Desire, Movies, and the American Man

Jason Segal & Ed Helms in
Jeff Who Lives at Home

I watched two movies recently that got me thinking about desire and the American man. The first was "Safety Not Guaranteed" and the other was "Jeff Who Lives at Home." The first movie is about a quirky and mismatched group of journalists who journey to a small coastal town in Washington State to find out who submitted a strange and provocative want ad seeking a partner for a time travel adventure. The second is about two brothers who both appear to have lost their way in life. Throughout the movie, fate seems to bring them together a number of times in order to restore and repair broken relationships, including the relationship of the brothers.

Neither of these films is really about the primary plot. They have an exploratory realism that articulates some of the unspoken malaise of modern life. In both movies, there is a sense that these characters forgot to pickup life's instruction manual, or that they missed the boat to the exciting life that was promised to them somewhere along the way. What is brilliant about these movies is that they do not purposely explore these themes, they just mirror life, at odd and unexplained moments.

Jay & Mark Duplass

Both movies have a connection with the Duplass brothers, Jay and Mark. I don't know much about them, but it seems that they have written, directed, and produced a number of movies together. Jay is primarily a writer and director, and Mark is primary an actor, but they have both done a mixture of jobs in their movie and TV careers (often from Jay garage/office in his home). To say the least, they seem to be highly creative and talented men. In their movies they explore themes of longing, desire, innocence, lost innocence, hope, despair, ambition, lost ambition, faith, and doubt in the  American male psyche. Gavin Edwards, in his NYTimes article about the brothers, argues "their body of work forms a vivid portrait of 21st-century masculinity in all its stunted absurdity."

A few years ago, a male friend tried to explain to me the pressure to succeed that he felt growing up. He had always been told that he could do anything, and in the midst of all of that pressure, he never figured out who he was or what he really wanted. The power of the Duplass brother movies is that they poke and prod at this strange and wondrous existential angst of the American male. The great irony of our age, they seem to be saying, is that real life is not about the grand or the heroic event or adventure. As John Lennon once sang, "Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans." One might even say that these movie-making brothers are trying to say, "live the life that is before you, it will be more extraordinary than you might expect." Or, in their off-beat style, they are just making movies that they enjoy, and isn't that the point.