One of the handful of touching moments in the recent movie floperoo* We Are Your Friends is when a couple of the struggling electronic-dance-music DJs go to the beach to “get their heads straight”; the coast at dusk is exactly what they need. The quiet ocean – as if living up to its name of “Pacific” — as emotionally and spiritually healing: This is a cliché of movies about Southern California, and, as a genre movie about struggling musicians, We Are Your Friends touches this base, along with all the others. (But of course, clichés sometimes – as in this case –become clichés because they are based on a truth.)
By coincidence, I was reading Gore Vidal’s 1968 succès de scandale, Myra Breckinridge, earlier this week, and found him channeling the intellectuals’ contempt for this idea:
[He] was a typical California type: a bronzed empty face with clear eyes and that vapid smile which the Pacific Ocean somehow manages to impress upon the lips of almost everyone doomed to live in any proximity to those tedious waters. It is fascinating how, in a single generation, stern New England Protestants, grim Iowans, and keen New York Jews have all become entirely Tahitianized by that dead ocean with its sweet miasmic climate in which thoughts become dreams while perceptions blur and distinctions are so erased that men are women are nothing are everything are one. Gentlemen, the desire and the pursuit of the whole ends at Santa Monica!
First, let’s savor the irony of Gore Vidal expressing contempt, in 1968, for the idea of blurring gender distinctions. Gore — you square, you! — thou shouldest having been living at this hour. More broadly, I think this passage points to Vidal’s general problem, which was that he was intelligent enough to see a lot of things but not intelligent enough to put them in context and understand them. Even through all the scorn he piled into that passage – “empty,” “vapid,” “doomed,” “tedious,” “dead,” “miasmic” — the truth can be discerned in it by anyone who is willing to engage in a sympathetic attempt to understand. “The desire and the pursuit of the whole” in which “everything [is] one” is just another way of phrasing mankind’s eternal religious quest, and there’s nothing ridiculous about it. (Vidal’s intended irony, in closing with the punchline about Santa Monica, actually reminds me of a more famous example of mockery-by-association. “Can anything good come out of Santa Monica?”)
* How much of a floperoo? This much: the fourth-worst opening of any wide-release movie since 1982. And it’s not getting any better. I saw it at the Arclight Hollywood last night — at 8: 05 p.m.! — and I was one of only five people in the theatre. (Should you see it? Well, it’s not as bad as the box-office returns and the bad reviews would indicate, but if you’re not a fan of electronic dance music or struggling-musician movies, don’t go out of your way.) (And should you read Myra Breckinridge? Probably not. As I said, Vidal had some perception, but not, shall we say, depth perception. I read it because I have been reading a lot of anti-L.A. literature. It’s a historical landmark in that genre — albeit a complicated one, because while Vidal disliked SoCal generally, he had a huge crush on the older Hollywood.)