David Kartch | Zen and the Art of Landscaping / 2000, 2001 general release

just relax

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Kartch (screenwriter and director) Zen and the Art of Landscaping / 2000, 2001 general release

 

David Kartch’s film Zen and the Art of Landscaping won several festival awards in 2000 and 2001 before its general release in 2001. It is, in fact, a truly well directed satire of the numerous daytime soap operas of the 1950s and 1960s which it calls up. In a somewhat more contemporary context, this film employs the life of US suburbia, restateing some of the impossible coincidences of soap opera plots, although in this case just making them plausible enough that Kartch’s film successfully skewers small town conventions and class distinctions simultaneously.

     The gardener Greg Daniels (Greg Haberny) has arrived at the lovely suburban home of Jean and Richard (Kathleen Garrett and Mark Blum), mowed the lawn, trimmed the hedges, and raked up the trimmings and grass into a garbage can, while stripping off his shirt in the hot sun, before

Jean arrives home from shopping. Strangely, as she is ready to remove her grocery bag from the back of her station wagon, she begins pounding down the sack as if to destroy all its contents. After observing her doing this for some time, Greg calls out, “Are you all right?” She pretends to ignore him, but soon moves over to apologize, suggesting she just realized that she has missed out in on a big sale at the Stopper Shop.

       She introduces herself—her husband makes all the arrangements with the lawn services—and he introduces himself as Greg, suggesting that all of his friends call him Zen, and before he knows it she’s invited him for something to drink. We all know what’s in store of course—unless you’ve never seen a comedy of the suburban wealthy like The Graduate before. He hardly gets the chance to recognize that there’s more than a little vodka in the orange juice she serves him and to observe from a refrigerator-posed photo that he thinks he went to high school with her son before she pulls him in for a deep slurpy kiss, despite his unintentional reminder that she’s old enough to be his mother.

     While seducing the lean hunk of flesh, she eyes the clock registering 5:30, obviously close to time when her hubby returns home. We can guess what happened, that she’s caught him cheating on her and is using Zen to get even. And sure enough, we see a car pull up and park in front of the house.

        The door opens, and in walks....Andy, her son who’s been away at college. The couple quickly break away and each attempting to readjust his or her clothing. Zen insists he should return to his work, but she insists on introducing the two. The son has seen way too much and won’t believe a word of her explanation that Greg Daniels has come in to fix the sink. Andy has some other memories of “Zen,” in fact. “Remember all those times when I came home from school all bruised and beat up and I just told you I was playing football with the guys?”

       “Well, weren’t you playing football?”

       “No, I hate football,” Andy screams out. “Mom, this guy was the Grim Reaper of Glendale High. He made my life miserable.”

       “That was a long time ago, okay.” Greg/Zen admits to Jean. “I used to be kind of a jerk.”

       “And look at you now,” Andy digs in. “How is the lawnmowing business?” For Andy, who clearly is still is really a jerk, he is just a “poor, white trash, mother fucker!”

       When Zen observes that Andy’s choice of words is strange given the situation, Jean slaps her brief lover’s face, while at the very same moment, stage left, enters her husband, Richard. Hearing his voice, Jean grabs Greg, pulls him to her and kisses him intensely once again, pretending shock for her husband witnessing their action.

      When asked why she is kissing the lawnmower, she responds, well, “it’s not just the lawn he’s doing,” Andy responding “Oh, God!”

      Wait, it gets worse. It seems Andy has driven all the way home to tell his parents that he’s gay. His father, as have so many other father’s, declares his son is not gay, and his mother immediately insists—after wondering why he couldn’t wait until after dinner—declares it’s just college. “Everybody thinks they’re gay in college,” Zen privately musing “Really?”

       As his parents continue their denial while simultaneously blaming of one another, Andy rushes over to Zen and abuses him just as has his mother: kissing him deeply on the lips.

        Startled by the act, Richard asks “You banging my son too?”

        “I’m not banging anybody,” answers Zen.

      “Except me,” Jean returns, moving it to take over by planting kisses on the “landscaper’s” lips. After Zen pushes her away and accidentally hits Andy in the process, the three get back into a pattern of blaming one another as they obviously have every day they’re lived together.

        “You don’t know what it’s like to wake up every day and feel that you’re different,” Andy interrupts.

        “That isn’t because you’re gay,” insists his father, “that’s because you’re adopted.”

       Another revelation. Which, of course, turns into further revelations, most importantly, that Jean had not wanted to have a child, afraid she might lose her attractive “girlish” figure.

        Jean hauls off and hits him in the face with a frying pan, explaining that what she was really afraid of was that if she didn’t remain beautiful her husband might cheat on her, as he has, apparently, with the check-out girl at Stopper Shop, Candy Miller—who just happens to be, we immediately discover, Zen’s girlfriend.

        Andy had a big crush on her all his senior year, he gasps, as Jean suddenly registers shock that Zen was going to cheat on his girlfriend. Before he knows it, the family made in hell all turn on the lawnmower-boy, coming after him like ghouls from The Night of the Living Dead, he keeping them away through the use of Weedwhacker as his backs away in his truck and drives off.

         Too bad such a clever writer/director did not continue in those roles; he became instead an editor of several documentaries and a travel TV series, The Coolest Places on Earth.

 

Los Angeles, August 20, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2021).

 

 

 

Carlos Veron | Dad & Papa / 2014 [commercial advertisement]

smart and funny fathers

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nathan Lennon (copywriter), Carlos Veron (of the Droga5 agency) (director) Dad & Papa / 2014 [1.46 minutes]

 

The same year, 2014, Honey Maid featured a much longer ad of 1 minute and 46 seconds which served almost as a very short documentary about two gay men who had fathered, with a surrogate mother, two sons. The camera catches them together with their children and one another along with photographs as the text reads what I’ve slightly abbreviated.

     Their eldest son, all of 8 or 9, begins the conversation:

 

“My dad would be like the smart one and everything, and then my papa would be….he's the funny one. We all work out time for each other so we'll always have dinner together we'll always share our best and worst of the day. It's usually hard to come up with a worst.”

 

     Together the two men then alternately speak:

 

“We’re kind of traditional guys. Marriage and a family and having kids was always important to us. We met in line at a coffee shop. I knew that week that I was gonna marry him.

 

What's interesting is you said you knew you were gonna marry me but….

     That wasn't even in our thought then. Like having a mortgage together was what marriage used to be for gay people.”

 

      Their son interrupts:

 

“One of my favorite memories with my family is the day we got Wyatt [their baby son]. I really just can't wait until he gets older.”

     The two gay men then rhapsodize briefly on how meaning and overwhelming it is to be parents.

   Throughout, we have seen the family eat s’mores (graham crackers with chocolate and melted marshmallows on top). But the company itself is not named until the end, with a very small logo for Honey Maid.

 

Los Angeles, September 18, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).

 

 

 

 

 

 

Carlos Veron | This Is Wholesome / 2014 [commercial advertisement]

how happy families look

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nathan Lennon (copywriter), Carlos Veron (of the Droga5 Agency) (director) This Is Wholesome / 2014 [31 seconds] [commercial advertisement]

 

The Honey Maid ad This Is Wholesome is probably the first of the three ads, given its short length.

    This ad features both gay fathers with their baby, one of the men feeding the child with a milk bottle and the other kissing the child, after which walk with their older son and the baby in a stroller.

      An instant later, we hear a female child’s laughter as her heavily-tattooed father pops a cracker into his mouth. A moment later, a mother is dancing with her daughter as the father plays drums. The frame switches to what appears to be a Hispanic single father buttoning up his son’s shirt. The next image of what looks to be a mixed racial married couple lifting up their daughter between them, as their two other children walk in front.   

 

      A narrator speaks over the images: “No matter how things change what makes us wholesome never will. Honey maid. Everyday wholesome snacks for every wholesome family.

      Since Nathan Lennon and Carlos Veron were credited with this commercial as copywriter and director, I am presuming (perhaps mistakenly) that they also served in that capacity for the other two.

 

Los Angeles, September 18, 2024

Reprinted in My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).

Carlos Veron | Love / 2014 [commercial advertisement]

turning hate into love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nathan Lennon (copywriter), Carlos Veron (director) Love / 2014 [1.43 minutes] [commercial advertisement]

 

In 2014 the Honey Maid company, maker of Honey Maid graham crackers, and part of the Nabisco Company, launched a series of ads under the general heading of “This Is Wholesome.” Perhaps the first of these was a general view of various new versions of family life, which included gay men, mixed marriages, and single dads of various races and social types.

     The company, perhaps as expected, received some very negative responses to these commercials, just as Coca-Cola had in response to their Superbowl ad of the same year, “It’s Beautiful” which argued that people of different ethnicities and cultures and a family with two dads were all-American.

     But instead of simply grinning and bearing the negative response or turning away from their original campaign, the Honey Maid executives, certainly with the help of their advertising agency Droga5, gathered up all the negative responses and asked two artists to create a work of art with the printouts.

 

      Carefully rolling them up into cylinder-like cones, they arranged them to spell out the word “Love.” But going even further, the company, who made another commercial documenting their actions, noted that there were far many thousands of more positive responses, which the artists, also rolling them up into small cylinders used to surround the word “Love,” symbolically creating a positive force field to their original transformation of the negative into love.

 

     It is estimated that over 1.5 million people saw the ad.

     I have described the original two ads below.

 

Los Angeles, September 18, 2024

Paul Thomas Anderson | Inherent Vice / 2014

 film soir

Paul Thomas Anderson (screenplay, based on the novel by Thomas Pynchon, and director) Inherent Vice / 2014

 

It’s the 1970s in the Golden State, Gordito Beach (read Manhattan Beach or any of the other numerous beach communities that trail down the Pacific coast just south of Los Angeles), when the hippies had not yet abandoned the sunlit glow at the end of the American trail to the West; here are the last remnants, we might argue, of the two and one-half centuries of manifest destiny: a faded vision of house, car, and family, which had become transfixed in the golden afternoon light as a tiny depilated pad replete with man, music, pot, chick and maybe, with a little luck, a decaying jalopy hidden away in a local garage. If everything was a bit diminished, it was still “groovy” and, after a couple of deep-drawn puffs or—if it was your thing—a few snorts of coke it was maybe even a bit transcendent! 

     While I was still entrapped within the marble halls inside the D.C. beltway beside the blue-suited, sinning spies serving up secrets to Nixon the cracked-up crook, and soon after, alongside the white-robed Sunday school saints of Jimmy Carter’s spiritual entourage, before being frozen-out by the black be-draped brigades of buffalos of the Reagan rich, the good people of what I then called my home city, were enjoying one long final sweet binge of no regrets, stuffing their bodily appendages with sexual aides (real and manufactured) and salving their mental cravings with drugs (real and manufactured) at the far end of the American Dream.

     This is the territory of Thomas Pynchon in fiction and director Paul Thomas Anderson in film, somewhat blindingly colliding in Anderson’s cinematic adaptation of Inherent Vice. Larry “Doc” Sportello (near-perfectly portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix), sporting a pair of mutton chops that threaten to trample his face, sits, smoking a joint, in his man-cave alone, a little high and, quite clearly, a little sad after having lost—as our not-so-trusty narrator Sortilége (named after, presumably, the disgusting mix of Canadian whisky and maple syrup gulped down in Montreal or the practice of reading the roll of dice as a divination of the will of the Gods) has reported—his beloved Shasta Fey Hepworth (Katherine Waterston). Her sudden re-appearance in his hut is not something he is not sure is really happening, and, in fact, even as viewers of the event, we can never be certain that the beautiful Shasta is real. For the story’s sake she serves simply as the real or manufactured excuse to send Doc, who works as a kind of confessor-psychiatrist-gumshoe in a nearby clinic, on a series of more than slightly surreal and sometimes even hallucinogenic adventures that transform even the most fervent of faithful followers of human trust into outright paranoids. 

     Seems that since Shasta split, she got involved with a slick but sleazy property-developer, Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts), whose English-accented wife Sloane (Serena Scott Thomas) and her always-in-the-buff boyfriend have other plans for him involving his disappearance and death. Will Doc be so good as to find him please? 

    If this sounds a bit familiar, it is, of course, right out of the Hollywood film noirs such as The Long Goodbye and The Big Sleep, and like them, Inherent Vice takes its audience on a long series of increasingly complex events that quickly relieve it from ratiocination. Strange things happen, again and again. Another would-be client asks Doc to check out a former prison cell-mate who’s now working as a bodyguard, along with an entire bike gang of Nazi Aryans, for Wolfmann. Checking out one of Wolfmann’s new construction sites, Doc comes upon the Chick Planet massage parlor, where stroking specialist Jade (Hong Chau) is all-too-ready to preview the girls’ special offers; but before he can even get an eye full, Doc wakes up with a hard-hit-to-the-head hangover and the dead corpse of Wolfmann’s bodyguard laid out beside him.

    Enter police detective Christian “Bigfoot” Bjørnoson (Josh Brolin), with a flat-top as ferocious as Doc’s sideburns, ready to pin the “murder” on his nemesis-friend, Sportello. The police always play a kind of mirror-image role to the hero gumshoe in film noir works, bollixing up everything in their attempts to get to motives quick and pin “it” (real or manufactured) on the first suspect they come across. But Pynchon’s-Anderson’s film is not quite as much a noir, representing a world hidden in dark shadows and motives, as it is a soir, a world of the California evening light where the sun sometimes gets in your eyes, and what you think you see is the glimmer of something else. Mirror images get inverted, twisted all out of proportion, are lost in the haze of foggy memory and perception. If “Bigfoot” is another version of Doc, he is a perverted medicine man, a being so locked in the conformity of job and family that he makes Doc Sportello look like an innocent piker.

    If Doc has lost “the perfect hippie chick,” “Bigfoot”—whose patrol partner has been murdered—has lost the lover of his closeted world. Throughout these on-screen adventures, as both detective and cop twist and turn, almost in a helix pattern, around one another, the policeman sucks on chocolate-covered bananas—his version of sexual satisfaction—while consuming vast amounts of his favorite drug—scotch, poured out in high-ball glasses by his young son. While Doc replaces his sexual longings for Shasta with “Bigfoot’s” colleague, deputy attorney Penny Kimball (Reese Witherspoon)—a woman wrapped up in high-detail bureaucratic research who occasionally is willing to search out the laid-back world of Doc where she can safely unwrap—“Bigfoot” gets his kicks by applying his foot along with every other part of his fit yet slightly flabby flesh to the contours of possible criminals, particularly Doc. The policeman’s wife apparently has to schedule her sexual events. Accordingly, the two, Doc and “Bigfoot” almost roll through the numerous twists and turns of this film’s plot like a dueling queer duo, Doc slightly floating with Bigfoot pummeling him back to earth, just behind.

    It wouldn’t do much good to describe their flat-footed adventures, because, although bad things happen everywhere they go, nothing is truly resolved and no definitive answers are proffered as to whom is responsible for the evils they encounter. A dreadful organization, the Golden Fang, is surely behind it, but does it represent an organization of drug smugglers hanging out aboard a boat, a cartel of dentists such as Dr. Blatnoyd (Martin Short) who operate medically on ex-heroin addicts and sexually on young teenagers such as Japonica Fenway  (Sasha Pieterse), daughter of a noted Republican conservative? Or is it centered in a nearby Ojai drug rehabilitation center which cures drug addicts by re-habituating them into religious cults?  Why are the CIA investigators Doc encounters living in the Spa, and why is Wolfman trapped there as a patient? Are Shasta and Wolfman actually aboard the boat? Was Dr. Blatnoyd killed by a fang-shaped device made of gold? Why have the villains hired an innocent former drug addict-saxophonist, Coy Harlingen (Owen Wilson), to spy within hippie-like communes and protest at politically rightist events? And why is Bigfoot, always just a few steps behind Doc’s trail, determined to incriminate and possibly get the innocent gumshoe killed by filling up his car trunk with several bales of heroin?

   All we can really determine is that in this Pynchon-Anderson fiction nearly everyone is up to no good. And whatever the Golden Fang group is doing, it represents the death of the hazy golden world in which Doc and others like him exist. Clearly the viper of reality has turned on the foggy-minded golden children of the sun to puncture their bliss and kill them with its poisonous bite.

    Finally, we fear that in this sun-soaked film soir world, where nothing can be clearly seen, there is no possible meaning. While we may have enjoyed the adventures played out before us, we finally must ask, where does it lead? The film (and fiction with it) leaves us in a befogged condition not unlike that which Doc endures daily. Is this world a real place? In other words, does the fiction-film really matter?

 

   Despite his confused detection, the non-revelatory, goofy clues he notes to himself (words like “drugs,” “prison,” “something Spanish”) Doc does successfully negotiate with the class-conscious rightist Crocker Fenway (Martin Donovan) in order to free the indentured spy Harlingen, returning him home to his heroin-recovered wife and formerly drug-damaged child. And, by film’s end, Shasta returns to Doc. Even “Bigfoot” makes a final, forceful visit asserting his bond with the gumshoe by breaking down the front door and ingesting a plate full of raw hash as if to say, “I’m like you kid!” If Doc is no hero, not even a potential survivor—we know that his and Shasta’s time has come to end, that their lives due to “inherent vice” (not representing any evil act they have committed, but through the very nature of their bodily frailty, the fact that they are human beings destined to wear out and die) will soon be over like the decade they represented—he remains at work’s end a true American innocent. They may be, as Graham Greene and others have argued, the worst kind of human being. After all, he has just killed the villain Adrian Prussia and his confederates! But from our cultural perspective, he remains a man of conscience, a confused but good man, a kind of holy fool who, for a few fleeting moments, aspires to a role that suggests a savior, a kind of Christ. Like many figures of his generation, now long disappeared, Doc believes in two simple things, pleasure and love. Too bad the corrupt world around him had to get in his way.   

 

Los Angeles, December 23, 2014

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2014).

 

 

Felipe Cabral | Aceito (I Do) / 2014

the problem of marriage

Felipe Cabral (screenwriter and director) Aceito (I Do) / 2014 [21 minutes]

 

While his lifeguard lover André (Jefferson Schroeder) is out at the beach playing a game of volleyball, Junior (played by the Brazilian director of the work, Felipe Cabral) is home gathering with a group of his friends who he quickly hides in the next room to pop out the moment when, after asking André to marry him, he responds “I do!”

      André returns, Junior hardly being able to control his excitement. After five years of love between the two he feels certain that it’s time for marriage, but the way he frames the question about their series of ups and downs, reassuring his friend that they have had more positive moments, etc, that André at first suspects he is attempting to suggest that the two break up.

    Startled by the turn of events, Junior reassures him that he loves him, even kneeling before his companion to pop the question.

      But André does not at all respond as he might have expected, first wondering if he’s just “kidding,” and then inquiring why, since they have such a wonderful relationship, is marriage necessary. He’s not sure that he wants to get married.      

    Junior argues that the LGBTQ community has fought so hard for it and now they can enjoy the rewards.

    “What dyke gave you that idea?” he challenges Junior, several lesbian friends listening in on his entire conversation from the next room. “These lesbians meet up and want to get married the next day.”

    Soon after Junior expresses an attitude that has received some heated discussion in the LGBTQ communities throughout the world who have suddenly found themselves in the position to marry like their heterosexual counterparts: “Marriage is just a bunch of paperwork that we grew up believing we need in order to be happy.” And from there he moves on gradually to a complete disquisition about hetero-normative behavior that gay men, having grown up in that dominant society, have learned to believe is necessary for their happiness as well, when in fact they often already have found their way to perfectly happy relationships.

       From Junior’s point of view, the community has fought so hard for it, why not take the advantage of their success and enjoy the fruits of what they have fought for, André arguing that he is happy for the choice, but it is not at necessary to make that choice in order to continue a good relationship.

       They are deadlocked in an unanswerable dilemma for a community that has so long been denied something, having found their own way around those roadblocks, that when finally given the opportunity to take advantage of the societal norm, they no longer feel the need for it.

     Is marriage simply a hetero-normative pattern that has destroyed so many straight relationships that it has become meaningless to gay men and women? It depends, of course, in how you perceive and define marriage. Having written a great deal about this subject, mostly in the positive on the side of marriage*—since I see it not as an institution but a societal announcement and joyful celebration of a couple’s love (my companion and I were together in a rather monogamous relationship for 45 years before we were married)—I also still have my doubts about its necessity, particularly given its governmental ordinations and restrictions, as well as its protections.     

 

    In this case, after much embarrassing “public” debate—Junior’s friends still listening in to the couple’s quirks and doubts through their entire discussion and André’s attempted effort at love-making—he finally gives in, agreeing and, after much further prompting, speaks the words “I do,” which brings the crowd of friends out from the other room with noisemakers and concerted efforts of celebration.

     That is truly too much for André, who now understandably feels a sense of betrayal after discovering that his friends have known about something that has not first been properly discussed in private. He storms out, the friends dribbling off as quickly as possible, leaving the previously joyful Junior alone in deep confusion and pain.

 

      Eventually, he wanders to the beach where he finds his lover, sitting down beside him. After a few moments, André breaks out in a chortle of absurd laughter, putting his hand around Junior’s head to stroke it in forgiveness, and leaning in to their obvious love. Junior still looks troubled, realizing what he has done, but soon cannot resist joining in the absurd gesture of laughter, a kind of violent release, which after all is how Henri Bergson has defined what is generally behind any laugh.

       The absurdity, in this case, goes even further, however, when the film’s credits reveal that “in May 2013, the National Council of Justice [in Brazil] published the Resolution 175 which requires all public registry offices to issue civil marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

       “Nevertheless, until the finishing date of this movie, there was no existing statute on the subject. In the Brazilian Constitution the word ‘marriage’ is designated, exclusively, for heterosexual unions.

       “We believe in equal rights, with equal terms. We accept love.”

       Although same-sex marriages are permitted in Brazil, even today (as of the date I write this) it is not yet legislatively designated within the constitutional rights of that country.

 

*See my pamphlet book essay, On Marriage: The Imagination of Being (Los Angeles, Magra Books, 2018)

 

Los Angeles, December 23, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2022).