don't know who's really responsible for what went wrong between Mikey and Nicky (only that Nicky has got to be a difficult friend to have, between his sadism and his neediness: Peter Falk's Mikey cares for him maternally, as Matthau does May in A New Leaf), we don't know whether the woman Nicky goes to visit in an extraordinarily uncomfortable scene where he has sex with her over her protests while Mikey twiddles his thumbs in the other room is, as Nicky claims, a neurotic whore, or whether she's a sensitive woman whom he's set up by sending his friends to her to try it on with her (or what his motivations might be in that case). “Who betrayed whom” and “who is the victim of whom” operates on every level of the film.

There's also an extraordinary scene where Nicky goes to see his estranged wife and baby before he dies, in which the actress playing his wife (Joyce Van Patten) is broken down by the end of the brief scene – her only appearance in the film – to a point of acute emotion rarely seen in any film. (Apparently May got the film taken away from her, and released in its unfinished state, after shooting almost three times the amount of film taken for Gone With the Wind. While this is clearly insane, and sounds like she would never have finished it if it weren't taken away, performances like these make it seem like it was worth it.) For a moment the viewer is left to wonder if Nicky and his wife don't “really” love each other after all; maybe she's the one he “really” needs, not his girlfriends or male friends, and this sort of primal bond is worth the anguish of their relationship (which, May indicates, includes his physical abuse of her) for both of them.

It's the extraordinarily intense nature of the emotions in the writing and performances that gives this impression – but the psychological conclusions that begin to form in the viewer's mind are swept away when Nicky next goes back to visit his “girl,” with whom he has a similarly intense encounter. While May (or is it just me?) clearly revels in the unapologetic swaggering masculinity that allows Nicky to go from woman to woman, wife to mistress, treat them both appallingly, and have them end up swooning at his feet, there is an emotional truth to this juxtaposition... the emotional truth that there's no such thing as a fixed, stable emotional truth. Like Lenny in The Heartbreak Kid, Nicky doesn't “really” love one woman, and not another; nor is it as simple as saying he “really” loves both... or neither. “Real love” is a sentimental fiction: one that Lenny uses as a justification for his erotic and social ambition. There is no real love, not even in friendship, only bonds of need with fleeting moments of real emotion. That's all love is, and it's nothing to get sentimental about, although it's also the core of our identities: Nicky is his relationships. He's defined by them, and nothing else has any meaning for him, even if what he seems to demand most of all, with a tyrannical disregard for what it costs the other person, is the acknowledgement that he's loved, the only thing that stands between him and his fear of the absolute obliteration of death.