The Perfect Man

LCC, in some very interesting comments to my preceding post, notes that “romantic comedies over the past two and a half decades have developed a common device of an applauding audience inside the film at the end - the 'big kiss' is doubly and self consciously a spectacle: from the factory workers in Officer and a Gentleman, to the office workers in Working Girl...” (LCC also cites the use of the same convention in Anger Management and Love Actually).

One common element shared by all of these movies (with the possible exception of Anger Management) is that in each case the romance is transgressive in some way, often cutting across generational and/or class boundaries (virtually all of the romances in Love Actually, for instance, are with subordinates or employees). Seen in these terms, the convention of the embedded applause is (over)compensatory, eliding over the unseemliness of, say, Paula (Debra Winger), in An Officer and a Gentleman, simply waiting for a promising Navy pilot (Richard Gere) to swoop in and rescue her from a humdrum, working class existence.

Given this linkage between transgressive desire and public acclamation, the precise inverse (or natural extension) of this convention of the celebratory “big kiss,” therefore, is that of the pedophile who arrives for his meeting with his underage paramour (typically met on-line), only to find a troop of police men waiting for him instead. In one recent case, for instance, NY City police detective Michael Lapine was arrested in 2004 after arranging a rendezvous with an investigator posing as a 14 year old boy. More recently, as Paul Farhi discusses in The Washington Post, the NBC newsmagazine Dateline has ignited a furor with its decision to pay the civilian watchdog group Perverted Justice more than $100,000 to impersonate children on the internet in order to help entrap potential pedophiles. The figurative embedded applause (applause, not for the success of the “romance,” but rather precisely for its failure) in the latter case become even more ironic since it is potentially out of step with the legal realities of the situation (as a Fairfax police spokesman noted following the airing of the first segment of the program last November, the Fairfax County police could not simply go out an arrest everyone who appeared guilty in the show:

As appalling as this was to most people, we couldn't just go out and arrest everyone. Until we could get into the computer records, we couldn't prove [a crime]. . . . The standards of what works well on TV are not necessarily the same as what [works] in court.

The solution which the show subsequently arrived upon was to deputize the private investigators, essentially integrating the law into the show in absentia, though in the process rekindling underlying concerns about the ostensible independence of the journalistic side of the show. 

[The targets of the preceding pedophile stings are all men, though the inverse problem of adult women preying on under-age boys is a growing and increasingly visible phenomenon, with recent cases including those of Jodi Thorpe, Kathy Denise White, Pamela Turner, Debra Lafave, and Mary Kay Latourneau. Despite the scandalous nature of many of these cases, there is nevertheless still a tendency within the popular imagination to regard this sort of “Mrs. Robinson” pedophilia more jocularly, as illustrated, for instance, in the recent song “Stacey’s Mom” (Fountains of Wayne), concerning a teenager’s sexual fantasies about the mother of his (girl?) friend:

Stacy, can i come over after school? (after school)
We can hang around by the pool (hang by the pool)
Did your mom get back from her business trip? (business trip)
Is she there, or is she trying to give me the slip? (give me the slip)

You know, I'm not the little boy that I used to be
I'm all grown up now, baby can't you see

Stacy's mom has got it goin' on
She's all I want and I’ve waited for so long
Stacy, can't you see you're just not the girl for me
I know it might be wrong but I'm in love with Stacy's mom […]]

These issues of mediated transference and transgressive desire, in turn, can be found in many surprising venues, such as Mark Rosman’s teen romance, The Perfect Man (2005). In the movie, Heather Locklear plays Jean Hamilton, a single mother of two girls who is desperate to find a man, any man, to marry. Each time a new relationship goes south, however, Hamilton packs up her family and moves to a new city to start all over again. In tow are her two daughters: 6 year Zoe (Aria Wallace) and teenage Holly (Hilary Duff), who blogs about her frequent peregrinations under the name “girlonthemove.”

The act of blogging (and of internet communication in general), in turn, provides one of the central pivots of the film as a whole. Frustrated by the instability which her mother’s disastrous love life was wrecking on the family, and reluctant to move yet again, Holly decides to create a “perfect man” for her mother to fall in love with. Using ideas (and, ultimately, the actual image) of the uncle of one of her friends, a bistro cook named Ben (Chris Noth), Holly creates an  idealized lover who writes, e-mails and IM’s Jean while ostensibly away on business in China. Holly, meanwhile, carries out most of this subterfuge from bedroom of her classmate Adam (Ben Feldman), who is nursing a crush of his own on the uninterested Holly.

The sight of Holly effectively romancing her mother under the imaginary guise—a la Cyrano—of a third party, is actually one of the least weird aspects of this surprisingly perverse movie. A more disturbing moment occurs, for instance, when Holly asks Adam to call up her mother and, impersonating Ben, break off the “relationship” between them. He reluctantly agrees to call her, but while speaking to her finds himself unable to end the imaginary relationship, and ends up courting her instead (all the while gazing lovingly at the image of Holly herself on his computer).

The scene of Adam using Holly’s mother as a projective substitute for Holly herself is then inverted when Jean finds a sweet drawing Adam had given to Holly, and proceeds to log onto Holly’s own IM account via her computer (wouldn’t any self-respecting teenage girl password protect her computer?) and starts IM’ing Adam, thanking him for the drawing on Holly’s behalf. Adam, thinking that he is speaking with Holly herself, then proceeds to enter into a romantic banter with Jean. In the end, of course, both couples end up getting paired up correctly, but only against the backdrop of these repeated instances of misrecognition and transgenerational desire (reminiscent, for instance, of Elizabeth Perkins’s rather off-putting infatuation, in Penny Marshall’s Big [1988], with Tom Hanks, even after realizing that he is actually just a twelve year old boy).

The blurring of idealized romance and its perverse other in The Perfect Man, meanwhile, can also be found in Lauren McLaughlin’s short story by the same title, published yesterday in Salon. The basic premise of the story is that the protagonist, Lucy, gets tired of dating a series of losers, and decides instead to design her own “Web-based AI” “virtual companion.” She creates him according to her precise specifications of what she thinks she desires, but subsequently finds him ignoring her, treating her badly, etc.—apparently having decided, after “mining [her] web habits twenty-four-seven,” that she, like all humans, “love[s] to be out of control.” Like Rosman’s film, therefore, McLaughlin’s story takes the fantasy of an idealized romance, and elaborates it against the backdrop of a polymorphously perverse landscape of deviant fantasies (in addition to the manifest perversion of loving a virtual AI robot, as well as the “rape fantasy” premise of Lucy’s secretly desiring to be manipulated by her lover, the story ultimately revolves around her agreement to wear an appropriately-named “pervsuit”—“ a body glove outfitted with invasive mechanisms remotely controlled by a black market AI with a well-defined dark side.”

Comments

[chowleen]

Speaking of ick-factor movies ('transgressive' is too fancy a word for 'The Perfect Man', Mr. N.G.!), have you seen Cary Grant and Shirley Temple in 'The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer'? That film was meant to showcase the now-teenaged Shirley Temple in an ingenue role, but casting her opposite the middle-aged (though very debonair) Cary Grant just confirmed the underyling ickiness of the phenomenon that was Shirley Temple-philia. Hilary Duff may not have had as much baggage from her Lizzie McGuire days, but the transition from child star to adolescent cyrano impersonating middle-aged bachelor to woo _one's own mom_ is still a lot to wrap one's head around.

Casting Chris Noth as the 'perfect man' also adds a strange layer of somethin' to the incestuous discomfort of the movie: I once read a Salon piece by a mother who talked about how watching 'Sex and the City' with her tween daughter allowed them to bond and have frank talks on topics such as oral sex (her example, not mine) in between mooning over Mr. Big. Now, I'm all for frank talk, but...

'SOTC' in fact gently ribbed this multi-generational 'Carrie, c'est moi' identification among its viewers: there is one episode in which the four friends are confronted with Junior League versions of themselves--a teenager whose father is having Samantha plan his daughter's bat mitzvah marches up to Carrie (with her three identically fendi-bagged and manolo-shod friends in tow) and proclaims, "I just love your column. It's all about me!"

fun post--much more fun than the movie.

[Renegade Eye]

I love this blog. I enjoy the topics and POV.

The Uma Thurman movie Prime, ended up, with the lovers realistic, and broke up.

I'm adding a link to you, to return the favor.

[crojas]

chowleen and RE,
many thanks for your comments.
RE, your comparison to Prime is intriguing. Although I haven't seen the film, I do know that even as Thurman was playing a middle-aged woman dating a man fourteen years younger than her, in real life she (having recently divorced Ethan Hawke) was dating the dating the “wealthy hotelier” Andre Balazs, who is almost precisely that much older than her... (they have apparently since broken up).

chowleen, I was very intriqued by your discussion of the way which Chris Noth brings some of the transgenerational innuendoes from Sex and the City with him to The Perfect Man, though in the series he was presented as Carrie's generational equal (particularly in contrast to the Baryshnikov character in the final season).

Finally, on the topic of pedophilic fantasies, I am reminded of my off-hand comparison of Nabokov and Li Yongping in my "Hyper-orthodox Orthographies" post a couple of weeks ago, and note the curious coincidence that both of these geographically displaced linguistic virtuosos are best known for novels which prominantly and explicitly thematize pedophilic desire for young girls....

[chowleen]

in the case of _Sex and the City_, the cross-generation love object-sharing of Big (as well as identification with Carrie) is with the viewers (e.g, the Salon piece about mom and daughter fans of the show) not within the text itself, a fact that the series poked fun at quite frequently...
well, now that you bring up nabokov again, isn't the email/IM switcheroo scenario in _The Perfect Man_ some faint, pallid take on the scene in which Charlotte discovers Humbert's obsession with Lo by reading his diary?

[Patricia]

Are You Hilary Duff?? :|

[crojas]

yes, of course.