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Mike Nichols, what planet are you from? | page 1, 2
Nichols tells us these lies to get his stars down the aisle just as "Carnal Knowledge's" Jonathan lies to women to get them into bed. Women are enemy and battleground in Jules Feiffer's taut script: Jonathan's first score is Susan (Candice Bergen), girlfriend of his unsuspecting college roommate Sandy (Art Garfunkel). Sandy keeps rhapsodizing about her to Jonathan. "She tells me thoughts I didn't even know I had," he moons at one point. In one of the movie's funniest scenes, Jonathan chases Susan through campus, screaming, "How come you tell Sandy his thoughts but you never tell me mine? ... Tell me my goddamn thoughts!" After Jonathan loses Susan to Sandy, he listens to the couple's chatter with rage and disgust, his face pinned in medium close-up. Bathed in ever-brighter light, the shot dissolves into a white-clad ice skater twirling on a pristine rink. She spins us through time; the next words we hear are a slightly older Jonathan urging Sandy to "get a load of the pair on her."
Virginia Vitzthum Virginia Vitzthum's column appears every other Tuesday in the Urge edition of Health & Body + Archives
Shivering as they overlook the ice rink, Jonathan confesses to Sandy that he'd been having trouble with "myself, you know, getting hard." Salvation arrived in a push-up bra: Bobbie, played by Ann-Margret. Jonathan exults, "I took one look at the tits on her, and I knew I'd never have trouble again." But the tits are attached to a needy, suicidal "ball-buster" whom Jonathan soon divorces. By the end of the movie, 40-year-old Jonathan can get it up only with a whore who recites his carefully worded speech back to him. Rita Moreno, dressed and coifed like a domestic, strokes his crotch, breathily describing "the women who worship you ... because of an inner strength ... Your knowledge of yourself and of them exposes the lies they live by." Lust and relief steal over Nicholson's face, which fades again to white and the skater. Appearing at midpoint and the end of the movie, the skater brings together jealousy, desire, hate, control and detachment. She triggers Jonathan's awe, which quickly smears into contempt. Like David Thewlis' scabrous Johnny in Mike Leigh's "Naked," nothing pisses off Jonathan more than a vision of purity. What Jonathan and Johnny hate most about women is the way they get their hopes up. They glimpse in women a possibility that life isn't shit, that there's goodness even in themselves. When they're inevitably disappointed, they smash up the woman who lured them from comfortable cynicism. Casting Nicholson in "Carnal Knowledge" was brilliant because he's a man's idea of a sexy man. What he does best is rage, which his (mostly male) fans seem to read as sexual potency. He's the least appealing leading man of his generation -- a rat-faced, wing-pulling bully. He seemed corroded even when he was young and trim and had hair. Over the years, Nicholson's loutish persona makes less and less sense in movies, which grow ever blither about cruelty. In the 1997 hit "As Good as It Gets," Nicholson is Melvin, as hateful a character as Jonathan, but everyone he abuses finds him adorably eccentric. In a peculiarly '90s twist, his misogyny and homophobia turn out to be a problem with his medication. Once he takes the right pill, the vicious old coot gets Helen Hunt. Today, "Carnal Knowledge's" Jonathan would get Viagra from his doctor friend Sandy, and the miserable Bobbie would be on antidepressants. If Nichols made the movie today, the couple's pain would already be anesthetized with shtick. They'd live happily ever after at the fade-out, floating right over the HIV-fearing, porn-consuming, post-feminist, alienated-as-ever, wife-killing end-of-the-century U.S. of A. It's not fair to blame the myopia on one old white guy happily married to Diane Sawyer, either. Mike Nichols simply reflects a Hollywood where misogyny and misanthropy result in all kinds of zany shenanigans. Impotence born of rage, fear and disgust has been replaced by a joke vibrator. Instead of well-matched adversaries seeking the emotional jugular, Nichols and his cohort create types for whom love means never noticing any particularities. We're from different planets anyway, so why bother looking any closer?
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