Further Adventures in Overvaluing the Sandwich

At some point—I can’t recall this specifically (and please correct me if you know, Dad (assuming you’re still reading the blog))—my father had me watch enough of the movie Five Easy Pieces, starring Jack Nicholson,—I assume that it was on A&E or something, and Dad was like “Hey, there’s a funny bit in this, let’s keep watching it.”—to see the part where, on the road from southerly oil-drilling town, on the way to the Pacific Northwest to visit his dying father, Jack Nicholson’s character, an ex-Classical pianist, stops with his car-load of womenfolk at a roadside diner for a meal—let’s call it brunch—and encounters a stubborn waitress. The menu states that there are no substitutions allowed, but Jack Nicholson’s character has something in mind that he’d like to eat that isn’t on the menu: a tomato omelet with a side of wheat toast. Nicholson’s character concocts a system of ordering within the rules of the menu to get what he wants—the sequence wherein he orders a chicken salad sandwich, hold the lettuce, mayo, lettuce, and go ahead and hold the chicken too, is genuinely hilarious, and regardless of the specifics of how it is that my father got me to watch at least that much of the movie, it’s worth it just for that. This—the initial watching of the this piece of the film (or, at the very least, the relating of this particular scene to me by my father)—stuck with me enough that I eventually purchased a digital print of the movie on laser-readable disc.

At another point, just after quitting the study of the performance on the instrument popularly known as the French horn, I was watching this movie (I owned it and watched it (unlike Zisek, apparently, I actually watch my DVDs) back when I still was a “horn player”), my friend Zac, who was and continues to be a successful musician, decided to go ahead and watch it with me. Upon viewing the film in its entirety—including the aforementioned hilarious scene of sandwich-ordering—Zac had absolutely nothing good to say about it, but at the same time recognized what appealed to me in it (aside from the hilarity), perhaps best exemplified by the following snippet of dialogue, spoken by a female character—a violinist—who, upon meeting Jack Nicholson’s character, is utterly shocked by his no-longer-a-musician-ness:

Violinist: The only thing I find very difficult to imagine is that one could have this incredible background in music and then just walk away from it without giving it a second thought at all.

Jack Nicholson’s Character: I gave it thought.

But, of course, the blogishness of the above writing let’s me stray away from the point that I intend to make with quasi-biography. I mean only to try and contextualize my enjoyment of this particular film at the same time that I intend to point out why and how it’s something of a guilty pleasure for me. In the end, the movie is a guilty pleasure because its misogyny outweighs its more generally-good qualities, mostly because its main character is generally awful, other than the fact that he’s talented and charismatic (again, this post does not, at all, reject the film—or the character’s—appeal).

In fact, the sequence in which the aforementioned totally-awesome-sandwich-scene occurs is probable the most problematic of the movie’s many problematic sequences (the sequence, to put it in the usual 3-act movie-structure-analysis is something of a bridge between the 1st and 2nd acts). It involves Jack Nicholson’s character and his girlfriend, on the way to Jack Nicholson’s character’s father’s house, picking up two female hitchhikers who had just been in a wreck. These two hitchhiker’s are essentially just stereotypical hippie-lesbian types, and every aspect of their involvement in the movie are unnecessary. Except, maybe, for the fact the movie is made by men about a particularly charismatic man, who would certainly have seen these women in the way that movie portrays them (the camera never (if ever) strays far from Nicholson).

And, at risk of writing another long post (and basking in the fact that one can be unacademic and unrigorous on a blog and still get the points across (one hopes) that one wants to, without bothering with the bullshit of getting, say, and an MLCS (Master’s in Literary and Cultural Studies) or looking up any particular references or seeing what other people have said (written) about similar topics), the general weakness of the female characters, and general awesomeness of Jack Nicholson’s character (he was, in fact, nominated for an Oscar for this performance, for whatever that’s worth) is fundamentally problematic for any viewer that is, like, hip to equality.

That being said, however, and being, hopefully, more or less hip to such things as equality, and further wanting to explicate things about the movie that remain good despite its problems (cough cough, sort of like, uh, Wagner, I guess (many of my peers at Grad school like to laugh at me for my “cough cough, sort of like, uh, Wagner…” moments)), let us look at another snippet of dialogue, from a scene where the violinist from the above scene has just convinced Jack Nicholson’s character to finally play the piano for her (and Jack Nicholson has played):

Violinist: That was beautiful Robert, I’m surprised.
Jack Nicholson’s Character: Thank you.
Violinist: I was really very moved by it.
Jack Nicholson’s Character laughs.
Violinist: What’s wrong?
Jack Nicholson’s Character: Nothing, it’s just, um, I picked the easiest piece I could think and uh, I uh, played it first when I was ten years old and I played it better then.
Violinist: Can’t you understand it was the feeling I was affected by?
Jack Nicholson’s Character: I didn’t have any.
Violinist: You had no inner feelings?
Jack Nicholson’s Character: None.

Wow! Women sure are dumb, aren’t they?

But seriously, folks, what can we take from this? Well, let’s re-read it, replacing piano playing with acting. What ends up being good about this, then, is that Jack Nicholson is not a method actor. Do you know where method acting gets you? Ask Marlon Brando or Heath Ledger. It get’s you crazy or dead. Jack Nicholson? He still shows up in some decent (The Departed) or even good (About Schmidt) movies. I’m certainly one of those indie-hipster “boy method acting sure does suck” types (see, most recently, perhaps, George Clooney in Burn After Reading for an example of why not being a method actor is a good thing), but at the same time, it’s probably a stretch to try and explain away my liking of a generally unlikeable movie by re-reading it by being about the Actor (sort of like how David Lynch’s Inland Empire is not and never will be a good movie).

The natural tie-in to all of this is the broader notion of literary misogyny (for God’s sake, the viewer is led to believe that Jack Nicholson’s character sleeps out in the open on a dock in this movie), which is, as I see it, the umbrella concept for how males go on being unfair to females through cultural mediums (despite their pronouns). And here—again, keeping things in their short-blog-forms—we can reference, say, Roth’s Zuckerman, Foster Wallace’s reading of John Updike, Norman Mailer’s reading of Norman Mailer, etc. Also—though this would require an additional additional post, which, so far as I know, would mean anything to maybe two of the reader-at-large of Of Mild Interest—Stan Brakhage. Total F-ing misogynist.

But, in terms of the movie trying to be character-driven and, like, totally “fair,” let’s looks at one final scene, where Jack Nicholson’s character gives a talking-down to a totally stuck up feminist middle-aged lady-person, in a scene where Jack Nicholson’s character’s woman wants to watch the TV and the middle-aged feminist is having none of that, and the feminist tries to exemplify Jack Nicholson’s girlfriend as the embodiment of a set of characteristics that, essentially, are what woman shouldn’t be:

Jack Nicholson’s Character: Don’t sit there pointing at her.
Middle-Aged Feminist: I beg your pardon.
Jack Nicholson’s Character: I said, don’t point at her, you creep.
Middle-Aged Feminist: But I was just telling her about…
Jack Nicholson’s Character: Where the hell do you get the ass to tell anybody anything about class or who the hell’s got it or what she typifies; you shouldn’t even be in the same room as her you pompous celibate.
Middle-Aged Feminist: Oh, this is really too much.

Right, so, clearly the movie sets up a fake Nicholson’s character-oriented view of the world, wherein, though the “feminist’ voice gets a voice, it is stereotyped and easily ridiculed. This is perhaps balanced by the totally irredeemable qualities of Jack Nicholson’s character—how can we buy into a movie about such an unlikeable bloke? And even the movie’s moral: “shouldn’t like this guy, and there he goes again...” shouldn’t be enough to salvage it.

So damn, then, other than trying to further introduce the kind of gender-related stuff (literary misogyny, what, what?) that I am apparently interested in blogging about these days, what good is all this? Well… I don’t want cheese or chicken on my toast either, God damn it!