The Zugzwang of Desire
How What’s Your Number? Reveals the Horrible Undead Fundament of the Romantic Comedy Genre.
In his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Alexandre Kojeve provides the groundwork by which Lacan will later determine lack to be the foundational character of the subject. Kojeve writes: “To desire Being is to fill oneself with this given Being, to enslave oneself to it. To desire non-Being is to liberate oneself from Being, to realize one’s autonomy, one’s Freedom. To be anthropogenetic, then, Desire must be directed toward a nonbeing—that is, toward another Desire, another greedy emptiness, another I.” Desire, therefore, never attaches itself to being, except fictionally through the mediation of another subject—another lack. This means that the subject can never truly make-whole its desire, can never totally circumspect the object desire takes because this desired object can never be such. Instead, desire do-si-dos another desire, circling back to back and blind to the lack that motivates its movements.
No film I’ve seen in the past year has understood this relationship better than Mark Mylod’s What’s Your Number?* which poses the question of the centrality of lack in the production of desire—as well as the desire to turn that lack into Being. By reducing the accidental content of the Romantic Comedy to rubble, Mylod tears the genre down to the bone—revealing the terror at its foundational level. Counterintuitively, by reducing the material of the genre to pure objective presence, the lack at the heart of the subject becomes all-consuming, tries even more desperately to attach itself to Being, and resolves itself ultimately in the acknowledgement of its own vacuous momentum.
The film opens with Anna Ferris** asking, “how many relationships do I have to have before I meet the right guy?” As my partner noted after watching the trailer, this question is at the heart of every rom-com produced today, it’s just that most films have the good manners not to come out and state the stakes so blatantly. This is the (accidental?) genius of WYN? that the accidents that make up the content of most rom-coms are swept away to reveal the horror of the fundamental premises of the genre. It’s not surprising, then, that Ferris’ question is given a quantitative answer: 20. As in, you can have 20 relationships before you’ll be precluded from ever finding the right guy. This is the desire of the subject in relation to his own desire, that is, to produce it at the level of the matheme. This trope is sprinkled throughout the fraught history of the rom-com, as in 27 Dresses (2008), titled for the count of Katherine Heigl’s bridesmaid dresses—an eschatological sign of the limited opportunity for her to find a husband of her own. Or My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997), where juvenile Julia Roberts sets the age of 28 as the outer limit of her willingness to look for a partner. Or The Proposal (2009), where Sandra Bullock’s character must wed Ryan Reynolds by the end of the year to avoid deportation and, by extension, a lifetime of misery. This pattern is nothing more than the means of signifying that material about which desire circles: the death drive. However, WYN? is exceptional in that it treats this representation as objective truth. All other films maintain a sense of play, of accident about the conditions under which limits are placed on the potential of desire. Anna Ferris is not offered this flexibility—her fate is written in the liberation/sheer terror of the object as such.
The expression of the death drive as the romantic limit is not the only feature of the rom-com genre that receives this treatment from Mylod’s film. The number 20 as the fixed maximum of lifelong sex partners is received from a Marie Claire article—an article that the female characters of the film are eager to validate as scientifically supported (“A researcher from Harvard” is invoked to end all speculation over the veracity of the figure). The presence of woman’s-magazine-as-legitimating-trope used so sincerely and without question can’t help but draw attention to the dozens of films where female protagonists’ emptiness and lack of interest in anything other than men is hidden behind the veil of a profession writing for women’s magazines and other such media. Examples include Never Been Kissed (1999), How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003), Knocked Up (2007), The Ugly Truth (2009), Sleepless in Seattle (1993), The Holiday (2006), and on and on and on. The pretense of career interest dissembles the fact that what is at the heart of these characters is lack, a lack that attaches itself to the lack of desire in the men that these women ultimately pursue through the accidental presence of “article ideas.”
The film concludes when a wealthy businessman proposes a European vacation to the unemployed Ferris, who quickly turns him down. “I wouldn’t be myself,” she explains, which is to say, she would have to cover up her lack in order to take on the role of his girlfriend/wife. The audience pauses, because WYN?—unlike other films of the genre—hasn’t done the necessary work to demonstrate that the handsome rich man is evil. In fact, if anything, he seems less reprehensible in his treatment of others (and especially women) than Chris Evans. But as the presentation of genre qua object, the film simply relies on the expectation that the rich man will be proven irredeemable and be fairly rebuked. Not so here. It is rather because he has interests, has identifications to distract from his central longing, that Anna Ferris realizes she would have to take on some of the same in order to exist with him. So she explains that she has a better offer: the offer of the nothing waiting at her apartment, where she doesn’t have to leave the bed, doesn’t have to be interested in anything other than the ceiling-fan-like monotony of her desire circling another’s.
This is the terror waiting at the end of the film: the lumbering, groping gait of an empty vessel slouching towards eternity. If my description of the love relationship is zombie-like, it’s no accident. What’s Your Number? makes clear where the true heart of the Romantic Comedy genre rests: in the space Lacan called “between two deaths.” With the momentum of the drive, but none of its attendant satisfaction, the two run mindlessly again and again into their inability to become one. Mylod has created a monster, to be sure, but a monster that can’t help but make us acutely aware of the distance we’ve gone awry from the promise of the Screwball Comedy. No longer passionate, no longer motivated, no longer imaginative. Just a number and its hunger.
*With the obvious exception of Kiarostami’s Certified Copy, but let’s not split hairs.
**In order to draw attention to the vacuity of the concept of “character” left to the Romantic Comedy genre, I will not be using character names.
†One result of this mise-en-abyme is the amount that the characters consume. As Zizek has said, taste in its sensual material has become abstracted from the nourishment of food, has become a “nothing” that forms the basis of the desire to eat. It makes perfect sense, then, that when Ferris asks the foundational question “how many relationships do I have to have before I meet the right guy?” her mouth is full.
Endangered 2010: The American
Anton CORBIJN
Now that my two favorite films of 2010 (Winterbottom’s The Killer Inside Me and the Joosts’ Catfish) have officially been eliminated from Oscar contention, my rooting interest in the awards ceremony is entirely invested in hoping that Inception is barred from receiving anything other than technical awards. Christopher Nolan, in a bald attempt to build an “original” film, decided consciously to avoid the influence of others in what must be considered one of the greatest acts of directorial conceit in recent history. When asked what kind of research he did for Inception, he replied:
I don’t actually tend to do a lot of research when I’m writing. I took the approach in writing Inception that I did when I was writing Memento, about memory and memory loss, which is I tend to examine my own process of, in this case dreaming and in Memento’s case, memory, and try and analyze how that works and how that might be changed or manipulated; how a rule set might emerge from my own process and I do that because I think a lot of what I find, you wind up doing with research. (link)
Nolan, essentially, confused his own perception of reality with the universal case, and assumed that “ten years” of reading his dream journal would produce the exact same effects as roughly 2500 years of insight into human psychology. While other directors haven’t had the lack of self-awareness or balls to take their utter indifference to history to Nolan-like levels, there has been an unfortunate trend towards choosing “originality” over quality. (For more context, take a look at my post on the trend of charging Black Swan with being the same film as Showgirls.) In essence, the ability to charge a film with being too similar to a previous film has become a populist trope, and an easy way to discredit work that is never judged on its own merits. There is, here, a chicken-and-egg argument to make over whether or not the pressure of public outcry against imitative filmmaking influences directors like Nolan, or whether Nolan’s pretensions give agency to the public’s unbalanced critiques. Either way, people who love movies lose.
This is why Anton Corbijn’s film, The American, was so refreshing: precisely because it wasn’t afraid to learn the lessons one hundred and sixteen years of filmmaking has taught. By paying strict attention to the conventions of past noir and suspense films, Corbijn created a new film that is surprisingly enjoyable and practically seamless. What The American illuminates most is the complicated relationship between film and its genres. Take a look at this review of the film, which starts with the line, “The story is startlingly clichéd yet told in a pretentious and ponderous art-house style.” The pejorative connotations of the word formulaic make it hard to remember that formulas develop for a reason: they work. The “clichéd” story and “pretentious and ponderous art-house style” are not valid reasons to dislike the film; they are simply the rich inheritance that film history provides us. Corbijn deserves credit for having the courage to make a genre film in a climate that calls for endless appeals for needless “original” experimentation.
Let us look, for context’s sake, at the following two screen shots. The first is from Corbijn’s film, the second is from Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1956 film Bob le Flambeur.
Note the similarity in framing: both characters are confined to the far right of the frame. Both are aware, at the respective points in the two films, that they are being followed. Both directors create suspense by coupling what the hero sees (Roger Duchesne and George Clooney both look apprehensively past the camera) with what the audience can see (down the staircase past the armed guards in Bob le Flambeur, and out the café window into the streets in The American). The possibility of us, the audience, seeing the threat to the hero before he can creates the dramatic irony that holds us in suspense. Corbijn has learned the lessons that Melville has taught.
Now look again at the two frames and notice that Corbijn has, without a doubt, added a third element to his frame that Melville’s lacks. Namely, the reflection in the window behind Clooney is distinguishable from the darkness outside. The audience can, therefore, keep an eye both on what is outside the hero’s vision and what it is he is examining. This subtle but very important twist is the kind of original thought that is most effective in film (and other art, for that matter): the type that departs from its model only slightly, using the established formal material as a platform on which to build unexpected tangents. This is the lesson I wish filmmakers like Nolan would learn, that—as Jazz legend Charles Mingus once said—“you can’t improvise on nothing, man, you’ve got to improvise on something.”
The fact that The American owes a bulk of its success to films like Bob le Flambeur, Notorious, The Big Sleep, and Rififi doesn’t make it any less an impressive and engaging film. The fact that it tells a story that we’ve heard before in a familiar way is, actually, its strongest asset.
Endangered 2010: The Killer Inside Me
Michael WINTERBOTTOM
I want to begin with a ludicrous and inexcusable journalistic move: a dictionary definition. The dictionary, in this case, is Urban Dictionary, and the content is user-generated. The concept I am looking to shed some light on is “cool,” one of the more popular entries on UD with over 150 entries. Browsing through the possible explanations of what is, admittedly, one of the more protean terms in popular usage, a certain interesting theme begins to develop:
“very conveniant [sic] for people like me who don’t care about what’s ‘in.’”
“laid back, relaxed, not freaked out, knows what’s goin on.”
“above and beyond a situation…characterized by strange masteries and hidden resources”
“a simplified way of telling someone to shut the fuck up because you don’t give a shit.”
“state of mind”
“on the down-low, secret, mum’s the word”
“a word used aimlessly when something doesn’t matter”
“A word that sometimes (not always) whores use in online conversations to show that they DONT GIVE A DAMN ABOUT WHAT YOU SAY in a polite way.”
“staying calm or not showing emotions, especially nervousness or fear”
I should also mention at this point, as a disclaimer, that one definition is “what you probably aren’t if you’re looking up ‘cool’ in the dictionary.” Suffice it to say, I knew going in that I wasn’t cool. The very gesture of the act of writing this article disobeys a fundamental aspect of “cool” I was trying to illuminate by pulling out the examples above. That is to say, cool is inherently related to the act of not caring. Caring about being cool (or caring about anything, really) precludes you from ever achieving that which you set out to achieve; that is, being cool. The act of writing a review of a film because you care about it (or, at a much more fundamental level, caring about the definition of “cool”) couldn’t possibly be less cool.
The reason I bring this up is because one of two dominant criticisms of Michael Winterbottom’s The Killer Inside Me is that its portrayal of serial killer Lou Ford is overly glorifying, and that the director is to blame for painting the character in the same shade as Johnny Strabler and Sam Spade (the other criticism, which I won’t talk about here because I talk about it elsewhere, is that the film is sexist). This interpretation claims that the relation between the character himself and the violent acts he perpetrates is morally reprehensible and borders on the pornographic. David Denby makes this claim to the moral high ground in his review (subscription required) in the New Yorker:
“Casey Affleck is the young deputy sheriff of a small Texas city in the fifties, and he merely plays it cool, offering little sense of the madness churning around inside the character. He whomps on women’s bare bottoms, and they adore him for it. Externalized, the material seems like a sadomasochistic fantasy with a hero who’s simply smarter and more elusive—and therefore hipper—than anyone around him can imagine. Winterbottom’s directing is stiffly inexpressive—seemingly disconnected, and protective of his insane hero. The movie is disturbing in all the wrong ways.”
If we analyze Denby’s claims one by one, we can come to the following conclusions. First, a psychopathic killer must be upset in some turbulent way, although it is unclear what form this turbulence must take. Madness must “churn around inside” a character, perhaps what Denby expected from the title of the film was a Jeckyl/Hyde, Dr. Strangelove syndrome or Sybil-esque drama to unfold. Second, the idea that a killer could be smarter, more elusive, or hipper, than those who hope to apprehend him is problematic. This vision of an intelligent, charismatic and attractive killer is related to a “fantasy,” although I am making my own assumptions when I suggest that Denby believes this vision of madness to be make-believe. Third, and finally, Denby posits that Winterbottom’s treatment of the Ford character contributes to this effect in that it is “inexpressive” or distant; therefore, Winterbottom is protecting Ford. All of these claims contribute to Denby’s conclusion that The Killer Inside Me disturbs us for the wrong reasons.
My response to these claims is simple: for the most part, Denby is right. Ford is cool, he is aloof and indifferent to his own crimes. His ability to outsmart and toy with his peers creates the possibility of fetishistic treatment of his abilities, and Winterbottom’s direction of the film explicitly contributes to this reading. I think for the most part Denby’s analysis is spot on. I do not think, however, that Denby is correct that the movie is disturbing for the wrong reasons. I think that movies that are disturbing for the “right reasons” are ultimately not disturbing; if we can perfectly explain why it is that we are disturbed can we honestly say we are disturbed at all? If we look at “disturbing” images of a genocide or famine, are we not inscribing those images in preestablished conditions called “war” or “hunger” in order to give them meaning beyond their simple disturbing content? It is only the disturbing image or idea that can maintain its disturbance well beyond the initial experience of the abject that truly “disturbs” us in the literal sense of the word. The reason Winterbottom’s film is truly disturbing is because it’s depiction of mental disturbance is true.
Take, for example, the case of Ted Bundy. Bundy did not harbor in him a battle between good and evil, he did not live in the woods writing insane manifestoes, he simply and calmly killed people in the light of day and did not care. He was attractive enough that women got in his car repeatedly although he looked exactly like a widely-spread police sketch of himself (his coworkers taped the police sketch to his desk because they thought it was funny how similar he looked). He was a master manipulator, a genius who managed to get a judge to claim that Bundy would have made an excellent lawyer in a different life. Bundy was smart enough that on death row he fabricated the idea that his addiction to pornography caused him to kill women, although there was absolutely no proof of it, in an attempt to win the favor of the religious right. Bundy’s is the truly disturbing vision of psychopathy; a man whose psychosis is ingrained in his vision of reality, and yet his vision of reality is similar enough to the status quo that it goes undetected. Killers like Kaczyinski and Gein are popular faces of evil because we can rest assured we would recognize their madness immediately. But Bundy is the mote that upsets the binary of evil and the everyday.
Winterbottom’s film produces the same effect, especially where judgments of cool are considered. The Killer Inside Me links violence, sex, and cool in an indelible way that forces us to question whether or not our idea of what is “cool” is on a continuum directly linked to dispassionate cruelty. This upsetting possibility lead critics such as The New York Times’ A.O. Scott to conclude that Winterbottom is “a director primarily concerned with finding out what he can get away with, and not entirely sure what he’s doing.” This response strikes me as especially pertinent, because it seems to be presented in the form of a threat. What happens to a director who crosses the line? Is he run out of town? Tarred and feathered? The very syntax of the sentence reminds one of a lynch mob in a Western film: “I don’t think you’re sure what you’re doing, Winterbottom. And you certainly don’t know who you’re messing with.”
My lasting impression of this film is that Winterbottom is one of the few directors who knows exactly what he’s doing, and knows exactly who he’s messing with. Unlike so-called disturbing films such as The Human Centipede (which, to be fair, didn’t exactly draw rave reviews), The Killer Inside Me removes the taboo from the realm of the identifiably deranged into the field of the everyday, and, more importantly, questions the interpretive system that determine what we as human beings value. In this sense, Roger Ebert most honestly reads the film when he says it “is expert filmmaking based on a frightening performance, but it presents us with a character who remains a vast empty lonely cold space. The film finds resolution there somewhere, perhaps, but not on a frequency I can receive.” The void at the center of the movie is not an accidental effect of sloppy filmmaking, but as Ebert notes, a masterful and intentional movement that extends the emptiness at the heart of the movie into an ontological field that includes the viewer. In the end, the title of the film must be considered at least partially ironic; it may resides inside one man, yet it finds footholds in all of our perceptions of reality.
