Mar. 24, 2010 - Issue #753: Zion I

SideVue

Body Surfing (online exclusive)

Trivial pursuit? Not when movies are involved. The head of the pack after the weekend’s box office has been tallied up is often determined by the thrill of the chase. Both The Bounty Hunter and Repo Men involve sniffing out, tracking after, and hounding down. It seems there’s no end of arsenal-toting, face-off and pair-off combinations (“that’s a gun in your pocket and you’re happy to see me!”) on celluloid. Take the case of these two movies: a bounty hunter who learns he has to bring in his ex-wife; an organ-repossession man who becomes the next target, of his partner, when he can’t pay off his new heart. But maybe there’s more running on between these two films than their cat-and-mouse tales.

The Bounty Hunter comes hot on the heels of that fairly recent subgenre—the marriage (or ex-marriage) action-comedy, itself a more literal takeoff of the screwball comedy, where sniping was kept verbal. A hetero (always, it seems) couple with more than one gun between them first seemed to blaze forth in La Totale!, a 1991 French film remade as James Cameron’s True Lies (1994), where a counterterrorism agent (Arnold Schwarzenegger) suspects his wife (Jamie Lee Curtis) of cheating on him and surveills her, interrogates her, has her strip for him (and us) , and then she gets further entangled in espionage that happens to involve him and her killing some bumbling Arab terrorists.

We could see The Bounty Hunter (with Gerard Butler trying to bring in Jennifer Aniston) and next month’s Date Night (Steve Carell and Tina Fey as a husband-and-wife who get caught up in crime) as a way to get groom-and-bride out of the house and into the theatre for the night. But the whole trend really took off with the allure of infidelity (and in Repo Men, the romance between man and woman ends up being forced out by the male-male friendship). Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005)—probably a little inspired by a short-lived ’90s TV series (where two spies posed as a married couple), with only its title coming from a ’41 screwball comedy by Hitchcock (devoid of any thriller machinations)—was the trigger man-and-woman.

The flick starred Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie as spouses unaware of each other’s true job as an assassin. But by the time of its release in June, buckshot rumours had already been blasted around on tabloids and the ’Net for months that Pitt and Jolie had hooked up on the set, meaning an imminent end to Pitt’s marriage to Jennifer Aniston. Paparazzi photos had appeared in April and the infidelity rumour mill turned buzz for the film into a Category-5 hypeicane as the Brangelina industry began, pushing the “machinery of modern fame [into] its most combative, absurd and intense” overdrive yet.

Had the movie’s onscreen marriage with a secret ended an offscreen marriage because of an acted-out romance turned, secretly, real? Could the illicit body heat behind-the-scenes between these boffo box-office stars be spied on screen? The real-life Hollywood role-playing became more intriguing than the script up there on screen. It was a torrid union of tabloided celebrity-image and marketed film-acting, on the run for all to see (for approx. $7.99 a ticket). The movie did so well, then—grossing more than $400-million worldwide—because it reignited marriage with the whispered promise of adulterous, naughty behaviour.

So the marriage bed became particularly fantastic and action-packed, and maybe the backers of The Bounty Hunter are hoping for some of the same, since Aniston and Butler have been rumoured to be an item by various gossip rags and sites. But the reel attraction of these films seems to be some suggestion of the body in threat—people want to see the stale institution of marriage not just dramatized, but made sexy again, if only because their relationship could use a little projected fantasy that both Mr. and Mrs. can happily consent to (safe, escapist eye candy for him and her up on the screen).

Maybe there’s also a greater longing to see more bodies again in our increasingly hi-teched, high-sped, 3D-ed, super-digitized world—two bodies bickering, cooperating, disagreeing, fleeing, united in harm, then safely together at home or in bed. The weary body of marriage reanimated up there on the screen—a strange paradox, maybe, to want to return to the corporeal virtually, but isn’t that what much of the super-popular Avatar is about? A man feeling whole and reconnecting with nature, getting back down to earth, yet virtually?

Certainly Repo Men—or The Body Hunter—reminds us that, as much as we surf online, coast along on daydreamy pages or screens and drift off with music, we’re still creatures of flesh and blood in the end. In its future where people extend their life by paying off expensive artificial organs with instalments, our bodies are our ultimate investment. “A pound of flesh” indeed—can’t pay and the organ-debtor gets the price taken right out of him or her. But maybe, with our new online mainstream and virtual reality, the body is the old thrill made new, as the coincidental pop-up of two films with the same body-enhancement obsession—Repo! The Genetic Opera and Repo Men—suggests. In Repo Men’s most unnerving scene, man and woman come together to undo each other, pushing a scanner in and out of their scalpeled flesh to clear their artificial-organ accounts. The body’s still the first and last resort—the site of a genuine experience and visceral emotion, where the real uploading and downloading, the true rebooting and shutting-down take place.

Award Show After Parting Shot

Interested in a pointed criticism of the Oscars? See John R. Macarthur’s recent essay on the award show. He’s mostly right in his analysis, I think, especially its political failings, safe comic banter and steady diet of Hollywood self-congratulation. And his image of a super-securitized, Oscared America as a kind of Green-Zoned Baghdad is brilliant.
 

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