Wednesday, February 9, 2011

“'The Kids Are All Right' and 'Sex at Dawn'”

We saw the new movie, “The Kids Are All Right,” the other night on DVD, and I thought of “Sex at Dawn,” the book I’ve been blogging about lately. The movie is about a lesbian couple, Jules (Julianne Moore) and Nic (Annette Bening) with two teenage kids, Joni (Mia Wasikowska), 18, and Laser (Josh Hutcherson), 15. Joni searches for the man who was their sperm donor; she finds him nearby, and the plot thickens, mainly around Jules. She is the stay-at-home mom, who begins to work as a landscape designer for the donor, Paul, (Mark Ruffalo), and also begins to have sex with him. Jules is horrified by what her body is doing. She doesn’t love Paul; she doesn’t even like him very much, but she can’t stop. But, of course she does stop, and abruptly, when, at Paul’s during a dinner party with the whole family, Nic confronts Jules after finding Jules’ red hair in Paul’s shower and bed. With much weeping and gnashing of teeth, Jules admits her affair, but also blames Nic for being busy at work and distant.
At this point, I yelled at the TV, urging Jules to get in touch with her inner ape and proclaim that she came from female ancestors who had multiple partners and who called for more by their female copulatory vocalization (FCV) (The sex scenes were fairly noisy). Not surprisingly, she didn’t do this but continued to apologize and seek forgiveness from the family. Also, not surprisingly, they were very angry at her and furious at Paul, who is portrayed as a guy just going along for the ride. Although in the end, Jules and Nic seem to reconcile, Paul apparently is thrown into outer darkness and will never again be included in the family despite his reaching out to the kids. So, we’re left with a bruised quartet, rather than a possible quintet that might have included Paul. How sad.
And how sad that the five didn’t have insight into their ape natures, as discussed in “Sex at Dawn.” If they had realized that Jules was behaving naturally, they might have acknowledged similar feelings in themselves, understood, forgiven both her and Paul, and have begun a tentative search for an expanded family that included him.
Perhaps the moral is that we don’t always have to act out of our biology, but if we don’t know and accept our biology, we are likely to act, like Jules, without understanding and with much grief.

7 comments:

Franklyn said...

It’s the old problem, confusing sex and love. Each can exist with or without the other. The notion that only one person must satisfy every intimate emotional need has a history in perverse religious morality, platonic philosophy and romanticism. It has caused untold misery. Sex serves many purposes, many of them having nothing to do with love, procreation or indeed with the act of sex. And love is as varied. Monogamy grew out of real estate, not love. I do not mean to imply that there is no role for monogamy, many couples prefer it. It is a choice, albeit one over which there is little control. But a loving couple, each happy and content with one another, may on occasion want sex with someone else. That doesn’t mean that he or she doesn’t love the other

David Townsend said...

I loved The Kids Are All Right, often howled in delight during the film, thought the performances were wonderful--and came away ultimately deeply uneasy. Yes, Jules needs to access her inner ape. But also a little crazy-making was the film's skirting narrowly the implication that Jules is attracted to Paul because there needs to be a man in a "real" family, and only when Nic successfuly "plays the man" at the end of the film by throwing Paul out is the integrity of their family structure vindicated.

Pete M said...

David,
Thanks for your comment. Obviously, “The Kids Are All Right” is a good movie, because it’s open to many interpretations. I saw Jules a bit differently from you. For me, she was a little bit less lesbian than Nic and thus open to sex with Paul, especially because the sex between Jules and Nic before Paul reflected some tension between them. Nic did "play the man" and get rid of Paul at the end, but that reflected her insecurity about Jules’ commitment to her, rather than her strength. By closing out Paul, the original family structure was indeed restored at the end, shutting out the possibility of including him in the family. I felt that that diminished the family and could lead to more conflict in the future if Jules again felt stirrings toward Paul or to other people. Control and love are mutually exclusive, and Nic’s attempt to control the family structure could very likely backfire.

David Townsend said...

I do agree about nuance and ambiguity in the film--and that that's a mark of its intelligence and wit. Not sure, though, how much shutting Paul out is a lost opportunity to incorporate him, given the predatory quality of his uncommitted attempts to insinuate himself and to break up the family--it's not just that Jules is consumed with guilt, it's that Paul really is trying to pry her loose from Nic, to have a family he's never shown up for.

Part of me thinks Nic and Jules' fascination with classic gay male porn is a sweet acknowledgement of the complexity of desire; another part of me is uneasy that it could on the other hand be seen as a mark of submerged phallocentrism in the film: somewhere, somebody's gotta have a dick to make this work.

Pete M said...

David,
It’s been awhile since we saw the movie, so maybe I’m not remembering correctly, but I don’t remember Paul as predatory, even though, of course, Nic saw him that way. I felt that he would have liked to be part of the family, especially to be close to the kids. Was he really trying to pry Jules loose from Nic? Maybe, but I don’t remember it that way. I thought he was not a bad guy who liked sex. Nic was insecure, so she got hysterical, making everybody else hysterical. I thought she was not a likeable character. Maybe the character conformed closely to my prejudices about dykes. Does every stereotype have a grain of truth? What do I know? I’m just a silly queen.

David Townsend said...

OK, it's been seven months since I saw the film when it first came out. Maybe I've altered memories, but I recall points when there was something really calculated in the look Paul would give one character or another, evaluating the effect he was having on them.

As for Nic, I didn't find her unlikeable or cold, just incredibly wound up and really incapable of cutting loose. I saw her as feeling caught in part by her perception of Jules being the flakey one in the relationship, and her own compulsion to "take up the slack."

In short, I thought that the dysfunctions between them were dead on for dysfunctions/co-dependencies in lots of relationships, including, oy, my own. The scene where Jules tries to seduce Nic into a bath, and they almost connect, but Nic ends up distracted by a crisis call from the office, was sad but lovingly observed and full of empathy for the longings each of them had for a freer, less trammeled way of relating to each other.

Pete M said...

David,
True, Paul was not a noble creature, but I found him very sympathetic. He obviously had women coming to him for sex all the time, and I think part of his attraction for them was that he wasn’t needy, at least for sex. He liked the attention and the coupling was easy. It was “just sex,” albeit friendly, but without an agenda, especially one involving the dreaded “m” word, at least on his part. He was loose and laid back. He was receptive to female attention without actively seeking it. That’s what happened with him and Jules. She was attracted; he was receptive. However, starting when the daughter finds him, he began to evaluate what it would be like to be part of a family, to be a father. He found that he wanted that, especially later when he was being shut out of the family.
I agree with your take on Nic, and it’s those very qualities that make her unlikable for me. She’s the opposite of Paul: tense and controlling. She doesn’t want Jules straying into undesirable pastures; Jules must be corralled, and the intruder expelled.
My guess is that Jules is not going to stay corralled. Keep a lookout for the sequel: “The Kids are All Right, but the Moms are fighting.”