#32
Post
by therewillbeblus » Tue Aug 01, 2023 1:06 am
Dunne's "normalcy" is a smokescreen though. He's an identity-less yuppie who's too afraid to break from his social norms, safe job and all that, but also can't stand his milieu and catalogue-superficial lifestyle he's crafted for himself. The women may be socially inappropriate and abnormal to an extent, but so are most of the men (i.e. Cheech and Chong as mild-mannered thieves, the men in the apartment complex who accost him repeatedly, Will Patton's Horst..) and we only get to spent more time with the women stressing their eccentricities because Dunne is compulsively drawn to them at first, and then ironically they begin to chase him when he's had 'enough'. I think the women are threatening to Dunne not just because he doesn't belong in this world, but because he goes in with expectations that cannot be met outside of a fantasy. People are weird, and he wants to break from the banalities of his ordinary existence to experience his weird side, but cannot access it (I'd say it 'doesn't exist' but I think it does, just not in the way he can conceive... when he is made to feel uncomfortable, there's a clumsiness in his response, but he is embarrassed by this - even if it's an opportunity to lean in to discover what makes him "weird").
I think this is the frustrating aspect at the center of the film... the castration iconography, emasculating encounters, etc. can obviously be read as a man ill-fitted to engage with his world in a safe way because the world is crazy, but there's a darker satire going on: That Dunne makes himself impotent by working in friction with who he is: a fatalistically boring, high-strung, skirt/experience-chasing Bro, whose only strategies are derivative come-ons he's picked up from movies, books, or observing his peers. He's not a natural 'participant', but a follower. This feels like his first outing, and he sucks at it. We can look at the frustrating discomfort of Arquette's flakiness and confrontational labile mood, but she comes across to me as a more "real" character than Dunne: a woman who's been around and has a protective part coming out to size him up (and fairly so!) and oscillating between trusting herself to let loose or retreat into safety. It's a pretty normal response on first dates, actually, and feels honest, but it's obviously frustrating to Dunne who has very simple, selfish, and directive motives - where her complex hangups don't fit in. Or take O'Hara's teasing provocations, which are inappropriate given Dunne's predicament that we're cued in on as surrogates... but she's not really, and it's also a case where a kooky woman is poking fun at the stuck-up fish-out-of-water who's always at the winning end of a power differential. Not to be mean, but as an offering to join, and maybe shed that self-serious shtick and get "weird"... you know, like he wanted to do. She knows getting home isn't life or death. Two lonely souls on a late night standing around looking down at their feet sounds boring - she's spicing it up. Awkwardly, but she's 'living'. And Garr's waitress, who presents with anxious attachment and unrealistic expectations of her own... well, they mirror his of Arquette, so the irony is thrown back at him, only then it's unacceptable.
These are all just people who are wrestling with who they are, what they want or expect, and how to fit that into a social experience, and everyone's coming up empty - and then reacting emotionally to it. Strongly, yes, as lonely vulnerable people do. And the only reason any of them are able to band together is because they can locate a scapegoat to project their rejected emotions onto. If they were in a different part of town at a different hour with a different demographic, it'd be Dunne and his office mates parading the streets looking for one of these late-night blue collar ladies or artsy outcasts. Except they'd be too scared or oblivious to venture from their own narcissistic fantasies to even 'feel' an emotion that strong. Dunne loses his cool because he's probably never been this emotional, though he thought he wanted to be. The real tragedy of the film is that Dunne sets out to achieve exactly what he gets, only not in the way he expected, and it's not cathartic. These abnormal people are the "normal" people of the world, and he has no way to escape the prison he's built for himself. He needs to feel, but he can't cope with what it actually looks like to feel; he needs to connect, but he is not prepared or willing to engage socially on intimate terms that aren't his. And yet while Scorsese knows this is a tragedy, he doesn't apologize for his behavior or ask us to sympathize with his character. Because regardless of that intolerable, confining experience, his behavior sucks. But we can broadly relate to not being able to connect despite what feels like giving all our effort, to having insatiable or unrealistic expectations, to being rejected, of being lonely, socially confused, misinterpreted, unwilling to risk what we need to in order to vulnerably get our needs met yet still being stuck with those unfulfilled needs, and getting angry with ourselves about that conflict and projecting it outward in some form. And Scorsese does leave an opening for us to empathize with that, even if we're doing so for ourselves and the millions of people populating the background of this film, elided from it, or watching at home.
](./images/smilies/eusa_wall.gif "Brick wall"){kind=small}
