Chasing Amy

CHASING AMY (1997)

This movie is the last in Kevin Smith's "Jersey Trilogy" which includes Clerks and Mallrats. Interestingly enough, each movie is basically different, has been marketed differently, and I have yet to meet anyone else besides myself who's caught all three.

Since Clerks was a low-budget, amusing attempt to get attention by practically any means neccessary, Mallrats a medium-budget attempt to recreate a John Hughes comedy in 90's style, and Chasing Amy a return to low-budget in an attempt to escape the lousy reviews and reception of medium budget movie, it would seem kind of improbable that Smith did in fact plan for some sort of cohesive trilogy. Apart from some characters moving from film to film or referring to events in other films, the only real constants are Jay and Silent Bob, two minor character/commentators who seemed so foul-mouthed and crude in the first movie, I fell to my knees and thanked Buddha I lived on the west coast. I suppose that if there is a theme to the trilogy (very doubtful), it's about the impossibilty of satisfaction; respectively, the impossibility to find satisfaction in work, in commerce, in love.

I hear she's dating Vince Vaughn now. How weird... Chasing Amy is about a comic book writer/artist (Ben Affleck, looking suspiciously like what Kevin Smith might look like if he managed to successfully cross-pollinate himself with Bruce Springsteen) who falls in love with another comic book writer/artist (Joey Lauren Adams) who digs him but is gay. Many people have complained about this movie for several reasons; (1) After a a first third to a half of a movie that is reasonably honest and good about capturing the old-impossible-love-affair angle that we've all been caught in, Adams and Affleck's characters do in fact confess love for each other and get together; (2) the movie never mentions the word bisexual once; (3) the characters split apart over what the movie presents is Affleck's insecurity over Adams's previous tendencies and experiences; (4) Joey Lauren Adams has a voice like a baby goat that bleats loudly for milk in a distant field and, 90 minutes later, is still bleating.

I think my main problem with the movie is an offshoot of (3), in that the characters split over what the movie presents is Affleck's insecurity over Adams's previous tendencies and experiences when it seems to me that Affleck's character has a valid grievance over the fact that she was far from honest over her previous range of experiences. In carefully constructing a sympathetic but complex character for Adams, the movie removes the sting of honesty Smith is supposedly trying for. All the other characters have to come to terms and do penance for their homophobia, their jealousy, their obsessiveness and have to face what those things say about them. Adams, however, is pretty much allowed to know everything about herself, apologize for it casually, and go back to training the focus on everyone else. The fact is, dishonesty to someone you love is still wrong, and is just as harmful a failing as any of the others mentioned above. I think this is the part that ends up letting down the audience I was with, who still felt for the most part like they got a good deal from the movie (the fact that the ending strikes the right balance goes a long way) despite an awareness of (4), particularly as Adams gives way too many scenes in high-drama mode, crying and angry and loud, summoning up the image of (4) again and again.

By the way, with all due respect to Kevin Smith, whose role in Chasing Amy I definitely enjoyed, I feel the time is past due to address a certain post-80's early 90's trend that I cannot honestly say I appreciate.

Kevin Smith explains it all At one point of the movie, Kevin Smith (in character as Silent Bob) explains the title of the movie. Now, I have no trouble with writer-directors. I have no problem with writer-directors who have roles in the movie. I do, though, have a problem with the writer/director/actor actually explaining the movie to the audience as I find this tends to make me question the w/d/a's faith in us, the audience, to get it.

I first noticed this back in 1991 with Spike Lee's Jungle Fever when Spike, as the best friend of protagonist Wesley Snipes explains the title of the movie to Wesley during a walk around the neighborhood:

SPIKE: You've got the Fever. Jungle Fever.

WESLEY: What?

SPIKE: Jungle Fever. You and this white woman are hot for each other and you think it's real, but it's just the Fever.

In true Jeff Generalization style, I'm having trouble thinking of other movies where the w/d/a does this, although w/d/a's are so prominent now, I'm sure I'm merely blocking on more egregious examples.

In any event, I would like to believe that I have other examples floating in my noggin, because when Kevin Smith ends his speech by saying, "and I've been Chasing Amy ever since. In a manner of speaking", a little alarm went off in my head.

If you're a future w/d/a reading this, I beg you: don't do this in your movies. Consider how much worse many movies would have been with similar scenes.

TOUCH OF EVIL

MARLENE DIETRICH: You're not looking so good these days, sugar.

ORSON WELLES: That's because I've got the touch.

MARLENE: What?

ORSON: The touch of evil. I'm corrupt enough that, as an authority figure, I throw into doubt one's belief in the concept of justice in this society.

MARLENE: I see.

ORSON: However, there is the additional ambiguity of the fact that I am, in fact, a good detective suggesting that one must have a touch of evil in order to understand it.

Or how about:

REAR WINDOW

JIMMY STEWART, laid up in wheelchair with broken leg, stares obsessively with binoculars and telephoto lens at the apartments across the way. At one point, he looks in an apartment where ALFRED HITCHCOCK, as a repairman, is winding a grandfather clock. HITCHCOCK turns to the camera which, filming from a distance is supposed to represent Stewart's Point of View:

HITCHCOCK (voice small in the distance): You are looking through your rear window, you realize.

STEWART (surprised but still looking through his binoculars): What?

HITCHCOCK: You are looking through your rear window into ours. Our rear windows reveal what goes on behind the facades of our buildings. As, similarly, does yours. You are trying to figure out what those in the building you watch are doing in private but ironically, you can only interpret what you see. Behind the facade is another facade to interpret. Of the soul, it is not as easy to ascertain the rear window, is it?

STEWART: I guess not.

HITCHCOCK: Additionally, the audience, by seeing what you do when no one else is around, is looking, in a way, through your rear window. Behind the facade of the heroic photographer, we see the voyeur afraid to commit, capable of loving only through a distance.

STEWART: I suppose.

HITCHCOCK: But the audience peering through the rear window of Rear Window must indeed wonder what the difference is between you and them, considering the great pains I go to draw equivalencies between your situation and theirs, literally filming much of the movie from your point of view. Are they too only voyeurs, wishing to see and solve crimes, distancing themselves from their own inability to love those close to them?

TAXI DRIVER

ROBERT DENIRO is sitting late at a night with an agitated passenger who is looking from the street at the apartment where his wife commits adultery. The passenger is played by MARTIN SCORSESE.

SCORSESE: That's my wife up there, you know. Yeah.

DENIRO (uncomfortable): Yeah?

SCORSESE: Yeah. And I think I'm going to kill her. Go up there and kill her.

DENIRO (more uncomfortable): Yeah?

SCORSESE: Yeah. This is making you uncomfortable, isn't it? You want to get away from this, don't you? And you can, because you're a taxi driver.

DENIRO: What?

SCORSESE: You're the taxi driver. You think you can see it but escape from it, because you're a taxi driver. You move from person to person, unable to connect with them, except briefly. But because so many of us are so brutal, so evil, so lost, you don't want to connect with us, do you?

DENIRO: Yeah.

SCORSESE: Yeah, that's right, so you keep yourself at a distance, thinking you're above it but you're not. You're part of it. The taxi driver, like the taxi he drives, is a integral part of the urban landscape. You are a symbol, a representative for all the conflicting demons and desires of urban life.

DENIRO: Yeah?

SCORSESE: Yeah, this tendency of people to go from one disconnected relationship to another is in fact a facet of urban life now, as much an integral part of it as the taxi....(etc., etc.)

See how unsatisfying that is.? Future w/d/a's, please leave a degree of ambiguity or, at the very least, leave this task to other actors in your movies. Smith, make a movie without yourself in it, and let's see what happens.

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