How to Talk About Bruno Without Using the Verb Sashay

Dear Millicent,

The summer movie gorging continues.  Yesterday, I saw Bruno.  I saw so much of Bruno that his urethral opening talked to me and said his name.  Yes, I have seen Bruno.  Quick list of reactions below:

• The first five minutes, especially when the title music started playing, were enchanting.  I settled in for some fizzy raucous incisive entertainment.
• Then I spent the majority of the movie not laughing.  The jokes were funny, but also often of the one note variety, like the SNL sketches that play out for three minutes past their prime.  I often found the idea of the scenes funnier than the scenes themselves.
• I think my favorite moments of the Baron Cohen characters are when we see a glimmer of the creator himself, marveling at the predicament  he has gotten his character and himself into.  Here, he gets whipped by a naked woman who has an extreme, well, everything.  Yes, he is an actor who has created the situation, and yes, he is Bruno, but there are these little microseconds where we can see Baron Cohen exposed in his own reactions.  The same happens when he has created a situation of absolute entropy or ridiculousness and maintains total control–part of the entertainment is watching him expertly not flinch or reveal the joke, a pleasure similar to watching James Bond.
• I have never seen more penis in a movie.
• Like Borat, the movie captures very ugly snapshots of the American character.  It is amazing because of this.  It is uncomfortable and not funny because of this.  It is also important because of this, even if everything has been skewed and is truth without actual truth.
• It is fun to make fun of people and what they will do for fame, and this is an especially apt critique of modern culture. But, the joke feels easy (though he does makes some very uneasy jokes for a grand effect), and I wonder what Baron Cohen has done himself for fame.  I hope he is a virtuous commentator akin to Jon Stewart, and have no proof otherwise…
• The trailers–more proof that we are now middle aged: The movie Couples Retreat.  We are the demographic for that thing (it stars Vince Vaughn, Jon Favreau, Kristen Bell, Jason Bateman), and it distinctly reminds me of movies my mom went to go see in the 80s.  I know we are not exact age, but we are now part of that group, or at least part of the marketing attempt.  It is weird.  I am disoriented by this.

I should have more thoughts at the moment, but it is tomorrow and I have to get up in what is now today’s morning.

Hope you are crafting mosaics with portraits of Roman gods, or botanical herbs,

Yours,

CF

Away We Go But We’re Still Here

Dear CF,

I’m choked up with thoughts. I’ve started five letters to you and finished none of them. This I want to fix. So much to talk about: let’s start with Away We Go, which I finally watched.

I’d forgotten that Eggers and wife wrote the script. The moment those credits flashed on the screen I understood my own reaction to the movie a little better (it varied, I will confess, between amusement, bemusement, disgust, and a few moments of genuine weepiness). Eggers. This is a movie about Eggers trying to grow up. Everywhere in this movie you trip on glimpses of that sparkly McSweeney’s preciousness that stems in large part from adults behaving as if they were younger and more vulnerable than they are. The engine driving this kind of story is the fantasy that we’re all paper flowers pretending to be strong, that there are terrible and lonely and small occasions for beauty, that we are all Young At Heart.

To his credit, I think Eggers is trying to grow. The movie is rife with self-corrections, with scenes that try to save themselves from sentimentality by laying on reality in sloppy layers. Reality! the movie announces. Not sparkly-sadness! The odd reenactment of The Sound Of Music by the adopted kids in Montreal shows exactly what this movie is trying to do: alert you to the fact that up until now you’ve only seen the part of the movie without the Nazis. But this? This is real, it promises. Cue the woman who just miscarried pole-dancing at a club. The same goes for the crazy boss in Phoenix, whose daughter spends the entire last scene (where she tries to kiss Burt) flirting with two men in a truck. There is darkness here.

But he hasn’t made it for exactly the reasons you mention: namely, it takes a sudden turn toward the censored Sound of Music ending. We end up with a tree hung with plastic fruit and a friendless couple that actually prefers it this way—a couple that started out seeking community, started out on what has to be read as a Biblical journey, Mary and Joseph in search of an inn (yes, that’s how highly our writers think of themselves—they are birthing the secular Messiah) and ended up on an island, locked away from the very world it hoped would save it from “fuckuphood.”

The movie starts with that question: “Are we fuckups?” The worry starts them off on a quest for an adulthood free of cardboard windows. That’s the working definition, “free of cardboard windows,” and it never gets refined any further. It never gets asked again, or answered, except by negation (everyone else is a fuckup too). I think you’re right, though you read it much more lovingly than I do: their final answer is the opposite of progress. No matter how delightful that house may be, it’s total regression and total retreat.

You said you found the couple “solid in ways that most movies would rather not look at,” and I found myself thinking too about how the movie tried to undemonstratively demonstrate the kind of intimacy that must (because this seems to be the nature of time and touch) border on boredom. I’m thinking of the car ride, while Verona is eating an apple (before she gets out of the car). I’m thinking of that opening sex scene, which announces exactly the kind of democratic semi-irritated sex this couple has (while, yes, stretching the limits of credulity by keeping the covers on and Verona clothed).

I liked those moments—even if the oral sex scene was a little overdone for shock value, I respect the work it did and how quickly it did it. It was unslick, not about sex at all really, and yet all about the particular brand of awkward the Burt-and-Verona couple inhabits when sex is involved and it isn’t awesome or angry. I liked Burt’s conversation with the other guy while they watched his wife pole-dance—a conversation that could never happen in an Apatow movie because it assumes that two young, relatively cool men might care seriously (and freely) about their partners’ emotional wellbeing and navigate those pretty painful waters with trepidation and concern. I actually thought that was a tremendous scene.  Had the women been present, it might easily have gone the way of Knocked Up—men expressing the right emotion because they’re performing to the ethical tyrannies of an all-female panel of judges.

I liked the scene where Burt and Verona are in bed, he’s babbling amiably about what a good dad he’s going to be, and Verona’s sudden sadness over how their island is being threatened by the very thing they created. (This would obviously be an important concern for this couple, since they have no one outside of themselves). I liked the “vows” on the trampoline.

As for the rest of it… well, the structure was unfortunate. The conceit of taking the Huckleberry Finn childhood Burt wants for their kid and mimicking it prenatally is sort of charming. There they are, sailing down the Mississippi through different zany episodes. But the episodes were so vicious, and so sad, and the lands they visit are populated by (as you so rightly say) cautionary tales!

I would have liked for them to stay in Miami. That was a spontaneous trip—it wasn’t part of their artificial quest. It had real urgency, it offered real companionship. It would have given them something besides themselves. I’d have preferred it to the fabular house dripping with Spanish moss that leaves them just as isolated as they first began, but with bigger windows (that aren’t cardboard).  The movie seemed to be attempting so much—it’s too bad that this is the only definition of adulthood we get.

A note on Verona and her plot: she doesn’t want to get married because her parents can’t be at the wedding? This was ridiculously uncompelling to me. Undertheorized. What does that have to do with anything? Is this woman who paints brain surgeries really the kind who fantasized about her daddy walking her down the aisle? I like and respect her position that “we can only really be good for this one person;” it’s an unambitious stance but I can respect it, even admire the constraints she chooses to put on their reality. But there are so many reasons not to marry—this was the one she chose? I liked her stillness so much. I wanted it to be wiser.

I wished I’d loved it more. This is such an interesting and worthwhile direction. More, please?

Fondly,

Millicent

Centa. Pla Centa.

Darling CF,

Your thoughts on placenta-eating alerted me to an interesting category problem: are placentas things that feed us—in which case it might make sense to continue the tradition—or are they the containers (or rather, conduits) through which nourishment is delivered, in which case the problem is more a case of nesting baskets? One more empty husk, as you put it? Pregnancy scrambles categories like mutualism, parasitism, life, in much the way that viruses do—”is it alive” is the philosophical crux for both kids in utero and viruses.

Life in biology textbooks is usually defined according to whether the thing reproduces, metabolizes, responds to stimuli, grows, adapts, and self-regulates. Viruses occupy a strange liminal space. Some consider them to be alive; others call them “replicators,” things that merely (merely!) reproduce.

Viruses, as you know, consist of DNA enclosed in a protein shell. That’s it. They don’t have organelles. They don’t eat. They don’t respirate. A virion’s modus operandi consists of using its protein shell to inject its DNA into the host cell, leaving the protein capsid behind (an empty husk). The viral DNA takes over the host cell’s DNA-reproducing equipment in the nucleolus and hijacks it into producing its own DNA instead. DNA codes for protein: the new DNA gets enclosed in a new protein capsid, the cell fills with virus, eventually bursts, and the new viruses go in search of new hosts. Rinse and repeat.

Can such a ruthlessly efficient thing—designed merely for the injection and reproduction of DNA—be “alive”? It seemed like an interesting counterexample to your labeling of the placenta as a temporary organ, which had never occurred to me but which I quite like. A virus has nothing to do with consumption or elimination, nothing at all to do, in other words, with feeding. The virion has perfected a mode of reproduction that eliminates the need for organs entirely. On the other end of the reproductive spectrum is the “cake” (ha!).  Different in kind from the vestigial appendix, the stone-ridden gallbladder and inflamed tonsils, the placenta grows and feeds and adapts and is expelled. It’s all organ, only organ, the exact opposite of a system that renders organs (and bodies, for that matter) superfluous.

So should mothers eat this morally correct meat? I guess my first question is a touch proprietary: I want to understand to whom, technically speaking, it belongs. Its fitness as a purveyor of nutrients seems to depend on whose needs it’s actually serving: mother’s or child’s. In other words, if it is a temporary organ (and I accept that it is), to whom does it belong?

Let’s consider the fetus’ status as an efficient parasite. Fetal and maternal blood don’t ever actually mix across the placental barrier. Instead, the baby’s placenta grows into the maternal uterine lining where the (closed off) capillaries filled with fetal blood are bathed in maternal blood in the intervillar spaces. An exchange of nutrients and gases takes place osmotically across that importantly walled-off border. In this sense, then, the placenta is essentially fetal, and in this account, it makes sense for the child to be grouped with it (whether for burial or breakfast).

It’s the feeding that seems important here. Again the honors seem to rest with the fetus, which saves itself from the streamlined viral model of reproduction by consuming and respirating, all via the placenta. It’s that temporary organ, in other words, that permits a less efficient but more complex interaction with the environment. The placenta is actually a product of the zygote, which results from the union of sperm and egg; it isn’t, in other words, built from maternal DNA (unlike, say, mitochondria, which produce all a cell’s ATP, and which are absolutely matrilineal).

I bet you can see where I’m going: if the placenta is specialized for fetal nourishment, why would the organ necessarily benefit the mother? You mention the mother’s many possible reasons for eating the placenta, including the sheer ballsiness of transgressing such a strict taboo (fascinated, by the way, to learn that cannibalism is relegated to the consumption of muscle!), but maybe it’s not so much “I eat my own organs, motherfucker!” as “I eat my baby’s organs, mo-fo!” which somehow puts the taboo on a whole other level.

You see the problem I’m running into—the same category problem that arises whenever abortion gets discussed: can the placenta belong to the fetus and not to the mother? One of the placenta’s functions is to impede the mother’s immune system from recognizing the fetus as a foreign body and attacking it. The mothercake is no such thing! It’s a double-agent—the baby’s advocate and intermediary, the arbiter for contests between maternal and fetal (and paternal, for that matter) biology.

I say, burn after reading.

Fondly,

Millicent

PS–I don’t know how I ended up on such a paranoid note. It probably has to do with the fact that I’m harboring my own little adenovirus at the moment. I am awash in emptied-out plasmid husks!

Growing Pains

Dear Millicent,

I am supposed to be writing up some grand paperwork, which means that I am eating peanut brittle and reading Joan Didion.  Every summer I teach the youths, sleep on a dorm bed, and begin my annual affair with Dame Didion.  It usually starts by accident (a common excuse for an affair), and once it’s on, it’s very on.  Today I was looking for something that could work as an example of how to write about place.  I usually rely on Gay Talese’s “New York Is The City Of The Forgotten,” but shocker, I lost some of the pages.  In the twenty minutes left before class, I was flipping through my text, and refound “Goodbye to All That.”  I think it answers some of the questions that have bubbled up in our conversations.  And, it proves that being cranky is not a demerit of virtue, as much as one’s normal reaction when the gloss is off.

She writes of landing in New York and feeling her life change:

I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary not withstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.

Of course, the city is fabulous, she is fabulous, life is meant to be spent talking and drinking and marveling at fire escapes.

I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later– –because I did not belong there, did not come from there– –but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure out that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs.  I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.

And then, Didion describes what I offer as her Saturn’s return showing up and kicking her in the ass,

That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.

This sounds bleak, mostly I think because Didion leans toward the bleak out of habit.  Does she really regret afternoons of gazpacho and bloody mary’s (quite the tomato lunch, I must add)? But I think it does address that great reckoning that has been looming and is now currently stinging: oh shit, here we are and what have we done and the past is not abstract after all.

I have grown much crankier in the past seven years.  Where I used to consider exuberance my calling card, I now groan aloud more often and lean back in irritation at a variety of things (spandex dresses, neckerchiefs, people’s monologues about how they are going to personalize a wedding and make it different, movies with sloppy logic).  Didion finds that she eventually has no patience for New York. She has to avoid certain neighborhoods because its inhabitants fill her with rage.  I wonder if this is not as sad as it sounds.  Not a closing off and loss of joy, as much as a shedding of a puffier skin that, while protective, keeps one from the truth of the matter.  Perhaps crank and raised bile is actually a reaction to finally losing one’s baby fat.

She ends:

All I mean is that I was very young in New York, and that at some point the golden rhythm was broken, and I am not young any more.

She was 31 when she wrote the essay.

My assumption is that the thirteen-year-olds will not savor this piece, just like my freshman felt no blow from Gaudy Night.  But, I will let you know.

Yours,

CF

Blogmiration

Dear Millicent,

Sometimes, I start gushing about the very popular blog Go Fug Yourself to the uninitiated.  I try to tell them about the delightful prose, but they get stuck on the fact that it is about clothes and the superstars.  Tonight, I think I found the excerpt that will woo them all.  On a recent cover featuring Sandra Bullock:

is this really the best picture of Sandra’s face? There is something so aggressive and overly intense about it. Like she was on a break during the photo shoot, and the photographer came up to her and said, “Look, I’m having a really bad day — I just ate a cat for breakfast and I’m pretty sure my underwear is on backwards and my cousin just came back from the dead after a tragic decapitation accident,” and Sandy paused for a sec, hoisted her leg up on a chair, leaned forward and said, “You’re shitting me, right?” And of course then the photographer would scream with joy and snap a photo, because clearly that mixture of barely suppressed revulsion, confusion, disbelief, and one squished boob is SO 2009.

Lovies,

CF

Eating The Temporary Organ

Dearest Millicent,

It’s Independence Day, happy fireworks! It seems fitting that I can smell the smoke from the many barbecues occurring in my neighborhood, because I want to talk about eating placentas.  Because of my doula work, I know people from a lot of places on the birth spectrum.   This goes from your classic OB/GYN to advocates of Lotus birth (a practice where the umbilical is not cut, and the baby is attached to the placenta until the cord naturally detaches).  This week, one of the more Lotus leaning posted a link to the Time Magazine article about Placentophagy (the practice of eating placenta).  The article is from the father’s point of view, and tells the story of how he carried his wife’s placenta home ASAP, and then watched as a placenta professional came to his house, cooked the placenta and dehydrated it into smart little capsules that his wife would take to help stave off postpartum depression and to produce more breast milk.  The idea is that the placenta is full of beneficial hormones that will help with the sharp changes in body chemistry that take place after birth.  The woman who did the cooking also said that some of the pills could be frozen and taken years down the road to help with hormonal changes in menopause.  The article was a bit repugnant because while it tried to have the everyman narrator honestly engage with the gross out factor of such an idea, there was no report on the outcome, or acknowledgment of his own foibles (and there is a terrifying graphic of a baby with it umbilical cord wrapped around a fork like spaghetti).  The entire thesis of the article boils down to two points: “ick,” and “my wife and her crazy ideas.” Neither of these are as fascinating, or chewy, as placentophagy itself.

A common argument for eating one’s placenta is that most mammals do so after birth.  On Wikipedia, there is a photo of a goat grazing as an example.  Some argue that this is because fear of predators and the need to quickly hide the event. But, this is disproven because mammals tend not to eat amniotic fluid, which is just as interesting to predators.  Then there is the argument that mammals eat the placenta for instant nutrition, something especially important after the exertions of birth and nursing.  Most placentas do offer a mammal help contracting the uterus and producing milk quickly, yet in modern human environments, we have lots of other things that can provide instant nutrition (like grocery stores of food, cafeterias, chicken soup for the soul).

As a  side note, apparently there is a small group of vegetarians that consider the placenta the only kind of morally correct meat to eat because there is no slaughter in its production.  I know.

So, while I have nothing much to say about eating other people’s placentas, I wonder about eating one’s own.  There is something attractive about consuming drugs that your own body has produced.  Instead of taking hormone supplements, using your own, kind of like blood banking.  But, then I tend to think that if the body expels something, it is probably supposed to stay out.  I’ve learned from  Bear Grylls that drinking your own pee can save your life, but it should only be done if there is really no other option around.  So with the placenta, this arguments seems a bit weak. By the by, apparently placenta eating does not count as cannibalism.  Cannibalism insists on muscle, and whatever the placenta is, it’s not muscle.  Same for the brain.

In her very honest account of eating her placenta in a drastic effort to avoid the same severe postpartum depression she suffered with a previous pregnancy, Mary Field says that it worked.  One of the most scary observations was how after her first birth her entire body felt dried up, and  she felt instantly old (this relates to my particular fear of pregnancy: becoming a husk to somebody else, the bigger nesting doll, but that is another conversation, no?), and that this didn’t happen when she ate her placenta.  As she tricked her mouth to swallowing (her strategy was to put it in the back of her mouth and not think about it), her hair and skin kept their luster, and she felt strong.  I wonder how much of this was a placebo effect of making such a bold effort and breaking taboo for one’s own sake.  She put her own hope for health over social cues, which I can see giving a quick boost and power to anybody.  The mental monologue possibly being, “You think I’m gonna be depressed? You think I can’t handle this? I dare you to look in my refrigerator. I am creator and destroyer, I eat my own organs, motherfuckers!”

Apparently the word placenta comes from the Latin word for cake, and is the root for pancakes.  In all kinds of languages, the word translates to “mothercake.”  This probably has to do with the shape, though I have to say that from the placentas I have seen, cake was never an image that instantly came to mind.  Perhaps it is called mothercake because it is the thing that offers sustenance to the child from the mother, and is its own of kind of biological sweet, transforming food to blood and crossing strange borders. And still, I can’t quite find the link that this name suggests a recrossing of borders, with the placenta as ultimate nourishment for mother post-birth.

In the Time article, the author was terrified by the sight of the placenta, but I wonder if he would not be equally terrified by any organ when it sees the light of day. Function is beauty, sure, but most of the things that get out of the body are pretty gross because of their biological intimacy.  Which makes me wonder if eating the placenta does make some kind of sense…like finding a hair in your food, and not caring as long as it is your own?

One mother I know captioned a picture of her placenta as proof that her child had thoroughly trashed her first apartment.  I like this because of its snark, and connection to the idea of home.  In many cultures, the placenta belongs to the child, and is sometimes kept to be buried with them in death. Alternately,  often the placenta is buried under a tree at birth.  The tree grows as the child grows, and so the child always knows where they belong, and will always have a home to return to.   This raises the question of if the placenta belongs to mother or child, or perhaps leapfrogs it in a lovely way, highlighting the shared home of that creation.

The placenta gets the very cool label of “temporary organ.”  I tried to think of other temporary organs, but they are all abstract: grief, homesickness, generosity, infatuation, wit, attention to detail, things we want to write down before bed but don’t, moments where the self is only a forgotten sweater that fits well enough.

I very much like that the human body can grow an entire organ for the job at hand, and that get rid of it when no longer needed.  The question is just when is its job done?  Is it a nice little machine that needs to be burnt after reading, or a more eco friendly device like an edible plate (do they make dessert flavored edible plates? That seems like it would be a great idea).

I dunno.  I find placenta prints (often hung in nurseries, a kind of block print on plain paper made by pressing the placenta, often creating a tree like design), both beautiful and a bit too much.  Too much memento, too much ode.  But, would I like to have a little map of my first apartment, knowing that my parents oddly celebrated my birth?  Yep.

As for the snacks, I worry anytime people mimic what other animals do.  That argument is a slippery slope.

Fireworks are starting.  I can hear them, but not seem them. Must be the finale somewhere.

Night-o, dear one.  Am off to eat something and wonder what the mouthfeel of eating one’s self is.

Yours,

CF

Yes, Michael Jackson Died

Dear Carlita F,

I’d been toying with writing about MJ, but kept circling round to other things. Since you brought him up, though, I will say this: Michael Jackson’s death put me in mind of his acquittal for child molestation charges all those years ago, which we heard over the loudspeakers while shopping for your wedding dress at a Beauty Supply store in the South, the trip that led to the wig-buying which led to the trip to a casino in Philadelphia which led to the dawning of our letterly selves. On that day the store went silent. Everyone stopped, listened, and the entire warehouse burst into shouts and applause when it was announced that he had been found Not Guilty.

That was June 14, 2005. Remember how grateful we felt to have been there at that pertickular moment, even though our own investments lay a little to the left, so to speak? We weren’t really co-celebrants; we were something else—spectators, I guess, more interested in the environs than the event.

On the occasion of Michael Jackson’s death I felt a repeat of that disconnect. I happened to have just—minutes earlier—passed a major exam, the shadow of which I’ve lived under for the last several months. As friends grew sad around me  I kept thinking about Captain Eo, whom I loved, and of how I used to say Michael Jackson when compelled to fill in the “Secret Crush” category in the Slam Books of my friends.

And beyond the clinical sadness I felt when I watched that documentary on his life; the sadness of something beautiful gone rotten, that’s really all I have. I was surprised by the magnitude of response, by people’s teariness and investment and felt a little embarrassed, the way you do when a family member dies and you don’t feel anything.

The day after his death some people came over to my house to sing songs, among them Billie Jean and The Man in the Mirror. Opposite ends of the song spectrum; as split as poor Michael himself.

And you?

Fondly,

Millicent

Catchup

Dear Millicent,

1.) Why haven’t we written about Michael Jackson’s death? His body is going to be on public display at Neverland tomorrow.  His upcoming tour was to be called This Is It.  Fans are apparently suicidal with grief.  It all seems so wrought that overwrought feels like a synonym rather than a further degree.

2.) Why are there so many websites popping up to help us make decisions: Bing, Hunch, Aardvark? The internet is slowly becoming our mass brain, and while it is run by secret algorithms and marketing research tabulations, we eventually will think it has a heart of astrology, and lungs of fate.  In short, are we screwed?

3.) New routines? Netflix wonders you must see as your eyeballs recover from their intense labor: Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Me Without You, Headcase.  There are more…just can’t think of them now.

I am in the land of adolescence, wondering about houseguests, and if youth is over when you ask yourself the question “I didn’t used to get this tired, did I?”

Yours,

CF

Fables and Nests

Dear M.,

Your thoughts about names and the responsibility of labeling things correctly were quite lovely.  I wonder if pen names can be considered honest at all, when they offer such a supreme cloak of distance.  Somebody said, but I didn’t say.  I could have said, but instead, Somebody said.  And yet, anonymity also allows for increased honesty, increased exposure of the most vulnerable and wobbly parts of things (our opinions on what is cool, our hopes in love, the things that we do not want our parents to know we think).  And what do we do here, my wonderful pen pal, if not fully wear the caftan of “us but not us” as we write under two of the best pen names a Millicent and a Carla Fran could have?

But your post also connects to some thoughts I had while watching Away We Go. I don’t think you have seen the film yet, and I encourage you to not read the rest of the post here until you have, because I am going to talk about it as if you have seen it: I am going to chat about plot points with little regard for spoil or alert.  But, before that, let me go ahead and with all caps say SPOILER ALERT, which I just realized I would want on a t-shirt, especially if I was a psychic or prophet.

So, the good news is that the movie was in no way as irritating or quirky as reviews had led me to believe.   In general, I found it to be round and authentic and apt.  It took on a bit of the Apatow set design of real living, but with much less jizz humor, and it would be interesting to do a side by side comparison with Knocked Up. Both movies face the issue of how to prepare to be a parent, how to find your adult place in the world, and look at models of the possible miseries ahead.  But Away We Go has a lot of love for both of its protagonists; neither of them are a plot device for the other’s growth.  The couple is solid in a way that most films would rather not look at: there is no climactic fight and revelation, no betrayal, and no stutter step toward the commitment and the future.   They are young and attractive, they aren’t ridiculously wealthy (for some reason, I adore that there wasn’t a quick assumption that they could afford all kinds of travel and self-finding), and they treat each other nicely without the standard treacle.

But, the movie doesn’t love all its characters equally.  While Maggie Gyllenhaal’s character is a funny little dagger, it is ultimately a cruel one that is about as flat and over-the-top as they come.  This great review from the New York Times suggested that Burt and Verona exist in a world where only they are sainted enough to be three dimensional and fair minded.  In the world of the movie, yes, besides Verona’s sister and Burt’s brother, they are adrift in a sea of caricature.  I almost don’t mind this because I think it connects to that important theme of carving out an adulthood.  Perhaps the extreme amount of caricature is just trying to do clean work by emphasizing how much of the world doesn’t match one’s perspective, and how alienating other people can be.  Who feels that they fully fit, that their parents’ worldviews are parallel to theirs, that the growned uppest friends are inspirations instead of terrors and cautionary tales?

Of course, in its press for clean lines, the movie skips an important part of this particular puzzle, and thus becomes more of a fable than a real take.  For being two such charming people, Burt and Verona have no friends.  Zero.  The cast they visit throughout the movie is either family or distant acquaintance.  There is not an email, phone call, or reference to a single person that they love outside of their little world.  By including like minded friends, the premise of picking up and leaving would have been fuzzier, and Burt and Verona couldn’t stand in such full contrast to the world they are navigating.  Plus, it is harder to land full and final judgment on friends, but it’s a quick guiltless leap for family and distant relations.  This could also be a metaphor for family life, as it does seem that once people family up, they implode upon each other with less and less time for expanding friendships.  The couple does feel sealed off from the world, but isn’t that what nesting is?

The end of the movie struck me for both its easy grace, which I almost mean as a compliment here, and for its ghost dance with the parent child continuum.  The home they have been looking for ends up to be Verona’s empty childhood house.  It has chandeliers, a breeze and a view, and a staircase just meant for children to run down.  So that we understand the house isn’t ostentatious, it has chipping paint and a rusted tin shed out front.  The movie starts in deep winter in New England, and ends with the more pregnant couple sweating in a deep southern breeze on the waterfront.  Lovely.  My question is, is perhaps the best home to raise a child the childhood that you have made peace with?  In fact, by returning to her childhood home, to a childhood landscape that Verona mentions early on as ideal and unruly, isn’t she professing a supreme self love (child rearing is a bit of a narcissistic endeavor)? Child, grow up as I did, and in a way, be me again.  This is possible in the movie because Verona’s beloved parents are both dead.  By choosing this house, she can give her parents the supreme compliment of wishing for a repeat performance, of returning to them.  By having children, we do become our parents, but I feel like the movie’s end takes the hard parts out of this, and makes it tender and scenic, again a fable.

They temper this by showing Verona’s emotional work of return, and the pain of her parent’s death, which I appreciate even if it was still a quick lob.  The movie moves fast, makes some easy jumps and events pile up very helpfully for the narrative. But, I never once groaned out loud.

I also very much like the final presentation of parenthood and adulthood: an empty house, a familiar one, and a landscape that is settled, exotic, even lush, and waiting to grow around them.  If it was a full on fable, vines would curl around their doorway and bloom as they sat, indeed sealing them off, but in the way that life does when there are are graces waiting for you, and perhaps elves and gnomes at the corner of the page.

A movie that did similar work, but with a more delicate and complex reach was the wonderful Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  It seems a true hurdle of adulthood (one I haven’t climbed–inflexible hamstrings) is making a world of your own without fear of what you have seen so far,  and with the extra nut of not assuming that fearlessness equals protection.

I wonder if this movie will be dated in 5 years, or as Mr. Carla Fran guessed, 5 months.    I wonder if 17-year-olds will see this and sigh, or if it is our generation’s turn at stories of early middle age.

Either way, I recommend the movie, though think it would make for an awkward second or third date.

Yours,

CF

* PS: As a final nitpick, the movie did a major disservice to doulas.  Burt says something along the lines “only dads who don’t want to be involved or don’t know what they are doing need doulas,” after the terrifying mother superior (Maggie Gyllenhaal) asks who their doula is.  I am constantly working against the stereotype that only mamas who use slings and have midwives use doulas.  Doulas help dads help mama.  They don’t get in the way.  And unterrible people use doulas.  Really.

*PPS: There looks like there is a slew of quirky down to earth romantic comedies coming out, including one charmer called Paper Heart.  Maybe the bromance has led us to this, the real person anti-formula (always starring Michael Cera).

*PPPS: This post bumps my ode to my cat off our list of recent posts.  This makes me sad, so I’m throwing a link to it here.

Noms de Plume

Dear Carla Fran,

I hope Leticia writes you or sends you some classy pumps. While you are being plagued by mail for a potentially whole new You who vacuums and complains about noise, I’m deliberating on whether or not to befriend an old Me.

It’s funny you should mention this, as just this morning I was thinking of a time—you may remember—when I developed some mail problems of my own. Due to an error on a change of address form Mama Millicent and I temporarily became one person in the eyes of the U.S. Mail, and it was disastrous and impossible to extricate our two separate selves back into Millicents Sr. and Jr., and I found myself on the brink of changing my name not because I was married, but because it suddenly seemed necessary—in an urgent and practical sense—to distinguish myself absolutely from my mother.

Had I gone through with that plan, I might have taken the name of an alter-ego I’ve cultivated over the years, an avatar of sorts who wrote Amazon.com reviews, had a Myspace account, and conducted all manner of questionable activities online. This alter-ego was in danger of becoming a nom de plume—I liked the name because it was ungendered and seemed like it might shield me (should a book ever materialize) from the color pink. This alter-ego was generative and hermit-like. It was unfrivolous and proudly unconstrained by society. It even started a blog. When I gave my husband-to-be an engraved engagement gift it was the alter-ego (which I keep wanting to spell altar-ego) that gave it.

My husband-to-be-that-was (it’s getting complicated) had an alter-ego too, in whose name he wrote songs and circulated albums. Let’s call him Harry. This gift was dedicated to Harry. To Harry from alter-Millicent, is more or less what the thing said.

I haven’t thought about my alter-ego in quite some time, but recently, when I idly clicked into the Facebook universe, among the list of “People You May Know” was my other self, still faceless, still genderless, with the little cowlick curl on top.

I don’t remember how to get into the account. I don’t actually remember creating the account. And no matter how many times I click the little X to dispose of that particular suggestion, it comes back, much like Leticia’s mail.

As for Mr. Millicent, he felt, I think, that Facebook was rather beneath him. He joined briefly, but he and I were never Facebook friends and he subsequently deactivated his account. Harry, however, has cropped up—as a person—commenting on the profile of someone we know. Mr. Millicent-that-was is nowhere to be found—he is still safely above the fray, one supposes—but Harry is around and kicking.

I assigned my students the project of creating a fictional character and starting a profile for them on one of the more prominent online dating services. They’re supposed to write a scene that incorporates as a character someone who expresses an interest in their fictional persona and writes back. Maybe a slightly cruel exercise, but it’s fitting, I think, that the doppelgangers on whose behalf my engagement gift was given and received are floating around in the Facebook ether. It helps to think that the contracts we made and the alliances we contracted were made in other names. Poor Harry and alter-Millicent were so pumped with great art projects, they had no idea what they were actually authoring.

On reflection, after rejecting her so many times, the way one does reject the People You May Know—as they usually consist of People You May Know But Rather Wish You Didn’t—I’m thinking of giving in and adding her as a friend. I wonder what she’ll say.

Fondly,

One of the Millicents