I Want to Be a Boy for My Birthday

sixteen_candles_1984

 
Sixteen Candles is thirty this year. It remains a beloved teen comedy; an iconic story of a young girl growing up to be a man.

All right, Sixteen Candles isn’t actually about a trans man, unfortunately; representations of trans people in media were even rarer two decades ago than they are now. But rewatching the film, it is surprising how obsessed this girl’s coming-of-age story is with manliness. Partly that has to do with the subplot involving the Geek (Anthony Michael Hall) as he tries to convince protagonist Samantha Baker (Molly Ringwald), or anyone, really, to have sex with him. His nerdishness and awkwardness is related repeatedly to a lack of manliness; Sam calls him a “total fag,” and he taunts his even geekier henchman by telling them “don’t be such faggots.” At one point, he even accidentally takes birth control pills, foisted on him by Caroline Mulford (Haviland Morris). He spits the pills out quickly, though…and soon thereafter, as if getting rid of those contaminating hormones is some sort of rite-of-passage, he finally manages his transition to not-womanly by having an unspecified but mutually satisfying intimate tryst with the seemingly way out of his league Caroline.

Like the Geek, Sam is trying to grow up — a process made no easier when her entire family forgets her birthday. Growing up for her doesn’t mean becoming a man, but getting one: in this case, the Robert-Pattinson-before-there-was-Robert-Pattinson hot, soulful Jake Ryan (Michael Schoeffling). Yet, getting the guy and being the guy are wrapped around each other in complicated ways. Sam (whose name is suggestively androgynous) is a sophomore; Jake’s a senior. Her eagerness to be older, then, is a wish to be like him, as well as a wish to be with him. Her desire isn’t just about romance, but about the desire to be acknowledged rather than erased — to get out of her beautiful sister’s shadow, and out from under the bleak school hierarchy. It’s not an accident that the film’s one glimpse of nudity is a scene in the girl’s bathroom in which Sam and her best friend stare at a topless Caroline in an excess of envy at her body and at her good fortune in dating Jake. The camera focuses first of all on her breasts before it pulls back; it’s an eroticized moment, in which the jealous sophomores’ desire to be Caroline (and so date Jake) is visually blurred with the desire to be with Caroline (and so essentially be Jake.)

Adulthood in Sixteen Candles, then, is in many ways coded as male — a patriarchal economy underlined by the viscious Asian stereotype of the quintessentially nerdy, iconically non-manly Long Duk Dong (Gedde Watanabe.) This link between adulthood and manliness isn’t a surprise; power in the 1980s, and still today, is generally coded as masculine. To grow up, to stop being a “fag” or (as one cruel upperclassman calls Sam) a “void”, is to grab hold of the male thing. Desire is not just about love, but about (male-coded) strength and substance and influence — thus the attraction of Bella to Edward, or of Anastasia to Christian Grey, or, for that matter, of Dorothea to Casaubon. Love isn’t just about wanting a man, but about wanting to be the man. Jake’s attractiveness , too, is not just his pretty face; it’s also his fancy cars and his place at the pinnacle of the school’s pecking order — and also the fact that he’s dating the desirable, visibly adult Caroline.

So romance is all about patriarchy? Well, not exactly. Or at least, the dynamic of wanting to grow up by loving and becoming the loved one isn’t restricted to heterosexual love stories. For example, it’s the basic premise of Nora Olsen’s wonderful lesbian YA novel, Frenemy of the People, out last week. At the start of the book, Lexie is the one out lesbian at the high school: she’s fiercely political, anti-bourgeois, and (in what I take as a deliberate Holden Caulfield wink) hates the smarminess and fakeness of her classmates. Clarissa, on the other hand, is a straight girl from a Conservative Christian family who rides horses and has tons of friends in the popular clique.

But then Clarissa suddenly figures out she’s bi (she has an epiphany where she realizes she likes pictures of Kimye as much for Kim as for Kanye) and she and Lexie begin a wary process of falling in love. That process isn’t just about learning to like one another; it’s also about becoming like one another — growing up both by loving and by turning into the loved one. At the end of the book, it’s the fierce Lexie who says, “It’s like Clarissa cracked me open, and all this tenderness spilled out of me that I didn’t even know I had” — and it’s the political Lexie who admits that “All I do now are bourgeois things, like horseback riding and lying around kissing my girlfriend.” Meanwhile, it’s the popular high school girl Clarissa who says that Lexie has “made me more fierce and brave,” and who gushes about the joys of property destruction. (“I can’t wait to do more things like that.”) The two girls have grown and found themselves — and the selves they’ve found are each other.

You could argue that the absence of patriarchal fantasies, not to mention the absence of stupid gay slurs and emasculated Asian stereotypes, makes Olsen’s coming-of-age story better than Sixteen Candles. And “Frenemy of the People” is in fact much superior to the film. Olsen’s a wittier and smarter writer than John Hughes, with a broader range of interests and sympathies than Hollywood formula can manage (the book tackles everything from the housing crisis to mental disability issues, all with an immaculately light touch.)

Nonetheless, I think reading Sixteen Candles through Frenemy actually makes me appreciate the film more, not less. Yes, the anxieties around masculinity are a bit off-putting. But at the same time, as Olsen shows, it’s natural for Sam to want to be Jake, because people, of whatever gender or orientation, often want to be, as well as to be with, their sweeties. If there’s some suggestion that she likes his status and his maturity — well, what’s wrong with loving someone because they have qualities you admire, and want for yourself? When you’re looking for it, you can even perhaps see Jake doing something similar himself — he gives an impassioned speech about wanting a serious girlfriend; he’s sick of partying. Growing up for him means putting aside the childish things that comprise being on top of that social hierarchy, and getting to be more like Sam, quiet and out of the spotlight. Maybe it’s Jake’s birthday too, there at the end of the film, and the gift he gets is to grow up to be the girl he loves.

A Film Shot in the Back

Caro asked me, as her go-to guy on things King Lear, to write up some thoughts for the Hoodlum Unitarian roundtable. I can therefore say with assurance that the key to understanding Godard’s 1987 King Lear, unlike most productions of the Shakespeare play, is Charles Bronson’s Death Wish 4: The Crackdown.

What, haven’t seen it? Fate has been kind enough to me that I can say the same. I’m thinking more about what it has in common with Bo Derek’s post-10 bomb Bolero, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, the Raiders of the Lost Ark knock-off King Solomon’s Mines, and another movie I won’t even bother to name but whose Wikipedia plot summary begins: “A female aerobic instructor is possessed by an evil spirit of a fallen ninja…”

This collection of infinitesimally budgeted squeezings from tapped-out franchises all share a common source: the Cannon Film Group, in that period from 1979 to 1988 when it was owned by the Israeli duo Menachem Golam and Yoram Globus.

While Golam and Globus may have been schlockmeisters without peer, they were schlockmeisters with occasional cultural ambitions and/or pretensions. And near the end of their control of the Cannon Film Group, Jean-Luc Godard decided to take those ambitions for a joyride.

A Picture Shot in the Back


King Lear has, among all his other problems with the universe, a spotty film career.

At the moment, the text of King Lear is probably best known in Hollywood for being misquoted in a tattoo on Megan Fox’s back. (Lear Life Lesson: don’t get tattoos in parlors without internet access; the skin you save may be your own.) The first film version of King Lear predates sound, which means either Panto Lear or the world’s densest title cards. It was sixteen minutes long.

There have been some really good television productions — Laurence Olivier, Michael Hordern (my fave), Ian Holm, Ian McKellen, Orson Welles — but trips to the big screen have been rare. In my lifetime there’s been a Russian production under Grigori Kosintsev, and it’s inexplicable that I haven’t seen it; doubly inexplicable given that it’s got an original score by Dmitri Shostakovich. There’s the existential despair-fest of Peter Brook, milking every drop of downericity. Al Pacino has announced plans, and I’m pretty excited about it, but apparently now it is about as likely to get made as Atlas Shrugged: Part II.

And then there’s this thing.

Would you be surprised if I said that Godard’s take on King Lear was not exceptionally literal? That there’s probably more actual Lear in the 16-minute silent version?


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybOhr-RtAas&feature=youtu.be

Before the opening credits, there is a recording of a phone conversation.

Godard: “Well… uh…”

Either Golem or Globus: “Let me tell in short, two sentences, my main concern.”

Godard: “Yes, of course.”

Either Golem or Globus: “My main concern is the concern of the company and the prestige of Cannon Group. Cannon has announced for a year and a half [at this point the cheerful baroque accompaniment skids into the ditch, as of someone pulled the phonograph plug] Jean-Luc Godard’s movie, ‘King Lear.’ It is not believed by many that the movie will ever be done. We are losing confidence. We are losing our name. I, I must insist that this movie, as promised, which was already postponed so many times, will reach the Cannes festival. This is my main concern.”

An unidentified but lawyerly voice on the other end of the phone says: “Okay, Jean-Luc, why don’t you respond to that.”

The movie is his response.


The film proper begins, actually, with a line about Norman Mailer: “Mailer. Oh yes, that is a good way to begin.” The line is delivered by, naturally, Norman Mailer.

Mailer, uncredited, playing a Very Famous Writer, has decided that King Lear works better if stripped to its essence. And its essence, as the Very Famous Writer sees it, is a Mafia movie: Don Learo, Don Kenny, Don Gloucestro…

And then the movie starts over again: a different take of the same scene — Mailer and his daughter Kate, discussing his approach and then, for more context, reading the contract they signed with Godard. Intercut are a series of title cards, as the movie tries to decide what it’s name is. “King Lear: A Study.” “King Lear: A Clearing.” “King Lear: Fear and Loathing.” “A Film Shot in the Back.” The titles continue to pop up through out the movie, prematurely announcing THE END more than once.

Our main character turns out not to be Don Learo — although he does show up, played by Burgess Meredith, uncredited — but William Shakespare Junior the Fifth (Peter Sellars, uncredited, who would later clean up as a director of opera).

The situation in the world is dire, Shakespeare Jr. V explains in voice-over: “And suddenly it was the time of Chernobyl, and everything disappeared. Everything. And then after a while, everything came back. Electricity, houses, cars. Everything except culture — and meat. My task: to recapture what was lost. Starting with the works of my famous ancestor.”

Later we see him going through a forest with a butterfly net; he exultantly spots a reel of film in a pond. Cultural rescue to the rescue! By scribbling down bits of overheard conversation between Learo and his daughter Cordelia (Molly Ringwald!) he intends to recreate the text, or at least some text.

How to tell there are 30 minutes left in this movie


At this point it should be pretty clear that continuing with a plot summary is not that useful of an exercise. The movie is as fragmented as the scraps of Lear that waft through, sometimes by disembodied voices on the soundtrack, interrupted by the screeching of sea gulls.

This disjointed fragments-I-have-shored quality also gives it the freedom to swing wildly between two different modes.

On one hand, there is ponderous lecturing on the meaning of cinema, given mostly by Professor Pluggy, from whom Shakespeare Jr. V seeks advice. He comes by his name honestly enough: he’s wearing spiralling patch cords as dreadlocks. It’s also, not coincidentally, Jean-Luc Godard. Perhaps he is reciting some classic work of film interpretation, but it drags on tediously, as if he’s intending to bore his audience intentionally.

Godard as Professor Pluggy

The other mode is a kind of improvisatory, vaudevillian jokiness. Here is Don Learo, over dinner, discussing Jewish gangsters Bugsy Seigel and Meyer Lansky: “Bugsy was a real killer. Not like this — uh, Richard Nixon.” In this vein, it’s not surprising that Woody Allen has a walk-on.


So how do you explain a movie like this? You have to use the Hebrew word freier — sucker. Golem and Globus, eager to do a prestige picture to mitigate their schlockmeisterhood, thought that underwriting a movie from Jean-Luc Godard was their fast lane to Cannes. They did not expect that they, themselves, would be the freiers.

The movie looks very much like a lark. Paid for by the Cannon Film Group.


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The Godard Roundtable index is here.