Movie Time!

I haven't seen 66.6% of his recent films (and only viewed The 40-year-old Virgin while pulling an all-nighter as part of a sleep study), but this Judd Apatow fellow is really starting to grate on my fucking nerves. Moviegoers--hardly the brightest and most discerning people--seem to love this guy's movies, which now include Knocked Up, in which a fat, lazy, stupid asshole (played by a guy who used to write for that pinnacle of sophistication, "Da Ali G Show") impregnates a smart career woman and then proceeds to make her pregnancy all about himself; and Superbad, which opened yesterday to thunderous critical acclaim. Here's a review of it that I happen to like, despite not having seen the movie (and probably won't see it, given that I think its major influences, like Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Dazed and Confused, were steaming shit piles--I suppose because I was the only kid in America who didn't think it was awesome to get dumped on by older, "cool" kids while in school). It's interesting that a critic has picked up on the massive vein of homosexuality pulsing (pulsing vein! ha!) through this guy's movies. The first thing I thought when I saw the long trailer for Superbad was, "great, now future fratboys have a movie that gives step-by-step instructions in how to be a pig."

The other movie coming out soon that I won't see but will hold a grudge against is Sean Penn's adaptation of John Krakauer's Into the Wilderness, a very short novel that reconstructs the last months of a recent college graduate of affluent background who gives away his possessions, hitchikes across America, and then strikes out into the Yukon wilderness. Moose hunters wind up pissing on his bones some months later.

Sean Penn is one of the planet's lousiest actors. He ruined Mystic River, he made the insulting Dead Man Walking positively unbearable, and I Am Sam stands to this day as the most embarrassing performance in modern American cinema. Aside from his being behind the camera rather than in front of it for this project--I have no doubt he'll sneak in there, somehow--Penn's translation of this slight story is an abortion from the get-go.

The story is truly, deeply affecting. The sequence of decisions made by the protagonist, ultimately leading to his unnecessary death (he was only 2 miles from a stocked survival cabin!), are indecipherable to us. He wasn't an eco-warrior, nor a wilderness poet, nor a suicidal teenager. He made friends easily on the trip across country, he did some minimal research into surviving in Alaska, and he kept a pretty perfunctory diary of the experience (no transcendentalism for him, thanks). None of what the kid actually did makes for a good movie, so it will no doubt be mostly made-up horseshit that splatters across the screen when the film gets to theaters later this year or early next.

People, particularly young people, will identify with this story. On its face it is highly romantic. The young man wants to make an honest go of it in the wilderness; clearly he is searching for something he feels he has lost in modern society. But it's all so fucking hopeless, and his decisonmaking is so incredibly poor, and the whole idea is so ridiculously naive that you must ask, "THIS is a college graduate?!?"

And the real meaning of this story, as a very smart man pointed out to me, is that this kid was a total asshole. A self-absorbed, sadistic little asshole. He left without a word to his family, which until then had believed he loved them and valued their love in return. He abandoned all the friends he made on the trip to Alaska, including some people who grew to care about him deeply--and for whom our hero apparently cared not at all. What this person failed to realize, as Lewis Hyde explained beautifully in The Gift, is that our lives don't belong to us; they belong to those who are with us. Now, you can call our owners "God" and "Jesus" if you want to, or you can admit that your parents and loved ones have invested in you their hopes and dreams, to say nothing of material resources, and therefore they "own" you. Or, you can accept that you "belong" to a society, which expects from you a productive return, and that our existences are ones of mutual obligation--we make each other better through hard work in all its forms--but you can't, under any circumstances, do what this kid did and abandon those who have an interest in you and go off and kill yourself. That makes you a failure, on all levels. Our lives, quite simply, don't belong to us. There are no self-made men and never were.