Doing things with words

--Tell me. --No. --Don't you trust me? --Yes. --Then tell me.
This basic conversation is the linchpin of so many movies you almost miss it. It's based on the idea that trust is a logical structure so profound that nothing in human nature can stand against it. Trust, in movie relationships, trumps all. Without trust, there can be no love, and there can be no trust in dramas without full and brutal disclosure.

It creates a false dilemma that movie characters always fall for. If you're in a movie and you've got a secret to keep, hope to God someone you love doesn't drop the trust card. If they do, you lose. Within this fanciful construct the argument from trust can be exploited to achieve anything a screen/playwright wants, and it's the easiest way to bring a complex situation to a head without trying very hard.

Dramatic trust is not real trust. Dramatic trust is a cheap way of forcing a character's hand, of tricking that automaton into thinking it's doing the only thing it really can. It is, after all, in love. And what is love, if not trust. And what is trust, if not--you know--spilling your guts all the time.

In the doctrine of dramatic trust, consideration of the other isn't humane, it's cowardice. In the doctrine of dramatic trust, consideration is the path of weakness and failure. If she brought your soup cold, you'd better tell her in no uncertain terms or your relationship is done by Act III. Absurd levels of disclosure are cathartic, fundamental, and in the modern cinematic American love story, sacramental.

In Closer, there's a ridiculous amount of disclosure, but not for trust's sake, and arguably not for love's either. It's disclosure for retribution, out of pettiness, selfishness, pain and anger. It's disclosure for all the ways we hurt and get hurt. It's for spreading out the harm, making others as miserable as we are. Sometimes it's an acute tactic, other times it's out of desperation, but it always feels brutal, honest and, you know, real.

So when the argument from trust came up, near the end--as it was bound to and right where it always does--I was really bothered. It seemed too easy. Then I put it into context. That is, I liked the movie enough to try and manufacture an elaborate pantomime to explain it away. Afterward, it still seemed too easy.

Closer is a movie about archetypes. I got confused at first, mistaking these beautiful, passionate impulse generating machines for human beings. Closer is about aspects of the condition of humanity, not about particular instantiations of humanhood. Draw two intersecting lines on graph paper. Write Anna on top and Alice on the bottom, Dan on the left and Larry on the right. There you have Artistry and passion, Reality and calculation, Self-hatred and secrecy, other-hatred and openness. I'm not going to tell you which is which, but you'll figure it all out by the time Larry and Dan start telling each other the [opposite] ways in which Anna hates each man. It's a painfully frank scene that has nothing to do with trust.

Then, at the end--after the big trust talk--are two quiet scenes that make you wonder if you might have had the order mixed up, if maybe the self-hater was more open than the other-hater. Maybe, but that's not really the point, because Anna, Alice, Dan and Larry can't exist without each other. That's the trouble with archetypes.

***

There's a lot in this movie about authorship and the task of naming, defining ourselves and our world. Dan's book has a bad name. Alice doesn't like to tell people her name. Dan masquerades as a woman in a sex chat room, and facilitates the most realistic depiction of IM-sex I've ever seen, down to the abbreviated net prose and the poor substitute 'ohooohohoohohohohhhh' for the ubiquitous faked cyber-gasm.

In a movie about fake people, paradigmatic lives and enough fucks, bitches, shits, and cunts to curl the toes of no less a foulmouth than myself, it says something when the most caustic and spiteful epithet spewed is 'writer'. It means weak, it means quixotic, it suggests a profound disconnect with the way the world actually is. Alice asks Dan,

Where is the love? I can't see it, I can't touch it, I can't feel it. I can hear it. I can hear some words, but I can't do anything with your easy words.

Parsed words are so unequal to the task of describing emotion that there is almost no nobility in even trying. Only someone as lowly as a writer could create something like dramatic trust--a plot device masquerading as a poetic ideal. Similarly though, it takes a writer of Patrick Marber's caliber to expose that kind of easy out for what it is, all the while dangling these mystical, passionate Platonic humanoids in front of us--that thing's rubbish, but look at these pretties, they're representations.

This is a very good, very unsettling talkie with a lot to say, ably said. See it, if only for Clive Owen. So hot right now.