MOVIE DIARY 2023: IT'S LIKE THE MOVIES, THE KIND OF THING THAT ONLY HAPPENS IN THE MOVIES!
Yes! The new era of MOVIE DIARY 2023 continues with another returning special guest, Sara McHenry! Sara’s been a longtime supporter of all my stupid bullshit, and she was the only person brave enough to interview me about the original iteration of this project, MOVIE DIARY 2018 (the zine with that interview is on sale on her Etsy store, in case you’re a MOVIE DIARY completist!).
This is a great opportunity to remind you that if you’d like to follow in Sara’s footsteps and interview me for your publication about MOVIE DIARY 2023 or whatever else, email me, let’s talk. If anyone from Interview Magazine is reading this, my long standing beef with your publication (real heads will know we’re coming up on 7 years) can be over very quickly by interviewing me, but I would also settle for a copy of your March 2023 Lana Del Rey issue which is apparently impossible to find at the Los Angeles newsstands I’ve been checking out almost every day for the past week. Ball’s in your court.
Defending Your Life (1991) - dir. Albert Brooks
SPECIAL GUEST WRITER: SARA MCHENRY
DEFENDING YOUR LIFE is a romantic comedy that explains the meaning of life, and yet it’s more fun than that sounds. Daniel Miller (Albert Brooks, also the writer and director), is a Los Angeles ad exec, a perfect 1991 yuppie. The movie begins on his 39th birthday, and he’s dismayed when picking up his new BMW convertible because the salesperson allows him to see a fancier car on the lot first. “My car looks like a turd now,” he complains.
Shortly after this exchange, he crashes his new BMW into a bus and dies. He’s resurrected in a place called Judgment City. Here I’ll note that there is no religion in this film, merely a philosophy of life. Judgment City is a secular purgatory: a place where the Universe evaluates dead humans to determine whether they move on to the next phase of existence or go back to Earth for another life here. This is all explained to Daniel by his defense attorney, Bob Diamond (Rip Torn). The premise is that people on Earth are so stupid (Bob calls us “little-brains”) that we make our decisions based on fear. Another attorney will be Daniel’s prosecutor, they’ll review footage of nine days from Daniel’s life, and two judges will decide his fate. When it’s sufficiently proven that he’s grown past making fear-based decisions, he’ll be allowed to move on. Illustrating the concept to Daniel, Bob asks, “Did you have friends whose stomachs hurt?” “All of them.” That’s fear.”
This winter, after two years of constant stomachaches, I spent some time studying Dialectical Behavioral Therapy. Watching DEFENDING YOUR LIFE again this month, I was struck by how closely its thesis matches one of my biggest takeaways: it is not reasonable to expect to eradicate your anxiety. It will always be there. The point is to learn how to work through and around it: to stop letting fear make your decisions for you.
Bob Diamond notes that Daniel is “very concerned with ‘normal.’” When he learns that his love interest, Julia (Meryl Streep, brilliant), is in a much nicer hotel than he is, he worries what that means. What did he do wrong that his hotel is less luxurious? Why do his pillows have mints on them and hers have cream-filled chocolate swans? Why are they reviewing nine days of his life and only four of Julia’s? His experience in Judgment City is what he thinks he deserves: a three-star hotel, a defender who seems distracted and indifferent, all the food he can eat, but he can’t enjoy it out of embarrassment.
In the climax of the film, Daniel employs an important DBT skill called OEA: Opposite to Emotion Action. He’s afraid. He has not learned not to be afraid. But he goes after Julia anyway. It’s the thing that the person he wants to be would do, so he does it. The judges, who had previously decided to send Daniel back to Earth, are watching, and decide to allow him to move on with Julia. Viewers are left with a lot of questions: was this whole thing–Judgment City, Bob Diamond, Julia, all of it–a bespoke experience explicitly to get Daniel to overcome his fears? Will he and Julia get to be together in the next life? Did Michael Schur really never acknowledge how much The Good Place was inspired by this movie? Is Albert Brooks hot?? These little-brain questions distract us from the movie’s very sincere lesson: when you can act in spite of your fears, instead of because of them, great things will happen. Your stomach might even stop hurting.
Sara McHenry is a writer who lives in Chicago, IL. You can find her on twitter @yellowcardigan for as long as that dump exists, and she has an Etsy store selling comics, zines, and an Akira meme patch (you'll understand when you see it). She loves cats, vegetables, and weightlifting.
BLONDE (2022) - dir. Andrew Dominik
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
I’m honestly still not too sure where I land on this one, but I do think I ended up liking it more than I expected. I think it achieves its goal of bringing to light the everyday misery of a misunderstood American icon, but it also does it in a way that seems to kind of revel in Marilyn’s misery, which I think is uncomfortable and at times even sort of tasteless. Was that the point, maybe? That this film is meant as an act of voyeurism or complicity, something to implicate the audience and their being compelled by a beautiful woman suffering so deeply for all of us to see? Is it our fault? (Collectively, as “the audience” I mean, not us personally. I know if you’re reading MOVIE DIARY 2023 then you are nice and good.) I don’t have the answer to that, but I do feel like if Andrew Dominik was going for this sort of metatextual ambiguity, then he should have tried a little harder to get at that. As it stands, there’s just so much misery in this movie that it seems to only want to point at how shitty it was to be Marilyn Monroe. Which, like, yes, we know. We knew that already. Maybe the fact that the misery just seems so over the top is a way to take advantage of this movie officially being a work of fiction rather than true biography? But even then, it makes it kind of disappointing that this is all we can come up with: A famous woman lives a tragic life, and everyone around her profits from her being treated like meat. Andrew Dominik, Joyce Carol Oates, Netflix, and this entire production are not that different from everyone else in this movie. They all still just want a piece of Marilyn Monroe. It’s disgusting. It’s compelling. But I also think it’s kind of unavoidable with this sort of subject matter. I don’t know how Dominik could have even begun to make it seem less like he was so taken by Marilyn’s suffering because I think in a way that’s been the draw of Marilyn Monroe as a pop culture icon. We’re all enthralled by this idea of someone so beautiful and beloved who had this unknowable sadness and tragic darkness in her.
I really loved the score from Warren Ellis on this. The strings and synth tones combo really worked for me, creating a genuinely affecting sense of doomed melancholy that carried the movie. It worked great for the look of this movie too. I thought it was visually exciting, but in kind of a dated way. It sort of reminded me of a classy, enigmatic perfume/fashion ad or Born To Die/Ultriaviolence-era Lana Del Rey music videos, which kind of feels a bit tasteless given how much of Lana’s aesthetic around that time was about being in the eye of the storm of toxic relationships with older men and a fascination with doomed Americana iconography, particularly, you know, Marilyn Monroe. It’s a kind of weird, visual feedback loop that’s sort of wild to wrap my head around, but the exaggerated gloss of it works, even if it’s in service to the heavy handedness of this movie.
Ana de Armas does not have an easy job here, and Blonde is almost three hours of Ana de Armas being put through hell after hell. I think she does a great job with it, but after about an hour of watching this poor woman suffer, I desperately wanted to get her out of there. I guess that’s the thing with these movies that are meant as a dramatic showcase for an actor’s depth and talent. Actors who star in movies like this are trying to prove something, trying to be taken seriously, trying to show off their range and their skill. And that’s fine, that’s part of the job, but these biopics always end up feeling like taking a shortcut to achieving these artistic goals. I say shortcut not as a sort of easy way out because it’s clear that de Armas is really putting in the emotional work for this role, but it’s more in the sense that we as an audience don’t typically need to take on a huge leap in understanding the inner workings of the subject of this style of biopic because everyone who’s sitting down for an almost three hour NC-17 movie about Marilyn Monroe already has some familiarity with Marilyn Monroe’s whole fucking deal anyway. Some level of expectation and understanding is already there at entry, so really the only place to go would seem to be shocking us with all the disturbing details and giving us multiple shots of a CGI fetus (and if you came into this not knowing that her life was pretty fucked up and sad then, damn dude, I bet this was very shocking to you and I hope you’re ok).
The shortcomings of this movie are not de Armas’ fault, to be clear. I think there are a few genuinely moving moments in this movie that hit so hard thanks to her skill and sensitivity at portraying Marilyn Monroe as someone who is constantly carrying around pain and loneliness in her heart, but who also still holds on to a hope that it doesn’t have to be this way, that maybe this is all just some big mistake. There’s the bit Colin Farrell loved, famously, but I also enjoyed these little moments gesturing at Marilyn’s internal solitude like when she’s meeting Joe DiMaggio’s family (allegedly) and she asks them if they just handed her a hard boiled egg to eat “just here, standing up?” and then she’s amazed to learn that people can make their own spaghetti noodles. The parts where she talks about Marilyn being a separate person from Norma and she wonders how and why Marilyn would do these things to her or get her into these situations are heartbreaking. Every betrayal of trust that she encounters feels like the end of the world. Especially the parts where she feels like she’s betraying herself. There’s this one part where Marilyn is getting applauded after the premiere of the movie she filmed after she’d gotten an abortion, where she gets quiet and whispers to herself, “For this, you killed your baby.” The way the shot is set up and the way she delivers the line was so devastating and just as brutal as the much louder and more scandalous or violent traumas she’s faced with in this movie.
The rest of the performances are fine. Obviously de Armas is the center of all this, but we get some good bits from the parade of men that don’t understand her (plus Toby Huss(!), who maybe doesn’t always understand her but he has the grace to not make a big deal about it like all the other men in her life). I loved seeing Bobby Canavale play Joe DiMaggio (allegedly) as this well-intentioned meat head trying to make an honest woman out of Marilyn, never really willing to get to know the real her, preferring his own image of her and their relationship (it doesn’t end well). There’s this incredibly funny shot where Marilyn’s filming that iconic scene from The Seven Year Itch (1955), where her skirt flies up over the subway grate, and she’s surrounded by hundreds of men filling up the streets of New York (artful exaggeration, presumably), elbowing to get a glimpse or take a picture or just generally hoot and holler, and then there’s a slow zoom on Canavale in the crowd, stone faced and scowling. Incredible comedy, though I doubt it was really meant that way. (Actually, quick sidebar: Do we think Blonde will age into camp? Personally I think it’s far too miserable to be camp, but I’m of course open to other readings on the future of this movie. We can talk about it in the Discord if you want.) Also Adrien Brody is in this, playing Arthur Miller (allegedly). Arthur really cares about Norma and he understands that there are hidden depths to her, and because of that they’re drawn to each other, but we never get the sense that he will ever truly understand how deeply being both Norma and Marilyn have messed her up. Their relationship is punctuated with the death of their unborn child, which at this point in the movie feels extra bad because it seemed like things were finally evening out for Marilyn. I generally really love watching Adrien Brody in anything, I think he’s really cool and I loved the way he was styled in this. I am obsessively checking the tracking info on a wider cut of pants that I ordered because of my new style icon Adrien Brody as Arthur Miller (allegedly); maybe this will be the lasting legacy of this movie for me.
NOT A MOVIE
I really wanted to take in another movie this week, but I blew it and I plowed through season 3 of Better Call Saul instead of watching All Quiet on the Western Front (2022), which I’m really dragging my feet on. By the way have you heard of this show, Better Call Saul? I’m watching it for the first time, and unfortunately I have to admit it’s pretty good. I avoided it for a while because I think I’d soured on Breaking Bad the further I got away from it, but I’m really enjoying Better Call Saul. The only thing I’m sort of rolling my eyes at is the fan service-y Gus Fring introduction in season 3. Extremely goofy shit. They linger on the reveal of a Los Pollos Hermanos sign like it’s the page 28 painting in Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) or Dirk Diggler’s cock at the end of Boogie Nights (1997).
Next week: MOVIE DIARY 2023’s first NEW special guest since 2018! Maybe I’ll finally end up watching All Quiet on the Western Front (2022). Or I could dip into some other Buster Keaton movies on the Criterion Channel? Could be fun. Did you know there’s a new Guy Ritchie movie out this weekend with Jason Statham and Aubrey Plaza? I just found out about it! I probably won’t have time to roll out for that this weekend, but I’m glad it’s there I guess!