Feature: THE OBVIOUS TOUCH: GET HIP OR GET OUT
THE OBVIOUS TOUCH: GET HIP OR GET OUT.
Woody Allen and Mira Sorvino in Mighty Aphrodite
Simultaneously shedding inhibitions and donning some sexed-up wayfarer 3D glasses, some friends and I went to see Piranha 3D (Alexandre Aja, 2010). Walking out of the cinema and swapping the glasses for lofty ideals, my friend pointed out the film’s “hipster scattergun” approach to costume design and mise en scène (I coined the term “hipsterectomy”, but not in time to use it). The male lead (Steven R. McQueen) wore a Pixies t-shirt and a Lou Reed poster was conspicuously plastered on his bedroom wall. I felt an anxious twinge because I had one of those two things and know multiple people who have both. I think I resented the film’s clear avenues for narcissism: either it was fawning for my approval, or it was too accurate and, by means I am yet to understand, repellent.
A sycophantic spectator-massaging approach to character psychology and narratology often goes unnoticed by me (because I’m a lazy filmgoer prone to napping), but I met this noisy aesthetic with resistance: the cultural worth of certain iconographies was implicated on screen, and I with it. These thoughts lay dormant while I rejigged my wardrobe, bought some new posters and contemptuously binned some old ones. Then I stumbled upon the thought that these motifs were speaking to a massive chunk of the audience, not just to me and, quite possibly, were being misconstrued by other people. I thought about the publicness of cinema itself and mass marketing. Increasingly confused, I was unsure whether I resented the film, other people, or myself.
It got me thinking about what it means to be on the “outside” of pop culture and how concepts of otherness, or nonconformity, or uniqueness, or coolness, have been progressively estranged from themselves and now gravitate towards familiarity. They are often obvious for me and others to locate and emulate, even while retaining some surprising sense of the idiosyncratic: an utterly narcissistic and populist project that rejects conformity as its first principle. I, like many others, am happy to entertain the contradiction. Admittedly, I had been harbouring these thoughts for some time.
I recently saw Woody Allen’s Mighty Aphrodite. It’s not the best film I’ve ever seen, nor the best Woody Allen film on offer, but, like the deceptively thought-provoking yet undeniably vacuous Piranha, it put things into perspective, inspiring a little self-reflection and hinting at some unfamiliar clarity. The title of this piece, “The Obvious Touch”, takes a passage from Theodor W. Adorno’s and Max Horkheimer Dialectic of Enlightenment out of context, but it nevertheless suggests something along a similar line: the attenuation of an idea and, in this case, its cinematic representation. Adorno and Horkheimer bemoaned the loss of integrity that accompanied the industrialisation of culture, and their writing demonstrates a dwindling faith in cinemagoers. They positioned the spectator as a hapless victim, sieve-like, digesting and discarding rapid, non-narrative imagery that is not made for pondering. If their misgiving on film’s growing tendency to subsume reality was cause for concern, can this trend still be reckoned culturally pervasive and heteronomic now that we’re all in on it, not so much victims but enthusiastic participants?
Urban uncertainty is now championed as an essential hang-up; faltering gestures and an aesthetic of insecurity and nonconformity have a confident, slick veneer, a lacquer of glossy cool reconfigured as the fashionably alienated norm. This subjective-cum-all-encompassing identity gets turned inside out, recycled and reasserted across art, music and fashion. It makes us ask: has the outsider been displaced, or meticulously sculpted into a more palatable identity with a regimentally “eclectic” aesthetic overture? The prevalence of the disaffected idiom entertains the contradictions that come with eliding the popular with the esoteric, the grotesque vintage with high-end fashion, the rocker with the mod, the punk with the pop, the pronounced with the subtle (thank you very much postmodern anti-aesthetic); but it’s always easy to spot the difference between what fizzles and what sizzles on the ambient hipster radar.
Casting our eyes back over celluloid history, being on the fringes of the status quo was once the hallmark of cool, rather than its bogus hip-affirming precondition. Monster flicks of the 1930s invited the righteous condemnation of the fringe dweller. We can reconceptualise these films with against-the-grain readings, making pansexual rhapsody of their conservatism. A lot of these arguments write themselves; others testify to the plasticity of film interpretation and an ever-gyrating moral compass. The phenomenon of the American teenager in the 1950s seems to have reshuffled the deck, giving rise to a by-no-means concomitant identity: the screenager – an obvious reaction with a distinctively mercantile agenda, but one that lacks the top notes of narcissism. Rather, the screenager was an equal figure for conservative ire, suburban consternation and moral quiddity. James Dean oozes cool, or rather, it radiates from him. It’s eager and it’s tactile – the red jacket, the hair, the sunglasses – but it’s not affected because it’s effortless. The outsider was no longer met with bellicosity, but with a warm pubescent embrace. There was something defiant indicated at the point of sale, even as these outsiders were commercial assemblages made to order to provoke and reward identification.
Tod Browning's Freaks (1932)
Sixty years before Tim Burton gave us Edward Scissorhands (1990), Tod Browning filled the silver screen will the real misshapen and deformed in Freaks (1932). The film is disconcertingly exploitative, but softened by a genuinely touching story about social outcasts – both on and off the screen. Nauseated spectators loathed the film and it ruined Browning, who had directed Dracula the previous year. With the help of director David Lynch and Anthony Hopkins, John Hurt gave us the heart wrenching The Elephant Man (1980). But it took the foppish and disaffected Johnny Depp in Scissorhands to really make the outcast truly endearing, and he has since become the outsider aide-mémoire: visually palatable and his body less of an interpretive event. It drew us closer to the social puzzle of fashionable alienation.
Last year, Bruce La Bruce’s L.A. Zombie was withdrawn from the Melbourne International Film Festival. La Bruce’s response: “Eureka!” The suggestion of arcane-novelty-as-selling-point isn’t unfamiliar. However, illegal screenings of L.A. Zombie in Melbourne yielded more of a ho-hum shrug than a visceral wince born of norm confrontation or salacious fervour. While this says something about the film itself (it was no Otto; or, Up With Dead People (2008)), the home-spun instigation of a morally risqué and legally precarious spectator-activated cinematic apparatus didn’t seem to move the world in the way that thrill-seeking cineastes had held their breaths for with a cautious optimism. In short, it landed with the force of an infant coughing on your shoulder, before returning to its slumber.
Michael Cera continues to endear himself to some with his naïve, unrehearsed mannerisms, and irritate others with his affectations. Last year, Jesse Eisenberg portrayed Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg in David Fincher’s The Social Network. Being on the fringe of society doesn’t seem to be possible in the rigmarole of postmodern dislocation. Depersonalised cybernetic tendrils extending across an anaesthetised matrix show us the often ugly and inevitably solipsistic outsider. Nevertheless, the film inspired millions of Facebook status updates.
As screen spaces for the outsider figure are opened up, we often find ourselves to be the outsiders: a visual trope and social identity quietly remapped across society and artistic expression, reconfigured as the hipster. As the hipster meme continues to cut a swathe through art, fashion and our general attitude, the question becomes whether this figure and, frequently by extension, ourselves, speaks with the same unique authority from a stable position: no longer at the apogee of pop culture, but as its intimate and trend-setting confidante. It’s hard to be simultaneously noisy and disaffected, let alone alienated and hysterically popular. It’s even harder to speak from the cutting edge, or say something unique, when everyone’s yelling at once.
If 1996 seems like another age, that’s because it is. But maybe Mighty Aphrodite can speak a little bit louder and with more perspicacity than other retro darlings. It’s somewhat unnerving to see someone in a film who is genuinely uncomfortable in their own skin, and Allen’s off-screen persona is probably even more alienating. Allen plays Lenny Weinrib, a New York sports writer who, along with his artist and curator wife, Amanda (Helena Bonham Carter), adopts a child. Against the advice given to him by a chatty and bizarrely out of place Greek chorus, Lenny, a reluctant parent to begin with, endeavours to track down his son’s biological parents. Anticipating folk with the characteristics of Einstein and Wonder Woman, Lenny is taken aback when he discovers that the mother is Linda Ash (Mira Sorvino), a prostitute and beleaguered amateur porn actress going by the stage name Judy Cum, who gave up her son for adoption and has no idea which of her clients is the father. The two strike up an uneasy but utterly convincing and touching friendship.
Allen and Sorvino represent two unique outsiders: a hapless prostitute and a yuppie middle-aged family man, two tiny figures in a sprawling metropolis strangely devoid of Facebook technology – people are aliens, even when they’re standing right in front of you or sharing your bed. Nevertheless, they are unique and exciting: Sorvino is blithe and unaffected as Linda, and Allen is…well, Allen in the flimsy disguise of Lenny. They are both cognisant of their outsider status, and painfully aware that they are involuntary non-identities in a broader matrix. Aphrodite comes in the wake of the demise of Allen’s public image, with his divorce from Mia Farrow and the beginning of his relationship with Farrow’s adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn – obviously adoption and marriage problems were on his mind. In Aphrodite, Allen becomes increasingly estranged from his wife, while Sorvino, taught that her only valuable commodity is her body, warms to this man who rejects her automated sexual advances and takes a genuine interest in her. Sorvino’s unworldly enthusiasm falls apart when she discusses her adopted child and, after running the rat race for so long and never getting ahead, she desperately wants out. Contrariwise, Allen wants only to decipher the world and to understand his place in it.
Allen never lets on that he is the adoptive father of Sorvino’s child, and while this provides tension, the real story is the relationship these two genuine outsiders form with each other. We are not provided with a demystification of the fallen woman, and Allen never controls Sorvino by withholding information she desperately needs, though the situation certainly brings into sharp focus that there is a delicate and discernible space between lying by omission and showing your hand. The film’s resolution sees Sorvino settling for a slice of domesticity (probably a relief after being trapped in a city with Allen), while Allen’s expanded nuclear family becomes stronger for the turbulence of his wanderlust and Carter’s affair.
This return to a conservative equilibrium and Allen’s general ability to beguile women in his films is bound to raise an eyebrow. I have a friend who dislikes Allen’s cinema for this reason: the women in his films can’t help but fall in love with him. In all fairness, even the most hapless male viewer can’t help but feel a little puzzled by this. Maybe Allen the romancer never resonated, and as he grows more and more decrepit it’s strangely more comforting to rationalise this trope as his personal delusion of a potent machoism undulled by age. Nevertheless, with a film like Aphrodite, I can’t help but feel that a reading along strict gender types would turn the film into a caustic political mess that may not be very useful, nor do justice to the performances. Allen’s familiarity and frequent reassertion of New Wave European cinema tropes suggests Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre sa vie (1962) as a touchstone, but in spite of the mental claustrophobia, things are a little more liquescent here, and I find the performances simply too genuine for the film to be reduced to such a reading. Besides, there’s a cheeky twist that kicks back at the Greek tragedy rubric.
Like Dean, Allen seems to rise above his studio-based progenitors (in part due to his auteurist/autobiographical approach). Both he and Sorvino are self-absorbed, but they reach out to each other in a painfully human way, without the clumsy metaphor of scissors for fingers. Importantly – and here’s the difference – Allen is not hip and, while he’s not contemptible, he’s not exactly likeable either. His glasses are the only retro-contemporary thing about him. Sorvino is likeable – the obverse of Allen – but not narcissistically engaging. She’s vacuous, but she’s no cipher.
Admittedly, Allen never strays too far from himself, on screen or off. Like Depp, he seems to play the same character in each and every film. He blathers about the place, nebbishly wringing his hands while second-guessing himself as his childhood anxieties clash with the expectations of filial duty and metropolitan adult life. His adult body seems to have formed a feeble shell of thick glasses and thinning hair around an insecure ball of neuroses always threatening to betray themselves. Allen is constantly interrogating his upbringing, his mental climate and, through his flinching and cringing, his own values regarding class, sex and sexuality.
I think it’s safe enough to assume some level of familiarity with the Allen topos. His sexual insecurities are not vindictively displaced onto the female body, but they are certainly on show here. However, Allen brings some new aspects to the table in Aphrodite, as he casts himself into the unfamiliar territory of the straight man in a mismatched comedy duo. The pretentious circles that wife Carter effortlessly wafts in are just as distressing as his encounters with porn producers (Tony Sirico aka Paulie “Walnuts” Gualtieri from The Sopranos) and Sorvino’s pimp. Allen doesn’t cast too many moral aspersions – he’s more flummoxed by Sorvino’s guileless enthusiasm to for what she does and where she thinks it’s taking her. She recalls her revelation when acting in Snatch Happy:
Sorvino:
I remember I was very nervous because I’d never done it in front of people with a camera before.
So there I am on the first day, on the set, and there’s this guy fucking me from behind, right? And there’s these two huge guys dressed like cops in my mouth at the same time, and I remember thinking to myself,
I like acting. I want to study.
Allen: Yes, well, it’s… it’s one way of getting into the profession.
Of course, to get the full effect of this statement you really have to hear the voice Sorvino puts on: somewhere between a monotone Micky Mouse and a busted accordion. Jami Bernard from the New York Daily Mail News wrote “it’s a nasty thing to make [Sorvino] so stupid and coarse.”
Sorvino:
You’ll like this. Somebody gave it to me. See? As the mainspring goes back and forth, the bishop
keeps fucking her in the ass. It’s a genuine antique and it keeps perfect time.
However, Allen isn’t really victimising her, never scoring points off her gleeful but truly dippy persona. Indeed, Sorvino crafted much of the character herself. Somewhere between a ragamuffin and an ingénue, she is utterly unabashed and devoid of hubris, yet unexpectedly capable of remarkable moments of acuity regarding her marginalised social status. All this makes for a truly disarming character. She’s also the most likable of the lot: Carter isn’t exactly an über bitch to hate on, but she’s unpleasant enough, and Allen just makes people uncomfortable. This is what makes them intriguing outsider figures: their search for genuine human contact in spite of themselves, not questing for broad social acceptance, but for a quiet happiness. Allen is quite content being a neurotic sap, but gently tests the parameters of this identity. He doesn’t rage against the system, and the only truly devious thing he does is steal the adoption papers. As stated, this places him on morally shaky ground, but the film sidesteps this with its charm.
Aphrodite doesn’t wander off topic too much and it remains an Allen comedy film – one that’s never going to make your sides split, and it’s probably not supposed to, though it does makes you chuckle at Sorvino’s boldness and cringe at Allen’s squeamishness. There’s plenty of irony, but there’s a fair bit of heart and soul searching, even if there are no profound breakthroughs to be had. There is no moralising and comedy is not used here to dissect the prickly topics of prostitution, adoption, marriage and infidelity. What sets it apart is that its characters are not broadly drawn cultural memes clumsily disguised as individuals. The ending is bittersweet without being maudlin. There’s sincerity in Allen and Sorvino’s imperfections and they’re a bit too peculiar to speak for everyone. Surrounded by newly-minted disaffected hipsters, this is what a good outsider should be.
