| Granted
we couldn’t figure out how to turn off the closed-captioning
on movie companion Stacey’s computer so we watched the
whole thing accompanied by real-time text, which had the effect
of undercutting any tonal seriousness with an absurdly straight-faced
glee at how fucking pedestrian all movie dialogue is.[1]
But even then Mystic River is a piece of junk, from
its embarrassingly juvenile-fictionesque opening flashback
sequence to the straight poops Boston accents of Laura Linney
and Laurence Fishburne to the in tandem melodrama that the
camera and soundtrack diarrhea all over otherwise competently
dramatic scenes. And it’s all contextualized For Men,
By Men, which viewing experience is contextualized by my total
non-interest in The Tragedy of Being Masculine and its cinematic
apotheosis in The Godfather trilogy, Michael Mann,
and most of Scorsese. I’m totally mystified by the Loyalty/Crime
fetish and its absurd accentuation of stoic Man Language (Pacino
giving his traitorous brother the kiss of death in The
Godfather Part II) along with misogynistic non-sequiturs
like Pacino’s “SHE’S GOT A GREAT ASSSS”
(from Mann’s (the pun is inherent) male soap opera Heat).
I also find most scenes involving pubescent boys acting like
pubescent boys particularly gross and implicitly pedophilic,
since they’re not acting like pubescent boys so much
as they’re acting like adult male fantasies of what
pubescent boys act like. Which maybe might slide if the fact
that they’re Acting weren’t so obvious, and since
the fake conversations are all about their penises and/or
torturing things, the nostalgic glint given these sequences
is always dubious and disconcerting. That Mystic River
makes explicit the implicit pedophilia of pubescent boy flashbacks
by inserting an actual pedophile into the scene might be considered
a moment of genre self-reflexivity if the movie weren’t
so fucking full of its own psychological foregrounding: it
only compounds the gender blindness, since Man-icon Clint
is un-self-aware that he’s self-aware of what he’s
directing, instead of being just straight-up ignorant.[2]
As for
its place in the larger For Men By Men land of Hollywood,
The Tragedy of Being Masculine is cousin to softer white collar
mancentric movies like Fight Club and American
Beauty, which old friend Cathy derided years ago with
the genre-moniker Plight of the White Man, or to their post-adolescent
equivalents in Tragically Adult quarter-life crisis emo movies
like Garden State, which overflow with self-righteous
narcissism played off as quirky sensitivity to the world of
indifference and pain they’ve inherited.[3]
That all of these movies are pretty much universally lauded
makes me want to trade in my y chromosome and go hide out
on the isle of Lesbos for the duration of this life. Nobody
seems horrified by the conflation of murder with Masculine
Responsibility (MR), or the dilution of that responsibility
by attributing it to sexual pressure from whatever Woman happens
to be hanging around. For example after Penn fulfills his
“It’s tough but somebody’s gotta do it”
MR of murdering a childhood friend, his wife (Linney), a flat
background character whose preposterous accent has thus far
been the only thing keeping her in the foreground, transforms
instantaneously from homely housewife into turned-on seductress,
literally pinning Penn to the bed and figuratively pinning
him to a life of crime, the implication being of course that
Adam only ate the apple because of that power-hungry bitch
Eve. But aside from all of that (i.e. the entire movie), Mystic
River is good whenever Penn and Robbins share the screen,
since their characters have a nice tonal interplay that feels
both understated and lived-in, and I liked Kevin Bacon’s
role too, but only because it seemed like a reprise of his
character in Wild Things, whose trashiness has more
integrity and nuance than Eastwood’s ode to the cock
paradigm and was a million times more entertaining.
________________________
[1]
There’s a sublime audial analogue on the DVD for Basic
Instinct called Descriptive Video Service®, “which
makes this title accessible to blind and visually impaired
audiences” as well as those audiences more deliberately
impaired, i.e. it consists of a woman’s voice calmly
narrating the action in between dialogue, most of which action
is the likes of “Yellow lights throb over the crowded
dancefloor as multi-ethnic clubgoers sway to the music. One
woman sports a bright pink mohawk; a muscle-bound bartender
dressed as a priest serves up a drink;” or, “Later,
Nick lays Catherine onto a bed, and plunges his mouth onto
hers. Kicking off his jeans, his naked ass straddles her.
Then he sits up and pulls his sweater off his muscular chest.
She lies beneath him, naked, her nipples erect. Her chest
heaves a sigh as he bends over and licks her breast. She writhes
under him. He wraps his hands around her breasts and hungrily
sucks on them. She caresses his head and squirms with pleasure.
His mouth moves down her body, from her breasts to her belly,
then toward her groin,” and so on. The effect is not
unlike sitting in the school library as a kid being read to
by the librarian, but with smut instead of Dr. Suess. And
for those not blind the interplay between text & image
and dialogue & description is enough to keep you credulously
rapt for days.
[2]
On a similar note, there are a few moments in which the movie
becomes a conduit of product placement, but like, somnambulistically
so: two that I remember are when a character under questioning
repeatedly and inexplicably asks for a Sprite, the tone of
which is supposed to be some kind of masculine joke I guess
but comes across like a momentary possession by the ghost
of The Coca-Cola Company, and the other in the form of a conversation
in medias res as two detectives walk out of a coffee shop
talking about how Dunkin Donuts coffee is not only better
than the piss they’re drinking but more affordable too.
[3]
The cinematic progenitor for this kind of bullshit is John
Hughes' The Breakfast Club, which had the misfortune
of promoting his teens-smarter-than-parents Great Theme without
being offset by the irreverence of Ferris Bueller’s
Day Off or the romance (and seedy brilliance of James
Spader) of Pretty in Pink.
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