But I’m
getting ahead of myself really, because this would only be the fitting ending
for what had turned out to be quite the remarkable day. It started out inconspicuously
enough as a somewhat typical Monday morning; I had slept quite well, but
Mondays always feel different, as the transition between weekend and work-week
is usually not without some pain. Since I’m out of work right now, I didn’t particularly
have to do anything, so after seeing my boyfriend off to his work, I looked
outside and it was shaping up to be a beautiful early spring day; it was still
cold, but the sun was shining and I felt the sudden need to go off on a long
walk, which ended up taking over two hours. The walk itself was already
pleasant enough, but somewhere along the way something magical happened. As I
was listening to my ipod, the shuffle treated me to the second Litany from John
Zorn’s ‘Six Litanies for Heliogabalus’, a piece of music that’s rather abrasive
for such a quiet Monday morning. But I was deeply immersed in it: from Mike
Patton’s screams and howls, to the angelic choir and the extensive organ solo –
all of it was as hypnotic to me as the first time I heard it. But then IT
happened, because the next song turned out to be a Dwight Yoakam tune. Those
first gentle guitar sounds had me completely transfixed, as if they were the
most beautiful sounds I had ever heard. They’re not even that remarkable when
taken by themselves, but with Yoakam’s sweet country pop coming right after
Zorn’s extreme stuff, it was the collision that made it so memorable. Or maybe
not even the collision, but the all-inclusiveness that was a personal watershed
for me. Here’s the thing: I had listened to both Zorn’s music and Yoakam’s with
the same intensity and pleasure over the years, but never on the very same
moment, as they represented different periods in my life. So now it was as if these
distinct periods suddenly merged.
Some
explanation could be helpful here, I suppose. There are those who divide human
personalities according to the four cardinal directions, with each of them
defining some core aspects of one’s character. Seen this way, I could be
defined as a West personality, since they are entirely comfortable with the
dark aspects of their character. West people are those who are able to look
deep inside their own souls, to descend into their own personal underworld and
return from it with valuable knowledge about themselves. But as every direction
has its own opposite, those opposite characteristics (animus or anima in
Jungian terms) are usually the least developed within that person, and one of
the chief ways of developing these opposite sides of oneself is spending a lot
of time with someone from the opposite camp. And since the universe has been
kind enough to hook me up with a boyfriend who is clearly East, our
relationship automatically involves a deep two-way influence. East people are
the daydreamers, connected not to the underworld of soul but to the upperworld
of spirit. The knowledge West people can dredge up in the dark recesses of
their psyche is invaluable, but without the light touch of East people like my
boyfriend, we West persons tend to be much too heavy and serious. East people
do possess the grace, sweetness and lightness that literally brighten up the
world, but without the deep substance of the West, they often are often in
danger of becoming too light-weighted. This basic difference in character trait
between my boyfriend and me was perfectly illustrated by the kind of music we
were listening to when we met each other: I had a very strong preference for
heavy and demanding music, mostly experimental and usually without much melody,
whereas my boyfriend definitely leaned towards sweet and ethereal sounds. Even
if I wasn’t aware of these things when we first met, in hindsight it’s quite
easy to see how his East personality started to change my West one and vice
versa, which more or less meant that I started moving from the rather abstract
and conceptual toward the concrete and personal. Up until that point, I had
always consciously moved away from traditional song structures and had embraced
every kind of music that was open and free (ranging from Free Improvisation to
Modern classical and from noise to abstract techno), but now started to enjoy
the simple songs of Country & Western, Rock ‘n Roll and German Schlager
music – which was the definite East influence of my boyfriend. But as I was
deeply immersing myself in this new and exciting musical area, I also noticed
that my taste for the experimental and weird decreased accordingly, so you
could say that John Zorn became Johnnie Ray. It’s not that I didn’t listen to
the more demanding music anymore, because since it was still on my computer I
would indeed hear it on a daily basis. I still liked it even, but the fiery
passion that had always accompanied it seemed gone and moved over to Country
music – until recently, that is. Because the very moment I started living in
harmony with my own body by radically changing my eating habits, I started
noticing a distinct change in my music appreciation. At first, I started
hearing the more melodious jazz music in the old way again, something that
caught me off guard since I hadn’t been able to recapture that feeling in
years. My fears that this would somehow be a mere fluke soon proved groundless,
as the feeling persisted over a period of a couple of months. And then
something even more profound happened: after easing into the more demanding
music again with a new-found passion for jazz, I was suddenly seized by the
urge to embrace even the most a-tonal music again, the very music I had left
behind me some seven years ago. And this is why my Monday morning encounter
with John Zorn and Dwight Yoakam was such an epiphany: it marked the first clear
sign of the synthesis between my West and East personalities, as it was the
first time in my life I would be able to appreciate both demanding abstract
music and sweet gentle sounds with the same kind of intensity at the very same time. Not in some
abstract, conceptual idea that I can only understand intellectually, but
through deeply felt experience. It may sound silly to some, but these two songs
at that particular morning felt like a spiritual rebirth.
How
fitting then, that a day that started out with such an amazing moment would
also end on a similar note. Not only because ‘How Do You Know’ gave me that
invaluable feeling of appreciation for being alive, but also because the whole
movie was permeated with the same kind of East-West synthesis that I had felt
so strongly that morning. Because Brooks displays an impressive combination of
west and east, it’s deeply profound and swiftly sweet at the very same time.
It’s combination of deep character study and breezy comedy makes it a hugely
complex movie, all the while masquerading as a mainstream romcom. But for all the
feelings of awe and inspiration the movie stirred in me, I found out afterwards
this reaction wasn’t exactly common. I had zero knowledge about the film when I
started watching it, except it was a James L. Brooks film, so I really had no
idea its reception has been lukewarm at best. I was almost even more astonished
by all the negative reactions to it, then I had been by the film itself, which
made me realize once again how different I perceive the world to most people
around me, and it was precisely this feeling that made me start this blog in
the first place. What I had constantly experienced as a truly inspiring
combination of Western profundity and Eastern lightness, most people apparently
saw as a crucial flaw of mediocrity, with one reviewer even complaining it
wasn’t dramatic enough to be a drama film and not funny enough to be a comedy.
How different this kind of reaction was from my morning moment of pure
experience, with all barriers between supposedly different kinds of music
entirely vanishing! There I was, in a state of mind where I just treat
everything around me for what it inherently is instead of into what category it
can or should fit into, not realizing most people still cling to these
unnecessary notions! Small wonder that my reaction would be so different from
most.
Even
though I’m obviously part of the society I’m living in, I’m at the same time
quite a bit removed from it, which has the big advantage that it makes me
naturally more perceptive to things most people take entirely for granted. For
instance, I am often not entirely aware of how far technology has already
advanced and what for most people has perhaps become natural, to me still often
feels strange and alien even. Only yesterday for instance, I was innocently
travelling on a train, when in the corner of my eye I noticed some strange
flickering. I looked up and to my horror saw that somebody was actually
watching a movie on some small screen in clear daylight in a crowded train.
Deep down I knew this was already possible of course, as I even have had
discussions with people about this phenomenon, but until now I had never really
seen it and registering it with my own eyes send me into quite a shock – even
though I was probably the only one on that train that this seemed strange to. The
precise details as to why this filled me with terror are not so relevant now,
but let it suffice to say that technology has pervaded the world even more than
I am generally aware of, which is also clearly one of the themes running
through ‘How Do You Know’. This is already announced in the very first scene
when the baseball coach simply says the selected players of the new season will
be posted ‘online’. No emphasis whatsoever is given to this, which makes it
quite easy to miss probably, but it sent shivers of unease through my spine and
alerted me to the fact this film would very probably be quite critical to the
ways we are kept prisoners of technology and work. When this feeling was
confirmed the moment the secretary has to bring her laptop in, I instantly knew
we were dealing with a flat-out masterpiece here and this sequence also
perfectly illustrates the brilliant synthesis of East and West I have been
endowing the film with.
Jack
Nicholson, Paul Rudd and the company lawyer are having some important
conversation that will involve a crucial plot development, when the secretary
is asked to come in ‘and to bring her laptop’. Yet again no real emphasis is
given, but the highly pregnant woman is clearly seen struggling with her laptop
in the background in a slightly slapstick sort of way that’s really funny to me. Because what could
have been merely the stock moment of the secretary joining the meeting to take
notes, has silently been transformed into something else entirely. The laptop
is clearly the modern equivalent of the pencil and paper that secretaries have
been using in films for decades and this is also the point, because even a
highly pregnant woman like in this film, could easily have managed to hold a
pencil and paper. But a laptop is quite a different matter: it may be a
portable computer, but as the scene bears out, it is still not so portable for
a pregnant woman as a simple pencil and paper would be. So by having her
struggle with it, clasping it clumsily at her breast and at one point almost
dropping it to the ground even, Brooks subtly but cleverly manages to turn such
a simple moment into a comment on the impact technology has on our everyday
lives, just as the ‘online’ comment in the first scene had already suggested.
In other words, the moment definitely has deep social commentary, but does so
in a way that’s not only funny but so subtle as to perhaps be invisible to
modern audiences, who are used to having everything spelled out for them. There
are several of these little pinpricks scattered throughout the movie, like when
Owen Wilson claps his hands after sex and the lights go on, the bedside
proposal scene that should be filmed but really isn’t and the expensive watch
that Reese Witherspoon is given, that feels more like a chain, than a way to
tell time.
All
these little moments point to the way our lives are so drastically shaped by
technology around us and that often only serves to confine us instead of the
liberation it proposes. It’s not only technology that keeps us prisoners, but
also work. Both Witherspoon and Rudd are thrown into an identity crisis because
they have problems at work. Without work, no society could exist of course, but
we have to ask ourselves why and how the work and the rules we have imposed on
ourselves have started to close in on us so much, making us a slave instead of
freeing us. The commercialization and dehumanization of too much work and
businesses is clearly a target here for Brooks, as Witherspoon get’s axed from
her team because she ‘is 3 seconds slower’, like she is some machine that can
be judged solely on numbers. But the greatest comment on the absurdity of our
self-imposed rules, is when the secretary goes to Rudd’s apartment with
information that can be of help to him, but which she cannot convey to him
because she had to sign an agreement swearing her to secrecy. It’s one of those
poignant moments this film is littered with, speaking so forcefully with both
sadness and humor as it demonstrates how stupid it is that the rules we
ourselves have created only serve to separate instead of uniting us. We do
progress on so many levels by finding cures for diseases and inventing all
kinds of things, but are mostly blind to the fact most of these new
technologies really cut us off, not only from the world but also from each
other. How did we get to this point, where work and technology are so confining
and stifling? Thankfully, there is sometimes light at the end of the tunnel,
like when in my own personal life I met the mediator who would be facilitating
the negotiations I would be having with the company that tried to fire me. When
I first met the woman, I took an immediate liking to her (and I believe she to
me) and when afterwards I got to talk to her, she said something that touched
me deeply. Before she took up this job of mediation, she had been a lawyer she
told me, but she had never been happy in that profession, because lawyers only
look out for the interest of their clients and only exacerbate and solidify the
conflicts instead of trying to resolve them. And as she had always been
interested more in building bridges than winning cases, she had switched to
mediation, where she would be able to focus on the common good. When I heard
this, I felt a ray of light flashing through my soul.
This
seems to be the solution Brooks proposes too in ‘How Do You Know’. Because if
my previous description may have given the impression it’s one of those cynical
pictures about the horrors of city life, please let me correct this now. It is
certainly critical of everything I’ve just described, but doesn’t do so with ‘doom’
written all over it. On the contrary, it presents the city as quite an alluring
place, full of wonder and amazement, with the cosmopolitan feel of neon lights
and swank establishments lovingly captured by Spielberg’s regular cinematographer
Janusz Kaminski. It has that indefinable feeling of space, with the locations
not merely there as backdrops, but coming to life as an almost breathing
presence. There’s an achingly beautiful moment when Witherspoon is waiting by
the bakery underneath Rudd’s apartment, because it has such a marvelous feeling of space. You can
almost feel the warm wind blowing through her hair, and in me it instantly
evoked past feelings of warm summer nights, like you’ve stepped through the
screen into another world. By conjuring up such a believable, almost textured,
space, Brooks and Kaminski pay homage to the beauty of being alive itself. We
may have managed ourselves into the most impossible situations with our idiotic
rules and our blindness to the dehumanization of commerce and business and we
even may be kept prisoners by our own technology, we are still surrounded by a
certain magic that has so much allure in itself. We may make fools of ourselves
on a daily basis, but these emotions are what keeps us human and vibrant.
Brooks has always been a fine poet of human emotions, but here he seems to have
outdone himself.
His
writing is impeccable, capturing the variety of human beings and emotions
within the space of two hours that really feels like only half its length.
There’s a John Cassavetes-like unpredictability to the characters that makes
them come truly alive, that surely moves beyond the traditional way film
characters are presented. How he does it I don’t know, but Brooks always
manages to coach the most heartfelt performances out of his actors and ‘How Do
You Know’ is yet another milestone. I’ve always loved Reese Witherspoon, but
here she’s nothing short than amazing, but so are all the other actors. Every
moment feels like a redefinition of cinema, with powerful emotions coming through
even the most seemingly innocuous scenes. Take the first moment when
Witherspoon and Rudd have dinner together, for instance. Rudd is a total mess
and Witherspoon also isn’t feeling too happy, and conversation is rather
strained until she suggests they don’t speak during the entire meal. Even if
nothing happens on a narrative level, that doesn’t make the scene empty. In
fact, that nothing really ‘happens’ in this particular scene is just the point:
it is a celebration of the very moment itself, of gratitude for being alive
even when the two characters have reach a zenith in their lives. It’s a whole
movie build on glances, looks, gestures and movements that don’t really ‘mean’
anything except conveying gratitude for our very existence. It is through these
idiosyncratic little things that we find the courage to keep going, even in the
face of so much adversity and our quirks are the essential corrective to so
many of the dehumanizing aspects of society around us.
This
feeling is perfectly captured in the before mentioned moment when the secretary
just had her baby and the father proposes marriage at her bedside. He instructs
Rudd to film the whole thing, thrusting a camera into his hand and proceeds to
deliver one of the most moving speeches I’ve ever heard in any film. Make no
mistake, this is no perfectly rehearsed soliloquy, but one fraught with errors,
uncertainty and humanity. At length he talks about what a failure he is, how
little financial prospects he has and always will have, and that this is the
reason he never proposed to her before as he doesn’t want to weigh her down.
Yet at the same time, he feels he is the only one who can truly appreciate her for
who she is and he goes on to say he will treat her with the love and respect
she deserves. It’s a gut-wrenching honest moment of two people who are both
obviously far from beautiful or commercially successful, yet who in their
imperfection are so beautifully human. But after the speech, Rudd discovers he
didn’t catch any of it on tape. They proceed to do it all over again, but of
course the magic and spontaneity of that first moment can never be captured
again. Retracing steps is never possible, so the man now has to be coached from
the sidelines instead of speaking from the heart, which takes all the real
humanity out of it and it now feels ‘acted’ instead of ‘lived’. The scene as a
whole then, feels like Brooks’ comment on the impossibility of recapturing the
spontaneous magic of the first take when making a film, because actors tend to
lose a little bit more with each subsequent take and his film is full of this
kind of raw performances. It is also yet another comment on the way technology
influences our lives and not always in the way we would want it to, as
technology literally failed us here. But perhaps we should be much better off
not trying to capture our entire lives with the aid of technology, as looking
at a filmed recording of a moment can never truly replace the original feeling
anyway, so just remembering such a defining moment is probably even better than
trying to relive it by technology.
And as
always, these extra layers of meaning are so seamlessly woven into the fabric
of the film, they never call attention to themselves. It has emotions flying
all over the place, it has humor and heartache, biting social commentary and a
sweet gentle touch all at the same time. It also neatly camouflages the little
fact Brooks uses the old screwball trick of having two secondary characters
present as a reflection on his protagonists, so they (and we) can now see their
own conflict in a different light. Because the film centers on the familiar
love triangle, with Reese Witherspoon having to choose between either Paul Rudd
or Owen Wilson. One reviewer of the movie went so far as to claim that the
choice was not really a choice at all, as both alternatives were equally
attractive, but I’m not sure what kind of universe he lives in. Because while
it should be clear the Owen Wilson is sympathetic and even sweet in his own way,
a good catch he really isn’t. Even though the film is too complex for broad
generalizations, if you come down to it, what Wilson represents here is the
exact kind of dehumanizing our society engages in too much. At the beginning he
even explicitly talks about humans in purely economic terms, when he compares
the dating process with an assembly line, something his entire apartment also
testifies to. He may be able to give Witherspoon the world when it comes to
luxury and possessions, he is also hopelessly immature and self-centered. The
difference between the Wilson and Rudd characters is beautifully illustrated at
the ending by the wrapping paper of their respective gifts. Because like
Hitchcock working at the height of his powers when he made the hairstyle of
Tippi Hedren the point of ‘Marnie’, so Brooks also makes the wrapping paper the
point of his movie: that of Wilson is, like everything else, the best money can
buy and it even has a ludicrously expensive watch inside of it. Rudd on the
other hand gives her wrapping paper that may not be as classy and expensive,
but which without a doubt is much more personal and idiosyncratic.
But the
difference here is not the usual one between one suitor who is rich and the
other poor, as Brooks slyly made both of them rich. So, if money conveniently
enough is of no real importance, what remains is the question of adventure:
Rudd comes from a rich family, but he is also embroiled in a nasty lawsuit
which made him lose everything and which forces him to choose between going to
jail himself for a few years or send away his own father for life. Since this
issue remains unresolved even at the end of the film, when Brooks has
Witherspoon pick Rudd instead of Wilson, he has her explicitly choosing
uncertainty instead of comfort. This is of course completely congruous with the
rest of the film which so beautifully celebrates the little moments and the way
too much certainty or comfort can also stifle us. Although making us aware of
the problems of our society, Brooks doesn’t judge, but gently nudges us into
being grateful for being alive. The resulting film is not at all the
nondescript middle of the road comedy that quite a lot of people make it out to
be, but an ultimate synthesis of Western darkness and Eastern light. Brooks
shows the folly of the Human Condition without becoming heavy-handed or
preachy. He is assured from start to finish without becoming rigid. The film
doesn’t really ‘go’ anywhere, nor is it supposed to, as it’s all about the
process and not about the goal. It forces our goal-oriented society to focus on
living inside the moment, savoring every instant – even, or especially, when
you’ve hit rock-bottom. Like my moment with John Zorn and Dwight Yoakam when I
could embrace both with the same intensity without caring for borders or
differences, Brooks manages the same: to leave behind all those stupid categories
of drama or comedy, to make a movie that’s pure human experience.
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