by Spitz, Marc
“You gotta hear this one song. It’ll change your life, I swear,” she promises.
It’s “New Slang” by the Shins, a three-year-old track from their Sub Pop album Oh, Inverted World. The band’s front man had been around for a decade, recording in Albuquerque under the name the Shins since the late 1990s. The song is gloomy and jangly, not unlike an old Kinks track, but there’s a soothing quality to it that is instant. We can see its healing effect on the grieving, tormented Largeman.
“The music was written in,” Riesco says. “He knew what song was going where before anything was shot. Zach basically handpicked these songs to be on the soundtrack to his movie.”
Garden State’s soundtrack album, released in the summer of 2004, sold almost a million and a half copies in North America, won a Grammy, and made major rock stars out of the Shins. It also established a cultural field upon which other Indie rock bands could follow suit, bands that had nothing to do with the film but shared a gentleness and a Brooklyn-ish quality, as well as a certain professionalism. Politics and revolt were not only unnecessary, they were a liability. “Music became Twee in that middle-class Brooklyn artisanal urbanite who went to college in the nineties. It’s not that I have something against that stuff. It fits into society, and what you get is niceness and contentment,” Riesco says. Somehow the rise of Nirvana and the Strokes felt like triumphs of the underdog, with a strong tether to eighties Indie, both British and American, while the rise of groups like the Shins, Modest Mouse, and the Decemberists to the top of the pop charts felt like a shrug, as if, unthreatening and uncontroversial, they always somehow belonged in a Starbucks. “It was music for people who didn’t buy into the ethos of cool that goes around rock, the danger element,” says Riesco.
The world of Garden State, like Stars Hollow, was a place these cool-shunners wanted to go back to again and again. To play “New Slang” was to return to that scene and feel something. “It was the beginning of the numbness everyone feels today,” says Riesco. “People texting and walking at the same time, unable to really connect with people.”
Braff’s shell-shocked hero is a refugee from Prozac nation. “There’s a lightning storm in my head,” he moans. Largeman’s so numb with guilt and chemicals that he doesn’t even recognize love the first time he sees it, in the form of Sam. When he meets her, in fact, she asks him if he’s retarded. The answer is, of course, yes, but only emotionally. Largeman, with his motorcycle and sidecar, is Marlon Brando’s Johnny, the Wild One, for his generation. Portman’s Sam is his deliverer to the world of authentic emotion. This is, of course, utter fantasy, just like Lorelai and Rory Gilmore’s diet. Sam is a classic “Manic Pixie Dream Girl,” the term coined by Nathan Rabin in his review of Kirsten Dunst’s performance in Cameron Crowe’s dud romantic comedy Elizabethtown the following year.
Sam keeps and buries a lot of hamsters. She still has a piece of her baby blanket (named Tickle) and sometimes reboots her brain by making funny noises. There’s footage of her figure skating while dressed like an alligator straight out of Sendak. She’s chaste but also, crucially, sexy, warning Largeman, “We’re not gonna make out or anything” when he enters her bedroom. Sam doesn’t exist anywhere in nature—only in the minds of writers—but there’s a darkness that she initially conceals and Largeman is too self-absorbed to detect. It gives her depth and makes her more real. Sam is an epileptic. That’s why she is at the doctor’s office, blocking out the reality of the situation by blasting Indie rock into her brain. She’s terrified, with her body betraying her at times.
“I look forward to a good cry,” she tells Largeman. Largeman looks at her as though he no longer knows what that word even means, but by the film’s end she not only has him primal-screaming into an open crevasse, washed clean in a rainstorm, but sexually heals him after all—in the very tub that his mother drowned in, of all places.
“This is good! This doesn’t happen often!” Sam swears to Largeman as he is about to go back to Los Angeles to resume his dead and hopeless life, the familiar. We wonder if he will wise up or get on the plane. He wises up. He runs to her, literally, and they are saved, these two broken heroes for a broken and terrified world.
Braff and the box-office success of Garden State would be chiefly responsible for the homely but sweet new leading men, your Michael Ceras, Jonah Hills, Jesse Eisenbergs, and Seth Rogens. “There’s Channing Tatum, and then there’s those guys,” says Josh Hamilton, star of Kicking and Screaming.
In a 2012 essay in Esquire, the writer Stephen Marche observed of the post–Garden State era, “All the rebels are fey in quirky America.” But are they true rebels, or was the very notion quaint in a post-post-everything world, constantly on orange alert?
Ellen Page’s Juno McGuff is the closest thing the era has to a true Punk. She abhors the then-current trope of the sexy nerd: “Jocks like him always want geeky girls who play the cello and read McSweeney’s and want to be children’s librarians when they grow up,” she says of her crush object, Michael Cera’s Paulie Bleeker. When she and Bleeker do consummate their mutual attraction, Juno is impregnated on the first try and must reckon with this “diddle that can’t be undid, home skillet,” as Rainn Wilson’s drugstore clerk tells her.
Diablo Cody didn’t go undercover in a high school like Cameron Crowe, and the dialogue of Juno has no “this is how they really speak now” verisimilitude. As with Clueless, Cody simply nailed the attitude of young and modern Twees, and inevitably they began speaking in the Cody-invented vernacular in tribute. Like all mainstream Twee fare, Juno is rich in the secret language of detail: Juno’s hamburger phone, her pipe, Bleeker’s orange Tic Tacs. These quirks used to be the domain of the “best friend” or “weird uncle” in movies. Now they are for the leads.
The soundtrack to Juno was an even greater success than the Garden State soundtrack, although, in a post–Garden State culture, perhaps not the same surprise. It topped the Billboard charts, and the film earned more than $100 million at the domestic box office. It was nominated for Best Picture, and Cody, who’d also written a clever memoir, Candy Girl, about her brief time as a stripper, won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar.
Juno has the wide-of-the-mark quality of a dozen after-school specials and One to Grow On–style PSAs on its side, most as tone-deaf as rapping Barney Rubble. Never has teenage pregnancy and abortion been taken on in a way that hasn’t seemed self-righteous or, worse, condescending. It’s broad, almost farcical, and achingly real. When Mr. McGuff says, “I thought you were the kind of girl who knew when to say when,” Juno responds, “I don’t really know what kind of girl I am.”
Instantly all the Holden Caulfield–like tough-kid slang melts away and we, the audience, are faced with Juno’s terrifying dilemma and the immense responsibility that goes with it. She is not even fully formed herself as her baby is forming inside her. “It has fingernails,” an anti-abortion protester tells her. This is why Cody got the gold statue.
Jason Bateman’s Mark Loring, once a promising musician, is as arrested as Juno in his own way. His 1990s heyday is long in the rearview, but he cannot let go. His wife, Vanessa, played by Jennifer Garner, is tired of “waiting around for him to become Kurt Cobain.” She wants to be a mother and can no longer reckon with being married to a man-child.
Mark is astounded by Juno’s facility with retro Punk rock and splatter-film auteurs and falls in love with her for her taste and the youth that she reminds him of. Of course, it’s the teenager who proves herself the mature one, not only surviving her outsider status but also placing the baby with Vanessa even after Mark leaves to pursue a happiness that’s almost guaranteed to elude him. The film ends with a grace note: Juno, reunited with the baby’s father, Paulie, being childlike again, playing guitar and singing the Moldy Peaches ditty “Anyone Else but You,” an update of the Velvets’ sweet duet “I’m Sticking with You.”
Suddenly the Celine Dions of the pop world were the minority and the Elliott Smiths were everywhere. The Moldy
Peaches performed the song on The View. Cera and Page became both romantic leads and action stars without having to spray anyone with machine-gun fire or make Stallonian quips. More TV shows with a sweetness at their core were green-lit, from CBS’s The Big Bang Theory, costarring Garden State’s Jim Parsons as a socially awkward physics wiz, to HBO’s Bored to Death, starring Rushmore’s grown-up Jason Schwartzman as a hapless novelist moonlighting as a private detective. “I wanted an ethos of kindness underneath everything,” Bored creator Jonathan Ames says of his Brooklyn-set farce. “It came to that after I got exposed to other TV writers. I was supposed to have a staff. I saw in those people’s scripts that I was sent—everybody was mean to each other. It sounds like a schoolyard thing to say. A lot of the humor came out of put-downs and mockery, whether it be mockery of characters the way they were written or the way they spoke to each other. I didn’t want that kind of humor anymore.”
Chapter 15
Dorks Incorporated
2005–2011
In which the post-abovegrounding of Twee swells the battle between haters and the Twee Tribe. Lines are drawn over girlishness and womanhood and the question is raised whether one can be a true feminist if one wishes everyone looked like a kitten. Also, “Girl” becomes a megabrand, but is it really shorthand for “White Girl”?
What do you do with bullies? If you’re Australian teen Casey Heynes, you snap. You pick them up and body-slam them. If you’re Fairuza Balk (a real-life actress whose name seems to come from the works of Roald Dahl) in the make-believe high school revenge saga, you use the powers of witchcraft to attempt to exact bloody revenge on them (or like Rachel True’s character, at least make their pretty blond hair fall out in clumps in the swimming pool). A decade after The Craft, the box-office hit Mean Girls finds a premeltdown Lindsay Lohan confronted with the same quandary. What do you do with bullies? Do you join them and rule the school, or do you fight them back? Mean Girls reduces it to an anthropological question, and maybe that’s what it is. Through the ages, the “life-ruining” plastics are always going to try to rip the sensitive kids to shreds. There will be freaks and there will be geeks. But what happens when the world, pop culturally speaking, begins to resemble high school, and technology and the anonymity of the Internet turns us all into mean girls? Do we go with or against the flow? It’s an existential question best answered by modern-day philosophers like Taylor Swift: “Someday I’ll be big enough that you can’t hit me, and all you’ll ever be is mean.” If there’s a flaw in this theory, it’s that the bigger one seems to get, the more blows one takes from haters. We may be living in a postsnark age, when the bullies themselves get tagged with names like “troll,” but it is also threatening to become a leaderless age, one without its innovators, Beatles, Stones, Godards, and Wes Andersons, because to put anything out into the world these days is to risk it being ripped apart by coyotes. It’s getting harder and harder to keep the social pact that our stars have with their fans. Ever since the 1960s, when young audiences stopped looking to their often ephemeral pop stars for pure entertainment and began expecting them to lead, the contract between star and fan has been a tricky one with regard to levels of fame. As I’ve mentioned, there is a part of Morrissey that can never be unfaithful to the idea of Morrissey. There’s a point where the ascent of beloved stars can seem like a personal victory for their fans, but if they pass that point, resentment begins to fester. As Morrissey himself sang, “We hate it when our friends become successful . . .”
This is, of course, a horrid liability for the artist. Part of making great art is to break the rules and defy expectations. And yet, with the advent of TMZ and similar sites and the rise of the Internet troll, a particularly cowardly, mostly anonymous strain of social commentator, came a heightened watchdogging. We police our stars now, via some kind of electronic caucus. In the spring of 2013, Zach Braff turned to the crowd-funding website Kickstarter to raise a budget for Wish I Was Here, his long-awaited directorial follow-up to Garden State. It had been nearly a decade since that film made a mark, and Braff’s career had cooled some. It wasn’t a given that a studio, even a large Indie, would hand him a blank check anymore. The teenagers who’d made the Shins famous had grown up. They didn’t even go to the movies as much anymore, preferring to binge on Netflix and on-demand cable. Some viewed it as a bold DIY act. Others found it vulgar, as if to say, “We invested in him. We bought our tickets to see his film. We bought the soundtrack album. We even sat through a few episodes of Scrubs. It’s in syndication now. He’s gotta be rich. And I’m freelancing! Fuck that guy!”
What may truly be at issue is the question of whether Braff has anything left to say. Is he putting one over on us? Can he speak to our pain again and heal us as expertly as he managed to in ’04? People are happy to pay for quality. It’s why the green-market phenomenon, and, to a lesser extent, the rise of Whole Foods, has been so pronounced in the last decade. Everyone wants to be able to feel good about their produce. But you know what you’re getting with the tomato. With Kickstarter, it’s a gamble and a matter of trust in the artists. The consensus on Braff, by the way, seems to indicate that he was worthy of trust, as his film was fully funded.
And so, with the rise of the great electronic democratic voice and a more empowered, hands-on approach to all forms of consumption comes an age of suspicion and, frankly, distrust when dealing with artists—especially our once-favorite artists. Nobody gets our hate more than the ones who once got all our love. Take the case of Miranda July. Nobody came with more cred correctness than the young July. Here is someone who first found her voice as part of the original Riot Grrrl movement in Olympia. She was and remains friends with Carrie Brownstein of Indie-rock trio Sleater-Kinney and released spoken-word albums on the same label, Kill Rock Stars. Her short stories appeared in the New Yorker. Her performance pieces were reviewed by serious art critics. She was mentioned in the same breath as alternative-culture saints like Kathy Acker and Lydia Lunch. And then she got famous.
July’s low-budget feature-film debut, 2005’s Me and You and Everyone We Know, showcased for a larger audience what had previously been a niche matter of taste. Her wobbly voice, gawky beauty, and performance-artist mien was not for everyone. “I’m going to be free!” she promises at the start of the film, “I’m going to be brave.” She is also going to be pilloried. The film itself is beautiful, with moments of grace (a quiet shot of a bird in a tree, a poignant and sad performance by the great John Hawkes), but it’s also hater bait, with July dialoguing with a goldfish in a bag as it wobbles precariously on the roof of a moving car. “I didn’t know you but I want you to die knowing you were loved . . .”
July was an acquired taste. But was she full of shit? Why the investment in girlishness at the onset of her thirties? July was thirty-one when the film came out. Why was her character sitting at home, waiting for a boy to call, like some lovelorn teenager? Was she renouncing her feminism? July made the cover of the New York Times Magazine in July of 2011. The headline read: MIRANDA JULY IS TOTALLY NOT KIDDING.
Is this scrutiny sexist in nature? Probably. Thumbsucker, the debut of July’s husband, the designer turned director Mike Mills, is even more Twee than some of July’s conceits, and nobody called for his head. Yes, the film that Miranda July was promoting in that New York Times cover story was partially narrated by an abandoned kitty, but who’s to say she isn’t 100 percent invested in that? “To her detractors (‘haters’ doesn’t seem like too strong a word),” the Times observed, “July has come to personify everything infuriating about the Etsy-shopping, Wes Anderson–quoting, McSweeney’s-reading, coastal-living category of upscale urban bohemia that flourished in the aughts.”
“I always liked authenticity, but authenticity can be very complex and shaded,” says Kill Rock Stars founder Slim Moon. “I never much liked irony, the whole sort of slacker thing. I always thought that was really just an expression of suburban entitlement or insecurity. I hate to pick on them, but to me Mudhoney was ki
nd of an example: ‘We’re gonna really rock—but we’re also going to only half commit, and you’re always going to wonder if we mean it or if it’s a big joke.’ I see how Miranda befuddles people and they think it might be a big joke, but I think she’s a complex artist who is very shaded. I don’t think she’s pulling our leg one bit.”
Zooey Deschanel was, for almost a decade, a talented actress from a show-business family and on a path toward a solid, respectable career, vying for roles with the likes of Michelle Williams, Kirsten Dunst, and other “serious actresses” with a penchant for dark, complicated material.
In Adam Rapp’s Winter Passing, for example, she’s as sullen as the young Winona. Rapp’s movies are a subgenre unto themselves, full of depressed people taking drugs and sometimes working in the sex industry. To appear in one of his films or plays is to send a signal: “I’m serious. I’m not afraid of the edge.”
Over the course of the film, she snorts coke, has impassive sex, and mopes around, mostly looking for more coke. Her voice is flat, depressed, perhaps medicated. She’s sickly, pale, sallow, and druggy. She is also morally compromised. Her father, played by Ed Harris, is a famous writer. When a publisher offers her a large sum of money to retrieve his letters, she heads home to confront him. There she finds he’s in a relationship with a doting British woman close to her own age. The two clash, and in one exchange, Deschanel quips, “Why don’t you go back to Narnia or wherever the fuck you’re from?”
In the years since that film’s 2005 release, many once-intrigued fans of Deschanel found themselves asking the same thing of her. Maybe there’s always been a dichotomy to Deschanel. People are complex, after all. Maybe she was warning us with her choices of roles.
