"I'm sorry I forgot to shave."
Two American directors were being talked about at the beginning of the decade as saviors of American cinema. Both were initially lauded for tense psycho-dramas. Both received significant backlash for popular, supposedly experimental films. One successfully sold us John C. Reilly. One unsuccessfully sold us Jared Leto. They ended the decade by directing There Will be Blood and The Wrestler, two films that just missed Best Picture Oscars, and (SPOILER ALERT!) two films that do not appear on my list.
If I had to narrow my criticism of Darren Aronofsky down to one sentence (and that sentence could not contain the words Fountain or Robocop), it might be: “he’s never made a film like Punch Drunk Love.” Even though the film had a 25 million dollar budget, it still strikes me—in the context of Anderson’s work—as similar to accidental films such as Chungking Express and The Conversation; movies made in the middle of epic works by Kar Wai and Coppola, respectively. Even before Barry falls afoul of the phone-sex scandal around which the majority of the plot operates, he races back and forth through his warehouse office with sincere conviction—as if to convince a skeptical audience that in spite of appearances the movie is going somewhere.
Yet the film is not about going anywhere, not even to Hawaii with frequent flier miles collected from pudding lids (“you can go places with pudding,” Barry quips at one point). The film is about preparing to be seen in a universe where you are always already seen. When Barry nervously feels out a conversation with Lena in a diner, trying to determine whether or not to tell her about his brobdignagian pudding-based consumer strategy, the tension is not in how she will take this potentially crazy news. We’ve already watched her follow Barry around the supermarket, pricing various products—we know that she knows. Rather, the tension is the dramatic irony of Barry having not yet realized he is already seen, has already been spotted.
When our protagonist finally finds his way to the Mattress King, a surprisingly charismatic dirtball played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, the sex line huckster is sitting in a dressing room getting a haircut. No one in this film is ready for the scene they have been asked to star in. The audience awaits, impervious, almost immune today to the sensation of having seen something they were never intended to.
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