Two worth-your-time 2013 films with similar themes, color schemed posters and even titles, recently made themselves, like whores, available at home: IN A WORLD is a semi-autobiographical female voiceover artist trying to make it in a deep-voiced man's game tale, written and directed by and starring Children's Hospital hottie Lake Bell; ADULT WORLD stars Emma Roberts as Amy, a Syracuse University undergraduate struggling poet who finally realizes she's not 'too good' for her job at an adult bookstore and is written and directed by men (a detail I will be addressing) and bearing a tacky tag line (make it out in above poster if you want, but I warned you). Both 'girl' characters start their films living with their parents, rent-free, and the films chronicle their respective launches into the real 'adult' world, reaching down for the big brass rings, stooping to conquer, and finding help along the way, mostly from sensitive boys and/or male mentors, like whores.
Why do I mention one film is made by a woman about a woman, and the other is made by men? For the simple reason that as a pretentious, callow Syracuse poetry undergraduate 'man' who applied at one of the local XXX bookstores at one point ("the endless trains of the faithless" - spouts Robin Williams on the TV commercial playing behind me, advertising the Chevy Silverado, "Find new roads!") I see deeplier than most to this story into (that's poetry). And I can tell you up front that Amy's adventures in that accursed city look right (the film was shot there) but just don't add up. I went there, but did the writer? Amy says she's an over-achiever with a straight A average and is a virgin and also hot, and yet wants to be a furious poet? Most poets are lucky if they're even one of the three. But to be all three is almost impossible, and to still want to be a poet for all that, hmmm. Not to mention she says has no car insurance because she spent the money on SASEs, confident of her immanent fame as a poet, which in itself is very suspicious for a supposedly smart girl, but she does this in the age when most submissions are done via e-mail and then stands by while her car is conveniently stolen. A character's life hasn't seemed so unconnected to any actual experience of the real world since Juno and Frances Ha!, neither I've been able to see in tiny fragments due to their anti-youth-gender denigration and complete cluelessness about the sorts of relationships being depicted. (1)
But Amy is just the sort of girl a sexual anxiety-prone male closet-macho writer would imagine, i.e. she needs a man who's good at organizing, so he can toddle in her wake making exasperated sighs and treat her like a child. She needs me, man! Ruby Sparks shall be her name. That's fine if you're not trying to show someone adapting to the real adult word, the reality of which is that there is no earthly or celestial way a girl as hot as Amy wouldn't get published, laid, and invited to endless readings by her sophomore year, even if she shouts her stanzas like a sorority pledge on her third Molson. Sorry that was sexist, but those girls were loud.
Although it's never clear if Amy's in school or out of it, she latches randomly (by finding his book in someone's car) onto a disillusioned middle aged semi-success poetry teacher mentor in his -nth mid-life crisis named 'Rat' (John Cusack). This clown does his own sewing, wears a ski cap indoors, and uses the word 'cray' (for crazy), but Cusack is a pro, and clearly had some input. He takes a page from the Bill Murray playbook and modulates his usual cool aloof warmth to include a complete ambivalence towards the small stuff. The pleased smile that comes across Rat's face after Amy trashes his apartment has few equals, you have to go back to the 1982 Betty Blue to find one.
And yet he can't even be bothered to take her virginity. Jean-Hughes Anglade would never stoop to morality - he'd sleep her Amy even knowing it would destroy her respect for him and lead to blackballing and hushed whispers. He would do it because sometimes he wants to feel like he has control over his own destiny, and because learning to be careful what you wish for and that no one is ever worth worshipping uncritically, and that sex needn't be earth-shaking to count as experience are all so valuable as life lessons that a truly good mentor wouldn't be bound by the academic moral code's morality but his own inner Hawksian morality.
Where is this version of Syracuse with midlife crisis poets afraid to lend a girl a hand in need, if she be hot? The only thing to do with a cute student protege is make love to her if she's fair, and to someone else if she's not (that's Wilde, yo). But worse is yet to come. There's a tall drag queen who lets Amy crash at her squat, and teaches her how to smoke weed and dance. Thank GOD she also doesn't get AIDS halfway through and give Amy a parting monologue about reaching for the sky. But the worse is yet to come: Amy gets a job at a homey mom and pop XXX-rated video store, an idea lifted from an old Mr. Show sketch, and the sort of bait-and-switch number that never really adds up to anything, anymore than the drag queen angle did. If the job had at least one sleazy element the comedy might have had some bite. If there were rats in the squat, or she had to step over junkies to get up the stairs... something! Adult World, yeah RIGHT.
I applied for a clerk job at a XXX store when I was studying up in Syracuse and let me tell you, it was not a mom and pop operation. I remember filling out my application and talking to the owner who loomed down at me from the tall counter, while what sounded like a woman reaching a lengthy orgasm or else being tortured with hot coals echoed from the back room. I knew I would go insane having to listen to that all day but I took mental notes of my impressions for future novelization. Rather than win me over with his gentle decency, this mug sized me up through his beady eyes and said "Ever take a poly?" - he meant polygraph test, to assess whether or not I had stolen from past jobs. I told him I would try anything once, but I think he could see I was turning pale after only ten minutes of being there. He probably just waited out his applicants, to see if they could hack the toxic vibes and nonstop moaning from the peep booths (there's no such booths in this mom and pop place, don't worry, honey). See, that idea could have been a movie, but every edge set up for cutting latent baby teeth in Adult World comes to us already sanded possibly through rewrites and second-hand sanitization: Cusack's mentor won't seduce her, the adult bookstore is really just a sweet homey place where everybody knows your name, and the drag queen bestie (Armando Riesco) is just a droll nurturer ala John Lithgow in World According to Garp, and cute stock boy Evan Peters is on hand to support and straighten her out as needed, and to patiently wait to bust his move until at least an hour of running time has elapsed.
I like a lot of things about Adult World, but it makes me miss another film, Art School Confidential, which is unofficially set at Pratt, where I reside now. Think Jim Broadbent or John Malkovich in that movie would have been so rude as to refuse m'lady's request for de-virginizing. The very idea of refusing such a hottie is hateful to Americans!
That's not a problem for Carol (Lake Bell ) in In a World. She goes right after fellow Children's Hospital star, Ken Marino, a successful voiceover artist who her father (Fred Melamed) has taken as a protege in some twisted effort to have a son, (his other daughter is played by the always amazing Michaela Watkins). Ms. Bell has always been my Children's Hospital favorite and here she ably carries the film in the tricky role of being both a success and a little disorganized, struggling to make it and getting by with a little help from her friends, and dealing with a dad who doesn't understand why he so desperately wants to keep her from being eclipsed by his female child. Dimitri Martin is nice guy sound engineer who helps Carol get breaks but could never bust a move -though he in turn is helped by an actually cool lesbian wingman, and when Carol does get a break it's from a woman producer (Geena Davis).
That's part of the genius of Bell's film, many comedies featuring ditzy women have been made, and about ball-busting career gals, vain actresses, and doting moms, all idling around until some pasteurized thirtysomething hunk with soft eyes materializes in the midst of a shopping cart collision. But In a World moves forward three squares, to capture the awkward phase past the ditzy klutz in search of a man phase, to chronicle what goes on between the lucky break-and-hard-work period and genuine success. Every time Carol woke up I was sorries she had slept through some big gig. I won't spoil whether she does or not, but I think it's interesting that I assumed she would, that Bell wouldn't show herself getting out of bed if she was still on time. And I know how harder it is than it looks!
Much as In a World seems remarkably astute, Adult World never feels quite real, quite set on a tone or era or even Syracuse as it really is: Amy's apartment is way too clean; there isn't adequate representation of how everything gets crusted over with salt from the sidewalks and roads, the way frozen slush rises up in a dirty brown wave at passing cars, etc. I did respect that her walls just had a Sylvia Plath poster above a mattress on the floor and she was half-trying to commit suicide (very Syracuse). I like Emma Roberts overall and she's game to go the distance here, but like her character she is still coming into her own as an actress of real gravitas --even when smashing Cusak's guitar she seems like she's just trying on emotions. Of course at that age all poets are fakes, unaware we can't bumrush greatness; so either she's an amazing actress or else just perfectly imperfect. Her dad is Eric Roberts! Julia Roberts is her aunt. See, that kind of thing would be cool to see in a movie. Why not play herself?
It's that sense of playing herself that makes Bell score so much more points de la resonance. She takes risks, she shows us things that might make people mad if they think characters are based on them. Of course In a World has problems too: Carol must be making money, so why she can't afford her own rent in a place as cheap as L.A.? Anyway, she winds up getting a windfall of work, which is exciting, but a subplot with her sister cheating on her husband with a handsome Irishman doesn't really add up to much compared to the riveting central drama of the father screwing over his own daughter, who's screwing the guy the father's screwing her over for. But so what? It's small potatoes, and just the bitchy voiceover artist party at Ken Marino's house is worth any price of admission.e
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| The ominous Hall of Languages at SU |
But for Ginsberg, a semester later, I had drunk way too much trying to get that magic back, and now I had a legit girlfriend, no more flirting, and she was sick, unable to support me, so I was nervous, the auditorium was packed, and I drank too much and couldn't get a buzz. My hand still shook holding the paper. I didn't stick around to go to the diner with Mr. Ginsberg after the show, as I had been invited to, citing my sick girlfriend as an excuse, but people who sat next to him during my set said he was thrilled by me, especially my poem, "Cashed like a bowl / of Indica Homegrown." So I've regretted my running away ever since.
Flash forward: I answered a back-of-the-paper ad to work at an XXX rated bookstore on Erie Boulevard, as you now know. I also tried my hand at an erotic novel, chronicling a disturbing vision I had the year before at a Rochester Dead Show, tripping and having a major 'too many people' bad one, of a gigantic carnival of S&M torture. We'd found an old LP called Tortura (left) left by a housemate's crazy uncle -- and it was a very disturbing thing to listen to, over and over, while tripping your face off, and it probably effected that vision. That uncle also had a lot of Zappa, and "The Torture Never Stops" was heard often, and seemed to be confirmation and extension of the grim existential cruelty that the LSD-enhanced Tortura sessions were exposing behind 20th century first world existence's curtain of blasé painless decency. My novel, Shroomsadoplasticism, was, never finished, and typed on a manual typewriter, so there's only one original - with the first and last ten pages long ago fell away... and now the pages are even out of order... so symbolic, man.A few years later I realized I'd never be a real poet because I couldn't get into Hart Crane or Marianne Moore --trying to understand their poetry was worse than tripping to Tortura. I didn't even bother to find out if I was accepted when I applied for grad poetry at the University of Washington. I did a bunch of open mic nights at the O.K. Hotel but all that came of it was that the long-haired hippy freak M.C. of the event stole my girlfriend. I moved back to NYC thinking I'd go read at the Nuyorican and blow their minds but soon realized I just could not endure the terrible onslaught of bad poets SHOUTING / in this same /STYLE / every other / WORD / of their / POEM. I'd really hoped Roberts' Amy was going to rant her poetry in that style. I'd be TALKING and THINKING in that STYLE for DAYS afterwards. Didn't Robert even GO to a POE-etry reading to reSEARCH? So I went into voiceovers, mentored by a cool older lady from an ad agency that shall go nameless. I did a few, was told I needed to join AFTRA to do any more. I joined - then they told me they weren't using AFTRA people, because of the strike. Also, they were going for the sensitive guy voice now, and my deep sexy deadpan growl was out. My dues lapsed. (my demo reel here).
A few years earlier, in 1994, after I'd been graduated and loose in the uncaring world for five years, (working as a freelance direct mail copywriter), I read that our beloved, sexy poetry teacher Stephen Dobyns was suspended from Syracuse for using 'salty' language in the classroom. His suspension was picked up in the NY Times as the exhibit A of the new PC fascism taking over college campuses everywhere:
No one suggests that he offered to trade good grades for sex. He is not accused of sleeping with or propositioning students -- one says he tried to kiss her at a drunken party -- or of the focused protracted hectoring we might call "harassment." The allegations all concern language: specifically, what the committee calls "salty language" used outside the classroom at graduate-student parties. They involve attempts to be funny, and to provoke. There was one cruel sexual remark about a professor who wasn't present, and the suggestion that another might benefit from a "salty" term for a satisfactory sexual encounter.
My fellow students from his class, Abbe and Laurie wrote a letter (printed in the Times but I can't find it online) citing as an example of Dobyns' scathing honesty all three of us remember: there was a seething frat boy in class whose poetry was so seething with misogynistic sexual frustration that one barely needed to deconstruct to squirm over. Even the phrase "huffing and puffing to her house on his Huffy Spitfire" made us wince. Dobyns said, emotionlessly, after the frat boy stopped reading: "what do you think, should we try to help this poem or just take it out into the hall and shoot it?"Is this sexual harassment? Not in any clear sense, but those clear borders have been smudged by university policies that refer to "a hostile workplace," to "patterns of intimidation.""Hostile" and "intimidation" are subjectively defined, as they were by the student who testified (hilariously, I thought, though, again, no one seemed to notice) that he felt intimidated by my friend's use of a "salty" phrase. He felt he was being asked to condone a locker-room atmosphere that might offend the women present.
There was much talk of protecting women from blunt mentions of sex. And the young women who testified were in obvious need of protection. They gulped, trembled and wept, describing how my friend yelled at them in class or failed to encourage their work. Victorian damsels in distress, they used 19th-century language: they had been "shattered" by his rude, "brutish" behavior. After testifying, they seemed radiant, exalted, a state of being that, like so much else, recalled "The Crucible," which used the Salem witch trials as a metaphor for the Army-McCarthy hearings. --11/26/95
With that phrase we loved him forever. He didn't need guide rails from some PC Voltari to uncover a misogynist frat boy when he heard one, even if that boy didn't know himself.
If Dobyns was single and the three of us came over to his apartment bearing Scotch, who knows? He might have shagged all three of us. Times were different and poetry, at least in his class, still had a violent, dangerous edge. Dobyns looked like a hybrid of Howard Hawks and Max Von Sydow (maybe still does) and he taught us Chekov the way a Hawks' protagonist or Von Sydow character in a Bergman film would, in a measured way that showed us one might be both macho and sensitive, serious but with a self-effacing humor, quiet but with the kind of deadshot aim that means you don't need to waste words, or bullets, and an inflexible personal code that meant tolerance for everything but unconscious misogyny and cliche'd triteness.
In Adult World, the PC thugs have left campus a wasteland of safety bars and bloodless ambivalence. The best Amy can do in Adult World is seek out promisingly sordid or 'authentic' real world experience in squatter drag queens, XXX video stores, older poet mentors living alone and with darting eyes -- but it's like some PC chaperone herald gets there first, shaving it all down from an R to a PG-13 like a furious Olympic curler. The drag queen doesn't even smoke pot in a joint -- it's bad for the lungs! -- so uses a vaporizer. The XXX video store is just a friendly family of genial eccentrics, they all but sing "Lean on Me" in perfect harmony to encourage Amy to follow her bliss. Cusack's poetry teacher is a good egg who would never 'take advantage' of an impressionable poet, no matter how hot and over the legal limit (and not even in school, supposedly). And so on.
In a World is blissfully long past this kind of naïveté. Carol uses sex and the lack thereof with an adult's savvy of the world, knowing how sex changes things for the good and bad every single time; her scatterbrained aspects feel real - she still makes it to her big jobs, she knows how to not mess up good things, and to mess up the already bad because who gives a fuck. Adult World has some great moments of comedy, and Cusack's character might not be the Rat he says he is, but he's pretty self-aware and even tells Amy to make mistakes, to 'fail better' but the film overall fails failing. Unless you find the nurturing gay male bestie of the frazzled heroine thing still subversive (2) and indicative of the grit and gritty, the the type who thinks Planet Hollywood is a 'real New York' experience, then something about Adult World might scan trite - watching a girl go from clueless self-absorption to self-absorption with a clue is hardly a journey at all. PC chaperones can clean up 42nd Street all they want, can ban smoking and nanny state a poet's life into irrelevance, but in the real adult the torture never stops. Suicide isn't just a joke, it's a real option many take.
Carol in In a World learns this, and that one might be tortured, or can be an instrument of torturing others, and that one shouldn't hesitate to do so if one lives in Los Angeles, because its kill or be killed. If Adult World Amy ever wants to really want to find out what that sort of true life experience is, what true poetry is, she'd best make some genuinely bad decisions, fast, like suffering through Prozac Nation, listening to Tortura over and over on bad acid, or having your lead guitarist die of autoerotic asphyxiation two weeks before the Lockerbie bombing. These were heavy things to endure. Finding a career writing erotica before you even lose your virginity doesn't really count as truth, he said, knowing of what he speaks, gesturing towards the faded manual typewritten mass lurking in his filing cabinet. He's old now, and poetry is on the web if at all, but film criticism lives on! From the vantage point of my ratty filth-encrusted podium of flies (all green and buzzlin'), rose thorn whip welts, funerals, and whores, whores, whores (my voiceover demo reel here), these things I do declare. But the 'world' has nothing to do with anything I ever write. Know this: there is no 'this.'
NOTES:
1. Strangely enough, those two films are highly praised yet I can't stand them, but I love Jennifer's Body, Margot at the Wedding, and The Squid and the Whale