Why is architecture the profession du jour for leading men in American movies? Joe Queenan exposes the hidden symbolism: like American men in general, architects are great at erecting enduring buildings, but hopelessly unable to use their erections to build enduring relationships.
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Again and again in these pages, we have returned to the theme of motion pictures as the subliminal expression of America's deepest fears. Thus, City Slickers can be viewed on one level as the subconscious embodiment of rural Americans' dread that the entire West will ultimately be destroyed by urban assholes like Billy Crystal. Forrest Gump can be interpreted both as a deep national yearning for an earlier, more innocent time when a Southern simpleton ruled the country (Jimmy Carter), and as an expression of our fear that such an era may once again be upon us (Bill Clinton). And Indecent Proposal expresses all male Americans' fear that once they turn 50 and their skin starts getting really bad, they'll have to fork over a million bucks just to get laid.
With this theory in mind, let us now turn our attention to a collection of recent films that probe another dark corner of the national psyche. The films in question are Jungle Fever, Intersection, Fearless, The Birth of an Architect, HouseSitter, Dream Lover, Quicksand: No Escape, Sleepless in Seattle, The River Wild, Clifford and the aforementioned Indecent Proposal. On the surface, these films would seem to have little in common: some of them were big-budget hits (Sleeless in Seattle, Indecent Proposal); others were medium-budget busts (Intersection, Fearless); some addressed festering racial tensions in this society {Jungle Fever); some did not (HouseSitter, Clifford); one featured an architect in a perilous aquatic sating (The River Wild); one starred the studiously useless James Spader (Dream Lover); one starred the flam-boyantly pointless Tim Matheson (Quicksand); and one starred a very fat man (The Belly of Brian Dennehy).
Yet if we probe beneath the surface of these movies, we can clearly see that these 11 films are united by a common theme: the inability of contemporary architects to build normal relationships with members of the opposite sex. So grievous are the wounds suffered by these gifted architects that one ends up strangling his wife, one ends up committing suicide, one ends up dead in a car accident, one becomes an apprentice to a hit man, and one ends up marrying Goldie Hawn.
The unsophisticated viewer might look at these 11 movies and dismiss this profusion of architects on the silver screen as a mere fluke. This would be the height of folly. If we have learned anything from cinema in the past, it is that the motion picture industry responds to the deepest fears of the American people and transmutes this unspoken dread into celluloid psychodramas in which anxieties are addressed, probed, and in some way, resolved.
In making 11 different films about the failure of male American architects to establish meaningful relationships with their female partners, directors as varied as Nora Ephron, Peter Green -away, Adrian Lyne, Spike Lee and Peter Weir have come face-to-face with the question: Why is it that architects can build wonderful, enduring buildings, but cannot build wonderful, enduring relationships? Are the architects in these films not, in fact, finely wrought symbols of all-American men, who are extraordinarily gifted when it comes to making things, but hopelessly out of their depth when it comes to making love? Or am I just rambling?
To answer these questions, let us step back and examine the plots of some of the individual films. In Fearless, Jeff Bridges plays a successful architect who stops loving his wife, Isabella Rossellini, and also stops being allergic to strawberries, after he miraculously survives an airplane crash. This is not totally outside the range of possibility; lots of men married to women as strange and annoying as Isabella Rossellini could easily fall out of love with them after being in an airplane crash. And allergies are weird. But why would Bridges then turn around and fall in love with someone as strange and annoying as Rosie Perez? Is there something about airplane crashes that calls into question the very foundation upon which marriages are built in this country? And does it make a difference if you happen to be flying with USAir?
As with all Peter Weir films, powerful metaphorical elements are at work in Fearless. Architects make a living by erecting things, but sometimes the things they have erected collapse. Airplanes, like buildings, are supposed to stay up, but sometimes they fall down. Viewed from this perspective, the airplane disaster in Fearless can be interpreted as a metaphor for Jeff Bridges's inability to sustain an erection when Isabella Rossellini is around. Only when his wife resorts to mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to pull him out of a life-threatening allergic reaction to a strawberry at the very end of the film does their relationship revive. The message is clear: If you're worried about losing your man to a hot little number like Rosie Perez, put some pizzazz back in the relationship with the help of some common fruits.
Bridges's mysterious affections in Fearless are duplicated in last winter's insipid Intersection, In this pitiful Mark Rydell project, the forlorn Richard Gere stars as a dashing British Columbian architect who abandons his gorgeous wife and partner, played by Sharon Stone, to bed down with a dimwitted journalist, played by the inexplicable Lolita Davidovich. Shortly thereafter, he is killed in a car crash, as any man foolish enough to leave Sharon Stone for Lolita Davidovich deserves to be. Although Stone is completely miscast as the jilted wife and mother, Gere is quite believable as the listless yuppie architect, and Davidovich is perfectly plausible in the role of a Canuck bimbo.
The notion that architecture and marital fidelity are incompatible is also addressed in Spike Lee's Jungle Fever. Wesley Snipes plays a successful, happily married black architect whose life falls to pieces when he meets Annabella Sciorra, who hails from a downscale Neapolitan clan in the wilds of Bensonhurst. The point of Jungle Fever seems to be that sheltered white girls like Sciorra, growing up in a racially pure, albeit Paleolithic, section of Brooklyn, secretly yearn for what one black woman in the movie refers to as "Zulu dick."
But this narrow racial analysis of the film does not do justice to its deeper inner meaning. Just like Bridges in Fearless and Gere in Intersection, Snipes has reached a point in his life where he finds both his career and his marriage utterly unsatisfying. Like Bridges and Gere, he flees a settled, placid, conventional relationship with his beautiful wife to get his ya-yas off with an exotic ethnic who seems to have a few screws missing. Director Spike Lee thus seems to be saying that if your marriage is already on the rocks, architecture probably won't save it. Or maybe he's delicately suggesting that marriages, like tall buildings, must be erected on a solid foundation, or else they will collapse. Or maybe he's simply saying that all white people suck.
The desire of male American architects to consort with women missing one or more screws also dominates the films HouseSitter, Sleepless in Seattle and Dream Lover. In HouseSitter, Steve Martin plays a reasonably successful architect who has a longstanding relationship with a perky dullard played by Dana Delany. But he eventually ends up marrying Goldie Hawn, a perky, compulsive liar who has invented numerous false identities to camouflage her sordid past. In Dream Lover, James Spader plays a successful architect who divorces his dull, obvious wife and ends up marrying Mädchen Amick, a non-perky compulsive liar who has invented numerous false identities to camouflage her sordid past. And in Sleepless in Seattle, Tom Hanks plays a successful architect whose wife has just died of cancer--perhaps from inhaling carcinogenic building materials--who ends up with Meg Ryan, a perky journalist for a major metropolitan newspaper, and therefore, a compulsive liar.
Is it going too far to say that architecture is such a tedious, lonely, unrewarding profession that even successful practitioners of the art would do anything to pack a few thrills into their lives, even if it means getting married to Goldie Hawn? No, it is not. In Quicksand: No Escapean in direct-to-video- via-cable film by Michael Pressman Tim Matheson plays a seemingly successful architect who develops an unwholesome relationship with a hit man played by Donald Sutherland, whom he never would have met in the first place, except that his wife hired Sutherland to follow him, because she suspected him of having an affair. And in The Betty of an Architect, Brian Dennehy plays a successful architect whose obsession with an obscure 18th-century French proto-fascist architect named Eti-enne-Louis Boullée so traumatizes his marriage that his pregnant wife starts sleeping with an Italian gangster named Caspasian to get back at him. And that's just the tip of a very large iceberg. Dennehy has come to Rome to mount an exhibition honoring his long-forgotten 18th-century hero, but once he gets there, he starts to suspect that his wife is trying to poison him. After Dennehy discovers that the exhibit he has been hired to mount is really some sort of money-laundering scam, he jumps out a window backwards and dies.
In the previous paragraphs, we have isolated truths about contemporary architects. One is that most of them cheat on their wives. The other is that it isn't a good idea to get into a moving vehicle with any of them. Yet a number of key questions remain: What do we learn about architecture in general from these films? Does architecture itself play an important role in the films? And what kind of person would pay Woody Harrelson to design a building for him?
The answer to these questions varies from film to film. Architecture per se plays no pivotal role in Jungle Fever, Clifford or Quicksand, where the main characters might just as well be pension-fund managers, real estate appraisers or executive editors at cutting-edge West Coast magazines. But powerful architectural motifs dominate all the other films. In Dream Lover, James Spader works in a large, handsome building with vast stretches of empty space inside. Clearly, the film is hinting, Spader has designed his workplace in the spitting image of his own personality. The Belly of an Architect opens with a lavish banquet in front of the Roman Pantheon, where we see a cake shaped like one of Boullée's designs. The dome on the cake is round and vast, not unlike the Roman Pantheon, and not entirely unlike Brian Dennehy. Fittingly. Dennehy's wife notes that back home in Chicago one of her husband's designs was popularly known as the Slaughterhouse, because "it was a building suffering from excess cholesterol."
Architectural themes also surface in Fearless, where Jeff Bridges is seen immediately after the plane accident in a motel: a cheap, inexpensive structure that illustrates the transient quality of life. Architecture is an important part of Indecent Proposal, where Woody Harrelson's success in landing a job as an architecture professor shows that our universities are in much deeper trouble than any of us had previously suspected. Architecture is extremely important in The River Wild, where David Strathairn is so busy diagramming buildings out in the bush that he fails to notice the attention lavished on his wife, Meryl Streep, by white-watering psychopath Kevin Bacon. And architectural themes play a major role in HouseSitter, where Steve Martin has built a big. stupid, pretentious architectural mess that symbolizes his inability to make intelligent decisions. "I like the way you've used the negative space," Martin tells Hawn when he visits her apartment So, apparently, does Kurt Russell.
The most subtle architectural themes of all surface in Sleepless in Seattle. In the opening scene, we see a somber Tom Hanks at his wife's funeral. The funeral seems to be taking place in the countryside somewhere. But then the camera pulls back and Chicago's stunning skyline rears up in the background. Chicago is the home of Louis Sullivan, one of the greatest American architects of all time. Then, as the movie progresses, the story is increasingly dominated by the New York skyline, most particularly by the Empire State Building, even though Hanks is living in Seattle and Meg Ryan is quarantined in Baltimore. In the history of motion pictures, I can think of no more savage repudiation of the architectural traditions of two municipalities than this. By artfully counter-balancing a moribund but once thriving East Coast city with a thriving but vapid West Coast city, yet choreographing events so that the film's romantic resolution takes place atop the Empire Slate Building in New York City. Nora Ephron seems to be constructing a massive, bicoastal, architectural diss: You can find work in Baltimore and you can start a new career in Seattle. But you won't find love in either of them. And you certainly won't find a skyline.
Yet, of all the movies we have cited, the one where architecture plays the most pivotal role is Intersection. Intersection, which is teeming with visually compelling architectural elements, is probably the only movie ever made in which an actor of Gere's stature confesses to his co-star that the "fenestration" in his latest project isn't quite up to snuff. He then has to explain to Davidovich, no I.M. Pei buff she, what the term "fenestration" means--info that seems to go right out the window with this dunce.
One question begging for an answer is why we should witness an explosion of films dealing with architects in the 1990s when relatively few movies dealt with the profession in the previous 75 years. Why? Simple. The reason there have been so few serious, thoughtful movies about architects in the history of motion pictures is because of the long shadow cast by King Vidor's 1949 epic The Fountainhead. After The Fountainhead appeared, the public was so terrified of films about architects that few dared touch the subject for al-most 40 years, Until now.
The Fountainhead, based on the hugely successful novel by the popular crypto fascist Ayn Rand, is one of the weirdest movies ever to come out of Hollywood. One of the things that makes it so strange is that it is a movie that is almost entirely about architecture. The other thing that makes it so strange is that it features horse-opera matinee idol Gary Cooper as the architect. Yup, Frank Lloyd Coop.
The Fountainhead opens with the Coop-meister, not very convincing as an intellectual and even less convincing as a young, rebellious intellectual, getting kicked out of architecture school because of his iconoclasm. He soon lands a job with a maverick architect whose motto is: "The form of a building must follow its function." Then the old coot has a heart attack while gazing at New York's skyline and dies. After 18 months without a commission, Coop lands a job designing a super-modern bank building. But the bank officers insist that he mongrelize his project by inserting a Greek temple on the ground floor and some other frills. Cooper tells them to stick it in their ears.
Alas, it is Coop's ear into which the proverbial "it" is stuck. Turned away everywhere, blacklisted and shunned, he is forced to seek work operating a pneumatic drill in a stone quarry. While blasting away, Coop's muscular forearms draw the attention of his female employer (Patricia Neal), who happens to be the Number Two architecture critic for a newspaper called the New York Banner, which is obviously supposed to be the New York Daily News. The woman, who never goes anywhere without a riding crop, keeps having flashbacks about those bronzed forearms, though what she's really angling for is a fast rip with that jackhammer.
Neal's wooing technique is direct, if a mite unorthodox. Attired in a man's shirt, a tie, tight jodhpurs and a riding crop, she visits Coop at the stone quarry and gets into an argument about his perceived insolence. But she soon gets over that and invites him up to the house to repair her fireplace. Coop inspects the premises, then delivers a lengthy discourse on the aesthetic qualities of various types of marble, ultimately explaining why the fireplace makes him puke. Eventually, he gets a bit fresh and she whacks him one across the face with the riding crop.
Incidentally, Neal's character is named Dominique.
No iconoclastic architect worth his salt is going to take that kind of crap from a floozy Number Two architecture critic on some dip-shit Gotham tabloid, so that night Coop goes back to her house and non-pneumatically drills her. The lady is impressed. This looks like the start of a wonderful relationship. But then Coop returns home to find a letter offering him a commission to build a fancy skyscraper. The author of the letter is a self-made man who doesn't care about Coop's reputation as a maverick, an iconoclast, and an Ayn Rand character. So Coop, back in the saddle again, vanishes without a trace. This annoys Neal, who can't contact him because she never asked for his name, and thus has no idea that he is really the gifted, maverick, iconoclastic architect Howard Roark. Miffed, she temporarily puts down her riding crop and goes back to work at the Banner. Here she learns that the paper's founder, Raymond Massey, who is madly in love with her, needs to mount a campaign to boost dwindling circulation. Safer streets? Higher wages? More cops? No, Massey eschews these tried-and-true rabble-rousing techniques and instead decides to launch a vicious smear campaign against the building that Coop has designed. Thai's right, a newspaper in New York in the 1920s, read by millions of apple vendors, factory workers, bookies and pimps, is going to boost circulation by mounting a public relations campaign against the architectural indignities being visited upon the public by an iconoclastic architect played by Gary Cooper.
I told you this movie was weird.
Dominique knows that Roark--whom she does not yet realize is Mr. Jack Hammer--has designed a magnificent building. So she goes to her boss/suitor Massey and asks him to call off the smear campaign. Massey reminds her that the Banner depends for its revenues on constantly stirring up the Great Unwashed, And does the anti-Coop campaign ever work! Yes, we actually see legions of straphangers in straw hats devouring the newspaper's architecture column and getting incredibly riled up about the building. Thousands of angry letters to the editor pour in. The public is really pissed.
Just when it seems that the movie can't possibly get any weirder, it goes straight off the cliff. The Banner's Number One architecture critic--can you imagine a New York tabloid with two architecture critics? --is an old fart named Ellsworth Toohey, who writes a column called "One Small Voice.'' Toohey, we discover, is secretly a communist who is using his position as an architecture critic on a daily newspaper to foment sedition among the masses.
Now there's a nick that no one had ever tried before.
Dominique can no longer be a part of this hideous charade. She quits her job in protest. Then, unexpectedly, she meets Coop at a party, realizes who he is, and tells him that she loves him, but warns that the masses will destroy him. "They hate you for your integrity," she declares, Dominique begs Coop to forsake architecture and get an ordinary job, perhaps as a riding crop repairman. He politely declines. In a fit of pique, she now agrees to marry Massey, the pig who heads the newspaper who is trying to destroy the man she loves.
The smear campaign is successful and Coop is again out of a job. He responds by going out and building an iconoclastic gas station. The public really likes it. So do the critics. The next thing you know, commissions to design important office buildings start rolling in. In the twinkling of an eye. Coop becomes rich and famous. He has survived the Banner's smear campaign. Ellsworth Toohey has been crushed.
Years pass, though not enough to make Coop look the right age for the part. Approaching senility, Dominique's husband now says that he wants to build a "temple" where he can shut out the rest of the world. So, even though he has tried to destroy Coop, he now hires him to build the house. As things turn out. Coop and Massey have a lot in common: They're both self-made men, they're both iconoclasts, and they both like women with riding crops named Dominique.
Coop, Massey and Dominique now become bosom buddies, picnicking together, going on exotic yacht cruises--the whole nine yards. But just when things are going swimmingly, an old college chum who has treated Coop like shit for the past 20 years drops by his office and begs him to design an imposing, architecturally appealing housing project and let him pass it off as his own work. Coop will do all the work designing it, and the other guy will get all the money and glory. Hey, what are friends for?
Perfectly cast as a man who would leap at an opportunity like this, Coop agrees to design the housing project, as long as his design will be faithfully executed down to the very tiniest detail. While he's away, his friend stabs him in the back by changing the housing project's design and throwing in a bunch of horrid frills, Coop conies back from his vacation and dynamites the building. Depressed by his latest outburst of maverick iconoclasm, Dominique tries to sever an artery with some broken glass. She botches the job. And then she wonders why she's only architecture critic Number Two.
At this point, Ellsworth Toohey, the People's Architecture Critic, gives a fire-and-brimstone speech demanding that Coop be destroyed for his failure to serve the people. Massey fires Toohey, but the entire City Desk walks out in support. Mobs begin to protest. Kiosks are destroyed. John Q. Public tan only be pushed so far.
In the end, Massey is reduced to putting out an entire newspaper all by himself. Finally, with circulation down to zero, he too caves in and denounces Coop as an enemy of the people, an arsonist and a rotten architect. Things look bad for the Cooperoonie as his trial gets under way. But after he delivers a rousing speech about the rights of the individual, the jury inexplicably acquits him. Massey now closes down his newspaper forever and uses the proceeds from the sale to give his old pal a commission to build the largest skyscraper in New York, which he describes as the last skyscraper before Armageddon. Then he commits suicide.
After The Fountainhead came out in 1949, Hollywood didn't make many more films about maverick, iconoclastic architects for nearly 40 years.
I don't think I have to explain why.
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Joe Queenan wrote about ear torture in the movies for the December '94 Movieline.