Breakfast at Tiffany's and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

It was 1961. Blake Edwards directs Audrey Hepburn who plays an American geisha based on a story by Truman Capote. For Hepburn, it is a defining role, for the other players, like George Peppard, Buddy Ebsen, and Martin Balsam, it would be one of their best roles before moving on to the new upcoming medium of TV.

Blake Edwards who had funny ideas about what is funny, had asked Mickey Rooney to pretend he was Japanese, created a typical surreal party scene, and later regretted and apologized for the former and repeated the latter with Peter Sellars playing an Indian gentleman in brown-face.

Detail from Dancer - copyright 2014 - A. Barake

Despite all the Hollywood crassness and foibles and the watering down of the very moving story, the movie is a classic, and is moving. Some scenes are exactly true to the book, and their power undiluted. The undercurrent of tragedy is always there, the sadness of men's lust for youth, the hurt of youth abused, and the exploitation that derives from these circumstances is played though the central character.

The pattern of a party girl that knows that sex is power yet that feels trapped by it and yearns for something more permanent than the puppet strings that the pull of Eros provides is classic. Marilyn's appeal comes from there. That Hepburn was able to transcend it while still providing the sadness is genius.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, although ostensibly playing with Chandler themes, does provide a nod to the same story (to be fair, so did Chandler in his own misogynistic way in "The Little Sister"). There is the sad back story of childhood abuse, and the party girl in Hollywood plot line, and the sympathetic "friend" who wants her but cannot "have" her.

The pattern of friendship that becomes love is a Hollywood staple, watered down in Doris Day - Rock Hudson movies, and used and abused even today. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang hints at it, but the boy and girl do not get together, the boy finally admits to not being good with girls. It plays all the cliches and then twists them into something that says "I know all about this bullshit".

Breakfast at Tiffany's could not do that. It was shot on a budget of $2.5 million and earned 15. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was shot on a budget of $15M and made 16. Draw your own conclusions on what sells.

Commoditization of Relationships

All rights reserved A. Barake 2013

Finding a partner for love, for life is part of the journey for most, and it is a bit of a paradox that we need to think of that person as special for it to gel. The search for the click of compatibility is at odds with what biology has evolved for us. Put random male and female animals together and they will usually mate. Of course there are exceptions, and it may well be that we as a species are evolving away from this facility so as to ensure our survival in this increasingly competitive environment.

What made me think of this topic, the selection of mates, is the age-old cultural stigma around pornography, around commoditization of desire. I think that one reason this feeling exists is that it tends to devalue the specialness felt around love, around desire. It compartmentalizes it and ultimately makes it a consumable. Nothing new here. Prostitution, pornography and sexual entertainment, to coin a phrase, have always been part of commerce. I think it is useful to think of them clearly, as subsidiaries of humanism, as ways to make us conform, to be farm animals in the corporate culture. The test is that someone profits from them. They also represent an area of potential emotional confusion, because they link very strong feelings and instincts with something that is too tightly framed and packaged as a consumer item. It is not a good idea to become attached to consumables, and it is not a good idea to separate your emotions in such a way as to be able to cater to those needs in exchange for currency. The malaise I feel is akin to the distinction made between a soldier and a murderer. The cultural definition is clear, but not completely rational, it is based on emotional separation. (An aside: the current CBC attention to post-traumatic stress disorder is the tip of a very big iceberg, one that they will never acknowledge, since they are an instrument of the state, a placebo for culture, a fucking depressing lie, but all we have left in the mainstream.)

Marcuse, in An Essay on Liberation makes a case for the way we internalize comfort and consumerism, becoming willing corporate subjects. Subjects are manipulated, held. Reading between the lines, one can see that conformity is part of the enabling mechanism, and commoditization of our humanity is the precipice to stay away from. Individual feeling, specialness, and its protection from influence, including advertising are survival mechanisms too. The difference between a surviving consumer culture and one that thrives on equality is sustainability. At some point, if we follow the former to its logical conclusion, we will have to eat dollars and copulate with machines.