‘Sorry About All the Gravity!’

Anna Faris, Serious Respect for the Unserious

Zachary Campbell

1. See, for starters, Dan Kois,  ‘Can America’s Film Critics Make Anna Faris a Star?’, New York [online], August 22, 2008; Ty Burr,  ‘The Very Best Thing in Some Very Bad Movies: Appreciating the Prize That Is Anna Faris’, the Boston Globe, January 6, 2008; Dana Stevens, et al., Slate’s 11^th Annual Movie Club, January 5-9, 2009.

Certain assumptions which underwrite this sort of opinion are troubling – that it would or should be all so easy to give a lot of excellent comedic roles to Faris, or that the larger industrial and cultural system in which her films come about is not, in fact, implacably if impersonally rigged against her. Faris is swimming against a current. To better appreciate her work we may want to understand why it is these low comedies provide her with opportunities that would not be found most other places in the cinema. Overall devoid of much wit, or of intrinsic textual machines which produce irony and hence cultural capital, the Faris oeuvre comprises mainly the sort of low culture that really is low culture – and not the low culture which has gained attention and produced sophisticated defenses of text or reception from scholars, critics and pop-savvy Web 2.0 denizens. Though her performances have admirers, most Faris comedies themselves elicit no strong defenses from her acolytes. It is a bit like insisting with perfect earnestness that one reads Playboy – really! – for ‘the articles’, Well, yes, and: Faris is indeed the genuine article, worth reading. But there is still more to it. ...

The Old and the New

In Raúl Ruiz’s Poetics of Cinema one finds this delightful passage, a summary of a book:

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2. Raúl Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema 1: Miscellanies (Paris: Dis Voir, 2005), p. 44.

I think the same principle applies when we are discussing virtually any strain of cinema that exists in contradistinction to the dominant beast of narrative. Anything spectacular comes as a counterpoint or even impediment to the narrative. Camp sentiment, special effects, musical numbers, stars, sustained crystallisations of wish fulfillment: when they are not enveloped in nostalgia or irony these are also the things which – especially when they are new or foreign – keep middlebrow film critics bristling about the decline of The Movies as well as Western Civilisation. Dumb comedies, brimming with such superfluities, may understandably tempt us into defending them on grounds of these ‘forgotten standards’. Faris, too, may be a symbol for common pleasures that are not commonly appreciated. Perhaps she could be rescued from the low by the high.

Critics, scholars, connoisseurs and fans have long tried to articulate the myriad pleasures of cinema which fall outside the asphyxiating paradigm of narrative meaning-making (the ‘central conflict theory’ Ruiz deflates in his Poetics). Our dilemma in appreciating Faris is whether she represents something primordial, something of spectacle and the thrilling corporeal brilliance of a recorded human onscreen in 1901 (or a talking film in 1931) – thus, Ruiz’s antichrony – or if we understand her as the culmination of a disreputable contemporary narrative tradition. This cul-de-sac of dumb comedy allegedly gets dumber and cruder by the year, and its fruitful offshoots embody anti-narrative precisely because they are in excess of the narrative, indeed in excess of and in opposition to all that respectable critical appreciation implies. So does Faris represent the reincarnation of something old or the emergence of something new? If the former, we can rescue Faris from the low while still scourging the doldrums of respectability: we value excess, rupture, jouissance, all these modernist and postmodernist virtues.

3. The concept of the bourgeoisie, smirkily antiquated, applies well here. Of course, today it’s easy to speak of sleaze or low in hallowed terms – everyone is an expert on reality television and what it says about culture – but much of Faris’ filmography is too dumbly unironic, too devoid of hearty self-aware moralisms (i.e., too divorced from the Judd Apatow method) to warrant proper bourgeois-to-masscult attention. The fact that Faris’ fans feel she’s above her work, ‘the very best thing in some very bad movies’, shows really how shallow our anti-binaristic pretensions really run. The judgement testifies to our collectively unimaginative approach to today’s real low culture, which is never ironic nor self-consciously termitic.

4. Lynn Spigel,  ‘The People in the Theater Next Door’, in Make Room for TV: Television and the Domestic Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Illinois-Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 153-154.

But it seems somehow wrong to feel we can cleanly extricate Faris from her contexts. As a polemical tactic, it makes sense to ensconce the low comedic performer within a long tradition – the traces reconstituting all the fascinating small things the body can do when the bourgeoisie choose not to look. (3) Yet the films themselves are worth some attention because it is in concert with them, even when they are quite awful, that Faris actually makes her impact. She is not a thing apart.

The Faris Phenomenon

Since World War II, American audiovisual culture has allowed for few women to be both sex symbols and physically funny. Writing of the rise of women in television comedy during the postwar years, Lynn Spigel notes that the ‘few variety show comediennes that existed were either the conventionally unattractive type such as “big mouth” Martha Raye or else the more waifish Imogene Coca, who used excessive mugging and grotesque costuming to distort her femininity’. Further, ‘the comedienne’s femininity was not erotically charged’ – insofar as she was funny, the production of American television (a family medium) moved the American female comic away from the sexy or the sexually suggestive. (4) It is not that American film and television have ever lacked funny women, or conventionally attractive women in comedies. But the sex symbols in comedies are rarely given space to be themselves funny – with the full arsenal of their bodies, faces and voices. Given how dramatically the practices and mores of televisual culture have since bent cinematic production in its orbit (vice versa applies in its fair share, of course), one can see how this excision of sex appeal from physical humor would spread in general. Faris, however, has built a career from being one of the rare exceptions.

She fits into a broad cross-section of a certain kind of cinema. ‘Dumb comedy’ alone does not quite do justice to the typology of the Scary Movie series (given a distinctive black American slant in the first two films which were courtesy of the Wayans Brothers), Waiting (Rob McKittrik, 2005 – the sort of low-budget gross-out comedy positively made to feature ‘unrated DVD extras’), Smiley Face (2007 – over-achieving stoner comedy by slumming auteur Gregg Araki), The Hot Chick (Tom Brady, 2002) and The House Bunny (two Happy Madison-produced makeover comedies), and so on.

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5. Faris’ acting does not bleed into codes of masculinity. But her work involves performing various functions of femininity in high stylised, artificial or self-conscious ways.

Recent Hollywood comedies have had a recurring theme of prolonged adolescence – and this adolescence is marked primarily by tropes of consumerism, financial dependence, emotional immaturity and myopia. This comes up in virtually anything bearing Judd Apatow’s name, as well as a large proportion of Will Ferrell vehicles. Faris, too, has been in a lot of movies of arrested development – Just Friends (Roger Kumble, 2005), Waiting, the dismal Mama’s Boy (Tim Hamilton, 2008), the delightful Smiley Face, The House Bunny, even (in their own ways) May (Lucky McKee, 2002) and Southern Belles (Paul S. Myers, 2005). She flourishes in films where idiocy and intelligence, childishness and maturity, bleed into one another and allow performance modes – in a single character or among the entire cast – to play off each other. (The Scary Movie franchise too, being a set of parodies, generates much of its humour – or attempts at humour – from making the deadly self-serious actions of its protagonists appear absurd, irrational, puerile.) Most of these films involve a moralising transition in which one puts away childish things; others do not – but that is all beside the point. Faris’ roles run the gamut from unselfish ‘straight man’ support to daffy star turns. Yet regardless of her position in this jokey sport of the getting of wisdom, she fairly consistently exploits the differences between child and adult, solipsism and altruism, and the boundaries of gender performativity. (5)

Waiting, although not a good film, admirably pays attention to the world of chain restaurants and retail, where middle class kids work with blue collar adults – and the middle class kids’ humiliating trap is when they become the blue collar adults they subtly pitied. Faris herself plays a relatively straight role in the film, a far cry from her goofier outings; but her quiet and simmering impatience actually allows the other actors to build off of her.

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6. See Burr, ‘The Very Best Thing’.

Performance and Subjectivity

What draws our eyeballs to these characters who steal the show – and in ‘serious’ commercial films as well as in junk comedies? Faris’ brief turns in Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003) and Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005) both hold their own. Though in these films she is written in as a blip on the radar, devoid (yet) of star recognition, she nevertheless commands the show for the few minutes of screen time she’s given in both titles. Of course she is written to be a loud, vapid blonde in both cases. But the achievement is more than this, especially in Brokeback Mountain, where her fixed furrowed eyebrows crystallise something crucial that the film, I think, means to communicate about behavioural norms, about a willful if not quite conscious neglect to look, to listen. Brokeback Mountain is largely built upon magnified subtleties of performance. For all its big country picturesque scenery, the emotional thrusts and through-lines are delivered by making the performative tweaks excessively fraught with tension, by showing all those tiny cracks in the veneers of Marlboro masculinity, of successful marriages and successful careers. We come to ‘read’ something into these proud people of the repressed American West, and with Faris’ Lashawn Malone it’s no different. In Lost in Translation, Faris plays an airhead who has no subtleties of character herself, but whose interaction with Scarlett Johansson’s husband (Giovanni Ribisi) indicates subtly the sort of vampirism that has sucked hope out of their relationship. Given superficial roles here, she very efficiently draws out something about all the characters in these films.

Just Friends is a comedy about a rising young music executive Chris (Ryan Reynolds) who accidentally returns to his hometown for the first time in a decade. There, his attentions are set upon his old high school crush, but they are repeatedly stymied by the character Samantha James (Faris), a pop singer and Chris’ unwanted charge for the week. Samantha is a Courtney Love/Avril Lavigne-style ‘artist’ with glittery pretensions writ large. On several occasions she interrupts the regular narrative/dialogue flow as though she were a force of nature, insistent upon her rights to everyone’s (including our) attention. Faris’ performance is almost indistinguishable from the character Samantha’s performance – the film becomes, albeit only when she is onscreen, a ‘social documentary’ of the vapid performative pretensions of celebreality. In one interruptive scene, Chris and Samantha are en route to Paris in a private jet, when she forces a landing by microwaving aluminum-foil wrapped tuna. As Chris cannot believe the bad luck of landing near his disowned hometown, Samantha shouts to whoever will hear her (and she doubtless thinks everyone else is listening): ‘Nice – plane! ... Not – happy!’ (A few moments later she giddily calls out to no one in particular: ‘Hey wait a minute, am I being punk’d? Where’s Ashton? Ashton!? Oh my God, ha ha, you totally got me! Ash-ton?’) Samantha’s camera-happy solipsism is forceful but unimaginative – when Chris barks at her ‘I’m busy!’ she responds, ‘I’m busy!’ (She is no such thing.) When he later implores her to leave him alone, ‘This isn’t a game, this is my life!’ she counters, ‘This is my life!’

Would a more tastefully intelligent comedy give us such a direct, yet unstressed, caricature of celebrity solipsism? I am skeptical. It is one of the virtues of mass genres (work that appeals to a presumptive ‘everyone’ rather than a ‘smart’ stratum) that these gestures often remain unthematised. If this results in less impressive, less robust texts, it also allows for greater superfluity, divergent noodling, unexpected eddies of tone, action or performance. This is where one finds termite art in Hollywood cinema today. So when Samantha James sings ‘Forgiveness’ in Just Friends, Faris’ facial tics come unadorned with preset categorisations. This scene is both funny and remarkable. Faris/James makes faces which betray all sorts of entirely stereotypical, exaggerated emotional states. These are unconnected to each other in sequence, but triggered by each turn of phrase in the (poorly written) song. When she sings ‘Forgiveness / Is more than sayin’ sorry’, she nods her head and furrows her brow as though she were imparting a moral lesson. When she refers to ‘a glass of wine’ and ‘make-up sex’ she affects a ludicrous imitation of a come-hither stare.

Though Faris recycles many of the same individual faces, gestures and vocal tones, one can truly say that her characters do not bleed into one another. None can judge her to have phoned in the same character for two roles – though most broad comedic actors, in similar positions, make bank on just that. Faris seems to instinctively know when to intrude upon a scene as a supporting character (Just Friends) and when to keep her presence alive but muted (The Hot Chick, where she shines in large part through her eyes and mouth and reaction shots). Sometimes she’s simply not given much at all (as in My Super Ex-Girlfriend [Ivan Reitman, 2006]: her straight role asks and allows little). In lead parts she always lends ample support to the actors with whom she interacts – note how she listens and reacts to Emma Stone in The House Bunny in the group staircase speech. Faris is a team player, and rather than looking down upon this material so ‘beneath’ her, she enlivens it. Generating unthematised (thus less ‘handled’) excesses of performance – detours and add-ons to the narrative – she is frequently able to move toward the limits of what her roles allow. As a result, Faris engineers for herself what more enlightened cinema still does not often provide – roles which enable simultaneous experimentation in slapstick, sexuality, bodily awkwardness, vocal gymnastics, posture and self-fashioning, goofiness, and unmotivated performative digressions.

Look at the scene in Smiley Face when Jane consumes Doritos and orange juice while visiting an old professor’s house. The camera lingers on Faris, and though we can’t see her fingers up close (surely coated in chemical cheese), we know that these grubby paws are making marks on the glass. We observe that Jane does not even notice, just as she does not realise her harmless, aimless, open-mouthed uncouthness towards her host. These small touches, welcome harmonies from those behind the camera and those in front of it, comprise a great deal of Faris’ charm – and her range. Her achievement is not that she’s funny, bright or likeable on her own. It is that she corresponds to the part, finds the walls of her role. And then she rushes out to meet all of them at once.