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Fear of Falling Sideways: Alexander Payne's Rhetoric of Class
*Derek Nystrom <15.3bios.html#nystrom.bio> *
/McGill University/
derek.nystrom@mcgill.ca
© <#copyright> 2005 Derek Nystrom.
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Review of:
Sideways. Dir. Alexander Payne. Perf. Paul Giamatti, Thomas Haden
Church, Virginia Madsen, Sandra Oh. Fox Searchlight, 2004.
1. In a moment that we are meant to take as a sign that its
protagonist has hit rock bottom, Sideways (2004) puts failed
novelist and wine snob Miles (Paul Giamatti) on all fours outside
a bedroom in a slovenly, bombed-out looking tract home; there, he
watches with surprise and horror as an overweight, tattooed,
working-class couple passionately fuck, the man taking intense
pleasure in his wife's recounting of how she had seduced another
man. There is much to say about this primal scene of class
abjection, but I will start by noting that it echoes the inaugural
scene of Alexander Payne's cinematic /oeuvre./ His 1996 debut
film, /Citizen Ruth/ (which, like all of Payne's films, was
co-written with Jim Taylor), opened by similarly positioning the
spectator outside the filthy bedroom of a white-trash couple,
their tattered mattress surrounded by empty 40-oz. malt liquor
bottles, as the title character (Laura Dern), an aficionado of
inhalants, endures joyless intercourse with her soon-to-be
ex-boyfriend. One might trace the trajectory of Payne's career by
noting that where the scene from his latest film--which is also
his best received--provides us with an on-screen delegate, whose
discerning middle-class gaze we are meant to share, the opening
sequence of Ruth does not align our perspective on its delinquent
working-class protagonist with any reassuring spectatorial
stand-in. One might also note that the abjected couple in Sideways
seems to be having a much better time--and that it is now the
middle-class voyeur who has the chemical addiction. All of these
developments point to the complicated, ambivalent rhetoric of
class that Payne has developed over the course of his films, a
rhetoric that takes a new turn in his latest, Oscar-nominated
release.
2. That Payne's cinema is centrally about class is clear--or at least
would be clear to any culture that did not struggle mightily to
repress this fundamental condition of social life. The subversive
/frisson/ of Citizen Ruth comes as much from its protagonist's
unrepentant resistance to standards of middle-class dignity
(indeed, even her choice of intoxicant makes trucker speed look
chic) as from the film's allegedly irreverent take on the abortion
debate.[1 <#foot1>] Meanwhile, the comically monstrous ambition of
Election's (1999) Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon) is identified as
the product of a shrill class /ressentiment/ instilled in Tracy by
her stewardess-turned-paralegal mother. The impending tragedy that
retired insurance actuary Warren Schmidt (Jack Nicholson) attempts
to avert in About Schmidt (2002) is the upcoming wedding of his
daughter Jeannie (Hope Davis) to Randall (Dermot Mulroney), a
handlebar mustachioed, mulleted doofus whose family resides in
lower-middle-class squalor on a street where shirtless men
blithely toss their garbage onto the lawn.
3. Yet the class condescension of these films is complicated by their
portrayals of middle-class characters. Ruth finds a way to
valorize its title character by critiquing the instrumentalist
handling of her situation by anti- and pro-choice advocates--a
process that discourages the audience from having a similarly
reductive relationship to her. Similarly, in Election we see Tracy
largely through the eyes of high school teacher Mr. McAllister
(Matthew Broderick), whose annoyance at her relentless striving is
mixed with a barely sublimated desire for her and resentment at
his own station in life; any disdain for Tracy we might share with
him is thus called into question. The audience is forced to adopt
an equally dubious perspective in Schmidt, as we are privy only to
the information available to its solipsistic and emotionally
self-deluding title character. As a result, we are led to
recognize that his dismay at his daughter's choice of partner
seems to be as much the product of his disconnection from Jeannie
(and from virtually everyone else) as that of Randall's apparent
unsuitability. Our understanding of Randall and of his dissolute
post-hippie family, we come to feel, may be constrained by
Schmidt's insistently blinkered viewpoint.
4. In its treatment of its middle-class protagonist, Sideways is of a
piece with Payne's other films. While we are asked to share
Miles's outlook on the events of the film--for example, we sneer
along with him at Frass Canyon, a theme-park-like winery that
aggressively markets itself to tour buses of senior
citizens--Sideways also goes out of its way to problematize any
easy identification with his position. Not only are we introduced
to Miles as he awakens groggily at midday from a night of "wine
tasting," but we also watch him steal money from his mother in
order to fund his weeklong bachelor vacation with his old college
buddy Jack (Thomas Haden Church), a soon-to-be-married, has-been
television actor. And, as is often the case in Payne's films, both
the characters' middle-class self-regard and the film's critique
of it are signified through relations of taste. While Miles's love
of wine is never shown to be anything less than genuine, it also
performs a compensatory function for a man who likes to think of
himself as a Robbe-Grillet-style novelist and yet must teach
eighth-grade English. Sideways also implies that Miles has a
drinking problem, for which his oenophilia is a cover. Yet the
film is also attuned to ways in which taste is only weakly
correlated with class position and with monetary wealth. Although
Jack is more successful than Miles, his palate and his appetites
are exuberantly undiscriminating. Payne's casting choices here
serve as an allegory of this opposition in middle-class taste
cultures: Giamatti is an independent film star, last seen as
Harvey Pekar in the brilliant and critically heralded American
Splendor (2003), while Church was last seen on cable reruns of
Wings, a mediocre but successful sitcom.
5. Which brings us to the film's positioning of itself in American
film taste culture. While there was no way to know that Sideways
would be as lauded as it has been, it is clear that Payne pursued
a crowd-pleasing strategy here; he has crafted a film that is
gentle and even uplifting in comparison to his previous outings,
films marked by their ruthless and even misanthropic humor and by
their refusal of happy endings. In contrast to the sharply drawn
caricatures of Ruth's anti-abortion zealots or Election's Tracy
Flick, with her cartoonishly clenched jaw, Sideways's characters
are three-dimensional figures whose failings are softened--just as
their features are softened by the cinematography's frequent habit
of bathing them in sun-dappled light. One might even argue that
the piano-tinkling of the film's score during travel-porn wine
country montages and the glossily lit dinner where Miles, Jack,
Maya (Virginia Madsen), and Stephanie (Sandra Oh) meet up
threatens to turn Sideways into the cinematic equivalent of a trip
to Frass Canyon. This tendency is confirmed by the film's
feel-good ending, in which the beautiful, blonde, and wine-loving
Maya phones Miles to tell him that she loved his novel--a scene
wherein Miles's cultural capital and romantic appeal are
simultaneously affirmed in a way that no Payne protagonist had
hitherto experienced.[2 <#foot2>]
6. Of course, Payne is too wary of unmitigated sentiment to show Maya
welcoming Miles back into her arms; the film closes on a shot of
Miles knocking on her door and cuts to the credits before she
answers. In fact, one senses often in the film that Payne is aware
of and playing with Sideways's aggressively middlebrow aesthetics.
For example, consider those montages of the wine country outings:
their use of split screens appears so superfluous as to be parodic
(especially when the separate screens are showing precisely the
same image). Furthermore, the beauty of those fields of grapes is
frequently undercut by the ensuing shots of, say, Miles and Jack
walking from their hotel to dinner, trodding down a highway access
road prosaically lined with car dealerships. As many critics have
noted, one of Payne's strengths as a filmmaker is his eye for the
banal, defiantly uncinematic detail: the slate-grey skies framing
Omaha's barren, non-descript landscapes in Ruth; the grim,
fluorescently lit, low ceilinged interiors of Election's George
Washington Carver High; the Hummel figurines adorning the brightly
appointed yet mausoleum-like family home in Schmidt; to which we
might now add the laminated menus of Sideways's mid-range
eateries. So while Sideways may frequently give in to the canned
lyricism of its romantic fantasies, its placement of these scenes
alongside the more mundane trappings of the characters' lives
provides a salutary clarifying effect, one that also, it should be
noted, supports Payne's grander filmmaking ambitions. For Payne
has often been described--and often describes himself--as a
1970s-style auteur, and Sideways's quotidian realism, its
self-consciously deployed split screens, and its long, slow
dissolves--straight out of Hal Ashby's The Last Detail (1973)--all
demonstrate his active engagement with this tradition. In
interviews, Payne has emphasized this connection: "I want to live
in a Hollywood where Hollywood is making auteurist cinema again,
like they did in the 1970s," he told the Miami Herald, "where we
can have smaller, personal and more human films again"
(Rodriguez). Film critics have largely assented to this
affiliation: Esquire has called him "the next Scorsese" and "the
Scorsese of Omaha," and the Hollywood Reporter's review of
Sideways is typical in its characterization of the film as having
"subtle overtones of the great character movies of the 1970s"
(Honeycutt). This association with 1970s auteurism has been
consecrated by no less an icon of the period than Jack Nicholson,
who said in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, "Alexander is a
real throwback to the kinds of filmmakers I started with" (Hodgman
90).
7. It is worth comparing Payne's films to those that Jack Nicholson
started out in--or at least, those he started to become famous in:
Easy Rider (1969) and Five Easy Pieces (1970). The former is the
tale of two hippies driving across the U.S. "looking for America"
that ends with the motiveless killing of its countercultural
anti-heroes at the hands of ignorant, prejudiced, southern
working-class men. Five Easy Pieces, in turn, is about the
disaffected son of a family of classical musicians who "drops out"
to work on an oilrig, only to abandon this blue-collar life when
it threatens to restrict his liberty. Both films offer
protagonists who challenge viewer identification as much as they
court it, and feature what was then thought to be an unprecedented
realism, portraying details of American life that had hitherto not
been represented on screen. But in spite of their countercultural
urge to undermine middle-class authority, both films also depict
their working class characters as either unthinking
traditionalists (Five Easy Pieces) or murderous thugs (Easy
Rider), and thus ultimately work, as I have argued elsewhere, to
recover and reaffirm a certain brand of middle-class subjectivity.
In the case of Five Easy Pieces, the protagonist is able to escape
his adopted working class life only by drawing on his previously
disavowed cultural capital; this development is echoed by the
film's own formal organization, which trades on the gritty realism
of its blue-collar settings and story elements while representing
them through art-cinema strategies that signify the filmmakers'
cultural distinction.
8. I want to argue that we can detect this bad faith--and a
concomitant demonizing of the working class--in Sideways as well.
Let us return to the scene with which this essay article: the
reason Miles is on his knees outside the couple's bedroom is
because he is trying to retrieve Jack's wallet. Earlier that
evening, Jack had picked up the woman, a waitress, who is now
describing the affair for her husband while they make love. Miles
must retrieve this wallet because it contains the wedding rings
for Jack and his fiancée. At this late point in the film, Jack's
impending marriage has been exposed as a sham, entered into
because his fiancée's father will bring him into the lucrative
family business. Yet rather than reject Jack's nakedly
disingenuous protestations that his fiancée is the most important
thing in his life (Church does some excellent bad acting here),
Miles agrees to retrieve the wallet and thus enable his friend's
mercenary bourgeois wedding. And just as Miles forgives his
friend, so does the film: Jack's wedding goes off without a hitch
and serves mainly as an occasion for the exchange of knowing
smiles between Miles and Jack. However critical Sideways is of its
middle-class protagonists' self-delusions and ethical lapses, both
men get the reward that they had been seeking: Jack gets laid and
his bride's family business, while Miles gets a beautiful woman to
read his novel and drink wine with him.
9. The working-class characters, on the other hand, are there to
remind us of the sinkhole of tastelessness that both men are lucky
to escape--literally in the bedroom scene, since the startled (and
still naked) husband chases Miles into the street after he grabs
Jack's wallet. But perhaps the most telling moment of this scene
is not Miles's and Jack's close call with blue-collar retribution,
but what Miles sees as he looks over the disheveled bedroom of the
copulating couple, searching for his friend's wallet: his (and
our) eyes pass over a television in the background tuned to an
image of George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. The juxtaposition of
this image with that of the couple's spirited lovemaking generates
an easy laugh, but it also makes one wonder if, as an email letter
writer to Salon's Charles Taylor observed, the scene is thus meant
to be "about the overweight, slovenly, working-class citizens of
'Bush's America' (not the thoughtful, cultured
expatriates-at-heart)" (qtd. in Taylor).
10. Here we should recall that the auteurist films of the early 1970s
that Payne and his admirers ritually name-check needed to grapple
with the critiques of the professional-managerial class leveled by
the New Left and the counterculture, which thus explained their
characters' (and the films' own) difficult negotiations of their
middle-class heritage. At our current historical moment, however,
the only sustained critique of middle-class power and privilege
comes not from the left, but from the right. Unable to face up to
the very real class contradictions of professional and managerial
labor, the left has allowed the conservative movement to be the
only political force articulating a coherent critique of this
labor, one that seizes upon the genuine class antagonism generated
by the prerogatives of expert knowledge and then reroutes and
mobilizes this antagonism in support of a political program of
anti-statist deregulation. In this context, one can read Miles's
depressive defeatism as a sign of blue-state intellectual
self-loathing and this scene as one in which he looks on in dismay
at a working class perversely won over to Bush's vision of
America.[3 <#foot3>]
11. Except that this couple does not seem to be practicing traditional
family values. And here we can perceive the antinomial impulse at
work in Payne's rhetoric of class. Part of the sequence's comedy
comes from the fact that the couple's home--described by Kim
Morgan as a "trashed-out abode . . . that looks like it was
ransacked during a visit by TV's Cops"--has prepared the audience
for a scene of domestic violence; our laughter is informed by our
surprise and relief that the husband's response to his wife's
infidelity is not patriarchal rage but broadminded pleasure in
non-monogamous relations.[4 <#foot4>] In this light, it seems that
any reductive connection between the couple and Bush's cultural
politics would be ill-advised.
12. Charles Taylor argues, however, that we cannot read this scene as
Payne's humanistic portrayal of "the sexual openness of [the
couple's] marriage," because "for that reading to work you'd . . .
have to get close to them, which is exactly what Payne, repelled
by their fat, will not do." But this is precisely what Payne
/does/ do: he gets close to them, his camera lingering on their
gleefully writhing bodies. I'd like to compare this gaze, which I
take to be /both/ fascinated /and/ repulsed, with that on another
scene of intense pleasure from Payne's work. I am referring to the
moment in Citizen Ruth when we first watch Ruth Stoops huff some
patio sealant. As she places the inhalant-filled paper bag over
her mouth and takes in a big, deep breath, we cut to a long
close-up of her eyes, which even as they redden and tear up are
wide open in desperate and seemingly real exhilaration. Payne
might be disgusted by experiences of pleasure that exceed all
bounds of "good" taste, but he is also deeply compelled by them.
For this reason, I am left wishing that Sideways had ended not
with Miles's return to Maya's doorstep, but with the scene that
comes just a few moments earlier. There, we see Miles eating a
burger in a fast food restaurant and drinking out of a styrofoam
cup. We learn that he is filling that cup from his long-hoarded
bottle of 1961 Cheval Blanc, a rare and precious vintage. The film
plays this moment as a bittersweet acceptance of failure: Miles
has learned that his ex-wife has not only remarried but is
pregnant, and his consumption of the wine can be construed as his
acknowledgment that there are no significant achievements or
pleasures left for him.
13. But what if we were to read this moment differently? What if we
were to note that it is a moment where Miles enjoys his rarified
pleasures, but without any outer significations of class
distinction? After all, sneaking sips of an alcoholic beverage in
a fast food joint erases the line between wine-lover and wino.
Furthermore, his fellow pleasure-seekers are probably a few steps
down the socioeconomic ladder even from those who like to take a
day trip to Frass Canyon. And they are all, Miles included,
guiltlessly eating food that tends to produce the kinds of bodies
we recently saw being transported into erotic delight at the
thought of non-normative marital arrangements. In short, we might
read the scene as one where Miles's specialized taste no longer
separates him from those with less cultural capital, but instead
offers him a sensual pleasure that is simply one among many in the
room. Alexander Payne may have rooted us firmly in Miles's
middle-class subjectivity and offered us a film that ultimately
gratifies his (and, as indie film spectators, our) longing for
cultural distinction.[5 <#foot5>] But his contradictory
fascination with the class valences of various pleasures may
unwittingly point to a logic of cultural distinction that does not
travel up and down, but instead goes sideways.
/ Department of English
McGill University
derek.nystrom@mcgill.ca /
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Notes
I would like to thank Ned Schantz for his conversations with me
about Sideways, and for looking over an earlier draft of this review.
1 <#ref1>. With respect to the "abortion debate" narrative of
Ruth, I agree with those who object to its suggestion of moral
equivalency between anti- and pro-choice forces as dangerously
wrongheaded (only one side of this conflict, after all, bombs the
institutions and assassinates the practitioners of the other).
2 <#ref2>. Scott persuasively argues that the nearly unanimous
critical praise granted to the film is not unrelated to the fact
that its hero is at heart a /critic/--one who not only gets the
girl, but also has his discerning taste reaffirmed by that girl.
3 <#ref3>. This reading of the film is also informed by Jacobson's
"Movie of the Moment" essay in Film Comment.
4 <#ref4>. I am indebted to my colleague Ned Schantz for pointing
out this audience expectation.
5 <#ref5>. It should be noted that Sideways is not, strictly
speaking, an independent film: it is a product of Fox Searchlight
Studios, one of the "major indie" divisions of the traditional
studios that sprung up in the wake of Miramax's (brief) success as
a division of Disney. Still, film critics discussed it almost
invariably as an example of independent filmmaking. For example,
Dargis closed her New York Times review by remarking that "since
the late 1970s we have been under the spell of the blockbuster
imperative, with its infallible heroes and comic-book morality, a
spell that independent film has done little to break. In this
light, the emergence of Mr. Payne into the front ranks of American
filmmakers isn't just cause for celebration; it's cause for hope."
Works Cited
Carson, Tom. "The Next Scorsese: Alexander Payne." Esquire Mar.
2000: 222.
Dargis, Manohla. "Popping the Cork for a Twist on a So-Called
Life." Rev. of Sideways. Dir. Alexander Payne. New York Times 16
Oct. 2004: B7.
Hochman, David. "The Scorsese of Omaha." Esquire Jan. 2003: 20.
Hodgman, John. "The Bard of Omaha." New York Times Sunday Magazine
8 Dec. 2002: 90.
Honeycutt, Kirk. Rev. of Sideways. Dir. Alexander Payne. Hollywood
Reporter 12 Sept. 2004
.
Jacobson, Harlan. "Movie of the Moment." Film Comment 40:5 (Sept./
Oct. 2004): 24-27.
Morgan, Kim. "Rare Vintage: Sideways is Good to the Last Gulp."
Rev. of Sideways. Dir. Alexander Payne. LA Weekly 22 Oct. 2004.
.
Nystrom, Derek. "Hard Hats and Movie Brats: Auteurism and the
Class Politics of the New Hollywood." Cinema Journal 43.3 (Spring
2004): 18-41.
Rodriguez, Rene. "Just Like Fine Wine." Miami Herald 12 Nov. 1994
.
Scott, A.O. "The Most Overrated Film of the Year." New York Times
2 Jan. 2005: II:18.
Taylor, Charles. "2004: The Year in Movies." Slate 4 Jan. 2005 <
http://slate.msn.com/id/2111473/entry/2111743/>
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