Sex Comedies & The Graduate

Tamar Jeffers McDonald defines the main goal of the sex comedy as "[pitting] woman against man in an elemental battle of wits, in which the goal of both is sex.  Only the timing and legitimacy of this differs from gender to gender, with woman wanting sex after, and men before or without, marriage" (38).  The latter part of this definition is debunked by the Kinsey Report, which revealed that women also had sexual desires.  The initial publication of the report created much shock to the public, who could not imagine such a revelation of truth.  This was, and still is, a double standard, where it is considered acceptable for men to have multiple lovers, but women, on the other hand, are looked down when they sleep around.

What I found most interesting was the introduction of a "'hierarchy of knowledge' in which he knows more than she and we know more than either" (45).  This type of battle-of-the-sexes game between is quite evident in How to Lose a Guy In 10 Days, where Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey duel it out -- for Hudson, to write a magazine article, and for McConaughey, to win a bet.  Without revealing their true motives for most of the movie, their battle of wits turns into real feelings for each other, and the ending suggests that they are in a committed relationship with one another from then on.  The audience, of course, has full knowledge of what's actually going on, which drives the storyline even more and makes the movie enjoyable.

Indeed, we can fit The Graduate, with Dustin Hoffman, into this type of romcom.  It would appear that Hoffman and Anne Bancroft have their own reasons for wanting to get each other in bed - Hoffman's character is [in all senses of the word] awkward and doesn't really seem to have any motivation to move forward after graduating from college and Bancroft's character, as she later reveals, does not have a great relationship with the rest of the family, obviously jealous of her daughter and sleeping in a different room than her husband - so for the first part of the movie, sex is, subconsciously or otherwise, their main goal.

McDonald, Tamar Jeffers.  Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre.  New York: Wallflower Press, 2007.  Print.
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Movie trailers for The Graduate and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days.

The Graduate trailer

How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days trailer

Ethnography

During a sunny afternoon at CSUN, I parked myself in the middle of the University Student Union outside seating area.  It was 11am in the middle of the school week and, with the sun bearing down on the campus, a number of other students had claimed tables for themselves to study, eat lunch, or simply relax with friends.  I immediately began looking around for couples and found two friends chatting at a table to the right of me, along with another pair of friends standing in the shade by the first floor of the computer lab.  For the duration of both exchanges, which were each about 15-20 minutes from the time I sat down, no other individuals joined their conversations and they were not showing any normal signs of affection, so it was not clear whether either pair was actually together or not.  To my left, I heard a male voice say, “Sure, join me” as another male student put his lunch down onto the table.  The male that was already occupying the table was wearing what appeared to be a wedding ring, though they did not seem to know each other until that very moment, as it was only the lack of shade that motivated the second male student to find another, nearby table to relocate to.  Although I was not close enough to them to make out their complete dialogue, they ate their lunch while keeping up a long conversation.

As I looked more generally at the people around me, I noticed that many of the students sitting by themselves at tables were female; meanwhile, more males were walking with friends to their next destination.  A table was filled with girls wearing clothing of their sorority, while many of the isolated individuals sitting at tables had books cracked open.  Countless students were passing through the area, probably headed home, to class, or to get food.  Many couples strolled by, holding hands and laughing, and there were also numerous male-only and female-only pairs of friends.  A common characteristic between all of these couples and friends was an apparent hurriedness and purposefulness to their walking, in addition to multi-tasking, with cell phones, books, and food in hand.  I also noticed a commonality in the clothing people wore and the accessories students had – Abercrombie-, PacSun- and CSUN-covered individuals with brand-name purses, sunglasses, hats, and backpacks, together with skateboarders and people on scooters riding along.  Despite the time of day and number of people that I witnessed, there were only a few probable couples to be found.

The media is no doubt responsible for how exactly we distinguish relationships in society – we look for normative representations of love according to the way film and television depict relationships.  As Tamar Jeffers McDonald points out in her book, Romantic Comedy: Boys Meets Girl Meets Genre, movies can make love and romance a valuable product just as much as they can make Coca-Cola or Nike products more desirable to people (15).  My ideal notion of couples, as a result of years of television and movies, is that those holding hands must be dating.  When I first sat down, I was immediately looking for couples by means of public displays of affection and pairs of one male and one female.  Pairs passing by me while holding hands were quickly identified as an item.  On the other hand, the two couples I initially found casually talking to each other could not be absolutely classified by me as dating, since I never saw them hold hands or hug, nor did I hear any part of their dialogues.  My assumptions, in both cases, could indeed be wrong.  Indeed, it is difficult to determine actual couples when looking for what the media deems as couple-appropriate behavior.

Other than these possible couples, there were no out-of-the-ordinary actions.  The two males I saw eating lunch together could have been seen as radical, had they shown any signs of affection to each other; although, they were most likely not together because of the presence of a ring.  In the face of such gender issues, it was very acceptable for the second male to ask to join the table.  If a girl had been the one to ask, it might have been seen as flirting or an attempt to get to know the male, even though the intense heat was actually the main cause of table switches.

Overall, I believe that the media is the most prominent influence upon today’s idea of American culture.  Further, each person whom I witnessed portrayed themselves through a specific identity – skater, athlete, fraternity brother, sorority sister, Christian, Muslim, teacher, student – identities most likely marketed in mass media.  In his book, Cultural Studies: Theory & Practice, Chris Barker suggests that “identities are discursive constructions that change their meanings according to time, place and usage” (217), and in the film, “American Psycho”, Patrick Bateman conceals what is an unacceptable identity of a murderer, instead representing himself as a wealthy and educated businessman.  What I witnessed during this somewhat-relaxing hour on the CSUN campus consisted predominately of school-based identities.  I would not expect the same actions and behavior from each person if they were sitting in class, and the way which people act with friends would not always equate to how they act with family.

Through life experiences, and more so through mediums such as religion and television, we learn what acceptable behavior is and how we can and should portray ourselves within society.  We are taught certain ideologies regarding love and self-identity, then go out and expect to see certain behaviors and practices among others, embracing clear actions that meet our criteria – the norm – and quickly dismissing those that do not – the radical.

Bale, Christian, perf. American Psycho. Lions Gate Entertainment, 2000. Film.

Barker, Chris.  Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice.  Los Angeles: Sage, 2008.  Print.

McDonald, Tamar Jeffers.  Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre.  New York: Wallflower Press, 2007.  Print.

RomComs: Structure, Similarities, Satisfaction

In Tamar Jeffers McDonald's book, "Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre", she quotes Berry's and Errigo's clever summation for their love of romantic comedies: "...we might love the great and the good, we can also adore the cute and the ridiculously bad, as long as the leading man is handsome or the story -- no matter how cheesy -- makes us laugh, makes us cry, or makes us hot " (1).

Since I wouldn't mind watching any movie with the likes of Patrick Dempsey, Gerard Butler, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, and Daniel Craig -- no matter what the storyline was -- I would have to agree with their statement.  However, past the core marketing tactics of casting a good-looking, male lead, RomComs usually go beyond the boy meets girl phenomenon as we know it.  McDonald defines the RomCom genre as "a romantic comedy is a film which has as its central narrative motor a quest for love, which portrays this quest in a light-hearted way and almost always to a successful conclusion" (9).

Examples of the traditional romantic comedy include You've Got Mail, Sleepless in Seattle, Dan in Real Life, and Enchanted.  All of these films use the expected, Western, white, heterosexual pattern of love: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy regains girl.  Although each movie's main character varies, in terms of sex, all four have a emphasis on portraying the universal imperfect mate and, accordingly, the perfect mate.  In You've Got Mail, both Tom Hanks' and Meg Ryan's characters are paired with the "wrong" people at first, then realize that they want to be with each other.  Same thing in Enchanted.  Not only that, the director makes sure that, by the end of the movie, you are not only rooting for the two "made-for-each-other" characters to be together, you are determined to give the movie rotten tomatoes if it does not meet your expectations.  This storyarch from Point A to Point B is the traditional way of defining and picking out romantic comedies.

On the other hand, I would consider a film like P.S. I Love You to be a non-traditional romantic comedy.  In P.S. I Love You, Hilary Swank and Gerard Butler start out as an already-perfect couple.  Despite their conflicts, they do not fail to show each other true affection and devotion in the first scene.  Swank's life is altogether shaken when Butler's character suddenly dies of a brain tumor, and she is forced to figure out how to move on, if she should move on at all.  I deem this film as a non-traditional romcom because of its movement and ending.  Swank's character is motivated throughout the movie to do various things because of mysteriously placed cassette-tapes and notes from her dead husband -- later, we find out that her mother was in on the plan and he planned everything precisely, showing how well he really knew his wife.  He tells her various tasks to complete, such as buy items, go to certain places, and even goes so far as to pre-plan a trip to Ireland with her best friends.  Along the way, Swank meets Harry Connick, Jr., an employee of his mother's with Aspergers syndrome.  Around the same time, she meets Jeffrey Dean Morgan, an old friend of Butler's, in Ireland -- they end up sleeping together one night before she returns to America.  It appears that Swank is supposed to decide to move on and fall in love with Connick -- at least, despite the beginning of the film, this is what traditional romcom viewers would expect -- the film takes a turn and Swank does not end up with either man.  The end of the movie shows her and her mother visiting Ireland and bumping into Morgan, but does not show them "happily ever after".  Rather, you can safely assume that she is at least open to the idea of falling in love again, but more importantly, is finally moving on from Butler's death.  In reality, P.S. I Love You serves more as an example to how humans each have different ways to mourn a loved one's death and falling in love again.

Besides the moral and ethical teachings that screenwriters want us to come away with these days, capitalism also plays a large part in the production of a romcom.  As McDonald states, "...if we can accept that product placement in a film operates to sell more Coca-Cola and Nike products, why not also view the fantasy of romantic love as a product being no more subtly endorsed?" (15).  Romcoms are not always so cut and dry, and there are countless movies that do not fit the typical description of a romcom as we are used to.

Berry, Jo, and Angie Errigo.  Chick Flicks: Movies Women Love.  London: Orion Books, 2004.  Print.

McDonald, Tamar Jeffers.  Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre.  New York: Wallflower Press, 2007.  Print.
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Respectively, the movie trailers for You've Got Mail, Enchanted, Dan in Real Life, and P.S. I Love You.

You've Got Mail trailer

Enchanted trailer

Dan In Real Life trailer

P.S. I Love You trailer

The Pollitt Love Languages

A unique story of love (or lack thereof), family, and mendacity, Williams' "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" leaves many things left unsaid.  Although the story is full of [mainly] women talking non-stop, is anything real being said?  Both Big Mama and Maggie can both yap their lives away, but their husbands pay them little attention, and it seems as though talking is simply a way for the two women to fill the emptiness that is so apparent in their relationships.  Talking, therefore, could be seen as the only thing left for the Pollitt women to do, as they both seem to have given up everything else to have a family with their significant others.  Maggie, for instance, who has married up in society, struggles throughout the play to keep her marriage alive.

What, then, does marriage signify?  Success?  Power?  Certainly not happiness.  And yet, everyone in the story creates lies and attempts to cover up the unhappiness that they feel.  Brick uses alcohol, Big Daddy uses material goods, and even Gooper can hide behind his financial and familial stability.  Further, the Pollitt men eventually reach a breaking point, telling their wives to shut up and giving them the freedom to find other men.  Despite these obvious, verbal gifts of independence, the women pretend as if they are either joking or are appalled and refuse altogether.

The 1958 film adaptation with Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman takes a firm stance on Brick, showing him as heterosexual and simply being deprived of love from his family, specifically his father.  This position is possibly a result having of big stars in a Hollywood movie, thus needing to take the safer route in order to succeed.  Big Daddy is shown to be a materialistic husband and father; his way of showing love to his family.  Brick and Big Daddy have a big blowout in the basement about the definition of love.  Big Daddy believes he is showing love through what he will leave behind -- much of his energy has been spent trying to make sure  that his family can live comfortably, without worrying about money.  Brick, on the other hand, believes that love from his father should be about time, conversing, and getting to know each other.  I think both Big Daddy and Brick are correct in their understandings of love languages (although Big Daddy's materialism is portrayed in an extreme way by Brick), but it does not seem that they ever come to understand each other; that they are stubborn, in a sense, and will not give into the other person's definition of what love is.

Williams, Tennessee. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. New York: Penguin, 1955. Print.

Group #1: COAHTR

I was in the Cat on a Hot Tin Roof group that presented on Tuesday, September 14th.   We had a difficult time meeting as a whole group because of all of our busy schedules, but I was able to be at the first group meeting where we brainstormed the themes we wanted to explore and all the possible ways to present our discoveries.  Knowing that we could be a little adventurous with our presentation, I thought we could stray away from the traditional discussion presentation of simply having each person speak to present specific topics.  After failing to do a Dating Game-esque presentation in a previous class, I saw the ability to integrate six characters into a Jerry Springer-esque presentation, especially with all the dysfunctional aspects of relationships within the play.  From that, and the fact that we had a 4:2 ratio of girls to guys, sprung our episode of  "Kerry Springer", where we would explore how each character feels like a cat on a hot tin roof; caught in a relationship that they can't get out of, and oftentimes, don't even want to get out of.

Each person had a role for Kerry Springer -- I was Big Mama, coming out towards the end to make sure to emphasize the fact that Big Mama believes there are no secrets to be had in the Pollitt family and to continue to be disillusioned to the reality of Big Daddy's distaste of her.  Most importantly, Big Mama is continues to deny any notion of Big Daddy dying, leading to an argument about the will that Gooper (represented in our show by Mae) has sketched out.

If we had had more time to work on the presentation, I feel like we could have really polished it up, and I had hoped to add an audio/visual element to the presentation, with pre-show interviews, pictures, and music, but eventually decided there wasn't enough time to do any of that.  So I settled on making a poster to hang up instead :)

Love and Lies

While reading Tennessee Williams's play, "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof", it is almost too hard to focus at times because you can really sense the noise, disillusionment, and intensity of this family living in the Mississippi Delta in, presumably, the mid-1900s.  Just in the first few minutes of the play, Maggie and Brick reveal a lot about themselves, both through what they say and what they don't say.  Brick is utterly emotionless, and his name even suggests his apathetic attitude towards life and Maggie especially.  Maggie, on the other hand, feels the constant need to fill a void no doubt created by the expectations (and, as a result, the disappointments) she had regarding her future with Brick.  She verbally makes it known that she is lonely and victimized, and seems to be desperately seeking any attention from Brick.  Maggie almost seems like a psycho at times, obsessed with Brick, and it makes you doubt if Maggie is really in love with Brick or if she's only in love with the idea of Brick.   Just like a cat on a hot tin roof, Maggie is uncomfortable where she is, yet looking for security within the Pollitt family.

Mendacity is a key concept that forms most of the play.  Each relationship experiences it: Brick/Maggie and Big Daddy/Big Mama are lying to each other, everyone lies to Big Daddy and Big Mama about Big Daddy's condition, Mae and Gooper's intentions for returning to the plantation are concealed, and Maggie tells everyone that she's pregnant with Brick's baby.  Further, Big Daddy and Brick state how mendacity is simply a part of their lives; something they can't live without.  While Brick is busy attempting to experience the click he seems dangerously trying to attain, Big Daddy exclaims "I've lived with mendacity!--Why can't you live with it?  Hell, you got to live with it, there's nothing else to live with except mendacity, is there?" (81), to which Brick begins talking about how he tries to run away from life by way of alcohol.  Brick later affirms his belief in the power of the bottle, by stating that calmly stating that "[m]endacity is a system that we live in.  Liquor is one way out an' death's the other..." (94).  The plot centers around the lies that they tell one another, whether verbal or indiscreet -- it's no wonder that Brick sees liquor and death as the only ways out.

Williams, Tennessee. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. New York: Penguin, 1955. Print.

Jerry Maguire and the Women Who Love Him

In 1949, Simone de Beauvoir wrote a captivating piece about the role of women in society.  In her Introduction section, she describes how the efforts of women to gain control over men have always been futile, to say the least.  That is not to say that women have not gained some freedom in certain aspects of life -- the ability to vote, to receive formal education, to join the workforce -- but these abilities are just that: gained.  Women are still disadvantaged in many regards -- they receive less pay and they are generally looked down upon in many occupations and contexts.   de Beauvoir states that "...the women's effort has never been anything more than a symbolic agitation.  They have gained only what men have been willing to grant; they have taken nothing, they have only received".  What a revolutionary idea!  And how true.

The most intriguing part of her work is that the binary relationship of women and men are not like any other binary relationships within history, with blacks and whites being the most prominent example.  Women have never been "apart" from men, in the sense that there is no female-only community in the world; if that were the case, there would be no reproduction of the human species in that community.  de Beauvoir best states that "[women] have no past, no history, no religion of their own; and they have no such solidarity of work and interest as that of the proletariat.  They are not even promiscuously herded together in the way that creates comunity feeling among the American Negroes, the ghetto Jews, the workers of Saint-Denis, or the factory hands of Renault.  They live among dispersed among the males, attached through residence, housework, economic condition, and social standing to certain men...more firmly than they are to other women".  If women share no common background and need men to survive (as loosely as I can use the term, as in, plainly for reproductive purposes) there is no ground on which to create revolution.  With this logical argument, women and men should be considered equals in all senses of the word.

Did Cameron Crowe, writer and director of Jerry Maguire, mean to portray certain gender stereotypes when he constructed the 1996 film?  Regardless of his intention, the extremes of the female role in society is very apparent in the women that appear in the film.  Kelly Preston plays Avery Bishop, Maguire's first love interest and wife.  She is portrayed as a modern, independent woman.  A leader in her own right, independent, and strong, it is difficult to tell who controls the marriage.  She establishes her dominant-personality from the beginning, and even when Maguire calls it quits with her, she doesn't let him break up with her without letting him know who's boss.  On the other end of the female spectrum is Dorothy Boyd, played by Renée Zellweger.  Reserved, a follower, and submissive, Boyd ends up living happily ever after with Maguire.  Some would say that she is the epitome of the desired woman.  After all, in the standard romantic comedy, why would Maguire end up with anyone except the one?  The one that completes him - and yet, I have to step back and ask why.  Is his completion in her found in her dependency and the fact she is not as strong and overbearing as Bishop appeared to be?

French linguist Saussure wrote about the idea of this binary relationship of signs, which can be applied to the sign of woman.  What do we think of when we hear the word woman?  What picture do we paint?  Submissive and dependent housewives and mothers, juggling multiple jobs at once is what comes to my mind.  Furthermore, using Derrida's theories, the word "woman" should only exist in certain contexts, but is there a society in the world that holds the concept of woman differently than others?  Although Saussure, Derrida, and de Beauvoir lived in the late 19th and 20th centuries, their ideas and the general notions of gender have continued to implicitly shape modern-day society's take on who females should be and what females should do.

de Beauvoir, Simone. "The Second Sex." marxists.org.  Penguin, 2005. Web. 22 Aug. 2010.

Derrida, Jacques. "Post-Structuralism, Deconstruction, and Post-Modernism: Diff'erance." Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden: Blackwell, 1998. 385-407. Print.

de Saussure, Ferdinand. "Structuralism and Liguistics: Course in General Linguistic." Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden: Blackwell, 1998. 76-89. Print.

The Identities of the American Psycho

After watching some scenes from the 2000 film American Psycho on Thursday, we discussed identity, agency, and subjectivity.  Within the first few minutes, Patrick Bateman, played by Christian Bale, gives an impression of all of the "selves" he is made up of, whether fake or real, and we get a glimpse into all of the external and internal forces that make him who he is and who he appears to be.

I am very much a postmodernist when it comes to the topic of identity.  As Barker states, "the decentred or postmodern self involves the subject in shifting, fragmented and multiple identities.  Persons are composed not of one but of several, sometimes contradictory, identities" (220).  Depending on the contexts in which you place yourself in, you are bound to have more than two identities, if not several.  Teens act different at home than they do with friends at school, and different again when they are sitting in class.  It would seem, then, that what actually defines us is not one but several costumes, so to speak, influenced by the people around us and the experiences we have and will have in life.  Further, even though language is a key identifier for each individual, language itself is a medium that societies create to explain who we are and what we believe.

Nevertheless, there is no person in the world that is not a product of the forces, controllable or not, they encounter and the world they are born into.  Barker describes identity as "...both unstable and temporarily stabilized by social practice and regular, predictable behaviour" (225).  Individuals are first defined by their parents and backgrounds, and the list of forces only expands rapidly as they are thrown into the world -- interests, hobbies, friends, culture, etc.  Those who accept the surrounding culture identify with the majority, and those who resist the majority culture construct their own identities.  And why?  Merely as a result of the rejection of the majority's ideas.  Ironically, many of these "resisting" identities become trends and subcultures themselves -- hippies and punks, for example.  In the end, we can't change who our families are and where we come from, but we have some agency to choose who to be.

Barker, Chris.  Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice.  Los Angeles: Sage, 2008.  Print.
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The revival cast of the Broadway musical Hair at the 2009 Tony Awards, performing "Hair", a song about the ideas of identity, culture, freedom, and...well, hair, in the 1960s.