MOVIE DIARY 2023: YOU KNOW, IF YOU WOULDN'T OPEN YOUR MOUTH, EVERYTHING WOULD BE JUST FINE.

Here we are, once again at the start of another classic MOVIE DIARY 2023 post. I’ve been waiting for this week, because this week my special guest is Tessa Strain! Tessa was the very first special guest back on MOVIE DIARY 2018, and she’s back now for her (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) sixth guest post. She’s also recently wrapped up shooting on former MOVIE DIARY 2018 special guest Caroline Golum’s new movie, Revelations of Divine Love, which is going to be an absolute banger. A genuine movie star on MOVIE DIARY 2023!

Entourage (TV, 2004-2011) & Entourage (2015) - dir. Doug Ellin
SPECIAL GUEST WRITER: TESSA STRAIN

My premonitions are few, but they are accurate, so at the dawn of 2023 I am obliged to tell everyone what I know: that this is the Year of Showbiz. I find that, when I share this news, most people intuitively get it without much explanation, but to the unconverted I offer the following:

The Year of Showbiz celebrates the crassness of creating entertainment: the schmoozing, the sweat, the desperation. It’s the glamour and grotesqueness of how the sausage gets made; it’s self-mythologizing monologues about “joining the circus” (see: The Fabelmans, The Offer);  it’s Joan Crawford’s birth year on Wikipedia reading “190?”;  it’s rolling calls by the pool; it’s wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses into a restaurant that serves a shrimp cocktail that costs more than a tank of gas; it’s the fixed smile and heaving shoulders of a Broadway hoofer taking a bow at the end of a grueling song-and-dance; it’s a guy in suspenders carrying a potted palm past a Vegas showgirl and a Roman centurion talking shop on a backlot; it’s Tom Cruise hanging off the wing of a prop plane yelling “SEE YOU AT THE MOVIES!”; it’s big, it’s loud, it’s SHOWBIZ!!

A surprising thing happens, which is that, in response to this spiel, upwards of four separate people ask me if I’m going to watch Entourage, as though somehow coordinated. I have to admit, it hadn’t occurred to me. For a show that ran eight seasons (nine if you account for the divided season 3) and spawned a feature film (coming to that later, I know what blog I’m writing for), the cultural shadow of Entourage seemed strangely paltry, an embarrassing relic not exactly crying out for reevaluation. HBO execs circa 2004 may have considered the Venn diagram overlap between Sex and the City and “Mark Wahlberg’s nostalgia for being slightly less successful” a potent cultural force, but the tale of up and coming boygenue Vinny Chase and his merry band of smarmy hangers-on has surely aged like milk. I had watched somewhere between two and three seasons of it while it was airing and primarily recalled that it felt like looking in a nightmarish funhouse mirror where my worst anxieties about men were reflected back at me, so in spite of the fact that it clearly fits the Year of Showbiz brief, I tell my pals that I’ll pass, for the sake of my ever-fragile sanity.

A quick, but relevant digression: I’m starring in a movie. I’ve found that there is no cool way to say this, no way to be cagey that doesn’t invite more questions. For months I try to explain why I’m going to New York for the month of February without actually spelling it out, burying the shame of my most dearly held dream coming true under a layer of euphemism, forcing friends and acquaintances to drag it out of me piece by piece, my evasions crumbling. So here it is: I’m starring in a movie about the 14th century mystic Julian of Norwich, who upon her deathbed received sixteen visions (“showings”) of Christ and then spent the rest of her life walled up in a cell at Norwich Cathedral journaling about it. I haven’t acted in eleven years, but this should be fine! It’s the Year of Showbiz, right?!

Somewhere in the air between LA and NY, I change my mind about watching Entourage. This month on set is already going to be a test, a project, a crucible. Wouldn’t it be funny, I think, to do it now, just to have done it, as a gag, as a goof, as a sick little hobby? Wouldn’t it just be so silly to tell people that watching Entourage start to finish is the linchpin of my “artistic practice”? But, like many things I’ve started as a joke, watching Entourage rapidly takes on a life of its own. Here I am, living alone for the longest stretch of my life in a sublet in Ridgewood, keeping strange hours, making myself emotionally vulnerable in service of the seventh art, playing a historical figure who chose a life of eternal solitude—is it any surprise that I find myself gradually clinging to five fictional adult men who seemingly cannot be apart from each other for any length of time? 

And who are these happy few, this band of brothers to whom I have lassoed myself? The aforementioned Vincent Chase, the Queens-raised pretty boy whose empty-vesselhood and long lashes mark him for seemingly inevitable stardom. Vince’s older half-brother, Johnny Drama (né Chase), a has-been actor who is forever being kicked down the rungs of the ladder to the stars of the cinema firmament. Vince’s best friend, the loathsome E[ric], former manager of a Sbarro’s, eventual manager of Vince, and the most insidious man in America (one woman’s opinion!). Turtle, Vince’s friend and driver, whose stoner affability belies a petulant attitude and the embarrassing ambition to be a business owner (he doesn’t seem to care what business). Does Ari count, even though he lives in another house and actually has a job? Friends, I cannot live in a world where Ari Gold, Vince’s agent, abusive boss, embattled wife guy, and a man of perpetual, white-hot, maniacal rage, doesn’t count. Jeremy Piven didn’t give himself mercury poisoning from eating at Nobu too often for Ari not to count!

There’s no getting around it—these guys are a boorish and tedious relic of early aughts raunch culture, and the music supervision on this show gives me the elder millennial equivalent of acid flashbacks. But sometime around Season 3, I begin to soften. I find myself referring to the titular entourage as “my boys,” “my friends,” “my peers” (not E, though—E can go fuck himself, no quarter for E). Around this time I start taking screenshots, by which I mean, using my phone to take pictures of my laptop screen, as part of what I now term “my Entourage journey.” Ari tells the boys that “All will be well,” a stone’s throw from Julian of Norwich’s own received message from Christ himself that “All shall be well and all manner of things shall be well,” and I send the screenshot to my director (and friend and Movie Diary 2018 contributor) as if to say “SEE? The Year of Showbiz provides!”

Nearly every episode hinges on the random vicissitudes of luck and hurt feelings that power the most influential Hollywood decision-makers, but as the show wears on we begin to see the governing dictate that the boys will always land on their feet begin to wobble. Things look less aspirational as money troubles mount and the stench of desperation starts to cling to Vince and his titular entourage. Will Batman and Robin make it out of this one alive? How many mistakes separate a Vincent Chase from a Johnny Chase? Must my boys, my friends, my PEERS (not E) surrender their dignity to keep everything they have from slipping through their fingers?

For Johnny Drama, the question is almost moot—what dignity he may have had has been abandoned long ago, in service of vanity, a paycheck, and most embarrassingly of all, a love of acting. Because Johnny Drama really, truly loves to act. Alone among the men of Entourage, he is genuinely motivated by a passion for his art (with the proviso that he’d rather you not photograph the right side of his face—same tbh). He is a figure of pathos, a holy fool who has given all he has to a dream that he may be incapable of earning on merit but is determined to earn through sheer will and shamelessness. It is an abject struggle and it is a struggle that I, watching Entourage on my laptop four to ten episodes at a time, am all too acutely aware I ran away from in sheer terror of the potential for degradation. Because it is degrading to open your heart to want, to make yourself vulnerable to rejection and failure and mediocrity. 

And yet here I am, shooting this movie. I joke that I am “coming out of retirement,” “making cronyism the new nepotism,” “pulling one last job.” Anything, anything to deflect from the reality of the situation: that I have been given an impossibly precious gift by an immensely talented friend, and I am nearly gripped with terror at the possibility of fucking it up. That I received a call and answered it without knowing if I would be equal to the task, because in my heart of hearts it was the call I’d been waiting for my whole life. Woof.

Entourage should have ended at the conclusion of Season 5, with Vince and the boys having retreated to the old neighborhood in Queens after Vince is fired off a movie called Smokejumpers, helmed by a hostile German director played by Stellan Skarsgård (whose character’s name is pronounced like the German “Werner” but is unaccountably spelled “Verner,” and please don’t ask me if it’s a joke because I LITERALLY CANNOT TELL). For the first time since the show began, Vince, ever a cipher, must decide if he actually wants to be an actor now that he, like his brother before him, will have to humble himself to do it. 

Last year as I was reading Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, I was haunted by scenes of Anna Wulf in sessions with her analyst. She is often asked about being blocked as a writer, to which she defensively replies that she cannot be blocked, because she’s not a writer anymore. You know, CHECKMATE. I felt more than a twinge of recognition, having at the time made what I felt was the wise and radical decision to let myself off the hook with regard to producing any kind of art and focusing instead of being well-read, well-fed, and buff. This, I thought, was the path to true peace and self-acceptance. When new acquaintances asked me what I did for a living, I simply answered with my job, without attempting to exonerate myself from mediocrity by enumerating my hobbies and aspirations (even when prompted, and some might say begged to). In retrospect, I made a lot of people uncomfortable.

It goes without saying that Vincent Chase wrestles with this for a far shorter stretch of time than I did. And because this is Entourage, he isn’t obliged to humble himself more than the length of an episode before Marty Scorcese casts him in his next movie.

It is with a heavy heart that I inform you, it’s all downhill from there. Three seasons and a movie (MOVIE DIARY 2023) later, my boys, my friends, my peers (not E), limp into the sunset having survived some of the most tonally inconsistent and mortifying plot arcs I’ve ever endured watching. As for me, having wrapped my viewing of the entirety of Entourage, I finish my last day on set and bid a fond farewell to the cast and crew.  And I beat my own retreat back to my hometown to figure out what comes next in this, the Year of Showbiz.

Tessa Strain is a writer (and actor????) living in Geoff’s apartment. Her work has appeared in Bright Wall/Dark Room and The Comics Journal. She is @tessastrain on Twitter, where she does a pretty good job, and on Instragram, where she does a bad one.

Five Easy Pieces (1970) dir. Bob Rafelson

Between this movie and Breathless (1960), I’m certainly getting a full helping of movies featuring men who are gigantic assholes! I liked Five Easy Pieces though. There are definitely some similarities between Breathless’ Michel and Five Easy Pieces’ Bobby (Jack Nicholson). They’re both insufferable jerks a lot of the time, they’ve both dragged some poor woman into their orbit, but where the movies differ is that Five Easy Pieces seems more interested in uncovering why Bobby is like this, while Breathless never really questions Michel about anything, content to let him ramble on with whatever bullshit he thinks he believes in at the moment.

Bobby is, by his own admission, not a nice person. He moves around a lot because he doesn’t want to ever feel tied down to one place. He thinks that things usually get bad when he stays around long enough. Right now he’s working in an oil field in California, and he’s seeing this woman Rayette (Karen Black). Rayette’s a waitress at a diner and an aspiring singer. She’s also a big Tammy Wynette fan, always listening to Tammy’s records on repeat whenever she has a chance (to Bobby’s annoyance). Bobby doesn’t treat Rayette very well. He seems constantly annoyed by her, he never tells her he loves her, he cheats on her. Despite all this, Rayette is hopelessly devoted to him, doing everything she can to please this unpleasant man. For her, living like this is just like she’s living in a Tammy Wynette song.

Bobby’s the kind of guy who’s always been running away from something — himself, his family, people in general, romance, responsibility, commitment — and he’s done it enough that there’s no other way he knows how to live. Part of the reason why he’s such a jerk is that he knows that this is the most effective way to get people to back off and leave him alone and free to pack it up and move on. Bobby’s ready to leave once again when he finds out that Rayette is pregnant, but when Bobby’s sister, about the only person he seems to actually care about, tells him that their father is paralyzed after suffering from two strokes, Bobby knows he has to face this. He takes Rayette along, less from a sense of him turning over a new leaf and more from her threatening to kill herself if he leaves her.

It’s both affecting and frustrating watching him chafe as he feels the walls start closing in around him and the hooks of obligation to people other than himself start sinking in. You get the sense that maybe this time Bobby is maybe making some sort of effort to not run away from his problems for the first time in his life, and that it’s not easy for him. It seems like every fiber of his being is crying out as he fights the instinct to leave everyone behind, and Nicholson plays this with such a great mix of discomfort and aggression. We get a brief aside when along the way Bobby and Rayette pick up two hitchhikers, Palm and Terry, two women who are trying to move to Alaska because, as Palm insists, “It’s cleaner.” Palm is just as unpleasant and confrontational as Bobby, grousing about how filthy people are these days and lamenting the influx of “so many stores and stuff and junk full of crap I can't believe it.” Palm is like Bobby in that she’s also running away from something and whatever she’s looking for is something completely unattainable. Alaska is no more pristine than any other place with people in the world. Where they differ, we eventually learn, is that Bobby isn’t even looking for anything in the first place, unattainable or not. Bobby’s just running.

When Bobby and Rayette finally arrive at Bobby’s old family home, we see what Bobby was running from. Bobby’s family is wealthy, they live in a mansion, and they’re a family of stuffy intellectuals and musicians. Out of embarrassment, Bobby makes Rayette stay in the motel for the week while he visits his family. He tells her it’s because the family situation is difficult and he needs to scope it out before bringing her in, but we also get the sense that he leaves her behind because to Bobby, Rayette is an embarrassing indication of a lower class life he lives after leaving his family, a reason for them to look down on him. Rayette eventually makes it up to the house on her own, and Bobby is mortified. She’s very polite and friendly, but she lacks the polish and refinement of Bobby’s family and their friends. At a dinner party, some friends of the family are having a pretentious, academic conversation, and when Rayette cheerily and obliviously chimes in asking if there’s a TV in the house, this woman who’s been sucking up all the air in the room pounces on Rayette, insulting her in a roundabout way to prove some larger intellectual point about class and the imprecision of language or whatever, who cares, she’s a jerk. Bobby immediately stands up to defend Rayette against this woman’s intellectual digs, calling her a pompous celibate, then extending it to the rest of the room, telling them they’re all full of shit. While Rayette is flattered by it, this outburst goes well beyond just wanting to defend Rayette. These feelings have been building in Bobby ever since he returned home and had to be around all these pretentious phonies again, and this is what finally makes him snap.

While Bobby’s staying at the house, he begins an affair with his brother’s fiancé Catherine. They fuck once, but Catherine never lets it go beyond that. After Bobby’s big outburst, he and Catherine meet the next morning out in the woods. Bobby tries to get Catherine to leave everything behind and be with him, but Catherine shuts him down with a pretty devastating read on who he is:

You're a strange person, Robert. I mean, what will you come to? If a person has no love for himself, no respect for himself, no love of his friends, family, work, something - how can he ask for love in return? I mean, why should he ask for it?

I think this really fucks him up, him being perceived so truly and finally understanding that he’s been living for nothing. Before he leaves, he tries to finally face his father. Bobby wheels him out, determined to tell his father his feelings. His father is unresponsive because of his stroke, but Bobby talks anyway, trying to explain himself to his father he hasn’t spoken to in years. He tells his father that he moves around a lot because he thinks things tend to get bad when he stays. Bobby alludes to their relationship falling apart, pushing him to run away, and we get the sense that this is the origin of Bobby’s antisocial, defensive mentality. He believes every relationship will go bad the same way it went bad with his father if he stays around, so he moves on before it he can get hurt. Bobby doesn’t know how to get closure with his father, especially with his father being unresponsive like this, so all he can do is give him a tearful apology about their relationship never working out. If there were some last ditch effort to salvage his relationship with his father, this was it, this was all Bobby had. After he leaves, Bobby will never see his father again.

The ending of Five Easy Pieces is pretty shattering. Bobby and Rayette stop at a gas station on somewhere on the long drive back down to home. Rayette walks over to a nearby diner to get some coffee, and Bobby heads to the restroom to take a piss and have a soul-searching look in the mirror. When he steps out, he flags down a truck driver and asks for a ride north, telling him he’s trying to get to Alaska. We’re left with Rayette returning to the car and futilely looking around for Bobby, and that’s it, the credits roll. After giving himself a few weeks of facing confrontation and responsibility, Bobby has come out the other end of it knowing that he won’t change. He’s still angry, he’s still afraid, and not even a baby on the way will tie him down, so he drops it all to move to Alaska. He’s been like this, loveless and ambitionless, and so convinced of what he doesn’t want that he doesn’t even know what he does wants for himself, so he chooses the same destination as those hitchhikers from earlier. It doesn’t really matter where Bobby ends up, he’ll always be looking out for the next place, afraid to stick around long enough to get hurt, but also unwilling to stick around long enough to grow.

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