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The drapes of wrath | page 1, 2
In "Fight Club," Norton's character complains, "I'd flip through catalogs and wonder what kind of dining set defined me as a person." Asked if he feels that way about his chaise, Karlin says, "I'm afraid of it defining me is what I would say. I couldn't buy it without in some way undercutting that purchase. It's such a fancy piece of furniture -- and not just fancy for a male, it's fancy for a young person. When I got it, I insisted on the store giving me the sign that hung over it. It was this flourishy description of it: 'The chaise longue is the most decadent feeling in the world! Crushed Velvet!' I got the sign and hung it over the chaise in the apartment. You can't look at one without the other. A purchase like that is loaded." If Karlin, like Norton in "Fight Club," were called Ikea Boy, would he take offense? "Yeah, but probably not for the same reason. I think Ikea is cheap. Most of their stuff looks like the stuff you try to get to make your place look nice if you don't have a lot of money. But if you don't have a lot of money, you should just be a little more creative. Spend a little time, whether it's flea markets or whatever. So if someone called me Ikea Boy, it wouldn't bother me because I surrendered some notion of toughness but because it implies I have bad taste." He chuckles a second before adding, "But I'm telling you! I'm straight!" Sarah Vowell Sarah Vowell's column appears on the Arts & Entertainment site every other Wednesday.
The thing cartoons like "Fight Club" and "Interiors" miss about human beings who are concerned with the domestic sphere is a certain realistic complexity. There's nothing wrong with living somewhere decent. Is there a more appealing scene in cinema than the one in John Ford's "The Grapes of Wrath" where the Joad family finally lands at a clean, kind migrant camp? The look on Henry Fonda's face when he learns his tired old ma can rest in lovely surroundings after so much meanness and filth is one of the most human expressions ever captured on celluloid. Remembering that look when Pitt utters generational, are-we-not-men nonsense like "our Great Depression is our lives" in "Fight Club" is, well, depressing. Because you don't have to wear red dresses like Maureen Stapleton to be a passionate individual and you can, like I did last week, spend 18 seconds plopping daisies in a vase without forgetting more important things like my workload and that I love my father enough to call him on his birthday. When Ben Karlin was talking up the simple joy of his new chaise lounge, I brought up a scene in the other current middle-class-male-gets-real film, "American Beauty." Married couple Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening are finally getting along well enough to make out on their living room couch and the mood gets ruined when Bening notices Spacey's about to spill beer on the upholstery. If things were going well with Karlin and a lady friend on his beloved chaise, would he mind a little mess? "I thought that was a great scene," he answers. "This has happened to me before. If I'm having a really good moment, I don't give a shit about anything. The way they played that scene was very arch. I know there have been times with food items on my nice stuff, and you just kind of go with it because you realize, you hope that if you're young and you're in the middle of life, that's the reason you're alive."
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