Lad Theory

Last Saturday, I was drawn into a random conversation with strangers at a friend's birthday party. I listened to a guy, mid-thirties, make generalizations about sex and love and make indirect asides about his ex-fiancee and his friends -- and then I piped up, "Oh, isn't this just ladder theory or Harry Met Sally stuff?" It didn't phase him -- he just said no, it was his own theory, and a good one, about how men can't be friends with women whom they're attracted to.



Like your eighteen-year-old cousin who makes up "quotes" that are actually misremembered lines from old Modest Mouse tunes, I find a certain type of guy tends to regurgitate the Ladder Theory, whether they've read it or heard it recycled in fraternity discussions or actually tapped into that original vein of nice-guy-resentment from which the theory springs. Guys are simple! they'll have sex with anyone. Girls are impossible! they have two ladders: guys they'll sleep with and guys they won't. The theory recycles familiar tropes like the "friend zone" and the "nice guy" -- though here they're given ever-affectionate terms like "abyss" and "intellectual whore."

The Uninvited Other Identity We Sensed at the Fight Club

Sara and I went to see Shutter Island last Friday -- mostly because it was the film showing at the St. Louis Moolah Theatre (and who can pass up an opportunity to sit in leather couches in an old Masonic lodge, watching movies on a giant screen?), but partly because it was a thriller and partly because it's a Scorsese film and partly because of Leonardo DiCaprio. It's about two US federal marshals who come to investigate the disappearance of an escaped woman from a island-locked mental institution for the criminally insane.

And so the film begins rather provocatively: two men who barely know each other, visiting a very scary place on a very solitary island in what appears to be a thickening storm, trying to get information from increasingly recalcitrant and resistant hospital leaders and guards, mixed with unnecessary flashbacks to WW2 and their death camps which are meant to resonate with the possibly evil machinations of a hospital for the insane in the 1950s. So far so good, yes?


So does the film move in the direction of a horror film, where the lights go out, the storm sets in, and all the evil criminals run loose, doing unforeseen violence? or does the film move in the direction of a political thriller -- i.e. the push for further information slowly reveals deeper and darker levels of conspiracy and manipulation? or does the film become a psychological thriller, where the hero's psychological pressures begin to bleed into the dilemmas of the villains, unsettling reality as we know it?

Burn the Theater Down

I went with Sara to see Inglourious Basterds last Sunday.

I remember going through a Holocaustophile phase in high school and early college -- I read Elie Wiesel's Night, A Hiding Place, the YA novel Number the Stars, A Separate Peace, Slaughterhouse Five, watched Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan (and cried during both), and consumed both of the Maus comic books, etc. etc. And I still want to read both The Diary of Anne Frank and Mein Kampf before I die.

But I worry that my once-and-maybe-future obsession with the Holocaust really just belied my eagerness for a sort of emotional shorthand for brutality, inhumanity, the banality of evil, etc. and also! don't forget! a cultural high card for the awesomeness of those guys who bombed Dresden and used nuclear weapons on those imperialistic Japanese terrorists and then went on to drag the world into a battle of good and evil based on whether the government owned Starbucks or not, a war served "cold" because we never fired a shot -- except in Korea and Vietnam and Cuba and Afghanistan and errm.

Anatomy of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl

So Sara and I went to see (500) Days of Summer last Thursday. This was not technically her desire, because she could see that it was a wet, sappy, soppy, sorry hipster mess just from the soundtrack of its trailer. It was my desire, because I read how it subverted some cliches of the romantic comedy -- and because I secretly love romantic comedies, as long as they weren't so predictable.

Days of Summer (apparently you can remove the 500 without damaging the title) recycles the classic notion of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, a cliche whose recent history I'd like to trace here. It all begins with that beautiful wish-fulfillment fantasy of guy-meets-girl, guy-is-brooding, girl-teaches-guy-how-not-to-brood, a fixer-upper relationship, thanks, you can drive him off the lot now. It works because the guy is vulnerable and scared of rejection and smart and deep and hard-working but has trouble with the opposite sex and hey guys that's just like me! And so we sit down in the theatre and we empathize -- and then the guy gets the girl finally, or the girl dies and the guy becomes a doctor or an architect and then visits her grave. (either way, you win?)