[The first part is here.
And no, this does not really refer—in some “other-shoe-dropping way”—to some
recent workplace-related issues, though the day for that may be soon. Sorry if this entry seems a little diffuse. More
economical stuff coming. Edit 2/27/13.]
Subsections below:
The start of my blaming Charlotte
A lesson from the Monica Lewinsky situation of 1998, and the relevant
male “exemplar”
Sketches of theories of why young women flirt with men twice their age
The moral positions of Harris and Charlotte showing their sides in the denouement
Weakness of Charlotte’s
side of the story doesn’t undercut Harris’s appeal—but the story is also one of
a dyadic dance, and the “visitation of value”
Further reading
Seeing this movie for the
Xth time since I first saw it in the theater in 2003, I would say that, for its
importance to the story, Scarlett Johansson’s performance as Charlotte is the weakest. This may or may not
be attributable to how director Sofia Coppola wrote her part and/or
directed her.
Johansson has had a fairly
illustrious film career for the past decade-plus (some could say maybe she’s
been more the beneficiary of luck than landing opportunities based solely on
talent), but here, while still pretty young, she seems like a not entirely
socially adept, yet earnest enough young woman—who drifts through the Japanese
environs, taking in (tourist-style) old temples and a lesson in flower
arrangement and such, not unappreciative
of beauty and cultural difference.
Meanwhile, she nevertheless has
a sort of “emotional affair” with a man twice her age. In terms of the sheer
personality the two actors bring to their roles, Harris, played by Bill Murray,
seems to bring a lot more than does Charlotte,
in terms of colorful expressions, humor, and reflections of life experience.
(He also shows what an aging actor can do when blessed with “basset hound
eyes”—which, as we know from the example of Rep. John Boehner, don’t always
endear us to their owner.)
In a way, this confluence of
very different sets of personal liabilities-and-assets is what you would expect
from such a “May–December” romance. The young woman brings youthful idealism,
wonder, and a “who cares about boundaries” open-mindedness, and the older man
brings a sort of moderating, humor-inserting capacity borne of experience (and
maybe a somewhat troubled sense that the young woman’s love-related hankerings
need to be gently nudged in a far different direction, without blunt offense
given).
The start of my blaming Charlotte
If Johansson’s Charlotte—contrary
to what the film shows—brought a lot more personality, and a sound sense of
pain and of really trying to work her way through the teeth and claws (mixed
with fun) of life—even while she seemed to go overboard in pursuing her
youthful agenda—I might be willing to excuse her for how she stimulates this
fleeting relationship. But I feel that, amid her apparent shallowness, she’s
more to blame here than Harris.
Now Harris, of course, can be
blamed too; his wife is often enough in touch with him by fax and phone,
seeming a nag with her redecorating project, and her voice—to the extent it
comes through on the soundtrack—seeming to have the stiff impertinence of a
naïve, presuming upscale housewife. Meanwhile, he knows what he
has—quarter-century marriage, loving kids at home, and a rare kind of career
(with all its gross compromises)—and he still risks it hanging out with the
young Charlotte.
But I would primarily blame Charlotte here, because
she is just starting out in a marriage—she has a husband with a career, which
is remunerative enough (actually, is simply the type) to come with the ability
to travel abroad; and she is college-educated. What is her “damage”—to use a term from the film Heathers (1989)—that she starts
gravitating toward an unconsummated dalliance with Harris? In a way, you could
say she is all the sillier for seeming a star-struck type in terms of linking
up with a man who, per the story, is an accomplished star.
But in a way, blaming one individual is beside the point.
As the film seems conscious enough of, this sort of fleeting relationship is one of
spontaneity and a dyadic quality. Indeed, without wanting to seem I
have an agenda regarding some real-life issue here, the trick with these sudden dalliances between people a generation
apart in age is a matter of a two-sided phenomenon. This is no “safety dance,” but a
dyadic dance. Amid these particular people’s jet-lagged, respectively
personally dissatisfied states they are in, a sort of romantic interest
suddenly wells up. A semi-Dionysian “imp” starts calling the shots. The two
hang out, chat…eventually kiss. It happens from both sides, welling out of the
needs of each, but also just “coalescing out of the air between them.”
A lesson from the Monica Lewinsky situation of 1998, and the relevant
male “exemplar”
The dyadic, or contextual,
aspect of this sort of thing can’t be overstated. It annoyed me years ago
(1998) when, in the heat of all the news reporting on the Monica Lewisky
affair, some news reporter would suddenly get on her high horse (I believe it
was a her) because it had been
suggested that more than Bill Clinton was to blame for the affair. Well, in my
view, of course he wasn’t the only
one! Monica Lewinsky was, too! In fact, if you look at the whole thing in
detail, you could not unfairly, at times, blame Lewinsky more.
I mean, we do criticize Clinton,
because as occupant of the type of office he was in (aside from the
expectations implicit in his marriage), he should have known better than to do
the kind of “animal” things he did with Lewinsky (remember the stained dress,
etc.). But she was a sine qua non to
this situation, too. In fact, even as its negative ramifications started to
ensnare her, she could be criticized for still pursuing the relationship as she
did—I read parts of her 1999 autobiography, coauthored by Andrew Morton.
In fact, in the book she talks
as if the love between her and the
president justified so much of her position. She sounds in this like someone
blinded by her infatuation. Why didn’t she realize that she was “mucking” with
a man in an important office, whose sheer responsibilities and social
implications were at stake, and that she was not just pursuing a private
affair? Eventually Clinton
called her, in a phone conversation, a stalker. In the context, maybe this hit
her as cold; one can’t entirely blame her for that reaction. But on a level it
was true.
More generally, the way young
women can gravitate toward older men should be understood enough nowadays—as to
both ambiguous and more innocuous sides. Some examples are just too comical:
think of Hugh Hefner (the “loin in winter,” as The New York Times memorably called him in a recent headline),
marrying a woman young enough to be his granddaughter. But twenty-something
women gravitating toward men twice their age—say, 45 to 50—happens more often
than some of us might think. And to those of us conscious of this general
phenomenon, or especially encountering it on our daily perambulations, it may
be unseemly or an impertinence in the concrete, but in the abstract it
shouldn’t seem so unlikely and bizarre.
Sketches of theories of why young women flirt with men twice their age
I’m not “flattering” myself when
I say that I’ve seen enough young women (about half my age) get into flirty
mode with me (and I am no obviously sexually
appealing sort!) that I see it as an odd trend—it is not so terribly isolated. (By
the way, don’t go by my LinkedIn photo—that’s from 2003. I look older now,
complete with some grey hair.) It typically happens in a public (or
semi-public) location—a library, or especially a store (young supermarket
cashiers, in my experience over many years, are among those young women most
apt to engage in during-work [for them] semi- or more-fully flirtatious
behaviors with customers; it usually doesn’t bother me).
In recent times,
post-2008-meltdown, I think this phenomenon reflects a little social tension
(or “fraying of sense of tradition”) in part. Kids may seem to be unjustifiably
in fun/optimism mode, but I think they often have a “substrate” of knowing
things societally (financial infrastructure, sense of future) are more in play,
or threatened, than usual. Amid this comes some contortions (or defiance) of
social morés.
I’ve been developing a theory
that twenty-something women flirt with twice-their-age men for one or more of a
number of reasons:
- They don’t know, or don’t realistically guess, his age.
- They “want to marry their father” (a rather crude way of putting a tendency that is usually less socially awry or objectionable than that may sound; you may or may not want to call it a version of the old Freudian concept of the “electra complex”).
- They want to passingly assert a little power—even without knowing quite what they’re doing—by being flirty with a man, who for his older age may seem even more exciting a “conquest” than a young man their age.
- They’re crazy.
With all this stuff when it is
manifested to me at particular times, I’m usually not too bothered. In specific
instances, when a young woman (about half my age) is being flirty, depending on
the nature and apparent meaning of the flirting, I may feel it is just an
impertinence or an annoyance that I try not to dignify with full accord or
encouragement. Sometimes, on the other hand, I may help set it up with my
“roving wolf eye.”
At still other times, a minor,
passing flirting between two people—“coming out of wherever”—can just be a way
to “sweeten the cup of coffee currently being drunk.” Greasing the rails. Just
having passing fun. Sort of like, “You look nice today.” It comes and goes. Who
cares?
The moral positions of Harris and Charlotte showing their sides in the denouement
It seems easy enough to theorize
that when it comes to Bob Harris and Charlotte, these two people gravitate
toward one another, seeing possibility, and a kind of succor and promise, in
each other that they can’t get (or currently think they can’t get) in their ongoing mates. They flirt a bit.
She, in particular, maybe unexpectedly at the outset, seems to need what “life-coach”
counseling he gives on the bed.
As the week goes on, they get
emotionally attached enough that she misses him. And just as, in their brewing
flirtation before the partying phase of the film, Charlotte shows the awkward
way one “decompresses” from a brief romantic flirtation—she seems to show a
sudden, surprising indifference in their saying goodbye in the hotel lobby, and
she gets on the elevator. Is she showing she feels a bit snubbed? Meanwhile,
Harris looks yearning/sad in the wake of her going.
Later, of course, when he is in
a limo on his way home, he spies her walking on a concourse, and he hurries out
and goes to say a real hearty goodbye, complete with whispered message in the
ear (there was a video online some time ago capturing what Murray actually said;
it wasn’t “Sofia is a pain in the ass, isn’t she?”) and feelingly given kisses.
It’s enough to make her tear up.
This completes the arc of their
relationship. An affair? Depends how you define it. Sexual? Of course not.
Emotional? Sure. Maybe not that big a deal for being an emotional affair.
But I’m sure when Bob Harris
goes home to his kids, they need not worry whether they’ll have a broken home.
Bob and his wife may have trivial arguments over a decorating project and what
he generally eats for dinner, but the kids will probably have their college
money and enough love from Dad.
Charlotte? For her to get into the semi-fling
she has with Bob, even after just being married: what to make of this? Is she
simply immature? Is she some kind of neurotic, or at least narcissistic, mess?
(Amusingly, a woman Harris
actually has a sexual fling with—which seems inserted as humor a little broad for this film—is some
unnaturally-redheaded singer who seems just the kind of Yankee who gave up
whatever she’d had in the States [maybe her U.S. life obligations were fast
vanishing due to some gross “thing that happens when you’re making other plans”]
for cover singing in Japan, with loyal instrumentalist in tow. Harris, head
bowed at the bar, is looking especially peaked, downcast, and unable to sleep,
with big stogie in hand and drink not far away. She pops by after finishing a
set and lightly says Hi. Next thing you know, he is waking in his bedroom to
the bracing morning light, in a real “What happened last night?” state, and the
singer flittering around is entertaining herself with Maria Muldaur’s “Midnight
at the Oasis,” a 1974 tune that seems as cheesily fitting as anything for
commentary on such a moment. And Charlotte
turns up at the door, Harris bolting up apprehensively to answer it….)
Weakness of Charlotte’s
side of the story doesn’t undercut Harris’s appeal—but the story is also one of
a dyadic dance, and the “visitation of value”
Some of the shallowness of Charlotte’s
perspective seems shown in—just before Harris’s and her well-done bed
conversation—her suddenly rhapsodic “Let’s never come here again, because it
would never be as much fun.” Later, there comes what is to me one of the most
trite scenes in the film, when in their last “date,” they are at a table,
looking at each other over a short distance, while—can you believe it?—the
Atlanta Rhythm Section’s “So Into You” is played by a male cover artist. This
looks like a shot for a cheap wine ad. And at one point when Bob says in a
spurt of regretful emotion—seeming to have dropped to her age—“I don’t want to leave,” Charlotte responds with a pat, “So don’t.
Stay here with me. We’ll start a jazz band.”
What, did they suddenly both
become 16 years old?
Looking at the story overall, I
feel more for Bob than for Charlotte.
But in any event, as short as their relationship is, it is largely a story of a
spontaneous “dance” that works for both people in a muddy situation, and it’s
over with, and seen through the artful camera, it provides a charmingly
atmospheric, sweetly melancholy story for our evening-film pleasure.
Some stories are about transient
situations, where the briefness and “vaporousness” of some of their qualities
or aspects may seem to belie that there was anything “edifying” to tell about
at all. But some experiences in life are
all the more valuable for the sheer “visitation” of value, of “expressions of
spirit”—even if these include yearning, sadness…—that come, unexpected, in a
weird location, with “mental circumstances” askew.
Maybe this story seems like a
slight one about randomly thrown-together bourgeois people who have too much
time on their hands and money at their disposal, but I think it touches enough
of us that it was worth telling. And the film still resonates 10 years after
its release.
Further reading
