THE NARCISSISTIC MALE GAZE: It's not you, it's me, because I am You

Trying again to watch JUNO the other night, and of course failing, made me ponder the difference between the male actors I love and the male actors I loathe the way a blind man loathes the mirror. How sharply sloped is this divide, the peak of a chart of self-recognition and self-disgust projected! Some actors can cross it but few return. What does this have to do with JUNO? Exactly, my learned reader, exactly.

There's a prejudice at work in this entry which I presume is based on gender; there are very few actresses I don't adore, now matter how narcissistic they are. It's a complex that seems meant for beautiful women, not coded-straight men, but when a guy is a narcissist full-blown egoic peacock it gets right under my beautiful, soft skin.

Here are some of my major culprits. Note in advance this is not necessarily meant to be a condemnation of their skills as actors, but more in the reaction they induce in me. Thy mileage may vary:

1. TOM CRUISE - Public Enemy Number One, he's his own worst enemy with deep rooted classic alpha-wussa-male Napoleanic coded complex vanity fair. His saving grace is that he's not afraid to make fun of his own raging hard-on of a narcissism, as in MAGNOLIA and--presumably--EYES WIDE SHUT, where it's especially noteworthy in his early bedroom scenes with wife Nicole. In a married couple (onscreen and off) has there ever been such insecure, casual disinterest in the other person's body? Kidman is great, peeing with the door open and dragging her pelvis around like a ball and chain of wasted nymphotential but Cruise is all about posing just right in the bed so as to perfectly show off his manly bicep; perfect hair and the satisfied smugness radiating out of his ever pore. He's been married to this woman long enough to have a kid (in the movie) yet still seems paralyzed by the need to show off. But if Kubrick deconstructed him that way, to reveal the core inner spoiled brat within us all, then why do I still cringe in embarrassment, like recognizing my own base humanity in the deepening voice of my little brother?

I do appreciate his focus and attention in big action films, he can charge up your adrenalin if you let him, like a personal trainer!

2. RICHARD GERE - He of the sophisto-Zen smugness, simultaneously humbling himself and enjoying the beauty of his own humillity as he comes before us to sing and dance and perform the painfully wry smile of one who gets all the women. He will always be AMERICAN GIGOLO to me, because that movie was in #1 at the box office when I was hitting the ghastly age of puberty. My school chums and enemies who had seen the film relayed the sordid plot line, but I couldn't see it as it was rated R and my parents were tough that way and why would I want to? Still, it had done enough damage just from the slick trendsetting Venetian blinds poster and the Blondie songs which dug into my sexual coal oven and still haven't finished burning. "Now slap her... slap her cunt!" That's all I remember when it later came on TV. Since then Gere's gone out of his way to show the world how pleased with himself he is now that he's a Buddhist and humbler than us all. I forgive him all however, after his gamely self-mocking guest spot on THE SIMPSONS and of course his terrifying dark shadow Travolta in LOOKING FOR MISTER GOODBAR.

3. ANDY GARCIA - The worst of all the narcissist actors, I've never been able to focus on a word he says, always wondering instead about what kind of hair cream he uses, and the insidious vanity that must creep in when one studies one's performing style so assiduously from a mirror that one never sees through one's own eyes anything but oneself. Is that what leads these actors to this fate? Is that what has befallen Nic Cage? Speaking of Coppola relations, Garcia, as I recall, got his big break in GODFATHER III, where critics noticed he was the only actor in the film who seemed to have memorized his lines. But that's no badge of honor! In the picture at left you can see his resemblance to both De Niro and John Cazale, so in a sense he was perfectly cast. If he had come of age in the 1970s instead of the 1980s, he might have rooted into the same dirty method basement which helped make Fredo and the Godfather-as-a-young-man so indelible. Instead, in true 1980s tradition, he stayed up in the master bedroom, hypnotized by the wall-length closet mirrors.

4. KEVIN KLINE - I think he's a fine actor, but Jesus Christ he's an out of control ham so enthralled by his own mellifluous line readings he leaves nothing left for us, which works in a film like IN/OUT, but becomes excruciating in Shakespeare. In my humble opinion, he's too.... "obsequious"? He acts as if he's making fun of the teacher's pet in some high school acting class he can't let go of. But he seems like a good sport and certainly redeems himself with his role as the deceiving dad in THE ICE STORM, wherein he captures the coarse unsexiness of unconscious bourgeois entitlement with a bracing honesty. And I appreciate that he takes the kids home in ANNIVERSARY PARTY so Phoebe Cates can drop ecstasy and trip all night with Jennifer Jason Leigh.

5. ROBERT REDFORD - The king, maybe even the inventor of the bland narcissist actor. Too bland to say much more about. Just look at Sundance, the scourge of true independence; freedom to be in a cage from New York to San Francisco. Now every mailbox is stuffed with film festival invites and no one can walk down the street without some film festival swooping down on them, commercializing their every move until all is hackneyed and recycled quirky just so that the whole GHOST WORLD LITE / PRO-LIFE TEEN QUIRK POWER PUREED FOR THE TOOTHLESS BOURGEOISIE of Juno could ever have a chance to exist. JUNO is the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to GHOST WORLD's The Wild Bunch.

In all fairness to Redford, he seems a nice guy and did well in SPY GAME. He's rugged. Sundance was originally strongly connected to Native American preservation or so I remember from some old NPR show. And so I got the brother's back if he needs me. He doesn't; he's too lost in the majesty of his self; was he abducted by Korean hypnotists working for Pat Boone?

RUNNERS UP: Ryan O'Neal, Jason Patric, Ben Stiller, Joseph Fiennes, who is like the opposite of Kline, unbearable as Shakespeare in SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE but great in Shakespeare's MERCHANT OF VENICE; Anthony Perkins (redeemed by PSYCHO and PRETTY POISON), Ethan Hawke (redeemed by Julie Delpy), Rob Lowe, Freddie Prinze, Jr., Leo.

The attractive men who embody the correct approach to conveying the arrogant but cool only semi-narcisstic males onscreen: the Wilson brothers, Jon Voight, Clint Eastwood, Mark Wahlberg, Denzel, Damon, Pitt, Channing Tatum, Elliot Gould, George Clooney, Elvis Presley, Ricky Nelson, Michael Blodgett, Christian Bale, Heath Ledger (and all Australians, actually), and of course... the definitive attractive non-narcissist male, Paul Newman!

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If the Quirks offend thee...

Put the blame on Mame, boys, for filling her widower pad with eccentric whimsy, or Frank Capra, for filling our heads full of pro-capitalist blarney, either way we're at a saturation point with "quirky" indie family comedies; anything after this and the flood will get into the basement and warp the floorboards of cinema. Hopefully this weekend's release of the tepidly reviewed "never should have escaped Sundance" LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE-cum-DAN IN REAL LIFE style quirky family comedy "about heart, about growing up, and growing old..." this Alan Alda-Matthew Broderick senile old bonding movie, DIMINISHED CAPACITY,  is the water line by which overdone cliches meant to pacify the whole extended family will now be over and done with. Presuming the poor film makes no money. I love Alan Alda, so it's a shame, who can I blame? Capra would scoff, and Mame would shudder with douche chills at this toxic level of cutesy-poo clowning.

There's a real comedy in there somewhere, maybe in a real early draft of Sherwood Kiraly's adaptation of his own novel. I mean, the pitch is great: a senile old man with a zest for zaniness heads to Chicago with a priceless old baseball card he finally wants to sell. The card is a great mcguffin, as nephew Broderick has to continually void all the bad deals the demented old man gets hoodwinked into (like swapping it for an editor's promise to print the old man's fish poetry -- don't ask). But along the misadventure-strewn way just about everything original must have been sifted from this idea and discarded; instead of an analysis of the meaning of value--an old, ugly, tiny piece of cardboard with a face of an ugly ball player being priceless, for no earthly reason--we're stuck in the mind of a senile fish poet (tell ya later), the cookie cutter mold is enforced right down to the hometown girl--divorced with clumsy child-- who Broderick leaves behind (Virginia Madsen, quietly searching for someone equally awake to do a scene with). Can you guess that the kid is a little league space cadet who keeps dropping the winning ball and it all comes down to him catching the card as it almost falls into a janitor's pail of soapy water? You can?

Luckily I was seeing this at the Sunshine in downtown NYC and so wasn't the only one groaning as quirk after tired quirk was upturned and exposed like so many bugs under rocks scored to mopey tunes off Sufjan Stevens' Illinois album.

A glimmer of blessed anti-sunshine arrives late inning in with Dylan Baker as a dealer at the Chicago baseball card convention. Playing a very serious Cubs fan, Baker lends a world-weary dignity as a guy who must continually endure the repeated failures of his beloved team. Wisely realizing Baker is really the only one in the cast halfway on the ball, first-time director Terry Kinney lets his scenes play longer than they need to, and for the time Baker's onscreen it's as if the clouds of stale cliche part and something hilarious, twisted, and true comes out. You can see the assemblage of quirky actors--Broderick, Alda, Madsen--watching him from the other side of the collector's table in awe, wishing his part started earlier and set the mood. Before Bakers' arrival, it's almost like a trading card session between two Sundance workshop veterans: "I'll trade you a quirky gag involving fish writing poetry for your 'learning to shake off your doubts and achieve greatness with your life' arc, I'll even throw in a white trash relation struggling with the first step of AA."

Of course the baseball card changes hands more times than an intercostal clavicle or secret roll of microfiche... as does Alan Alda's southern fried accent. His eccentric Uncle Rollie apparently orders his quirks from an old Sears catalog, whether baiting lines attached to typewriter keys so fish can type poetry (now you know) or drying his socks on an indoor gas grill; Ruth Gordon is probably rolling atop Harold, still screaming, in her grave. Sure Matthew Broderick has his chops, but I want to punch him even now for Bueller's interminable smugness. I don't feel sorry for him being stuck in this mess, but Alda is still way too witty and physically agile to be convincing as a coot and meanwhile the other actors all stand around looking like they can't find their chalk marks. But even so, Broderick looks mere stiff-jointed steps away from being 93, while Alda's still a breath of fresh air.
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As long as it's not completely terrible, we can fall into any movie like a dream, emerging only when the credits roll or the phone rings or when we need to go to the bathroom or refill our whiskey highballs. Similarly, the spirit upon leaving the body becomes amorphous intelligence seeping into the interlocking gazes surrounding it, merging with the all-seeing I.

Who is to say, after all, that when a really good actor dies on screen, that we do not also die, or that this character is really reliving his life through us, through our eyes, the way we might look in awe at photos of ourselves as babies, the way a chimp or Hamlet studies the human skull? It's astounding, Roderick, the basis of consciousness, the mirror regarding itself into infinity. That's why a much better movie was the one I revisited after trudging home from Sunshine Cinema: ALIEN: RESURRECTION.

The astounding mirror character I am talking about here is the reincarnated/cloned Ripley character played by Sigourney Weaver. Is she the "same" Ripley who died at the end of ALIEN 3? Did her consciousness transfer via the cloning process of mad scientist Brad Dourif? The transmutation of self, of sentience, of soul, is what is the issue here. Is the soul as we perceive it really ego, and is ego really just an obsession with one particular locus of identification, with the body you inhabit at this point in time? Is ego then not a kind of imprisonment, being trapped outside the free floating locus of Polydent-ification?

The way Sigourney Weaver grasps these paradoxes is nothing short of poetry. Ripley is egoless and animal-like; sublimely sexy, languid and lolling like an already cool person taking ecstasy. I didn't like ALIEN: RESURRECTION the first time I saw it--in the theater with a backache the day after Thanksgiving visiting my girlfriend in Portsmouth, NH; but it's better with repeat viewings. There's a steady stream of redeemable moments all the way through though, like robot Winona Ryder jacking into the computer mainframe by sticking a tube in her vein like an Oxycontin IV. French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet clearly takes the time to make each outlaw character memorable and not just a few cliche'd quirks stapled onto an actor, the way they are in CAPACITY.

Another way to picture it as three different levels of identification- which brings us from movie watching to being to watching being:

First level is identifying with a character in a story; second is "becoming" other people in the cast, wherein we can still shift the locus of our ego identification from one to another; third is one amorphous intelligence that moves from individual to individual voice and mind, staging its own elaborate rituals for self discovery. To see or hear someone or something is to become the seen or heard. Ultimately isn't all that is alive or ever was just DNA talking to itself? The paint paints itself through the painter, and it sees itself through its beholders. Your eyes are the mirror in which colors comb their hair --an endless cycle of creation and destruction, the brush, the brain, the subject all along one hideous serpentine chain leading straight
up/down into the void; perception and perceived merely frets and bridge on the same instrument.

How's that for motherfuckin' quirky, Uncle Rollie? While the tired and overly cautious filmmakers carefully weed out the genuine eccentricity from their films, real life goes on all around, more baffling and phenomenal than even the looniest Frenchman's conception of science fiction.

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