"A Serious Man" (2009)

For physics professor Larry Gopnik, life has become a series of cruel, random events. His apathetic students would rather bribe him than study. His brat children barely speak to him. Someone's sending anonymous hate-mail to his tenure board. His increasingly psychotic brother keeps getting arrested. The neighbors keep advancing on his property line. His shrewish wife wants a divorce. And no matter how many doctors, lawyers and rabbis he consults, he never gets a straight answer: "What does it all mean?" he asks; "What should I do?"



So Larry Gopnik does nothing. He neither reports the bribe nor accepts it. He's too busy to understand his kids. He submits nothing to the board of tenure ("I haven't published"). He tells his brother to work on his problems, although Gopnik declines to work on his own. He avoids his neighbors. When asked what he wants to do about his impending divorce, he answers, "I want things to go back to the way they were... No... I don't know." He is upset by the confusion of change, but remains so alienated from his community and himself that he cannot feel, or move forward productively.

The title of the film is "A Serious Man." "I'm trying to be a serious man," cries Gopnik, begging for one rabbi's clarity. But what does it mean to be "serious," and what do we look for in "clarity"?

Gopnik - spoiler alert - never will have the clarity he seeks. The movie-goer, however, is privy to two parables about "meaning" that more or less stop the show. The first, told before the title credits, prompts the audience to take sides: Is this a meaningful universe in which we must trust in and obey God's will, or is life chaotic, rendered meaningful only by our own moral actions? The second parable asks us to draw on our own interpretation of the first: If you found something extraordinary - say, markings on the back of a gentile's teeth that spelt out, in Hebrew, "help me" - would you take it as evidence of God's personal message to yourself, or would it seem a freakish coincidence you could nonetheless use as a reminder to lead a moral life?

These considerations of morality, and of faith vs. chaos, continue until the Hamlet-like protagonist finally decides to take a moral action - with consequences. At the same moment, his cats-in-the-cradle son will similarly finally take a moral action - with consequences. Whether or not these consequences are ordained by a just God or merely coincidental will depend on the movie-goer's interpretation of reality - and of the film.

This is a fucking awesome movie. It is a conversation-starter, for one, and, more importantly, is the first period drama to use Jefferson Airplane's "Somebody to Love" as an epiphanous statement without coming off as vapid. "A Serious Man" is also, natch for the Coen brothers, hilarious. It is their most personal movie - a movie they've said to have based on their own father, a movie that takes place in their own late-60s childhood Minneapolis, a movie about Jewish identity and faith. It is dark, and cruel, and random, and funny, and it works. You can go see this film, or you can go see "Couples Retreat" and kick yourself. Your choice: morality vs. faith via the Coens, or Vince Vaughn in a swimsuit via a guy who was in two episodes of "Punky Brewster."

BOOK: "Bonk" (2008)

Things I Learned from Mary Roach (part 17 1/2):

1. "[P]eople's earlobes swell when they're aroused, [and, according to Kinsey,] 'the membranes which line the nostrils may secrete more than their usual amounts of mucus… If one's mouth is open when there is a sudden upsurge of erotic stimulation and response, saliva may be spurted some distance out of the mouth.'"



2. Sex education needs to be more descriptive. Positions favored, for female response, by the first modern sex manual, Van de Velde's Ideal Marriage: "Second Extension Attitude: Supersensory (Variation [b])" and "the Anterior-Lateral Attitude, [which] has the woman 'half-lateral, half-supine, with a corresponding half-lateral, half-superposed attitude of the man, which is possible by appropriate arrangement of pillows.'"

And then there's this, which kind of breaks your heart: "Robert Latou Dickenson writes that he encountered, over his many decades of clinical practice, eighteen women whose virginity had remained intact despite having (what they took to be) intercourse for years. 'The husbands and wives, though otherwise intelligent, thought the cleft of the vulva was as deep as his organ was expected to go.' Then there was the woman written up in a 1965 issue of JAMA whose husband was mistaking her urethra for her vagina."

3. Scientists are bad people. Towards discovering whether or not the contractions of female orgasm "upsucked" sperms towards helping out conception: "A German anatomist named Hausmann killed a bitch while she was mating and then – presumably allowing a moment or two to disengage the flummoxed male from the proceedings – picked up his scalpel and opened her up… Five years later, a second dog experiment found what Hausmann had found, as did an 1853 guinea pig experiment, a 1930 rat experiment, and a 1960 golden hamster experiment… I find it hard not to project a sliver of sadism upon the scientists. The hamster guys are especially easy to mistrust, having stated in their paper that 'the mated hamster was killed by a bow to the back of the head.' Who clubs a hamster? What would you even use to deliver 'a blow' to a head that small?"

Answer, Mary Roach: nobody, now-a-days. Boyfriend, who, two jobs ago, used to engage in mouse genocide for UNC-Chapel Hill, would generally lay a mouse's stomach upon a metal surface, press a metal rod to the back of the neck, and pull its tail. If a metal rod was not nearby, he would press his own thumbs to their necks. For larger specimens – monkeys and dogs, for example – this method is never used. Scientists usually propel CO2 into an air-tight atmosphere, causing asphyxiation, or they use deadly injections. Apes are treated best, and put into a special animal reserve, which fact makes many scientists roll their eyes, as they are bad people.

4. People do not understand the limits of the anus. "Urological Oddities, a 1948 compendium of memorable cases, includes an 'elderly fellow' with a corsage pin that got away from him, a man who died from infection after inserting a twig from the family Christmas tree, and a farmer who 'lost a rat's tail.' There is always an explanation. The man, toting three sets of three-inch surgical steel forceps, for example, insisted that Nos. 2 and 3 had gone in an effort to remove Nos. 1 and 2, a story that collapsed upon examination, when all three turned out to be in there handle-first. As embarrassing as these hospital visits must have been, they pale in comparison to the Houston man who was taken away, on his back in an ambulance, with a large water tank from a public commode stuck on his penis. 'The patient had attempted intercourse with the water-tank,' reports B. H. Bayer, M.D., in one of those rare, shining moments when urology approaches high comedy."

Some hundred pages later, there is more: " 'Rectal Foreign Bodies: Case Reports and a Comprehensive Review of the World's Literature' includes a list of objects doctors have removed from rectums over the years. Highlights: a frozen pig tail (one of the 7 female cases in a total caseload of 202), a bottle of Impulse Body Spray…, a parsnip, a plantain (with condom), a dull knife, a cattle horn, a salami, a jeweler's saw, and a plastic spatula. Multiple holdings in the same rectum are listed under the heading 'Collections.' These include several that would pass as still-lifes ('oil can with potato,' '2 apples,' '402 stones'), several that probably couldn't ('umbrella handle and enema tubing,' 'lemon and cold cream jar') and one that suggests a quiet evening in the Biltmore ('spectacles, suitcase key, tobacco pouch, and magazine')."

5. It is generally useful to read scientific footnotes. To wit: "A comforting word about the crooked penis. Dr. Hsu says it is rare to see one that stands perfectly straight. Actually, what he said was: 'Most men are communists! Lean to the left! Second most common: bow down, like Japanese gentleman! Number three: to the right. Four: up! Like elephant!'"

6. The fifteenth century was probably awesome. "'What, then, is to be thought of those witches who… sometimes collect male organs in great numbers, as many as twenty or thirty members together, and put them in a bird's nest or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves like living members, and eat oats and corn, as has been seen by many and is a matter of common report?' It's a question I cannot answer. I can only lament the long, dry journey that legal publishing has made in the centuries since 1491."

7. France in the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was probably less awesome, if you were a bad husband. "This was the era of the 'impotence trial'… If the wife won the case, the man would not only be fined and forbidden to remarry, but would have to return the dowry he had received from the woman's family… The team would arrive at the appointed hour and wait outside the bedroom until the defendant yelled through the door that he was ready for viewing. The examiners would file into the room and gather around the bed, whereupon the accused would pull back the bedclothes and show them what he had. These were tough critics. 'We did find him in a state of erection upon our arrival, but he did not have sufficient attributes to consummate a marriage.' How did they know? They leaned in a groped ('Touching this swelling, we felt it to be flabby')."

8. "People with spinal cord injuries may develop a compensatory erogenous zone above the level of their inquiry… Applying a vibrator to these spots can have dramatic effects… 'My whole body feels like it's in my vagina,' said the subject, a quadriplegic woman who had just had an orgasm – evinced by changes in blood pressure and heart rate – while applying a vibrator to her neck and chest. Komisaruk and Whipple's book The Science of Orgasm includes a description of a 'knee orgasm' experienced by a young (able-bodied) young man with a vibrator pressed to his leg. 'The quadriceps muscled as the thigh increased in tension… At the reported orgasmic moment, the leg gave an extensor kick… and a forceful grunt was emitted.'"

9. Lady-smell is excellent, although those adverts for "pheromones" in the backs of Esquire are stupid. "The rickety notion of rhesus – and, by implication, human – sex pheromones can be traced to… [that] in 1971, Richard Michael claimed to have pinpointed compounds in the vaginal secretions o his females that, when sniffed, caused the male monkeys to initiate sex. (But not very many of them. Critics point out that just two males accounted for 50 percent of the data)… In 1975… a team of researches from the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia launched an investigation of changes in the 'pleasantness' of women's vaginal odors across their monthly cycle. Seventy-eight subjects were asked to sniff tampons that four women had worn during the various phases of their cycle. (For obvious reasons, the women were asked not to eat onions, garlic, or asparagus for the duration of the study. Less obviously, the women were discouraged from eating broccoli, Brussels spouts, cabbage, chili, curry, kale, sauerkraut, and pineapple.) The supposition was that the odors might be more appealing during a woman's ovulatory phase than at other times during her cycle. And they were: Subjects judged them slightly more pleasant and less intense than at other times. However, the authors noted, the data did not go so far as to 'support the notion… that vaginal secretion odors are particularly pleasant to human males"… [Although] a Google search on 'soiled panties' produced 78,000 hits, most of them direction you to freelance sellers, women who throw up a Web site with a couple of photos and a PayPal link. Wikipedia says some Japanese sex shops operate panty exchanges to girls, who wear a pair overnight and then exchange them for a new pair on their way to school. 'The more soiled they are, the more they will fetch at sale,' says Wikipedia, yet further distancing itself from stuffy rival Britannica."

DVD: "Teeth" (2008)

I just saw "Teeth," which is two-thirds awesome, so if anybody's thinking of seeing it, I thought I'd let you know.



We watched the first five minutes of "Teeth" over sandwiches, and then Nick had to leave the room. "I would run ten thousand miles to get away from this movie," he said. (This from a guy willing to pay full ticket price for both "Meet the Fockers" and "Alex & Emma.") His reaction is pretty consistent with most reviewers' – the San Francisco Chronicle called "Teeth" "the worst first-date movie ever," while the Village Voice said it was a movie "that every man in America will watch with his legs crossed." Having read that, I was, of course, totally psyched.

You might know the premise from the much-hyped trailer: abstinence-promoting teen comes of age just in time to find there's a 1950s B-movie monster living inside her junk. At first reverential of her sex (she earnestly explains to her classmates that it's because women have a "natural modesty" that a textbook's censored portrayal of vulvas makes sense), Dawn becomes afraid of its power when it suddenly chews up the penis of a boy who has decided to rape her. Dawn turns to her textbook for help and information, and the score plays a soaring "Hallelujah" as she pries loose the censorious sticker and gazes at the unsentimentalized, unpoliticized truth about what women really are.

This scene reminds me of both Ayaan Hirsi Ali's epiphanic realization about the political import of female purity, which led to her crusade towards curbing the doctrine of women's submission, and also the revolutionary moment of the Boston Women's Health Collective. The BWHC's "Our Bodies, Ourselves" marks their lesson this way: "As we talked and shared our experiences, we realized just how much we had to learn about our bodies… We learned that we were capable of collecting, understanding, and evaluating… information; that we could open up to one another and find strength and comfort through sharing some of our most private experiences; that what we learned from one another was every bit as important as what we read in medical texts." For Hirsi Ali and the BWHC, thus, the moment in which key information – that is, the fact that women are not mythical creatures who must be paternalistically protected from all the threat their sexuality implies – becomes available is the moment of dawning political consciousness and sisterly activism. For Dawn, whose community is peopled exclusively by the teen-horror-movie staples of evil dudes, useless girls, and barely-there authority figures, it is a moment in which her spiral toward narcissistic vengeance becomes fairly secured.

From this point, there's a couple more excellent gore shots of lacerated cocks, and a couple more hilarious scenes in which the super-awesome Jess Wiexler as Dawn skips blithely along in her day-glo "I'm Waiting" tee, acting like the twentieth century never happened, but the movie's early promise remains unfulfilled. Which kind of pisses me off, because there are so many cool directions the movie could have gone. This way, however, it's hard to tell whether we're supposed to be laughing at our victim-protagonist's cluelessness or cheering her newfound empowerment.

Still, the best parts of this film are all about Wiexler's face – everything she does with that face is hilarious. I especially liked the scene where Dawn slowly and methodically darkens only her lower eyelashes, attempting to work her seductive grimace like Alex from "A Clockwork Orange." She walks a perfectly calibrated line between realism and satire. Her coming-of-age story's pretty cool – for the first hour. And then it gets all conventional, and by the end, Dawn's just some directionless femme fatale who goes around killing guys who inappropriately flirt with her, and it's kind of hard to keep interest.

DVD: "Funny Games" (2008)

The first part of "Funny Games" is pretty decent. We meet an attractive couple and their polite son as they drive through some beautiful scenery on their way to a yuppified vacation home (soy milk in the fridge and an un-ironic apron over mom's dress) where, we have been led to assume by marketing, they will be slaughtered. Soon enough their idyll is interrupted by two young men even more polite and yuppified than themselves (all exaggerated tennis whites, all very "if you please" and "thank you, ma'am") – the very young men, we've been led to assume by marketing, that will do the slaughtering. The meet-cute between the boys and the family is hilarious at the same time that it builds some excellent tension, and I was very excited to see whether the whole family would be killed or if it would be only the boy before the parents woke the fuck up from their Kubricky need to hesitate and killed their tormentors "Virgin Spring"-style. But then, out of nowhere, some seriously stupid shit went down. Right in the middle of the tension-filled happy place horror fans all love, one of the villains turned away from the suffering, sniveling family to directly address the camera and ask us – us! – which team – evil boys or virtuous family – we wanted to see win. "What do you think?" he purred.



I thought about how rampant, how unconsidered, condescension toward horror fans is. I thought, Hey, how come "Last House on the Left" was never nominated for an Oscar – how come "Dawn of the Dead"'s still relegated a "cult" classic? I thought about when Chris Rock hosted the Oscars.

The only worthwhile thing that ever happened at the Oscars was when Rock took his microphone to some downtown theater and asked regular people their opinion of the year's best picture. People who'd never heard of "Being Julia" and weren't interested in "Finding Neverland" or wine-soaked "Sideways" – people who answered the question enthusiastically and without hesitation. "'Saw'," they all said, cheerfully; "That movie was awesome." Back in Hollywood, the audience laughed and laughed. This may have been mere self-deprecation, but not wholly; after all, the fat cats were laughing in the direction of people filmmakers regularly condescend to and whom critics regular disdain as stupid and vaguely evil.

I think that Michael Haneke, the director of the recently-DVD'd Funny Games, is the kind of person who'd be laughing (forlornly) at the idiots who thought "Saw" was so much fun.

"What do you think?" The fucking presumption! Of course we wanted to see as many people as possible, of whichever group, die in as many fucked-up ways as possible, as long as the killings kind of sort of made logical sense and the story was decent. I mean, the whole breaking down the fourth wall thing made no sense to me for half a second, until I realized the villain-director wasn't talking to genre fans but to art-house "meta"-loving simps who'd been persuaded by marketing to see this movie as a feel-good-about-yourself-for-not-liking-horror-movies horror movie. The horror, in this movie, is the audience who sees it for the trailer rather than for the glossy fan letters written from Park City, Utah. These letters consistently praised the director of "Funny Games" as "deep," and reiterated Haneke's terribly condescending line: "I want the spectator to think." (About our environmental negligence and cultural dependence on consumption? About our ever-diminishing voter turnout? About the failures of our educational system? Not so much.)

But wait a minute! If he wanted us to think, why not do some documentary in which readings from Marshall McLuhan and interviews with Noam Chomsky side with recent findings correlating use of violent media with delinquency and diminished empathy? Why, instead, film tension-filled chase scenes and carefully-planted splatter? The intended audience is surely responding more, physiologically, to the genre staples here than impacted by the intended moral message. In this handling, the message becomes Briefly Consider the Consequences of Enjoying Simulated Carnage (You Might Be a Sociopath), or, Project the Fear that You Are Evil for Enjoying Simulated Carnage onto Those Who Watched Funny Games Thinking It Wouldn't Be Insulting.

A little while after I'd seen the film, I read a certain passage of Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children that went like this:

"You have to understand," Seeley was saying. "They – we – all want the cod-liver oil... We want him to chide us for our lack of seriousness, and we want to shake our heads and take our castigation manfully because then we feel absolved, supremely free to watch the Oscars on TV. The way Catholics are entitled to a good piss-up on Saturday night, as long as they're taking their wigging in the pew the next morning. Lets everybody feel serious and still have fun. He's a stooge. He knows it and we know it. We're all complicit" (159-60).

Replace "stooge" with "douche" and there's your Funny Games.