In Which They Were Kissing Cousins

Nuclear Summer

by MAXWELL NEELY-COHEN

How I Live Now
dir. Kevin Macdonald
101 Minutes

Proto- or almost- or pseudo-incest pops up in film way more than actual incest does. For every truly hardcore incestuous subtext, every Luke/Leia, there’s a Cher/Josh and a Kathryn/Sebastien and a Margot/Richie and a Naomi Watts/Robin Wright banging each other’s fictional dreamy surfer sons in an Australian paradise.

Likewise, almost nuclear war (or after nuclear war) comes up in film way more often than actual nuclear war does. Pre- and post-apocalypse get all the glory, and seeing the bombs fall and the mushroom clouds hover is mostly the provenance of montages at a beginning or end. The actual number of fully depicted and realized nuclear strikes on the silver screen is so low that the youtube videos that attempt to compile them run so short they cannot be properly choreographed to a full Nine Inch Nails song.

How I Live Now begins not with mushroom clouds, but with snippets of voices that sound like a mixture of internal monologue, mean girl Facebook statuses, and random sentences from Wikipedia. A teenage girl listens to loud punk on an airplane. She moves through passport control. An even younger British boy meets her in a terminal.

“No one calls me Elizabeth,” she tells him when he shows her the sign with her name, “except my dad, and he’s an asshole. Call me Daisy.”

Foul-mouthed American Daisy (Saoirse Ronan) is sent away for the summer to live in the English countryside with her aunt and her three cousins, Piper (Harley Bird), Isaac (Tom Holland), and Edmond (George MacKay). But while Daisy’s aunt is away two things happen: She falls in love with Edmond, and a nuclear weapon is detonated in London.

The children are not just forced to endure, but make a conscious decision to survive as a family unit. They encounter fear, separation, existential ambiguity, and the changing battle lines of grownups, all without any clear goal save staying together. We never are told what is happening in the world, who is attacking whom, or why. There are not even delineated sides aside from the haphazard household they’ve formed. And this in a sense is better and scarier than any Hunger Games-ish exposition on how it all went wrong. The immediacy is palpable.

The movie never forgets to let you know there’s a war on. Airports are guarded well past any TSA wet dream, jets roll thunder across the sky and make eardrums bleed with sonic booms, and every adult, in our few glimpses of them, is visibly frightened. Every glancing shot of rain or ash or smoke feels like it could be establishing radioactive death.

And equally, the film never forgets to let you know that even in war there are sometimes sunny days spent on lakes in innertubes and warm nights spent dancing around bonfires.

From the very second the conflict begins it is unapologetic in its speed and sound. That first moment of detonation is an exercise in what real disaster feels like. The violence is swift and serious, but without gratuity or style. Gunshot wounds and corpses are gruesomely undramatized unhollywood realities. Combat is short and unchoreographed. Bullets fly faster than a camera could track them. And they tend to hit and kill things.

“I am a fucking curse,” Daisy tells you. “Everywhere I go, bad shit happens.” She wears a grim reaper t-shirt with the sleeves cut off. Her eye shadow creates filters of dark void sucking time and space away from her blondest possible hair. And despite her angst, her fear, her yearning for Edmund, sometimes you’re left to wonder if that shirt is not a signifier of the times, but rather an indication that she’s the one doing the reaping.

The most daring thing about How I Live Now is not the unapologetic endorsement of consensual cousin incest, but the extent to which it feels completely comfortable leaving adults out of large swaths of the movie. Even before the war, it never tries to overexplain why it’s the kids who are taking care of everything- why the inmates are running the asylum- the parents are all absent and that’s just the reality. Adults are afterthoughts. Cheap props.

But even with that, it is totally unclear what How I Live Now is trying to do, or even if it is trying to do anything. The script festers in a constant state of tension, a slow build without release, a crescendo that never gives way to drums or bass or breakdown. It lacks the fairy tale fire and style of Hanna, Ronan’s other masterwork of teen girl violence. It is not a slick 111 minute Chemical Brothers music video punctuated with Ronan hunting Cate Blanchett through a myriad of Grimms’ folk tales.

How I Live Now holds no cohesive message within its fantasy, no sense that it is trying even to be a fantasy at all. Teenage dystopia, even violent teenage dystopia, is almost always predicated on a twisted sense of wish fulfillment- that Katniss Everdeen’s life, despite all the death and misery, is much more interesting and worthwhile if you are a bored first world child.

There is not even an attempt to make the romance itself a dramatic soap opera worthy of Team Edward-level attention. There is no triangle. No unspeakably hot other boy or girl from the other side of the tracks magically shows up one day to up the stakes.

The love between Edmund and Daisy, despite its taboo, is formless. While we are given enough insight to suppose why Daisy likes Edmund- that he mitigates and medicates her serious bouts with crippling anxiety and OCD, not to mention his hunky penchant for survivalism being particularly useful in the face of current events- we are never allowed a glimpse into his inner life, never given any notion of what he might see in his cousin, other than a chance to play strong silent rural guardian angel to an American blonde, played by an Irish actress.

There are definite moments of ‘what the fuck is really going on here’, but that uncertainty is never embraced, that question never intentionally becomes the point. The uncanny drifts in and out of relevancy almost like it’s flirting with a Pynchon or DeLillo or Danielewski rewrite but is unwilling to commit that far.

But director Kevin Macdonald’s willingness to even entertain visions bordering on such deconstructive nihilism suggests that maybe he should maybe become our collective alternate history pick who could have turned the final Harry Potter movies into genuine works of apocalyptic art as opposed to heartless Hollywood cashgrabs.

When it’s all said and done, Daisy does develop an evocative toughness to her that holds meaning onto itself, an evolving ruthlessness wholly different from what Ronan gave to Hanna. Despite not having a childhood of arctic combat training courtesy of ex-CIA dad Eric Bana, not being a genetically engineered trained assassin from birth, Daisy might be the more terrifying of Ronan’s young assassin performances. Daisy’s killing does not feel like a video game. It has emotion and grit. When it comes, you flinch.

Over the course of the movie, her weaknesses become her strengths without any overwrought growth or learning curve. There is no survivalism training montage. No archery range. It is almost as if her inability to thrive in the former world was predicated on its relative peace and functionality, that only once the shit hit the fan could she come of age. And in giving a female character that- a construct usually reserved for a pampered modern male bemoaning a lack of suitable manly endeavors- there may be a subtle brilliance despite all other imperfections.

Except for the whole kissing cousins thing. That’s gross.

Maxwell Neely-Cohen is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in New York City. He last wrote in these pages about Paul Walker. You can find his twitter here and his website here.

"The Day The World Went Away" - Nine Inch Nails (mp3)

"Hanna's Theme" - The Chemical Brothers (mp3)

In Which It Is Considered The Definitive Version Of Paul Walker

Burnt Rubber

by MAXWELL NEELY-COHEN

Right now, as of press time, the fictional Paul Walker stock (symbol: PWALK) is valued at $118.93 a share on the play money Hollywood Stock Exchange. For reference, Leonardo DiCaprio (LDCAP) is valued at $109.22, Ryan Reynolds (RREYN) is at $52.82, George Clooney (GCLOO) is at $55.39, Ben Affleck (BAFFL) is at $53.79, and Ryan Gosling (RGOSL) is at $39.83.

Also, right now, as of press time, Paul Walker has never been the singular leading actor in a movie of note.

In 1998, in black and white, this was the moment Paul Walker pseudo-arrived. Despite his career as a childhood actor and model, it didn’t happen until Pleasantville, when Reese Witherspoon saw him drive up in his car and stopped her time-space continuum, I’m-trapped-in-a-tv-show freakout, and then asked in a teenage daze - “Who’s that?”

Our first image of him was as Skip Martin, the star (white) basketball player in the All-American problemless Chamber of Commerce (white) town. Oh! Gee! Skip Martin! He’s so swell! Little did they know that in Pleasantville, Skip Martin was patient zero. Even though he did not let himself go Technicolor until the climax, he was the first infected, the start of the outbreak, the vector, the drawbridge that had been left down.

Within a few months, Skip Martin gave way to Lance Harbor, the All-Star QB1 of West Canaan’s Coyotes in 1999’s Varsity Blues. Even in a setting five decades later Paul Walker got to be the jock chosen one immortalized on the giant sign planted in the front lawn, number 7 in your programs and number one in Ali Larter’s heart. Late 90s Paul Walker was made to play your platonic ideal of the high school god-king starting quarterback. He was crafted for it, yanked out of the sod of Friday night lit fields across SEC and PAC-10 states. In Varsity Blues, even crippled on crutches with his performance relegated to mystic teenage coach status, the Paul Walker of 1999 was at home using the last seconds of halftime in the championship game to implement a high-powered passing offense that would make the 2010 Oregon Ducks jealous.

The look of elation present on his face as he signals in a hook and lateral to be the final play of the game cannot just belong to the character of Lance Harbor. The real Paul Walker seems like the type of guy who would call trick plays in high stakes situations. If he was coaching your children’s peewee football team (and such a thing might just happen to you one day), with four seconds left on the clock he’d find the most ridiculous farce in the playbook, glare at the parents on the opposing sideline, adjust his baseball cap, and give a little smirk as he directed your local neighborhood 8 year olds to unleash mischief on their poor opponents.

Paul Walker’s final portrayal of a teenager came in She’s All That, you know, that movie where we’re supposed to believe that Freddie Prinze Jr. and Jodi Lyn O’Keefe are somehow the king and queen of a high school also attended by Gabrielle Union and Usher.

As an adolescent devil named Dean Sampson Jr., Paul Walker became a Satan disguised as blonde snake holding a poisoned apple to poor artsy Rachel Leigh Cook. He was a walking, talking plot device, the only actor portraying an actor. He was the force moving the script along, clandestinely chain-smoking in half of his scenes, delivering lines like “Hey, guys, check it. Guess who jammed a 30 year-old flight attendant at 25,000 feet en route to Cancun?” and “Well, well, well, check who’s back from spring break… looking all fine and shit.” All a respite from endless shots of Freddie Prinze Jr. trying his hardest to emote confusion.

For his hard work, Paul Walker was given the title of teenage hunk. It was his picture ripped out from a magazine that hung in the 6th grade locker of a lesbian friend of mine. He was the perfect beard in middle school.

In the final act of his preamble worthy of mention, Paul Walker starred opposite Joshua Jackson in the non-canon Yale-as-opposed-to-Harvard The Social Network prequel The Skulls. Paul Walker got to be Caleb Mandrake, that rich kid who exclusively has threesomes and forgets whom he has dated and loses his keys to his secret societies (probably because they are so various). Caleb was an expert duelist, a marksman, and a murderer. It might be, in terms of acting, the role most removed from Paul Walker’s actual experience. You see Paul Walker is really Paul Walker IV, son of Paul Walker III, a sewer contractor instead of a senator (though this particular sewer contractor married a model).

After graduating high school, Paul Walker IV bounced around several Golden State community colleges taking marine biology classes. It wouldn’t be surprising to find out that he had not set foot in the state of Connecticut before shooting The Skulls (which was filmed in Toronto). It wouldn’t be surprising to find out that Paul Walker has never set foot in the state of Connecticut. In fact, to this day there’s little photographic evidence showing him in states other than California.

Regardless, it’s there in fake Canadian Connecticut at that fake Canadian Yale while playing a badly drawn caricature of a Bush that for the first time we see him get behind the wheel of a very fast car.

Film franchises don’t just accidentally gross $1,600,000,000.

The Fast and the Furious and its sequels have thrived by surfing the faultlines of a degenerating American monoculture. One can argue that the first film, released in a pre-9/11 2001, was pop culture’s first glimpse of a different America, a twisted version of Obama’s America, a demographic reality which has since come to be and thoroughly scared the shit out of Republicans everywhere. The Fast and the Furious depicts an urbanized country where whites are The Man and the minority, Latinos are the plurality, and blacks and Asians are competing forces of cultural production in a hypercapitalistic free-for-all. In the films sequels, the United States is just another country, exceptionalism be damned.

In that world, even as it morphs from film to film, Paul Walker’s character Brian O’Conner occupies an identity space that we haven’t even invented a term for yet. Whenever Channing Tatum is asked by an interviewer how he learned how to dance, he says that he grew up in a predominantly Latin place where he was sick of being the awkward white kid who couldn’t dance at all the quinceañeras.

Though we never see the specifics, a similar backstory must be responsible for why Brian O’Conner knows how to drive the way he does.

The sort of street racing culture promoted in the first three films has a reach which lessens as you go up the socio-economic ladder. This is because it takes a special kind of rich white kid to decide that a custom Nissan or Subaru is more appealing than daddy’s Maserati. And while the sequels racked up and the successive volumes became replacements for the 90s action effectfests of Schwarzenegger or Stallone instead of films about racing or import culture, the undercurrents are irremovable. They all still center on the car, the enduring American symbol, now globalized by fetishism for superior imports or honored in nostalgia for a previous period of domestically produced muscle.

Brian O’Conner is a street racer turned LAPD cop turned an FBI agent turned turncoat- a runaway, a vagabond, a master criminal who ends up co-leading a crew that includes ex-Mossad babes and Tokyo drug dealers. He is the hook studio executives toss to white America (and female America) so they’ll buy a ticket.

Paul Walker a.k.a. Brian O’Conner. Vin Diesel’s best friend and Jordana Brewster’s babydaddy. An American you know and love.

The real Paul Walker uses the twitter handle: @RealPaulWalker. The Real Paul Walker was raised Mormon and has a 14 year old daughter. The Real Paul Walker surfs, backpacks, hunts, tracks, fishes, snowboards, races competitively, and holds a brown belt in Brazilian jiu-jistu. He does all of these things as if his only goal in life is to become the 90s subcultural version of the Übermensch. He posts photos of his global adventures on his website, flash enabled galleries with black and white versions of his arcing forever-tan biceps holding up a surfboard over his scruff-laden chin as background. He plays frisbee on the beach. He jumps out of helicopters onto snowy peaks. If you study The Fast and the Furious movies closely enough, you’ll notice that as they progress, the more often The Real Paul Walker is flaunting the insurance companies and driving the cars instead of a stuntman. The Real Paul Walker has several dogs. He visits baby lions in nature preserves. He takes relief trips when there are earthquakes.

When you watch enough galley interviews of Paul Walker you start to realize that despite his Californian drawl and cliché  ridden answers to cliché ridden questions, he has a surprisingly expansive vocabulary that functions in direct opposition to the stereotypes he represents. As if on some Joycian mission he rarely uses the same word twice, finding synonyms on the fly and following nouns with verbs you aren’t quite expecting. Even while discussing the most mundane topics possible he builds shrinking towers of dependent clauses separated by dashes, all marked by a minimalism worthy of Raymond Carver. When exiting that hypnotic youtube trance caused by watching hours of press conference pre-release dialogues, you wonder, what is going on in that head of his? Who is playing whom? Which Paul Walker is the Real Paul Walker? Is there any difference?

“They try to neuter you as much as you can,” The Real Paul Walker tells a galley interviewer, “And not to pat myself on the back too much but there are, quite frankly, a lot of things I can do better than some of the stuntmen, a lot of the stuntmen, there are certain guys we bring in as specialists, that say are really good at this, or good at that, but my lifestyle, the way that I was raised and playing all the sports and doing everything that I did, I like to consider myself a pretty physical and athletic guy.”

The only thing stranger than Paul Walker’s status as movie star is Paul Walker’s status as sex symbol. Paul Walker will never be People's Sexiest Man Alive. His only appearance in their Most Beautiful issue came in the 2002 edition. The internet is not littered with memes predicated on his hotness. Yet every video clip where he is the subject, every blog post featuring his picture, is littered with comments unilaterally declaring his sexiness: the digital equivalent of panties thrown onstage at a rock show.

Whereas Clooney, Gosling, Tatum, Efron, DiCaprio, et al are or were supermassive celestial objects that generate heat smashing into the atmospheric zeitgeist at apocalyptic velocities, Paul Walker is something else... He is background radiation. He’s the smoldering remnants of the American prettyboy ideal from back when it was exemplified by Abercrombie models playing football shirtless on beaches on the 4th of July. An artifact from the land before fixed gear bikes, Kardashians, and Prii, before teenage tumblrs covered in naked girls wearing Supreme accessories and A$AP Rocky holding court like he actually is a young American royal (and who’s to say he isn’t).

The Real Paul Walker will soon turn 40.

In the coming year he will finally get a movie to call his own, portraying a father trying to save his newborn daughter when Hurricane Katrina kills the generators in a New Orleans hospital.

And in the coming year Paul Walker will once again get behind the wheel.

Maxwell Neely-Cohen is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in New York. You can find his website here, and his twitter here. He last wrote in these pages about the safe haven.

"Locked In The Basement" - The Boxer Rebellion (mp3)

In Which We Reach The Safe Haven At Last

Southern Beaches

by MAXWELL NEELY-COHEN

Safe Haven
dir. Lasse Hallström
115 min.

When I was 15, not long after switching from a D.C. public school to a small, notoriously liberal private school, I discovered that among all of my friends I was the only avowed atheist. We sat at a beach house passing around a large bowl filled with anonymously written questions, the first one being “does god exist?” While some did not believe in a single paternal Judeo-Christian god, all had faith in some sort of grand proto-spirtual metaphysical force. All, except me. This, in a school with maybe three Republicans, in the most statistically liberal geographic voting bloc in the United States.

Two days later I watched my first (his second) Nicholas Sparks film adaptation, stunned to discover in A Walk To Remember that rural America’s high schools were supposedly so filled with teenage atheists that a single student (played by Mandy Moore) believing in God was openly mocked.

Eleven years and $453 million later, Safe Haven is the eighth Nicholas Sparks film adaptation.

When it begins, we are greeted by frantically cut visions of a brunette Katie (Julianne Hough) running away from a house barefoot in a drab blue dress, skin splotched with blood beneath a cloudy sky. Interlaced with white titles on a black screen, she sprints into a neighbor’s home and is comforted by an old lady.

The next thing we know she is blonde, under a grey hoodie, under a leather jacket, and under nighttime rain, evading a cop (David Lyons) at a bus station as if she is a Mara sister in a badly shot Fincher flick.

But with her escape the sun comes out, and the familiar Sparksian vaguely-Americana singer-songwriter soundtrack accompanies a montage of arriving in the coastal town of Southport, North Carolina. And once again, there are sandy paths, fishing boats, and small seafood restaurants on piers. The majority of Nicholas Sparks films and books are set along the Atlantic coast, and in all of them water plays a major role, as if any chance of romance is useless for those of us not directly adjacent to a picturesque beach or stream.

Safe Haven proceeds to tell the story of Katie’s attempt to start over in this small town, where of course there is a good-looking widower (Josh Duhamel) with two children and no edge whatsoever running the general store. Katie gets a job as a waitress, suffers extreme paranoia and nightmares concerning her past, and learns to love again over canoeing and plaid shirts and beach outings with little children who tell her to paint her floor yellow.

Her only platonic adult friend is Jo (Cobie Smuthers), whose every single line manages to be a cliché, even when she becomes a metaphysical dreamwalker (“I love the way the light comes through the trees,” or “take a lot of pictures, you’ll only regret the ones you didn’t take.”)

All of the above is interspersed with shots of Lyons as a police detective hunting Katie from his office in Boston, switching between a police procedural and someone screaming “there-are-second-acts-in-America-life (!!!),” as if the film is a philosophical battle between Nicholas Sparks and Anti-Nicholas Sparks. That is until multiple twist endings warp the absurdity into M. Night Shyamalan territory.

There is no evidence in Hough’s performance of the slutty reverend’s daughter she played in the 2011 remake of Footloose, no glimpses of the professional dancer portraying a teenager who spends her nights grinding in fast food parking lots to Three Six Mafia. The only scenes in Safe Haven where Hough dances she is a passive partner. The only indications of her other career are visible in the agility she uses to avoid the drying paint on her cottage floor. 

Duhamel, on the other hand, lacks the cult of personality usually associated with a Sparksian male romantic interest. He is not The Gosling, The Efron, or The Tatum, not worthy of a “The,” not ever going to book a role as Soderbergh stripper, getaway driver, or Nicole Kidman kink jailbait.

Safe Haven is the second Sparks adaptation to feature a villainous abusive police officer as an antagonist. (Along with The Efron’s pseudo-incestuous, a-new-younger-exmarine-boyfriend-replaces-my-dead-younger-exmarine-brother, The Lucky One.)

While it is certainly true that law enforcement officers boast a spousal abuse rate double the national average, both films want to have us believe that singular police officers are untouchable, that there are not divorce lawyers, judges, DA’s, and IA agents who have made their entire careers out of destroying bad cops, and that women will never have the strength to fight an abuser without a new man stepping into the picture.

Welcome to the world of Nicholas Sparks. Caller ID, landlines, and digital cameras are all major plot-driving devices, even though we clearly see children playing with iphones. God is always present, even when left out of the dialogue. He’s always there to drop a rainstorm so you have a convenient opportunity for making out, always willing to bring someone back as a ghost to give you fabulous advice. Never does faith go unrewarded. Ever.

Of course, Safe Haven is just another in a long series of attempts to capitalize on the success of The Notebook, the movie (and novel) that plucked Nicholas Sparks from the sea of other bestselling neo-romance writers and placed him on the altars bookshelves of sorority girls everywhere. There have even been non-Nicholas Sparks Nicholas Sparks movies (Charlie St. Cloud, The Vow), which always star actors and actresses who have appeared or would end up appearing in his work.

There was a time, before The Notebook, where thinking Ryan Gosling was the sexiest man alive was solely the province of proto-hipsters and film geeks, aroused by the idea that some Mickey Mouse Club kid could play a Jewish neo-Nazi in The Believer. But that’s how powerful The Notebook was, propelling The Gosling on his way to becoming the most feminist male American sex symbol in history.

At a party in 2006 I met a high-ranking executive of a large multinational advertising agency who explained to me that sometime during the late 1990s American females became particularly susceptible to something she called the “plight of the poor little trapped rich white girl.” While the character trope has a long history (see: William Shakespeare or John Hughes) I was told that  somewhere along the upward curve in mass-media, standard of living, and evolution of adolescent heartthrobbery it had become the dominant romantic narrative to sell to young American women. This was opposed to, for example, the rags to riches tale of Pretty Woman, the foremost romantic film fantasy of the prior decade or so, and the highest grossing “romantic comedy” of all time.

By making the female protagonist rich (and with unforgiving parents) instead of poor you change up the “normal” order of events. Landing the guy is no longer the way to landing the pretty expensive stuff. You combine the dramas of familial pressure, guilt of privilege, suffocating misogyny, and cross-class dating, all starting from a fantasy of materialistic wish fulfillment (one that so many corporations have worked hard for decades to imbue in young female consumers). As the marketing executive explained to me, “Rose in Titanic only gets to wear the diamond in that story if she’s rich.” This was why Sparks had been so successful with The Notebook, she said.

Whether or not I think she was right, what is particularly interesting about the enduring success of such dramatic works is most of the people who consume them will never date, let alone marry, someone outside of their own class or ethnic background. That despite the fact that the outright social taboos are gone, a modern day Sybil from Downton Abbey marrying her family’s chauffeur would still cause gossip and raised eyebrows. All measures of social mobility in the United States, even including marriage, are at historic lows. In a very different way our society might be as hostile to straight women pursuing the kind of love from The Notebook as it is to gay men pursuing the kind of love from Brokeback Mountain.

In light of Twilight, the sands may have shifted, and the trapped rich white girl story may be already relegated to secondary status in favor of more metaphysical (and sometimes disturbingly regressive) romantic concerns. But it is still the arc that made Nicholas Sparks a household name. And even in Safe Haven, where the characters are theoretically working class, everyone still ends up with beautiful beachfront property or quaint forested cottages. And the bad guys end up wonderfully dead by grand confluences of natural forces or misdirected bullets. And not because Jessica Chastain sent some Navy Seals to kill them for her, or because Katniss Everdeen learned to hunt and put an arrow through their skulls, but because God, metaphysical spiritual force or otherwise, judged and deemed it so.

Maxwell Neely-Cohen is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in New York. You can find his website here, and his twitter here.

"Feet Off The Ground" - Three Six Mafia (mp3)

"Spirit in the Sky" - Norman Greenbaum (mp3)