The first sight of the Grand Canyon. The dip of the roller coaster. The bite of wasabi. Your first orgasm.

Remember that craze of nostalgia movies back in the Seventies? Well, I know you don’t, Grl, but we’ll fire up the laptop and watch Paper Moon one evening, snuggled up together.

Summer of ’42. It came out in theaters when I was a teenager (barely), but I had to wait for a television rescreening years later to see it. My parents certainly weren’t going to take me to an R-rated film! I had to rely on Mad Magazine’s version in the interim, so my memories have the same soft focus as the film itself.

The film and the novelization by Herman Raucher were huge hits. The “nostalgia” craze of the ’70s was just beginning, with The Way We Were, American Graffiti, Paper Moon and others to come.

It was the baby-boomers reliving their good times, I guess. The years before jobs, children and mortgages. The years of high school, college, good music, fast cars and first love. A dollar bought you an hour and a half of memories in a dark hall, and you emerged, sighing, into the present day.

There was more than happy memories in this film. There was the conflict and confusion of those years. The war, to be sure, always looming just over that sea horizon and underscored by the young men in uniform, but beyond that, the threat and promise of adulthood.

As Raucher says,

Nothing from that first day I saw her, and no one that has happened to me since, has ever been as frightening and as confusing. For no person I’ve ever known has ever done more to make me feel more sure, more insecure, more important, and less significant.

There’s conflict and confusion. And there’s a great story.

Hermie, Oscie and Benjie are three boys, summering on the fictional Packett Island in that summer of 1942.* Oscie is a little older than the fifteen year old Hermie, and Benjie a little younger, and the “Terrible Three” play their roles to perfection. Oscie is the knowitall, brash and bold; Benjie is the nerdy youngster, always just a few paces behind. And Hermie, as played by Gary Grimes, is in between: cute and handsome, shy but willing, romantic and gawky.

We first meet Hermie as the three boys conduct a commando reconnaissance raid on the beachfront house of young bride Dorothy (Jennifer O’Neill) and her soldier husband. Peering over the dunes at the couple, Oscie and Benjie make ribald comments, as the husband kisses Dorothy and then picks her up and carries her inside, while she laughingly protests. His friends leave, but Hermie is smitten, frozen to his observation post until the shouts of the other two boys rouse him.

Over the summer holiday weeks, Hermie braves the scorn of his friends to get closer to Dorothy, left alone on the island when her husband ships out. He performs chores for her, cringing with embarrassment when his attempts to show worldliness and sophistication flop. “You should be more careful – you could get a hernia,” he advises her about lifting bags of groceries.

As boys are, they are obsessed by sex, and painfully ignorant of anything but the basics. The discovery of a medical text with body parts named in Latin, and photographs that no drugstore would possibly develop, provides help, but ultimately even more confusion. Just what is this mysterious “foreplay”, why is it required, and exactly how do you play it?

There are teenaged girls, and fumbling encounters at the movies and marshmallow roasts, but it’s Dorothy that Hermie desires. One evening he shows up at her place for coffee, but all is silent save a record stuck on its final groove and the smell of alcohol and cigarette smoke. Nervously entering the house, Hermie finds a crumpled telegram, advising the death of the husband.

Dorothy emerges, tear-streaked and devastated. She puts the record on again. It’s That Old Feeling, a reminder for Dorothy of her lost love.

She holds her hands out to Hermie, they dance, slowly and tenderly, and then she takes him to bed.

It is an incredible scene. Sweet, poignant, soft and sensual, but without being salacious or sleazy. It’s soft-focus sex – you know what’s going on, but you can’t see any details.

And that’s what makes it. After all the embarrassment and ribald speculation, Hermie’s fantasies have come true, but in a way that he never imagined.

He leaves the house, drifts away home through the grass on the dunes, and in the morning returns to find her gone, the house empty, a note on the door. He never sees her again.

The film ends with Herman, now grown, returning to the island, returning to the house, decades later. We hear him as he looks out to sea,

Life is made of comings and goings. And for everything that we take with us, there is something we leave behind. In the Summer of ’42, we raided the coast guard station four times. We saw five movies, and had nine days of rain. Benjie broke his watch, Oscy gave up the harmonica… and in a very special way, I lost Hermie forever.

This film speaks to me, as it did to so many of my generation, and, for all I know, everyone. Our own first experiences may be wildly different, but like going over that first rollercoaster dip, we can’t go back to the safety and innocence of a minute before. We’re different now.

I’m romantic enough to think that losing our virginity isn’t so much a loss – after all, what have we physically lost? – as it is a gain. An entry into adulthood, solid knowledge, a feeling of confidence, a desire to do it again and get better at it. And I’m romantic enough to think that it isn’t so much sex that we learn as we explore further, but love. Love and intimacy and the shared feelings of another human being. I love being able to give my partner that ultimate pleasure. And I love it when we come together, and I know that just a few inches away, the same waves of bliss that are rolling through my happy brain are crashing ashore in my lover’s head.

Go see the movie. See it again if you’ve watched it a long time ago. Enjoy the scenery, the three boys coping with the world, the funny moments – there’s a fantastic scene where Hermie goes into a drugstore to buy condoms – the interactions between the characters, and finally that delicious, bittersweet scene where Hermie becomes Herman.

—Guy Sez

*In the novel, it’s Packett Island. Herman Raucher based the story on his childhood holidays on Nantuckett, but in the film, it’s clearly California around Fort Bragg.

Have I sold out? Promoting a movie I haven’t seen yet?

I don’t think so. I guess the function of a movie trailer is to make you want to watch it, and in this case, the trailer(s) for Love and Other Drugs has done it for me.

“My character in this movie obviously has a lot of sex, so I had to practise a lot,” male lead Jake Gyllenhaal says of his Viagra salesman character. “That was very important.”

I like his attitude!

He also reveals that he has never used Viagra, so obviously research for a film role isn’t that important for him!

Loosely based on the book Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman, this film is stiff with penis jokes. And humor. This is a blog about sex, love and laughter, right? Right up our alley! Buttons pushed every which way.

The movie takes a good hard look at three things: drugs as in Viagra and medications needed to treat the Parkinson’s disease of Anne Hathaway’s character, sex as in the two stars getting it off as many times as possibly, often with each other, and love.

I’m cold on drugs, to be honest. The odd Tylenol for a cold or a headache, and that’s about it for me. The flood of V-mail was just background noise, and things like “Horny Goatweed” just make me laugh at the thought. There’s only one thing I need to make sex a fabulous experience, and that’s love.

Which is the message the film is selling, once you get down to it. Gyllenhaal’s character might be pushing Viagra, but he doesn’t need it for his relationship with Hathaway’s character. He goes all the way for her in every way, and he doesn’t use drugs to do it.

Let’s face it, when your lover is going downhill with a terrible disease, if you are in it for the sex, you’re getting out before it gets too hard. Sex and sickness aren’t a good mix for any market. Viagra, movies, popcorn – sure, but when the Grim Reaper is standing at the foot of the bed, who can get it up?

But these two stay the course. Sickness strengthens the bond, rather than snapping it.

The film seems to be wandering into Love Story territory here, and a number of critics pan it for its lack of focus. Parkinson’s and porn, hard sex and soft love – together in the same film?

Well, it seems that way. I’m a sucker for films like Notting Hill and The Time Traveler’s Wife where the love far overshadows the sex.

But it looks that it’s the reverse here. Both important, but more sex than love.

Right. Grl, your theater or mine?

—Guy Sez

Guy Sez: I’d like to say this is a movie about San Francisco. There are several shots of San Francisco from the air, a few scenes in the airport and one of a female star explaining why she moved to Omaha:

San Francisco Manager: So, what happened?
Natalie Keener: How exactly do you mean?
San Francisco Manager: You graduated top of your class. You could have had your pick of employment, including right here. Instead, you went to Omaha to… fire people for a living?
Natalie Keener: Challenging work.
San Francisco Manager: I’ll say. I couldn’t imagine doing that day in and day out. Especially not in this climate.
Natalie Keener: I… followed a boy.
San Francisco Manager: I guess we’ve all done that at some point in our lives.

But no. It’s about America. Modern, impersonal, corporate America. The world of airport lounges and identical hotel rooms. The procedures of security and check-in. Loyalty cards and status.

Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) is the opposite of a corporate headhunter. He’s a headkicker, firing employees of downsized corporations. He’s always on the move around the country, terminating people by batches in Dallas, Chicago, Kansas City, Tulsa…

His life is airline lounges and hotel chains, rental cars and living out of a carry-on bag. He lives for airmiles, platinum status, check-in speed and efficiency in travel, possessions and relationships. He’s also a motivational speaker, spreading his lean gospel:

Ryan: How much does your life weigh? Imagine for a second that you’re carrying a backpack. Now, I want you to pack it with all the stuff you have in your life. You start with the little things: the shelves and drawers and nicknacks. Then you start adding larger stuff: clothes, tabletop appliances, lamps, your TV… Your backpack should be getting pretty heavy now. You go bigger. Your couch, your car, your home. I want you to stuff it all into that backpack. Now, I want you to fill it with people. Start with casual acquaintances, friends of friends, folks around the office. Then you move into the people that you trust with your most intimate secrets. Brothers, your sisters, your parents, your children. And finally your husband, your wife, your boyfriend, your girlfriend. You get them into that backpack. Feel the weight of that bag. Make no mistake, your relationships are the heaviest components of your life. All those negotiations and arguments and secrets and compromises. The slower we move, the faster we die. Make no mistake, moving is living. Some animals were meant to carry each other, to live symbiotically over a lifetime: star-crossed lovers, monogamous swans. We. Are. Not. Swans. We’re sharks.

Ryan is a shark. He spears through the crowds of travellers with checked luggage, first class lanes reserved for him, lounges opening up with the wave of a card. He’s the dream of everyone who has ever languished in a line of shuffling coach passengers, dragging their checked luggage.

Ryan meets Alex (Vera Farmiga) in a hotel bar. She’s got a loyalty tag on a keyring, and before you can say HHonors, they are spreading out their cards, checking each other’s programs, drooling over status and airmile tallies. She’s got sixty thousand, domestic, but he’s got a lot more than that.

He’s joined the Mile High Club transatlantic. She’s done it on a regional hop.

He’s impressed, and in the blink of a camera they are searching for a closet. Next morning they examine their schedules, dates and airport codes spinning and dancing until a jackpot comes up and they can share a layover in a few weeks.

Ryan’s life in the air is interrupted by a summons to corporate headquarters in Omaha. We see him arriving at his tiny, spartan apartment, no personal possessions of any kind. It might as well be a hotel room. Next morning the road team is assembled to listen to a pitch from recently hired Cornell grad Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick). Ryan’s carefree sequence of flights and hotels and rental cars is under threat.

Ryan and Natalie are sent off for one last road trip, firing folk in a dozen cities. As an aside, every one of the terminated workers is actually a real and recently fired person. For the film, they were given the opportunity to say what they would like to have said at their exit interview. There are some very deep reactions on display.

In Miami, they encounter Alex once again, at a moment of personal trauma for Natalie. A night of carousing follows, with Ryan gradually coming to realize that his life, his career, his philosophy may not mean as much as he thought it did.

There’s more to the film, a lot more, but I’ll leave it for you. It’s good, and there’s no copout ending.

This is perhaps the perfect film for America after a year of deep downsizing. In any given audience there will be people nodding their heads, maybe crying if the wounds are recent.

Ryan’s boss: Retailers are down 20 percent. Auto industry is in the dump. Housing market doesn’t have a heartbeat. It is one of the worst times on record for America. This is our moment.

Terminated worker: On the stress level, I’ve heard that losing your job is like a death in the family. But personally I feel more like the people I worked with were my family, and I died.

Ryan is good at his job. He instructs Natalie, who confidently relies on her “minor in pyschology”, and together they rise above the pain they are inflicting.

There’s sex in this film. And yes, she uses a body double. Ryan has no commitments, no partner, nothing but casual encounters with women on the road. Even his occasional neighbour in Omaha who delivers Ryan’s mail responds to his offer to get together with the news that she is seeing someone. Ryan just shrugs. It’s not important.

Ryan’s message to imagine your life as a backpack and to empty it of belongings and then set fire to it is a fantasy for the road warrior. His message to treat relationships the same way is not one that I would expect to resonate with too many people. Like, anyone with a heart.

Possessions can weigh you down. and yes, every now and then somebody loses everything they own in a fire or some other disaster – like being laid off. But relationships are the true gold. They weigh nothing in your mythical backpack, but they are everything in your life.

Ryan and his co-workers see their jobs as sugar-coating the inevitable. They have no control over or knowledge of why a worker is terminated – they never ever say “fired” – and their own jobs are just a list of names to cross off and a stack of glossy termination packages to hand out, each one listing the material benefits, severance pay, timings and conditions of downsizing.

But the workers being let go see the thing different. Their coworkers are their friends. Their job provides for their family. How do they translate Ryan’s slick lines into words they can use with their wife and children?

This is a film about airmiles and hotel chains and rental cars and casual sex. But it’s really about relationships. What do you really want out of life? A million airmiles and a graphite loyalty card? Or someone to hold you close and share your life. All of your life.
–Guy Sez

Comments:

No Flagship Lounge at DFW. Admirals Club one of my favorites, ate out, sharing icecreams with Grl at B&J, chicken and salad at TGIF. Quick beer in the club, skipped inflight meal, very nice shiraz. Grl hung out window admiring awesome desert and mountain view, I read Diary of a Sex Fiend. Pleasant flight. Good to be home!