24 February 2010
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (2009)
It’s been awhile since I read the collection of Wallace’s short stories, but I don’t remember being quite as appalled as I was by the film’s distillation of these short stories. In the book, they’re tempered by other stories and so maybe that’s why they seemed so awful in the movie, but the real destructive jab to Wallace’s short stories and “hideous” subjects is very simple: the movie needed a reason to exist. The short stories have all presence of the questioner and the reason for the questions edited out. Questions posed to the subjects that make them muse on their hideous traits (usually sexual, sometimes personal, or historical) are represented by a simple “Q”. The movie not only gives an emotional space for the questions (I don’t believe we ever actually hear them but she’s there, and occasionally, even emoting!), but gives us an entire framework to justify the questioning, which attempts to align it with a philosophy that may have been implied in the stories but did not lurk at every corner, and that is the ominous specter of Academia. There’s no way to avoid it – David Foster Wallace’s writing reeks of intelligence, but it subsequently doesn’t adequately reflect a polyphony of voices the way a good play would. Witness the dualism that he constantly employs in his fiction from The Broom of the System through Oblivion, where nothing is simply what it is, but rather a clash of often competing descriptions: whether it’s a premise or an axiom, but not both. Whether it’s velcro or tape, and yet there they are. These are of course minute examples of a towering short coming in his fiction that I assume isn’t all that towering, but it’s something I’ve come to see more and more as I’ve continued to read him. And while this guy might spatter Czech in his dialogue, and that guy might speak lucidly of masturbation, they’re all circumnavigating the thing itself with this incredibly precise vagueness. Which is to say they all sound more or less the same, particularly when you read one after the other (hence the other stories breaking these up, I suspect).
So what are you left with in the movie? A glut of unappealing men talking about their unappealing perspective – which is fine, often the monologues are entertaining in a kind of gross way. But is there any way these interviews have any particular weight in the study of feminism as the movie suggests to reason this sociological study? Feminism? I guess, maybe, if you’re an undergrad at Sarah Lawrence College but wouldn’t a study of how men are affected by feminism negate the entire premise of feminism? Or has Women’s Studies reached the post meta post land, and thus this kind of thing would be an acceptable basis for an anthropological study (and excuse me, there’s methodology to an ethnographic study? Thank you Dr. Valentine) but it certainly wouldn’t be as unrealistic as the exchange between Timothy Hutton’s teacher and the girl which is just there to be some base justification for the whole ordeal that comes off as nothing more than a base justification and is kind of an insult to, like*, DFW’s writing.
The best monologue in the film is that of Subject #42, who recounts his father’s work as a Washroom attendant of which he’s simultaneously respectful and embarrassed about. It’s delivered with a raw intensity that really works, and maybe it’s because it isn’t at all hurried. I suspect it’s rather faithful to the book, but I honestly don’t remember it at all, and it’s one of the few monologues that’s representatively showcased (Christopher Meloni’s, on the other hand, is laughable in its winking, smirking, want-to-be-bad but is actually bad-ness) by actors and a set, which helps to fill in some of the void standing between the son and his father.
It raises some good rhetorical questions – Dominic Cooper’s monologue about rape is not at all believable or convincing, in part because it’s so loaded toward surprise and is absurdly confrontational. It’s an argument that gives you pause – it’s true, but given so much amplitude I think it loses a lot of its potential. If he were calm and collected and talking about perspective and knowing some thing, I would be more inclined to believe him than if he were hysterical and in my face screaming about how he’s in a better position because he’s been raped and knows what it’s like. That sounds more like post-traumatic stress disorder, which okay, is fine if that’s what we’re after here, but then why is the monologue so shift and loaded toward knocking the viewer on her ass.
And for fuck’s sake, can’t a one-armed stud play the one-armed stud? Do we honestly have to endure the embarrassment of watching that scene?
* This is another thing you’ll notice about his fiction that seems frequently absent from Wallace’s essays or non-fiction writing. Go back