Having wrapped up the Marvel Cinematic Universe for 2017, I can now finally turn to non-MCU films.  In the past this has meant working my way through the Skandies list from top to bottom.  However, earlier this year when I was writing about the 2016 movies, I kept saying things like, “Wow, each movie is better than the last! Maybe I should watch the list in reverse order, har har!”  Then I decided that maybe that shouldn’t be just a joke.  Why not go from bottom to top?  So I’m starting with a couple of movies that didn’t make the list at all.  In fact, not only did neither film garner a single vote, neither film received a single rating⁠—suggest­ing that none of the voters even saw them.  That seemed odd.  But then I remembered: to be eligible for the Skan­dies, movies have to play in theaters in the United States.  Nei­ther of these, despite featuring some big-name actors, did.  Why not?  Well, 2017 was the year of the #MeToo movement.  And these movies were directed by Louis C.K. and Roman Polanski, respectively. 

Vernon Chatman and Louis C.K., 2017

When this movie premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, Louis C.K. was pretty much on top of the world.  I remembered him as one of a number of young, undistinguished stand-ups who appeared on Comedy Central a lot in the mid-’90s, but as he hit his 40s, a buzz started to grow that he was becoming the comedian of the moment⁠—that his act, once heavily reliant on silly voices, was now not only genuinely funny but full of incisive social commentary.  He landed a show on cable that was hailed as the Seinfeld of the 2010s⁠—a fictionalized depiction of the life of a comedian, but simultaneously more seri­ous and more absurdist than Jerry Seinfeld’s take on the subject; it became a critical darling and won some Emmys.  Woody Allen cast him in one of his movies, and it looked like C.K. was primed to follow in Allen’s footsteps, evolving from a wacky comic to an important cultural figure acclaimed for an alloy of comedy and drama that was both brash and cerebral.  So much so that for his first feature film as writer, director, and star, he essentially made his version of Allen’s Manhattan: black and white, set in New York, and revolving around a 17-year-old girl.  He even asked Allen to play a key role… as an acclaimed filmmaker, aloof and epigrammatic, now grown elderly, but still notorious for having a taste for much younger women, and in fact accused of child molestation.  I.e., to play himself.  Allen declined, despite C.K.’s protestations that it would be a good way to rehabilitate his image.  But C.K. soon found that it wasn’t Woody Allen’s image he had to worry about.  A week before I Love You, Daddy was scheduled to hit theaters, C.K. confessed to charges that he had masturbated at several women outside the context of a consen­sual sexual encounter.  And while people can only be canceled metaphorically, the cancellation of Louis C.K.’s movie was literal.

So, on to the movie itself.  Louis C.K. plays a TV writer who has recently met with critical acclaim and commercial success, with a swanky apartment in Manhattan, access to a private jet, and a desk full of Emmys.  A top female movie star wants the lead role in his next series, and invites him to a party where he gets to meet his idol, the Woody Allen figure (played in Allen’s absence by John Malkovich).  The title of the movie comes from the fact that the C.K. character has a shallow, spoiled 17-year-old daugh­ter, who says “I love you, Daddy” a lot because he’s a pushover who after a little hemming and hawing gives her everything she asks for⁠—like, when she wants to go on spring break multiple times in a season (“What about school?” “Daddy, it’s senior year! After spring break you don’t even do anything so who cares?”), he not only gives in but lets her take the jet.  At the party, she also meets the Woody Allen character, who insinuates himself into her life to the point that before long she’s hanging out on his yacht and accompanying him to Paris.  And, as tended to be the case on his TV show, the Louis C.K. character wrings his hands ineffectually while every other character in the movie berates him, and that is basically the plot.

I dunno⁠—this movie kind of feels to me like it was beamed in from an alternate universe.  It is a universe where young women are all dying to jump on older men⁠—not just a 19-year-old hook­ing up with a 28-year-old she meets at a party, but a Hollywood ingenue scheming to get with a schlubby middle-aged writer⁠—not offering up sex in order to get a part, but agreeing to take a part because she hopes it will lead to sex⁠—and a prep school girl throwing herself at a wizened weirdo easily old enough to be her grandfather.  It is also a universe where, when the C.K. character protests that this is wrong, he gets chewed out by the women in his life: “Because she’s seventeen? Come on⁠—it’s a number!” “This is a positive thing!” “When I was fifteen I dated a man in his fifties⁠—it was my life, I don’t regret it!” “We’re all perverts, who cares? Who cares how old you are?” “I had a thing for you when I was fourteen⁠—so what?”  But in our universe, who talks like this?  The cultural pendulum has actually swung in the opposite direction, and a powerful consensus has formed that expressing these sorts of opinions is unacceptable in the public sphere.  Occasionally a radio shock jock will say something along these lines (and then get fired).  I can’t help but think that the writers here were trying to pull a little rhetorical judo, putting the arguments they were trying to attack into the mouth of the writer/director/star and then kicking him around⁠—“Look, it’s that trademark Louis C.K. self-denigration!”⁠—and then inocu­lating their own position against attack by putting it into the mouths of a bunch of fictitious women.  I doubt they were really fooling anyone, since the tactic is kind of transparent: “When I was a teenager I had an affair with a middle-aged man and it was great!” says the imaginary woman made up by a couple of middle-aged men.

But… virtually any kind of storytelling is going to involve some amount of shapeshifting, unless every single one of your char­acters is a perfect clone of yourself.  And in writing characters who don’t share your subject position, you basically have three choices: draw upon yourself anyway, draw upon others, or make stuff up out of whole cloth.  When author John has character Jane say or think or do something, a member of the audience might object, “No woman would really say/think/do that!”, and if John objects, “But Jane is primarily based on me, and that’s what I said/thought/did when I was in a similar situation!”, the audience member can counter, “But you wouldn’t have if you were female!”  And it’s important to listen to that kind of input.  But you reach a sort of impasse when the response is “But Jane is primarily based on Joan, and that’s what Joan said/thought/did when she was in a similar situation!”  For my own stories I do tend to lean heavily on repurposing direct quotes and anecdotes from the people in my life, mainly because those tend to be the seeds from which the stories grow in the first place, but also as a guard against charges of implausibility: you can’t say “That would never happen!” or “No one would ever say that!” if it actually did happen and someone actually did say it.  And yeah⁠—there are billions of women in the world, and I imagine that at least a few of them have said things like the female characters in I Love You, Daddy.  Maybe the writers knew some of them.  Maybe the writ­ers were quoting some of them.  But perhaps this is one of those cases where you let one of them make the movie.

Based on a True Story
Delphine de Vigan, Olivier Assayas, and Roman Polanski, 2017

This movie actually addresses what I was talking about above.  It’s about a writer named Delphine whose first novel has become a bestseller but has also alienated her from her family, as she basically stitched the story together from her family’s dirty laundry.  At a signing she meets a fan called Elle who very quick­ly wins her trust: she lets Elle move in, shares her computer passwords with her, lets her pretend to be Delphine at meet-the-author events so Delphine can stay at home… even as Elle proves to be alarmingly unstable.  (For instance, when the blender won’t start, Elle bludgeons it to smithereens with a rolling pin.)  It seems weird that Delphine would keep Elle around, almost as if Elle has her under some kind of hypnotic spell⁠—except, we learn, Delphine’s real motivation is to pump Elle for the details of the wild life story she has hinted at, in order to turn it into her next novel.

The success of the movie Fatal Attraction in the late ’80s, with its “mistress from hell”, led to a spate of other “_____ from hell” movies in the early ’90s: The Hand That Rocks the Cradle had the nanny from hell, Single White Female had the roommate from hell, Misery had the fan from hell, etc.  Based on a True Story is one of those⁠—a rehash of the last two of those in parti­cular⁠—with a soupçon of Fight Club thrown in.  Again, this film didn’t qualify for the Skandies, so I wondered why my past self had put it in the queue, given that it was so blatantly derivative and couldn’t have gotten very good reviews (which, I later con­firmed, it didn’t).  Only when the credits popped up at the end did I discover the answer: it was written in part by Olivier Assa­yas, and I loved Summer Hours and Carlos.  This is not his best work!  I try to know as little as possible about movies before I watch them, so I must have just gone to Assayas’s page on IMDb, looked under “Writer”, and copied the title over to my list with­out even clicking through to see that the director was Roman Polanski.  Polanski, of course, has been a fugitive from U.S. law since 1978, when he fled the country during the sentencing phase of his trial for drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl.  Of course, Polanski has subsequently had films play in the U.S. and even won the Oscar for Best Director in 2002, so I wondered whether any new accusations had emerged in 2017 that would have made releasing Based on a True Story a non-starter.  And there were: a month before the film hit theaters in Europe, two women ac­cused Polanski of raping them at ages 15 (in 1972) and 10 (in 1975) respectively.

During the distance learning year at the high school where I used to teach, the professional development team advised that we take some time out each week for discussions about topics of the students’ choice, since Zoom didn’t allow for the kinds of social­izing that had always been an important part of the classroom experience.  These discussions weren’t supposed to be academ­ic⁠—we were expecting topics like “What’s the best pizza place in town?” and “Would you rather be able to fly or to turn invis­ible?”  But one of my sophomore classes was eager to debate a more intellectual question: “Can you separate a work of art from the artist?”  In the case of Roman Polanski, that would mean, can you enjoy, or even watch, a Roman Polanski film without impli­citly endorsing rape?  The whole idea of “canceling” artists relies on the notion that you cannot⁠—that it is incumbent upon consu­mers of media to turn their backs on offenders and thereby ban­ish them from the artistic sphere.  When I mentioned to Ellie at the time that my sophomores had spontaneously brought up this question, she said that she wasn’t surprised: adolescence is a time when people become preoccupied with questions of iden­tity, and nowadays, she said, people establish their identities al­most exclusively through commodity choices, which in the world of art means fandom.  So it stood to reason that they would have some anxiety about that.  Choosing a favorite musician, for in­stance, has become less a matter of “Do these songs sound good to me?” than of “Am I the sort of person who fits into the com­munity of people who proclaim themselves fans of this musi­cian?”  Of course, this has always been true to some extent⁠—the clique of metalheads at every school was rarely the result of a diverse assortment of students gathering together over their shared liking for Black Sabbath.  But that example actually serves to show the change.  There is a difference between, on the one hand, making friends and adopting their interests, and on the other, adopting a selection of allegiances in order to signal to the world at large what communities you would like to consider you a member.

To me, the real irony is that I have come to be convinced that identity itself is largely illusory.  Twenty years ago my sense of self-definition was very important to me, and Jennifer would shake her head and explain that really we’re all just “inputs and outputs”.  It’s an observation that seems wiser to me with each passing year.  We are nodes in a web of connections, and I think one of the Roman Polanski accusations is a case in point.  An actress accused Polanski of raping her decades earlier, when she was sixteen.  Some tried to discredit her by unearthing inter­views she had given in the 20th century, in which she sounded like a character in I Love You, Daddy.  She said then that she’d had a six-month affair with Polanski and that it was her idea: “I wanted to be his mistress,” she said, and “I wanted him probably more than he wanted me.”  That doesn’t mean that she was delu­sional back then and it doesn’t mean that she’s making stuff up now.  Different inputs⁠—shifts in the culture⁠—lead to different outputs, right down to our understanding of our own personal histories.

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