In Which We're Up All Night

On Insomnia

by ELIZABETH GUMPORT

It is impossible to describe insomnia to people who are sound sleepers. These are the people who trust that getting in bed will be followed by falling asleep, as surely as night follows day; these are the fearless people. Sleepless people are a very different breed. They know what insomnia really is: not just the failure to fall asleep, but the fear of that failure. For an insomniac, there is no such thing as a good night. Every evening – even if it eventually, mercifully comes to an end – is shredded by anxiety. To reach sleep the insomniac must first pass through terror.

The fearless person also fails to understand how easy it is to become one of the sleepless people. All it takes is one bad night. That bad night begets others: once you know you might not be able to sleep, you can't. Recognizing that staying awake all night is a very real possibility, something that could actually happen, is no different than realizing that your boyfriend might no longer be interested in you, or that the friendship you thought was indestructible is, in fact, as vulnerable as anything else, or that you could very well not succeed at doing the work you so badly want to do. When you imagine such scenarios, you seem almost to will them into existence. To see the abyss is to take the first step towards it. What made F. Scott Fitzgerald “sleep-conscious,” as he called it, was a mosquito: the bug bothered him all night, and after that he had trouble sleeping for years.

photography by Yasmine ChatilaAnd while you can always find a new boyfriend, there is no substitute for sleep. Anyone who has ever had trouble sleeping knows that all treatments for insomnia are in some way inadequate. Melatonin stops working when you take it too regularly, and alcohol only postpones the problem. If you have a glass of wine, or two, or three, you will start awake in the middle of the night feeling feverish and fretful and maybe a little fat. Ambien works, but only if you can set aside eight or nine hours for sleep. Any fewer and you wake up thick-headed and heavy-eyed.

A cure that leaves you groggy or hungover is no cure at all. The point of sleep, after all, is that it is supposed to restore energy, and hope. It makes you alert enough to do things, and optimistic enough to believe they are worth doing. If you wake up feeling otherwise, what's the use?

The sleepless become superstitious. Once she has tried the standard solutions and found them wanting, the insomniac devises her own treatments, her own odd rituals. In order to exhaust themselves, Emily and Charlotte Brontë walked in circles around their dining room table. Teddy Roosevelt took a shot of cognac in a glass of milk, and W.C. Fields found he could only fall asleep if stretched out in a barber’s chair or on a pool table. If rest still remains elusive, you can at least force others to suffer with you: Tallulah Bankhead hired “caddies,” young gay men who would chat with her and hold her hand until she finally drifted off to sleep. Groucho Marx would pick up the phone, dial the first number that popped into his head, and insult whoever answered his call.

If pills and drinks and caddies don't work, all you can do is wait. When morning comes – when, as Philip Larkin put it in “Aubade,” the rest of the “the uncaring / intricate rented world begins to rouse” – some insomniacs are relieved. Now, at least, they can stop trying to get some sleep; now they have a reason for being awake. “Work,” Larkin wrote, “has to be done.” Others remain in bed. In one diary entry, William Wordsworth's sister noted that, as of ten o'clock in the morning, the poet was still in bed, hoping to fall asleep. Insomnia infects your whole life. It renders meaningless the distinction between day and night: if you cannot sleep, and you have nowhere to go, you will be as oppressed when the sun is up as when the sun is down.

Another option available to the insomniac is acceptance. This requires a slight rearrangement of attitudes, the editing of various terms: it's not that you “can't sleep.” You're simply “resting” or “cleaning” or  “working late.” Vladimir Nabokov called sleep “the most moronic fraternity in the world” and claimed that he often wrote better during periods of insomnia.

If you can't write, or clean, or even rest,  you can always do something else: “an ideal insomnia,” Joyce Carol Oates once said, “allows for a lot of reading.” The best books to read late at night are ones full of facts. Facts act as a kind of anesthetic: they numb you to yourself, the subject to which your thoughts would otherwise turn. The gratitude you will feel for these books, and their authors, will surpass your usual appreciation for a good book. It will be deeper, more personal, and more possessive. I have had more than a few long, bad nights, and more than a few good companions. Two of the best were Joan Didion's Miami and Eula Biss's Notes From No Man's Land, and I recommend both to anyone in need of a shot of novocaine.

Once accommodated, insomnia can provide certain pleasures. You are privy to the other, secret world, the one that begins when everyone else goes to bed. Being awake during these long, hidden hours is like taking the subway during the middle of the day or walking around Manhattan after a blizzard. All is private, silent, and still; for once the world is polite, and for once it belongs to you. Light, and its absence, command your attention: in Central Park, the shadows of the branches look like black bones in the snow. In your room, the movement of the moon shows itself on your wall, a patch of light that creeps from corner to corner as the hours pass. All night a streetlight shines into your window.

If you live in a city, other people's apartments are a matter of much concern. The lights in the building across the street go out, one after another, but in one window a television flickers, its invisible owner keeping you company late into the night. He is your first mate, your loyal fellow officer: together you sail into the vast night. Then, without warning, he jumps ship. The television turns off. You cruise on alone. The night is as deep and endless as the ocean.

This is when the bad feelings find you; this is when reading is something you do not just to keep busy but to blunt the pain. After a certain hour, even the best natures start to go bad. Once, while visiting a friend, Mark Twain threw his pillow at the window in a fit of frustration. The pane shattered, letting in the “fresh air” Twain needed for his rest, and he fell asleep. In the morning, he discovered what he had broken was not a window but a glass-enclosed bookcase. (Everyone knows time passes oddly in the insomniac’s bedroom, but space can shift, too.)

Acceptance might work occasionally, but a series of sleepless nights – and the hot sheets and aching hips that accompany them – will exhaust anyone's patience. In many poems, the ever-joyful Wordsworth manages to remain humble and hopeful, trying to coax the “blessed barrier” between days into existence. But eventually even he got angry: "Shall I alone, / surely not a man ungently made, / Call thee worst Tyrant by which Flesh is crost?" In another poem, sleep is personified as withholding lover whom Wordsworth must beseech: “Do not use me so but once and deeply let me be beguiled.”

Wordsworth was not alone in imagining sleep as someone who would not join him in bed. It's a common image, perhaps because when you can't sleep your thoughts often turn to those people who have refused your company, or forsaken it after many shared nights. One of Elizabeth Bishop's most famous poems concludes with the following lines: “So wrap up care in a cobweb / and drop it down the well / into that world inverted / where left is always right, / where the shadows are really the body, / where we stay awake all night, / where the heavens are shallow as the sea / is now deep, and you love me.” The title of the poem is “Insomnia.”

Bishop is describing second-stage insomnia, which takes over after the first thrill of inhabiting a secret, hidden city wears off. In the second stage, you mourn for the people who left you behind, the people who no longer love you, the people who did you wrong. If you are sharing a bed with someone else, this is the time to leave the room. Staying will only make you resent him: the silence of sleep will begin to sound like indifference.

What comes next is worse. What comes next is a catalogue of everyone you did wrong, everyone you betrayed, everyone you loved less, or worse, than you should have. This is third-stage insomnia, and if at this point you don't take another Ambien what follows is even more brutal. Why stop at listing everyone you've ever hurt? Why not see if you can think of every single thing you've ever done wrong in your whole entire life?

If you stay awake late enough, eventually you remember everything. All your usual defenses dissolve. Your mind is weary, and there is nothing in your white, silent room to distract it. Your exhausted brain can no longer apply the pressure needed to repress your memories, and they all come back, all of them, every one, and especially the ones that prove you are the worst version of yourself: the lies, the evasions, the unreturned emails, the shoplifted packs of gum. And, of course, every single ungenerous thing you have ever thought, no matter how fleetingly or how long ago, about the people you love most. Anxiety cascades: just when you’ve drained one disaster from your mind, another breaks the dam. The panic and shame that overcome you when you find a really old to-do list and realize you haven’t done a single item on it? Multiply that feeling by the number of minutes left until sunrise. You can tell yourself to be reasonable, to count your blessings, to get it together, but such reassurances will ring hollow. As Fitzgerald put it, at three o'clock in the morning a forgotten package feels as tragic as a death sentence.

There is a point after which it is no longer possible to be productive, a point after which you are too harassed by regret or simply too tired and brainless to work. Not being able to work compounds the agony of not being able to sleep: you feel useless, ashamed, fraudulent. Fitzgerald described his own sleepless nights as encounters with “horror and waste,” with “waste and horror – what I might have been and done that is lost, spent, gone, dissipated, unrecapturable.” Perhaps, he wrote, the restless night prefigures “the night after death. . . No choice, no road, no hope – only the endless repetition of the sordid and the semi-tragic. Or to stand forever, perhaps, on the threshold of life unable to pass it and return to it. I am a ghost now as the clock strikes four.”

Like Fitzgerald, Larkin heard death approach in the empty, abandoned hours of early morning. “Aubade” is one of the best descriptions of the final stage of insomnia, which, once you've experienced it, renders the other, earlier stages even more painful, because you know what's coming: “Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare. / In time the curtain-edges will grow light. / Till then I see what's really always there: / Unresting death, a whole day nearer now, / Making all thought impossible but how / and where and when I shall myself die.” In the middle of the night, the insomniac weighs her remembered mistakes and finds what makes shouldering their burden so painful is the knowledge that some day she will have it, that burden, taken from her. How much better would it be to regret everything forever! “This,” Larkin observed, “is a special way of being afraid / No trick dispels.”

Sleep can't always undo insomnia's ill-effects: Fitzgerald's struggle with insomnia heralded his breakdown. “In a real dark night of the soul,” he wrote, “it is always three o'clock in the morning.” The bad things you think alone in your room sometimes turn out to be true. And, as with insomnia itself, sometimes it seems like they turned out to be true precisely because you thought of them: if you had been asleep you wouldn’t have felt like a failure, and if you hadn’t felt like a failure you wouldn't be a failure. Despair is a stowaway, hopping into our soul in the middle of the night and smuggling itself into our days.

Sleep is not like death. It is insomnia that is the first taste of death: dead, you will never sleep again. There will be no more soft beds, no more clean sheets; never again will you pile pillows around yourself, never again will you find contentment beneath a warm blanket on a cold night. In “Sad Steps” – which, like “Aubade,” unfolds at four o'clock in the morning – Larkin described the longing that overcomes the insomniac when she looks out her window, the desire she feels that is deeper than other desires, because it absorbs them all. In the middle of the night, the moon's “white stare / is a reminder of the strength and pain / of being young; that it can't come again, / But is for others undiminished somewhere.” You will never again be the person who made all those mistakes; you will never again be the person you once were, as foolish as she was, or even the wretched, sleepless person you are now. The only thing left to do is get older. And to sleep, if you can.

Elizabeth Gumport is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Manhattan. You can read more of her work here and here. She last wrote in these pages about the life of J.D. Salinger. The photographs of Yasmine Chatila can be seen here and here.

“Topanga Canyon” - John Phillips (mp3)

“I Will Never Marry” - Linda Ronstadt (mp3)

“Blue Bayou” - Linda Ronstadt (mp3)

In Which Happiness Is A Solid And Joy Is A Liquid

The Consumption of J.D. Salinger

by ELIZABETH GUMPORT

J.D. Salinger provokes the personal turn. When we write about his work, we write about him, his private life – or our own. What is public becomes private; criticism creeps towards memoir. Salinger is the JFK assassination, Salinger is 9/11: where were you when you read The Catcher in the Rye? Aleksandar Hemon was in Sarajevo, Aimee Bender in Southern California. Both of them were teenagers, as were Joshua Ferris’s waiter and Adam Gopnik’s son. Joanna Smith Rakoff was working for his agent in New York, where she answered letters from fans who wrote in with their own Salinger stories.

I was on my couch. The book had once belonged to my father, and on its cover was a partial peace sign, which at the time I thought was part of the design. Later I realized my father had drawn it himself. (I think I am not alone when I say I remember Salinger’s stories as books, as encounters with physical objects. Their content seems embodied in their bindings: Franny and Zooey’s green border, Nine Stories in blue and orange. Salinger himself selected the precise shade of white Little, Brown used for his covers.)

When my mom saw me reading Catcher, she reminisced for a while, and then she asked me: why didn’t Holden just eat something? If he had just had a snack he would have felt fine. Who isn’t crabby when he’s dehydrated? It’s a good point, one both real and fictional people would do well to remember, and one that is particularly relevant in the case of dirty realism: everyone feels lousy when they are hungry or hungover. A headache is not a philosophy of the world. Unless, possibly, that world belongs to Salinger, whose fiction is full of finicky eaters. Holden is hardly unusual: Franny picks at her chicken sandwich, and when the narrator of “For Esmé – With Love and Squalor” offers Esmé a piece of his cinnamon toast, she declines, saying “‘I eat like a bird, actually.’” The narrator himself takes only a single bite.

Although Salinger’s characters are not terribly interested in eating food, it does intrigue them for other reasons. In “Just Before The War With The Eskimos,” Selena’s brother presses a chicken sandwich upon Ginnie, who hides it in her coat. When she leaves their apartment, she takes the sandwich out to throw away – but then returns it to her pocket. “A few years before,” Salinger writes, “it had taken her three days to dispose of the Easter chick she had found dead on the sawdust at the bottom of her wastebasket.”

Salinger’s characters ignore meals and preserve dead chicks because, as Aleksandar Hemon points out in “The Importance of Wax and Olives,” Salinger’s characters are interested in objects only insofar as they are useless. The title of Hemon’s essay comes “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” in which Sybil asks Seymour if he likes wax and olives. He says yes: “Olives and wax. I never go any place without ‘em.” What unites olives and wax is their worthlessness: they are pure objects, pre-commodities, neither candle nor garnish. They are just things, things that serve no purpose, like a sandwich you will never eat. The hotel room where Seymour kills himself smells of “new calfskin luggage and nail-lacquer remover” – the odor of officious practicality, of objects bought and used.

In “Seymour: An Introduction,” Buddy reports that his brother admired the kind of poet whose “real forte is knowing a good persimmon or good crab or good mosquito bite on a good arm when he sees one.” Buddy’s analysis serves equally well as a description of Salinger, and of his relationship to objects, or at least the relationship towards which he aspired. His ideal is a kind of categorical imperative of objecthood, Kant’s second formulation applied to Easter chicks. Objects ought to be treated not as means to an ends but ends in themselves. A persimmon, an olive, an arm or the arch of a foot, like Sybil’s, which Seymour kisses: what counts is things as they are, the very pieces of the world.

Buddy’s account also goes a long way towards explaining what it is that makes Salinger’s writing so good. Salinger is acutely aware that we exist in the world – in cities, in apartments, in bodies that rub up against couches and church pews and cabs and other bodies in those cabs – and he is a master of capturing what it feels like, literally feels like, to live.

In Zooey, Seymour’s letter is not just summarized but described: it is a packet of yellow paper, its pages wet with bathwater. It is a real thing Zooey can hold in his hands, like Esmé’s father’s watch, or the red tissue paper that reminds the young Comanche of the Laughing Man’s poppy-petal mask. The richness of Salinger’s fiction comes from his attention to objects, to the physical stuff of life, and from his understanding that the words that describe these things are things themselves. Words are their meanings and more than that: they are themselves, and in Salinger’s hands they are beautiful.

Yet if it is in his treatment of the physical world that Salinger excels, it is also where he eventually gets in trouble. On the New Yorker website, Salinger’s stories are available in their original format, columns of prose bracketed by advertisements for sunscreen and department stores. The offerings are refined, luxury tempered by good taste: madras bathing suits and foundation from Helena Rubinstein for the lady, Yardley shaving cream for “the man who won’t settle for average.”

Unlike wax and olives, these items are valued for reasons beyond themselves. Yardley shaving cream is used to shave one’s face – and to mark oneself as a man who will not settle for average. This is what Hemon calls its “spiritual essence,” which is required for “a commodity to enter the market and attain a value as a thing alienated from human labor.” A commodity, Hemon writes, “cannot be an empty thing... It has to fulfill a need that is not merely material — it must have a spiritual essence that responds to a spiritual need... To possess, to own that essence, that ineffable quality of a commodity that differentiates it from other commodities, one has to buy the thing that contains it, which makes one different from those who buy other commodities. Consumption spiritualizes and individualizes the consumer, as he or she enters a web of imaginary relations between human beings and the world.”

The man who buys Yardley’s shaving cream violates the categorical imperative of objecthood, but so does anyone who values anything for any reason beyond it. Zooey says it himself: “treasure’s treasure,” even when that treasure is spiritual. Disgusted by all the savages, with their phoniness and “unskilled laughter” and consumerism and self-serving ambition that mistakes itself for the pursuit of knowledge and knowledge that does not even pretend to be wisdom, Salinger’s characters devote themselves to that final item totally and explicitly. What they want is spiritual enlightenment, and it turns out that to achieve enlightenment all they have to do is look for it everywhere.

Thus Salinger himself not only betrays his own injunction but commands it. Everything you do ought to be done the service of self-perfection. The smallest action ends in enlightenment: this is what it means to shine your shoes for the Fat Lady.

This is also what tempers the soaring generosity of Zooey, what cuts against Zooey’s – and Salinger’s – overwhelming, aching belief in other human beings. Do you not lose sight of the person himself when all you can see when you look at him is Christ? When, more to the point, all you want to see is Christ? It seems you must: people and objects are valued not for themselves but because for the person seeking wisdom they contain it. Every object is holy, every gesture a genuflection, every person the Fat Lady, and in every Fat Lady is Christ Himself. No longer is anything useless; instead, everything has the same use, including food. “How in hell are you going to recognize a legitimate holy man when you see one,” Zooey asks Franny, “if you don’t even know a consecrated cup of chicken soup when it’s right in front of your nose?”

To a fan, Salinger’s fiction is that “consecrated cup of chicken soup.” He nourishes his reader’s hunger to understand and to be understood, to feel as if Salinger had him in mind when he wrote the way Bessie had Franny in mind when she cooked. To each reader, Salinger says spiritual satisfaction can be achieved through what Joan Didion summarizes as tolerating “television writers and section men” and “looking for Christ in one's date for the Yale game.”

These are what Didion calls Salinger’s “instructions for living,” whose simplicity is the source of their appeal. To ask someone to endure a date is not to ask very much. Ultimately, Didion concludes, Salinger’s books are but “self-help copy. . . Positive Thinking for the upper middle classes, as Double Your Energy and Live Without Fatigue for Sarah Lawrence girls.” We need not change our lives, they tell us, or even necessarily our behavior. All that is required is a good attitude. Enlightenment is as easy as heating up a can of Campbell’s.

If Franny and Zooey is an instruction manual, one of its rules is that it should be read as such. Everything in Salinger’s world has its use, including books: compare Lane’s interest in Madame Bovary with Franny’s in The Way of a Pilgrim. He wants an A, while she wants enlightenment, and it is her way of reading that Salinger celebrates. If Franny is our model reader, what she teaches us is that reading for self-improvement, self-enrichment, self-abasement, self-whatever – reading for the self – is the height of nobility.

She treats The Way of a Pilgrim the way Didion says we treat Franny and Zooey, which is in fact the way many of us do treat Franny and Zooey: as something that can be applied to our own lives, and can change them. Reading for private instruction is not misreading but reading rightly – reading in the manner of Franny. It is for this reason that our first encounters with Salinger loom so large in our memories: his are books about taking books personally.

My father’s copy of The Catcher In The Rye is an artifact, now, so delicate as to be unreadable. Still, I keep it, and if this is taking things personally I will say that is perhaps the way some things should be taken. In fact, part of me is sad that I no longer take Salinger as personally as my younger self took him, and sad that I am a stranger to that girl and the people she once loved.

Elizabeth Gumport is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Baltimore. She last wrote in these pages about Wild Things.

"Play the Game" - Shout Out Louds (mp3)

"Moon" - Shout Out Louds (mp3)

"Throwing Stones" - Shout Out Louds (mp3)

In Which It's Good To See You Girls Getting Along

Call of the Wild

by ELIZABETH GUMPORT

In the mid-19th century, the federal government turned the Everglades over to Florida on the condition that the wetlands would be drained. Sugar cane fields and rice paddies replaced swamp. Frequent floods threatened the crops, so in the 1940s, the Central and Southern Florida Flood Control Project built canals and levees that made possible further agricultural and urban development. Water from the Everglades was diverted to the cities of South Florida, which grew rapidly during the postwar period.

In the late 1890s, fewer than 1,000 people lived in Dade County; in 1960, over a million; in 2008, over 2 million. This figure includes residents of Coconut Grove, a wealthy Miami neighborhood and home to the Ransom Everglades School. The school has its origins in the all-boys boarding academy established in 1903 by Paul C. Ransom, who stated that his students were those who “believe they are put in the world not so much for what they can get out of it as for what they can put into it.” In the 1970s, the Ransom School merged with the Everglades School for Girls. The school has a sailing team, and offers courses in motor boating, canoeing, and boat building. Tuition is currently over $20,000 a year. Wild Things was filmed on its high school campus, which sits on the shore of Biscayne Bay.

The premise of the John McNaughton’s movie is this: good-looking things are good to look at. Wild Things begins in a theater: Blue Bay High School’s auditorium, where Kelly Van Ryan (Denise Richards in a stomach-baring baby tee; later, during a key seduction sequence, she wears jellies) looks with hunger at the man at the podium.

This is Sam Lombardo, the school’s beloved guidance counselor, a role that required Matt Dillon to wear his hair teased, gelled, and parted down the middle. Also on stage are two Blue Bay police officers (Kevin Bacon and Mimi from Rent), whom Dillon has invited to speak to the students about “sex crimes.” Behind them is a mural: blue sky, tangled vegetation. It is the kind of painting you used to see in museum dioramas, the backdrop to a scene of animal savagery: lion on gazelle, dinosaur on smaller dinosaur, wild creatures displayed for the edification of civilized ones. This is the working class, blue collar on show for blue blood, man on display for woman. “You’re a hired hand,” Kelly’s mom (Theresa Russell) snaps at Matt Dillon, after she fails to tempt him back into her bed.

In Wild Things, everything that could be a penis metaphor is. When Blue Bay’s principal brags about catching a barracuda, Dillon tells him the fish is poisonous. “It’ll kill you,” he says. “I could say that about most of the girls you date,” the principal responds. After both Denise Richards and her mom – wearing leopard-print lingerie – flirt with Dillon the movie cuts to a shot of an alligator speeding through the waters of the Everglades.

Female sexuality is as deadly as a swamp, the vagina an amorphous abyss that absorbs corpses without a trace. McNaughton aligns the landscape of Florida, in all its tropical excess, with the female body: theirs is beauty that burgeons into violence. Men who fuck around with it run the risk of getting fucked.

Eaten away by the Everglades, Florida is a drowned state, the end of America, and thus the ideal setting for a story about the end of American manhood. This is the tip of the country; this is a peninsula that pokes feebly at the ocean, which feels nothing.

The original script had Matt Dillon and Kevin Bacon making out in the shower. In an interview, Dillon expressed relief that the scene was cut, despite Bacon’s enthusiasm. “Kevin’s a married man,” he said. “I’m wondering, why he was so eager to do the gay scene?”

Women are not just predators but predators who camouflage themselves as prey. They claim power by feigning powerlessness. When Denise Richards accuses Dillon of rape, the DA believes her immediately. Only Mimi has doubts: “she’s acting,” she says, studying the girl’s statement on tape. It emerges that Mimi is right – the whole thing is a scheme to get Sandra Van Ryan’s money – but the best actress of all turns out to be Suzie (Neve Campbell), who is ostensibly even more disenfranchised than Denise Richards. Denise, at least, has money; Neve has none.

I wouldn’t have guessed Suzie was a sailor, Mimi says at the end of the movie, as she watches Suzie’s dad hook his daughter’s battered boat up to a shiny new car. Neither did anyone else, which is why they are all dead.

Men are from one side of the police department, girls are from the other!

Neve Campbell triumphs because that is what happened in the 90s and because she alone recognizes how seductive the surface of things is, how powerful a hold it has over even the most ruthless con man. People want the world to be what it looks like, and so from what they see they extrapolate what they want. A tooth becomes a dead body, the profession of loyalty genuine loyalty.

Everyone in Wild Things thinks they are tricking everyone else: even though I am not what I appear to be, you are; I have true depth, while you are as shallow as a swimming pool. This is the prevailing belief, the philosophy that determines strategy, despite its obvious flaws. If you are going to play the fool, you better assume all the other fools are playing, too. Success depends not just on the clarity of your gaze but the consistency with which you hold it.

In life, such thoroughness is rewarded; in art, thoroughness is the reward, the source of the audience’s pleasure. This is what it means to have an aesthetic, to have style, and from its opening credits – the font, a slightly italicized sans serif, resembles spray paint, or the porous white concrete so prevalent in South Florida - to the end Wild Things has it. It is a masterful example of maintained perspective, a totally realized world. Every lush tree, tangled with vines, every part of Denise Richards’s body, every swimming pool and sailboat: all serve to convince us the characters are right. Good-looking things are so good to look at.

Like Basic Instinct, Wild Things is a story about and by men who feel like victims, but McNaughton’s film is better-humored and less of a revenge fantasy than Verhoeven’s. This is the difference between the early 90s and the late 90s, when whatever threat feminism posed seemed to have been neutralized – “be comfortable with your sexuality” having become synonymous with “maybe have a threesome” – and the recession was over.

Wild Things was released in 1998, the height of the dot-com boom. Pets.com, Kozmo.com, and Flooz.com were launched the same year. A few years earlier, the value of all crops in the Everglades Agricultural Area was given at $750 million. Only 50 percent of the original wetlands remain.

Greed, not lust, is the governing sin of the fin-de-siecle Florida. “You think any of these women are going to marry you?” Sandra Van Ryan asks Matt Dillon early in the movie. Later, in the golden light of late afternoon, we see him checking out a woman in front of the Sun Trust Bank. For literally everyone – by the end, only about two characters aren’t involved in the scam to steal Sandra Van Ryan’s money – the money is the motive.

Playa more like PLAYER!!!!

The swamp is for the poor, the sea for the rich. Only the wealthy can afford to see the places in America worth seeing. Even after the market for real estate in South Florida crashed, the average price of a home in Coconut Grove was $800,000. If you want beauty, you better be ready to pay.

Elizabeth Gumport is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Baltimore. She last wrote in these pages about Bruce Davidson.

"Chicago Train" - The Besnard Lakes (mp3)

"Glass Painter" - The Besnard Lakes (mp3)

"Albatross" - The Besnard Lakes (mp3)