Movie Doubles - 'Up In The Air' & 'Couples Retreat'

Paens To Emotional Retardation

I haven't done a movie double for a while so I thought I might tackle one here, just for the heck of it. I am sort of being chased back into thinking about cinema a bit more these days because basically, having won it all in 2009, the Yankees are oddly unexciting to me this year.I've hardly followed the Spring Training narrative this year and feel oddly detached from that part of my blog-life.

It's occurred to me perhaps that the problems of my own life stem from the fact that I have an enduring love for things, that I acquired in my childhood and teenage years, that I still don't relinquish - and that perhaps this is symptomatic of my own emotional retardation. I don't know how much stock people can put into the notion of emotional retardation any more than they can put stock in Emotional Intelligence, but I thought I'd throw that out there just for a thought.

One of the big myths in psychology is the mid-life crisis which manifests itself in Hollywood plot-lines with regularity and indiscriminate stereotyping of people who undergo this phenomenon where their marriages break down out of ennui and the next thing you know they're doing something radically different. How feasible is this in the real world? How often can such apparently random transformations be supported in our lives?

Which brings me to two recent films that can only be described as paens to emotional retardation.

How Emotionally Retarded Is This, Exactly?

'Up In The Air' is that rare American film that does not end with the formation of a family. Not even as a surrogate. In that sense it is already a film that busts out of the box of American cinema, even with George Clooney playing the main character who seems suave and impervious to the threats of his own lifestyle. He has a moment of reconsideration which sits in diametrical opposition to the Natalie character who persuades him to consider a more mundane existence. And yet, through no choice of his own, he sets off again on an endless voyage through the turnstiles of airports and interiors of airplanes.

The picture the film paints of a life of a traveling professional is at once bleak and inviting. It's true that when you're on the road for work, you become strangely detached from the world and the distance allows you to coolly dismiss values and cohesion with a wider society. It's no secret that a lot of us would choose to be such travelers, even if it meant we were sacking people across a big country, feeding off their tragedies. The interesting thing about 'Up In The Air' is just how beautiful a case it makes for such detachment. It is exactly the sublime and the dharma on the road that Kerouac writes about. It is an outward journey, if built on some mundane means.

In contrast to the endless vagabond road in 'Up In The Air', 'Couples Retreat' single-mindedly converges on an island resort in the tropics where couples undergo therapy that would scare most couples, just to find out how screwed up their relationships are. The search for meaning in their relationships reveal the comic boredom of married life in Suburban America, and the only thing that seems capable of redeeming them is their abreaction to European accents.

'Couples Retreat' is in strong contrast to 'Up In The Air', a very homeward bound journey. All the characters are actually on the road to affirm and re-affirm the values of their homes and hearths. The comedy arises from the essential disconnect between how much value is placed on the ideal and the cheesiness of the lives of the people who set out on the quest.

American Vernacular

Dialogue and the misdirection that ensues from the mis-communication forms a great deal of the interest in 'Up In The Air'. Most films have dialogue to express non-visual abstractions; because if it's visible, then it's film-able and that solves most issues. When a film is as emotionally abstracted (and not in the Sharon-Stone-Emotionally-Cubist, sense I might add) the net effect of characters conversing on screen becomes very abstruse and obscure.

American vernacular is at once the language of Pax Americana but also the repository of the most obnoxious and vicious corporatese and cliches. Americans invent vernacular with gay abandon as if the English language is infinitely elastic in meaning. So Clooney's character slides and elides through all the tough conversations of sacking people - on behalf of the linguistically challenged. He then meets a woman who is equally dissociated from the words she is using.

What makes Clooney's character interesting to watch is the amount of self-awareness he displays about the dys-functionality of sacking people gently.

Meanwhile, we find 'Couples Retreat' is also filled with corporatese cliches that drive 4 couples on to the plot device of going to a resort island for therapy. One of the couples resorts to presenting the idea with a Power Point presentation to convince their friends and the pathos that comes out of it is awful, which I figure is where the black laughs come in. It's a little hard to talk about substantial issues of the heart when the language itself is infested with these half-digested, re-regurgitated shards of American advertising floating around the conversation.

The impenetrable vulgarity of the language is therefore where so much of the irony resides in both films, and that can only be put down to the triumph and decay of the American vernacular. I only wanted to point this out with these two films because they actually show this problem more than many films in recent memory.

The Anxiety Over Boredom

Both films are coming at a very similar problem and it is boredom in life. No matter how passionate the initial feelings, a passionate love always is under threat from receding into boredom. The couples in 'Couples Retreat' are struggling with this issue as every bit as George Clooney's Ryan Bingham and his siblings and friends.

The creeping ennui in couplehood and matrimony drives the 4 couples to a strange retreat which so happens to be on a tropic paradise but is more threatening than a trip to that orgy night in Kurbick's 'Eyes Wide Shut'. All the characters are struggling with the anxiety of boredom in a palpable way. Ryan Bingham in 'Up in the Air' hooks up with a woman Alex who seems like the ideal woman for him, only to find out she too is looking for some way to overcome the anxiety of boredom in her 'real' life back home in Chicago.

The extremes these characters go to in both films is exactly what connects these films thematically. We live in fear of the boredom when it is actually within us to be so boring to others.

Tangential to this issue is the inability to separate stimulation from interest. If you play guitar, that's interest. If you play Guitar Hero, that's mere stimulation. Yet, one of the important plot lines revolves around Vince Vaughn's characters being able to better play 'Guitar Hero' than the concierge of the retreat.

Ryan Bingham has made traveling itself an end in order to not face the boredom - replacing it with another. The seeming mystery of passing through airport check-ins and body scans and luggage pickups (and we all know there has to be a skill in that) all serves to create a whole bunch of business for him not to face the boredom of his life. It's really strange to watch 2 films back-to-back that are centered around this same anxiety.

Minimalism and Consumerism

The solution to the Anxiety of Boredom presented in both films then is interesting. Bingham's choice in 'Up In The Air' is to stoically pare back his own life to the point of minimalism and utter lack of connections. We can't tell whether the ambivalence stems from a desire to embrace the minimal or a desire to flee the complex. The texture of that minimalism isn't actually all that inviting in the film. If he didn't wash and iron his suits, he's next door to being homeless and without any taste whatsoever.

By contrast, the 'Couples Retreat' solution seems to be an embrace of consumerism in the hopes that something you will purchase along the way, whether it is an object or an experience, will make you feel better. It's a little more than an excuse to keep playing the game, but play the game they do. This is a decidedly un-philosophical, un-thinking un-reflective movie when it comes to the underlying assumptions of contemporary society. Consider this: if it was possible to buy the experience of wind-surfing or jet-skiing at a resort where next week somebody else will purchase tho experiences, what actually makes that experience particularly uniquely your own? Isn't this the problem with tourism rather than traveling?

At least Bingham is traveling. He's just not looking; mostly because he might see something that captures him. The couples in 'Couples Retreat' are trying to spend their way to Nirvana.

Assumptions About The Inner Spirit

Maybe it's better to understand both these films as yearning for spirituality. 'Up In The Air' makes a case for detachment a la Buddhism, only to falter and pick up again. 'Couples Retreat' seems to make a case for New Age-ism, but a closer inspection reveals the consumerist never quite dies in the American quest for Spiritualism. It's like that Woody Allen joke where he says his goal is to forge in the fiery smithy of his inner soul the zeitgeist of his generation, then mass produce it as a sell-through high volume product.

'Up In The Air' actually makes a reasonable case for detachment and discarding connections. It's just that the connection between the asceticism and the hedonism are never fully extinguished, which makes for drama. The most telling moment might be when Bingham flies to Chicago to find commitment to the world, only to find that Alex has connections of her own already. Therein lies the drama an betrayal, but it's also oddly discomforting. It's a good, memorable moment - one of the best in Clooney's career.

'Couples Retreat' says it's looking for the inner animal spirit, but once again, if you can just buy it off a shelf from a guru, what exactly is the point in that purchase. Maybe I'm being a little harsh on what is at best a lowbrow comedy, but it strikes one as pretty bad pretension to raise the issue and then just not deal with it except as forms and bullshit. It's not like we as the audience brought up this stuff.

It's interesting that both these films proceed on the assumption there is the spiritual and make various gestures towards it and the metaphysical, and then proceed on a largely materialist journey. I love America, but sometimes the bleak, barren-ness of the American cultural psyche scares the living daylights out of me.