What happens when a regular Joe re-creates scenes from the movies in his own life to test Hollywood's grip on reality? Here, our intrepid reporter reports on his third attempt to find some shred of celluloid credibility, for which he willingly put himself in such life-threatening situations as nearly freezing to death in the Atlantic Ocean.
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Seven years ago, responding to its mission as an informal cultural consumer-protection agency, Movieline magazine commissioned me to reenact a number of inspired scenes from famous movies to see if they would work in real life. The results were profoundly disheartening. Despite my industrious efforts, I was not able to persuade a prostitute to accompany me to a business dinner and pretend to be somebody incredibly sophisticated named Vivian, the way Richard Gere did with Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. I was similarly unsuccessful in persuading women to swallow numerous unappetizing foodstuffs the way Mickey Rourke did with Kim Basinger in 9 1/2 Weeks. And I had no luck landing a job as head of a prominent psychiatric institution without even coming in for an interview the way Gregory Peck did in Spellbound.
Based on my exhaustive review of more than a dozen motion pictures, I felt it was safe to say that movies were just incredibly stupid, littered from beginning to end with tantalizing ploys, clever gambits and ingenious tricks that looked great up on the screen but would never work in the real world.
When I embarked on a follow-up study in 1993, I was chagrined to find that improvement in this area of the cinematic arts was progressing at a glacial pace, if at all. Unlike Sharon Stone in Sliver, my female acquaintances were not prepared to take off their panties in public, and unlike Willem Dafoe in Body of Evidence, I did not find hot candle wax to have a stimulating aphrodisiacal effect when dripped on my genitals. What's more, when I went to Harlem to re-create the scene in White Men Can't Jump where Woody Harrelson toasts Wesley Snipes in a game of pickup basketball, I got my ass whipped. It's not just the fact that white men can't jump; they can't dribble, they can't rebound, and they can't shoot either. In the end, I came away with the same conclusion I had reached two years earlier: Hollywood remained "a twisted dream factory, spoon-feeding the public a hopelessly skewed, transparently fake vision of reality."
In the five years since "Don't Try This at Home: The Sequel" appeared, I have held my tongue on this subject, hoping, foolishly, that my second expose would produce the results that my first attempt had so dismally failed to elicit. For a while, it seemed that there might be a tiny glimmer of hope. Based on my extensive exposure to the Industry's finest products in the years 1993-1996, it did appear that some effort had been made to invest popular films with a higher degree of verisimilitude. I think, for example, that in Speed, Jan De Bont faithfully captured the daily horrors of the modem transportation experience. But in the past year or so, it has become evident that this brief Golden Age of Celluloid Credibility is at an end. No matter how you cut it, die-hard Red Sox fans do not give up their tickets to Game 6 of the World Series just so they can be with some fucking girl the way Robin Williams claimed he did in Good Will Hunting. And in real life, guys who look as ordinary as Dermot Mulroney does in My Best Friend's Wedding never get to choose between Julia Roberts and Cameron Diaz. They get to choose between Tori Spelling and Illeana Douglas. If they're lucky.
Of course, the foregoing are merely observations, not hard-won truths derived from the rigorous scientific analysis that characterized the first two installments of "Don't Try This at Home." And so, if only to give Hollywood the benefit of the doubt, I decided that it was time to plunge in once more and determine to what degree contemporary films deviate from the established parameters of what laymen and clinicians alike refer to as "reality."
Titanic seemed like a good place to begin.
Whether or not Titanic as a whole presents a credible reenactment of the historic events of April 15, 1912 need not concern us here; personally, I don't believe in a Supreme Being who would condemn 1,523 souls to the depths of the North Atlantic just because the night watchman was so busy eyeing a couple making out on deck that he missed spotting an iceberg until it was too late. But Titanic contains one pivotal scene so glaring in its departure from reality that I felt honor bound to reenact it if only to warn the public: "Whatever you do, don't try this at home."
This is the scene where Leonardo DiCaprio spends eight minutes in frigid waters blabbing away to Kate Winslet while the life force ebbs out of his spindly body. I was already of the opinion there was something thermally suspect about the plot of Titanic when Leo and Kate spent almost four minutes partially submerged in the bowels of the listing ocean liner without seeming to be any worse for wear. To follow that up with the eight minutes up to the neck in 28-degree water was obviously pushing believability even further. So my very first assignment was to leap into the ominous waters of the Atlantic myself at roughly the same time of year that the Titanic sank and establish:
1) How long I could stay in the water without dying.
2) How chatty I could be under the circumstances
Here, a word about methodology. Because Movieline has a constricted research budget, it was not possible for me to travel 453 miles south of Newfoundland and plunge into the arctic waters where 1,523 doomed passengers met their fate. Instead, I decided to re-create the scene 30 yards off the shore of a New York area beach. It goes without saying that the water, though a tad nippy, would be significantly less icy than the 28-degree waters that engulfed the Titanic that tragic night 86 years ago. What's more, I carry quite a few more pounds than the sleek Leonardo DiCaprio, and could rely on my body fat to keep me going longer than he did. It was thus entirely possible that I might last longer in the water than DiCaprio did, suggesting that his feat was actually within the range of possibility.
On the other hand, I have a few more years on me than the young DiCaprio. So it's possible his nervous system would outperform mine.
All things considered, I decided that the assorted variables would ultimately cancel themselves out. If I could stay in the water for eight full minutes and say things like, "I don't know about you, but I intend to write a strongly worded letter to the White Star Line," it would effectively refute my critique of James Cameron's seemingly zany plot device and make me seem like a mean-spirited old coot who was simply jealous of the director's enormous success. If, on the other hand, I perished in the Atlantic before the eight minutes had elapsed, it would prove to be my final legacy, the last death-defying escapade of a valiant iconoclast who had given his life in the service of the truth.
Here, I'm going to make a long story short. At 4 p.m. on March 31, 1998, with the outside temperature in the low 80s due to a record-setting spring heat wave, I rambled onto a beach a few miles from my suburban Westchester home and got ready for a quick dip. As soon as my wife had the stopwatch ready, I plunged into the water fully clothed and tried as hard as possible to behave like Leonardo DiCaprio. I reckon I was underwater for about 30 seconds before I felt my nuts starting to turn blue. Because I'm a crusty old gamer, I tried to stay submerged as long as I could, but I only lasted 47 seconds. At no point in my ordeal did the thought of repeating even one of DiCaprio's assorted remarks to Kate Winslet occur to me. The only thing I thought about was how blue my nuts were turning and what a stupid way this was to earn a living.
Because I had the option of lifting myself out of the water and retreating to the safety of the beach--an option not available to DiCaprio--it is entirely possible that I simply pussied out and could have lasted another couple of minutes in the water before my nervous system started to shut down. So the question of how long I would have survived is still open to debate. What is not open to debate is this: once a fully clothed male plunges into the water of the Atlantic in early spring, before the ocean has had time to warm up, he's not going to be thinking about love, honor, grandchildren or ironic, postmodern epistles to the White Star Line. And he's definitely not going to be very chatty. He's going to turn blue in the face, and the last thing on his mind is going to be women. This is, to my best knowledge, the only situation a heterosexual male can place himself in which women would be the last thing on his mind.
In summation, Titanic is pure horseshit. Almost without exception, pure horseshit is what I encountered in my subsequent investigation.
Conspiracy Theory is a treasure trove of stupefying scenes that will not work in real life. This is the movie where Mel Gibson plays a deranged New York cabbie who is both a menace to public safety and a garrulous conspiracy theory nut. How this would distinguish him from any other New York cab driver I have ever met is anybody's guess. Abducted by a shadowy organization that preys on deranged New York cab drivers, Gibson is bound hand and foot and locked in a basement in the deserted wing of a mental hospital previously occupied by the people who financed this movie. Julia Roberts, playing the same likable nitwit she played in The Pelican Brief and I Love Trouble, sneaks into the hospital in search of Gibson, and eventually hears him shouting to her through the heating vents. She then follows the shouts to their source, tries to rescue the dysfunctional cabbie, and basically screws everything up, but that's a whole other story.
From my point of view, the only thing of interest here is the premise that if you are ever bound hand and foot and locked in the basement of the deserted wing of a mental hospital, a fate most movie critics fear, it will be possible for you to escape by shouting through the heating ducts at a beautiful woman who just happens to be out for a morning constitutional because there's not much happening in her career. Well, I tried it in three different buildings, including a local hospital. And it didn't work. It flat-out didn't work. So if you're ever trapped with hands and feet bound in the basement of the deserted wing of a mental hospital, just lie there and hold your breath and try to take your mind off your predicament by figuring out brain twizzlers like: why would a bunch of villains under the command of the typically over-the-top Patrick Stewart take the trouble to bind me hand and foot and lock me in the basement, but not gag me? What kinds of morons are they?
Screenwriters?
Another scene in Conspiracy Theory that will not work in real life is the one where Gibson, strapped into a wheelchair with his eyelids taped open, escapes from his captors by madly pedaling the wheelchair down a long corridor and then bouncing down two flights of stairs, all without sustaining serious physical injury. First off, unless you're a person who has spent a substantial amount of time in a wheelchair, you are not going to be able to escape from your captors, mats because they are not in wheelchairs and are armed with guns.
Second, as soon as you try careening down a flight of steps in a wheelchair, the device will begin to pitch forward, meaning that you'll land on your head and probably die. While it is possible to descend two flights of stairs in a wheelchair if you grab the railing with one hand and brace yourself against the wall with the other, this will seriously impede your progress and enable your pursuers to catch up with you, even if one has just had the front part of his nose bitten off like Patrick Stewart did. Actually, here I am engaging in pure speculation because while I did climb into a wheelchair and try to descend a flight of stairs in it, I never actually bit off the tip of anyone's nose. I think the reader will be willing to make allowances for this slight deviation from orthodox movie reenactment techniques.
Almost without exception, my attempts to reenact scenes from other recent movies met with crushing failure. In Romy and Michele's High School Reunion, the fetching pinheads played by Mira Sorvino and Lisa Kudrow try to pass themselves off as the inventors of Post-it notes but are humiliated when their claim is proven false. I, on the other hand, didn't have any trouble persuading people that I had invented Post-it notes, not only because I know a lot about epoxies and resin substitutes, but because people I know never really believed that I bought my gorgeous house on the money I make writing articles like this, so they were relieved to find out that my principal source of income was derived from a more conventional revenue stream.
Other reenactment attempts met with similar failure. When I called my mom and asked if I could move back in with her and try to find myself the way Albert Brooks did with Debbie Reynolds in Mother, she said, as always, that I was "a sketch."
When I asked a couple of my friends if they would re-create the premise of The Full Monty and strip for money, they told me to go fuck myself. Not a single one even asked how much money, and, based on what I've seen of their bodies, I was not entirely disappointed by their disinclination to participate in the experiment. And frankly, some of my friends look like they could use the money. My friends were similarly unenthused when I suggested that a bunch of us get together and reenact the key party from The Ice Storm, in which suburban wives agree to sleep with whomsoever's car keys they pull out of a bowl. "That only works if one of the women looks like Sigourney Weaver," a male friend sagely explained. "But it's a better suggestion than that Full Monty idea of yours. Keep trying."
I also didn't have any luck doing the one-handed push-ups Demi Moore pulls off in G.I. Jane. Nor was I able to learn Portuguese in 20 minutes the way John Travolta did in Phenomenon. No, when I went to a Brazilian restaurant and tried to order my meal in the native language of Vasco da Gama after 20 minutes of full immersion in the idiom, the waiter dearly had no idea what the hell I was talking about. At this juncture, purists may complain that in the movie John Travolta inherited prodigious autodidactic skills after being knocked flat on his ass by some supernatural force. But I think that even after being pulverized by some amazing supernatural entity, a guy like John Travolta would still have gotten a lower score on his SATs than I did, so if I couldn't learn a foreign language in 20 minutes, neither could he.
I had two other restaurant experiences worthy of note. One afternoon, I visited a trendy midtown Manhattan restaurant and ordered the waitress to clear away the silverware so I could ostentatiously eat with my plastic knife and fork just like Jack Nicholson did in As Good As It Gets. Unlike Jack, who is reviled by the wait-staff because of his cutlery-based idiosyncrasy, nobody in the restaurant thought my behavior the least bit odd. Instead, the waitress treated me the way she would have treated any other customer, laboriously reciting a list of house specials I had no interest in hearing.
It was more of the same when I invited a friend to lunch at the Times Square Olive Garden and began singing "I Say a Little Prayer." If you remember back to what happens in My Best Friend's Wedding once Rupert Everett begins singing the abysmal Dionne Warwick hit to Julia Roberts while they are dining in what appears to be a Red Lobster, everyone at the table quickly joins in, and shortly after that everyone in the restaurant participates in a festive rendition of the sappy chestnut. This was not my experience. No one in the restaurant joined in when I began singing, "The moment I wake up, before I put on my makeup, I say a little prayer for you." Instead, they just tried to ignore me. So did my friend. There was absolutely no sense that everybody in the restaurant had been waiting 30 years for precisely the right moment to publicly display their affection for the long-forgotten vocal stylings of a woman now best known for her affiliation with telephonic psychicry. Everybody just kept eating their food. "You must do a lot of karaoke," said the waitress when she brought my lunch. She said this the way people used to say, "you must do a lot of coke." I also think she thought I was gay.
I'd like to close out this essay by briefly touching on the subject of homosexuality in the movies. In In & Out, Kevin Kline plays a high school teacher scheduled to be married just a few days after a former student (Matt Dillon) unexpectedly "outs" him. Although everyone, including Kine himself, has always assumed that he is straight, everyone, including Kline himself, now begins to suspect that he is gay. To settle this matter once and for all, Kline watches an instructional audio-tape which enables him to determine whether he is gay. The premise is simple: straight men do not, will not and cannot dance. Gay men do, will and can. According to the voice on the tape, "Men do not dance. They work. They drink. They have bad backs." But they do not get down and boogie, and they never, ever get funky. Thus, if the person taking the test could successfully listen to "I Will Survive" without getting the urge to shake all or part of his booty, it would prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was not gay.
The scene in the movie is actually very amusing. Kline, dad in manly clothing--untucked flannel shirt, blue jeans, work shoes-- stands in the middle of the room and tries to resist the infectious beat of the late-70s Gloria Gaynor hit. But gradually his fingers start a-tapping, his legs start a-thumping, his shoulders start a-swaying, and before you know it, he's a-bouncing right off the walls. The verdict is in: Kline is indisputably gay.
Here, once again, Hollywood had gotten things completely wrong. I have a wife, two kids, a Philadelphia Flyers poster, a Van Halen album and an almost pathological dislike of Barbra Streisand. So there's no way that I'm gay. But when I put on the flannel shirt, the jeans and the work shoes, and then cued up "I Will Survive," I immediately started dancing, just like Kevin Kline. I didn't dance well, and I didn't dance for long. But I danced. So putting a scene in a movie suggesting that men who dance are gay is like putting a scene in a movie suggesting that people who talk like John Travolta can learn Portuguese in 20 minutes.
The facts are in and the conclusion is unavoidable: once again, Hollywood is completely out to lunch. Professors at MIT are not consulting janitors for help with complex math problems (_Good Will Hunting_). And nobody in the Irish Republican Army has hair like Brad Pitt or ex-girlfriends named Gwyneth (_The Devil's Own_). When all is said and done, motion picture studios continue to hornswoggle suckers by filling their films with immensely entertaining scenes that bear no relationship to events taking place in the real world. For the third time since 1992, I have undertaken a systematic investigation of this phenomenon, and my take on things now is the same as it was then. Fagghedaboutit. Return to your humble farms and villages, attend to your families and 40 IK plans, and just dismiss from your mind whatever you saw up there on the silver screen. If you try to ride sidesaddle at full gallop the way Judi Dench does in Mrs. Brown, you'll be in traction for six months. If you try to switch your face with the face of your enemy the way John Travolta does in Face/Off, you will die. And if you're thinking about going into a lesbian bar to pick up a chick the way Ben Affleck does in Chasing Amy, you'd be better off leaping headfirst into the North Atlantic at two in the morning on a frigid night in April. You'll last longer, the reception will be warmer, and you'll definitely have a better chance of meeting the girl of your dreams.
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Joe Queenan wrote about Barbra Streisand's Center for Conservancy Studies for the May '98 issue of Movieline.