Love and Other Drugs

Love and Other Drugs begins as a typical romantic comedy, albeit of a particularly sexualized type, since the protagonist Jamie (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a lothario who also happens to be on the cutting edge of Viagra marketing in the mid 1990s. Love is a drug for Jamie and he is also a salesman for a drug that produces erections, which makes him even more popular with both men and women. However, there are two peculiarities in the movie’s relationship with reality. The first concerns the drug manufacturer Pfizer, the appearance of which does not simply conform to the practice of product placement, whereby corporations pay to have their wares appear in films. Pfizer plays a major role both with regard to the anti-depressant Zoloft, which Jamie markets (in competition with Prozac) early in the film, and later of course with the appearance of Viagra. One might think that the machinations of drug salesmen for particular companies might be presented in a more veiled manner, with the names of the manufacturers and drugs disguised but easily parsed, but this is not the case. The other bit of sobering reality is the turn of plot whereby Jamie’s romantic interest Maggie (Anne Hathaway) turns out to be suffering from early-onset Parkinson’s disease. Suddenly Love and Other Drugs turns into a darker piece of popular entertainment, namely Love Story, another tale of romance interrupted by disease. Speaking in terms of the drug of popular entertainment and escape, the difference between these two films lies in the particular cocktail that is being offered. It’s as if we were mixing two previously incompatible substances, beer and wine—in this case sex comedy and melodrama—and then adding some sort of reality twizzler to produce a new, exotic drink.

The Elements of Style

In a front page piece on the increasing prolixity and ambiguousness of Supreme Court decisions, Times reporter Adam Liptak found that the search for unanimity—an aim that Chief Justice Roberts has prioritized—has led to directionlessness, which may account for the increasing length of decisions. “Unanimous opinions are the most complex,” Liptak writes, citing a recent study (“Justices Are Long on Words but Short on Guidance,” NYT, 11/18/10). Interestingly, shortly after the lead-in, Liptak points to the fact that Brown v. Board of Education, a sweeping decision in the history of jurisprudence, took 4,700 words, while the recent Parents Involved v. Seattle, which only dealt with a part of the Brown case, racked up ten times the verbiage, “enough to rival a short novel.” (The same is true of “Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, coming in at a cool 48,000 words, “or about the length of The Great Gatsby.”) Brown, for all its brevity, improved human life. Liptak’s piece, however, also illustrates that consensus is not the only cause of opaqueness. “A decision in May,” writes Liptak, “striking down life-without-parole sentences for juvenile offenders who did not kill anyone said only that states must provide ‘some meaningful opportunity to obtain release.’” Here, a decision that the court was divided on also seemed to be infected with an equanimity that castrated the very basis of the ruling. Of the decision’s vague phraseology, Justice Thomas wondered, according to Liptak, “what that could possibly mean.” Strunk and White’s Elements of Style is a classic whose application has enormous impact both on syntax and, ultimately, thought. It was once de rigeur in our country’s finest institutions of higher learning. Simplicity was one of the underlying principals for composing pity, grammatically tight texts. Yet, “omit needless words,” one of Strunk and White’s prescriptions for concise writing, is not something that can always be applied when it comes to writing laws that appeal to all, or strive not to offend certain constituencies. 

Sauve qui peut

An internal combustion engine turns fuel into energy that powers things like pistons. There is a wonderful scene in Jean-Luc Godard’s Every Man for Himself (Sauve qui peut), recently revived at Film Forum, which makes an engine out of bodies. Two prostitutes have been hired to service a wealthy businessman and his assistant. One prostitute, played by Isabelle Huppert, stands in front of the businessman. Every time his assistant licks her ass, she has to apply lipstick to the businessman’s lips. Meanwhile, every time the businessman steps on the other prostitute’s breasts, she has to blow the assistant. The actors mechanically emit sounds that enhance the machine-like effect. On one level, prostitution in the movie is a metaphor for the relationship between men and women—in one scene Huppert’s pimp beats her up and makes her say “no one can remain independent.” But on another the level, interdependence becomes a metaphor for mechanization, the division of labor and, inevitably, the alienation of man from the product of his labor, which, in the case of the scene in question, is physical love. One of Godard’s points is that love is no longer freed from the context of industrial society and the means and modes by which things are produced. The prostitute is not an exceptional creature, but rather an illustration of the commoditization that affects everyone. At one point Huppert meets up with Nathalie Bye, her counterpart in the film, who is attempting to break off her relationship with a filmmaker named Paul Godard. Huppert’s prostitute sells her body in order to buy the dwelling of a woman who has previously sold her soul. The quid pro quo is reminiscent of the earlier sex scene and the equation is also curiously similar: man + woman = 0.

That American Life

Ira: (Voice-over) It was getting to be a dangerous situation, and something they really hadn’t planned on.  Many educated couples who listen to This American Life on their local NPR affiliate enjoy the show, but few get hooked the way the Epsteins did.

Dr. Epstein: I studied orthodontics at Penn, and later established a successful practice. At one point I’d heard that endodontics was a growing field, but I stuck with my dream of establishing an orthodontic practice. My patients were for the most part spoiled Manhattan private school kids whose parents sent them to orthodonists under the theory that flawless teeth would increase their chances of getting into Harvard. Then my wife listened to one of your episodes and something happened. Soon we were planning our schedules so that we could listen together. I remember the one about the woman who goes to Africa to be with her chimp. It was very touching because the chimp eventually leaves her and she stays on anyway.

Ira: If you could put it in words, what attracted you guys to the show?

Epstein: Well it wasn’t your voice. Both my wife and I have always found your voice very unprofessional, even grating. You sound like a weasel, I have to say.

Ira: So what do you think it was? You don’t have to worry about hurting my feelings. We at This American Life take pride in our no-holds-barred attitude towards American life, and that goes for the show itself.

Epstein: Well, I’d say that we both had this fantasy that someday you would do an episode about us, and that’s exactly what’s happened.

Ira: (V.O.) The admission reminded me of Khrushchev banging his shoe on the podium when addressed the UN. He said, “We shall bury you!” I think he said something worse, but that was the translation that was offered. I’d always thought that This American Life attracted its large radio audience because of the quality of the stories, and, without feeling vain, I thought that my narrations had something to do with it. Was it possible that there was a sizeable portion of our audience who listened simply because they hoped that someday they might be profiled? 

Ira: Wasn’t it magical thinking to believe that if you listened to the show you eventually would find yourself the subject of This American Life.

Epstein: Not really. We’d heard of other examples. For instance, the chimp lady apparently had been an avid listener to the show. I also knew an otolaryngologist who’d been a listener. In his case it was his kids who were the subjects of one of your portraits. Apparently, my otolaryngologist friend had been filling planes with bales of marijuana and doing quite a business running them between Key West and Ponce. His kids had been the ones who turned him in, and apparently the reason they’d done it had nothing to do with their concern about the illegality of the drugs, but rather with their feelings about the duty of citizens to pay taxes on imported items.  Both kids had phobias about the IRS, and I think it was one of the things you explored in that episode.

Ira: (V.O.) At this point I felt the need to cut the interview short so as not to perpetuate the false impression that listeners to This American Life would eventually find themselves on the air. Democracy is nice, but as producers we have to look for the best story. This is Ira Glass for This American Life.

Man with a Movie Camera

Wednesday’s Times reported on a WSJ article about an NYU professor, Wafaa Bilal, who is having a camera “surgically implanted in the back of his head for several months as part of an art project commissioned by the Qatar government” (“Art that Looks Backward,” NYT, 11/17/10). Bilal is accomplishing many things with his act, amongst them changing the definition of the hand-held camera (usually the wobbly, live-action effect is created by holding a camera; now it comes from placing it in the head). He is also changing the association we make when we see the title Man with the Movie Camera (usually we think of the Dziga Vertov classic of post-revolutionary Russia; now we will think of a medical procedure) and producing a new camera technique, which, for want of a better term, we might call the Orpheus effect—remember that bad things happen to Orpheus when he looks back at his beloved Eurydice. Apparently, NYU is all up in arms about the privacy implications. But how is it an invasion of privacy to discover someone talking behind your back? First of all, look at Linda Blair’s famed 360-degree head turn in The Exorcist. Willian Friedkin made cinematic history with that iconic image, but he also distilled the essence of a unique contortion that had been going on at New York literary parties for decades. It’s clear that NYU needs to protect its students, but Bilal’s “art project” is just a form of backhanded realism. It simply points to a phenomenon (like marijuana smoking) that, while not condoned by law, has become so commonplace as to defy jurisprudence. 

Ting's the Thing

What do you do if you are a Nobel Prize winning astrophysicist who is passed over for work on the LHC? It’s a tough job market out there, but it would seem that having a Nobel on your CV would knock down more than a few doors. If you’re Samuel Ting, you move from the micro- to the macrocosm, from the tiny bits of matter out of which matter came to the product of it all—the stars. These two worlds constitute the two elements of the Unified Theory that Einstein was never successful in completing, though it was a solution he aspired to. Described by the Times as “one of science’s great control freaks and worrywarts,” Ting, a 74-year-old M.I.T professor, “discovered a particle that would revolutionize physics, but he took so long checking for errors and looking for more particles that another lab found it and he wound up splitting the Nobel” (“A Costly Quest for the Dark Heart of the Cosmos, NYT, 11/16/10). That was back in 1974. Today, Ting is the author of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a device that studies the dark matter that Ting and other scientists think is the glue that holds the universe together, and which is due to be flown on the space shuttle Endeavor to the International Space Station on February 27. Essentially, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer is the LHC on wheels, what the Times calls “an-eight ton assemblage of magnets, wires, iron, aluminum, silicon and electronics that is one of the most ambitious and complicated experiments ever to set out for space.” The $ 1.5 billion dollar project, which according to the Times has involved 600 scientists from 16 countries, aims at revealing the mysterious substance “whose gravity determines the architecture of the cosmos.”  Some people will go to any lengths to get a job.

127 Hours

Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours is a perfect film school assignment. How to make a movie about a guy who is trapped by a rock—more specifically, a rock that pins his arm so that he can’t move from the brooding beauty of a remote crevice that threatens to become his tomb? It’s also a parody of the notion of individualism and independence. The character of Aron (James Franco) is as industrious as the actor who plays him, and whose hyperactive productivity has been widely documented lately. Aron is haunted throughout the action by the fact that he never returned a telephone call from his mother or told anyone where he was going when he set off on his own for the mountains. If he had told someone, they might have noticed he was gone in time to save him. The answer to the film school assignment, if you are not a student but legendary director Danny Boyle, is to have a flair for fantasy and for depicting the mind in a state of shock. The famous toilet sequence of Trainspotting is the embryo of Boyle’s  style, and its swirling appears like a footnote in the scenes involving liquids, whether they be water or urine. On the matter of bodily functions, it’s lucky that the real-life character Franco plays was not a vegetarian, as he might have had qualms about drinking his own blood, as he does to survive in the movie. On the matter of fantasy, there are two kinds that the movie depicts: that which occurs in Aron’s head and that which is played out for the camera Aron uses to record his experience. At one point, Aron realizes his fantasy life when he masturbates while looking at a photo of a female hiker he’d met along the way. “This rock has been waiting for me its entire life, waiting to come here, right here. I’ve been moving towards it my whole life,” he says. Ironically, Aron’s statement is discountenanced by the sudden turn-around of his predicament that the movie so brilliantly portrays. One moment he is free, insouciant, daring reality, and the next he is totally humbled and reduced. There is no build-up, no intimation of the fate that will befall him, unless of course you’ve read the reviews.