Nothing Easy about It

Have you ever been an "outcast"?  I have.  Multiple times.  It's a set of experiences that scar you in ways you don't discover until the next go-round, when the next mob of villagers gather together with torches to chase you up a mountainside.  It's transformative without allowing for a lot of self-reflection, and by the end of the process your whole personality has changed.  Your whole being.  But you just move on, scarred and smarter, exhausted and scared but also filled with a knowledge you could not have gotten any other way.

Emma Stone's Olive in Easy A, a talky, sweet, self-conscious movie-reinvention of John Hughes for the 21st Century, is the perfect "outcast," in that she is female, smart, sarcastic, and warm-hearted, a perfect recipe for pissing most "normal" people off for some reason.  And the movie gets a lot things right around the concept of being exiled and scorned.  First of all it's ur-text is The Scarlet Letter, and Nathaniel Hawthorne's beautiful starchy novel is used in a variety of ways to enlighten us on the sociology and psychology and artfulness of being driven out of town.  As well, the actors who support Stone, especially Patricia Clarkson as her mom and Stanley Tucci as her dad, have a nonchalant lovingness in their eyes, and the actors who play her tormentors, especially Lisa Kudrow as a whore/guidance-counselor and Amanda Bynes as Marianne, the Bible-believing bitch-leader of a group of teenaged Jesus Freaks who lead the EXPEL-THE-SLUT campaign, have a special, dry, cartoony evilness, like Jeffrey Jones' principal in Ferris Bueller's Day off.  The plot is easy and swift:  Olive lies about having sex with "George," a made-up college freshman, but her lie ignites a rumor inferno to the point that Brandon, a gay friend of hers with tormentors all his own, begs Olive to lie and say they've done it too.  To be his extra-special beard.

What sets Olive, and the movie, apart from a lot of other teen comedies trying to channel Mr. Hughes, is the joie de vivre Olive has in tormenting her tormentors:  she doesn't just lie about bumping uglies with the gay guy.  It's an all out Cirque de Soleil of teen-sex at a house-party, with the two of them yelling and moaning so all the high school kids outside the bedroom door can hear.  As Olive tells Brandon:  "I don't do anything half-assed."

Emma Stone is a star, and this movie is only the beginning I hope.  She can dish it out and take it.  She can be victimized without being a victim, kind of like Barbara Stanwyck or some other glamorous, throaty, old-school movie star.  There's a scene in which she is waiting to go to the principal's office and Marianne (who works in the principal's office) is sharpening pencils.  Stone's Olive does not let this anal-retentive display of whore-hatred go unnoticed.  In a hilariously sarcastic triumph, she "coaches" Marianne through her pencil-sharpening fit:  "Sharpening pencils are we?  That's just great.  Yes.  Keep sharpening.  Yes.  Yes."  And so on.

At that moment I knew Emma Stone is a star, and that the movie has something to say about surviving being an outcast by getting the joke but also never forgetting that the "joke" is serious as hell.  Marianne would like Olive to disappear.  Meaning:  under all the high-school farce and frenetic pacing and Olive's sweetly insouciant voice-over there's a serious tone, a life-or-death feeling in the movie.  The only way you can get through a life like Olive's, the movie is letting us know, is torment right back, and also figure out your exit strategy, or you're dead.

Olive's exit strategy goes into movie-movie brilliance, with a wonderful homage to Ferris Bueller's Beatles number in downtown Chicago.  She ends up happily ever after, thank God (you wouldn't want it any other way thanks to Stone's performance), but the movie leaves an afterburn.  It made me think about all the times I've been cast as an "outcast," and how that feeling has given me both a sense of terror dealing with people, as well as an evil sense of humor.  There's never one without the other.  I've had religious zealots pissed at me because of a novel I wrote about a child-molester, asking for my head and my job; I had hoods and even a cheerleader threaten to beat up in high school; more recently, as a co-founder of a non-profit arts organzation that supports people with developmental disabilities here in Cincinnati called Visionaries & Voices (V&V), I had some folks there unleash some vicious rumors about me because I was seen as a stubborn megalomaniac who wanted their heads.  Etcetera, etcetera.  What all this boils down to is that I've learned absolutely nothing I can actually tell you about concerning "outcast-ness."  Except there is now a density in my thoughts, a fear that hardens into a new kind of laugh, a new way to approach the world.  Stone's Olive is symbolic of this new approach:  sew a letter A on your outfit, torture those who torture you.  Don't do anything half-assed.

Raymond Thunder-Sky, the reason I helped co-found V&V, dressed up like a clown and a construction worker (a scarlet letter all his own) and walked around town drawing drawings.  There are stories of him being beaten up.  Called names.  Stories of people calling him a "John Wayne Gacy" freak.  One story about him being pushed off a city bus.  But you know what?  He was triumphant.  He did what he needed to do.  It's in his face, that look of derision and gallow's humor, that mix of innocence and the wear-and-tear of what people can do to you.  

There's nothing easy about it.   

A Lovely Thing to Behold

Lars and the Real Girl was released in 2007 to not a lot of acclaim, except a smidgen for Ryan Gosling's incredibly moving performance.  I've seen it three times now, and each time Lars moves me more as I see how the writer Nancy Oliver creates a universe that's Utopian in scope, but utilitarian in the way it is conveyed.  The premise sounds like a stupid joke, which is probably why the movie did not get as much notice as it should have.  Lars is a functional recluse who lives in the garage behind the house where he grew up.  His brother and sister-in-law live in the house-proper.  The sister-in-law, Karen, is trying desperately to include Lars in their domesticity, even at one time tackling him out in the snow to ensure he makes it to dinner.  As played by Emily Mortimer, Karen is the beating, beautiful heart of the movie:  someone so guileless and sweet that she feels the need to enforce kindness, not just give it. 

And that's the way many of the townspeople in Lars and the Real Girl come across throughout the rest of the film.  When Lars orders a fake girl through the Internet (and it's a salacious website he gets it from, advertising poor lost lonely orphan-girls to be adopted by poor lost lonely old men), and the girl arrives, you expect the movie to lurch into simpleminded, mean-spirited comedy.  Even the third time when I watched I was almost anticipating some crude aside I missed the first two times, but the triumph of the film is that it takes that low-grade concept (lonely loser purchases a fake doll to make love to) and elevates it by paying attention to what the fake girl means, and how her presence in Lars' life allows him to find his way out of all the traps he has set for himself.

This time seeing it I noticed even more of the disability aspects of the movie.  In order to move Bianca (the fake girl) around Lars imagines a disability for her, so he has to get a wheelchair for her.  Bianca, his first love, is a woman with a disability, and yet the townspeople, when asked to help Lars through his delusion by believing in it along with him by the local family doctor (a miraculously understated Patricia Clarkson), take Bianca into their midst as one of their own.  They provide her with a job at the mall as a model, and eventually she is even voted onto the schoolboard.  In her vacantness and in her pliability, Bianca becomes a perfect symbol for human kindness.

And Lars is as well a person with a disability:  loneliness manifesting itself into a delusion, some kind of mental illness, I'm sure, but what the movie does is dramatize not the internal aspects of "being disabled," but the external ones movies always miss.  When Lars goes to a party with Bianca, there are stares and comments, but there's also this feeling that somehow Lars is using Bianca to let people know how human he is too, and how much he needs.  He could never tell them that upfront, so Bianca becomes his visual cue, and we see him and what is "wrong with him" through innocent eyes.  His attention to Bianca, his devotion to her, becomes as natural and real as any romance in movies can be.

"Disability" gets deconstructed because the secrecy and shame usually connected to a story like Lars' are not there.  He is openly courting a fake girl he ordered over the Internet, and guess what?  Everyone in town is in on it.  The "disabilities" inherent in both Bianca and Lars' bodies and persona are somehow "owned" by everyone, and in the end a sort of catharsis happens, at least for me, as I watched.  Throughout the film, Ryan Gosling's face transforms from the face of a weary, half-dead soldier in the beginning to a beautiful half-asleep silent-movie comedian in the end.  He finds peace, a casual insouciance, but there's neediness still in his eyes, and a desire coming from his forehead somehow to figure out how to be who he is, and get what he wants out of life, without losing his mind.  Lars' quest becomes a sane journey if not to self-acceptance, at least to accepting reality, which is probably the same thing.  And this movie truly does something miraculous:  it delivers a tableau hardly ever constructed for movies and rarely seen in true life:  people being nice to each other, even when being nice means putting up with something they might easily toss aside as "deranged" or "sick."

It's a lovely thing to behold.