Everyone Else as Pre-Comedy of Remarriage

I participated in
a very fun
end-of-the year
poll, the MUBI
Fantasy Double Feature
in which I compared
my favorite film
of the year,
Everyone Else,
to Stanley Cavell's
Comedies of
Remarriage




The following is an expansion on that thought, part of a defense written to another poll participant, David Phelps, who didn't think Everyone Else could be compared to a classic comedy like The Awful Truth. [I have since expanded on this expansion, and finally reached a conclusion here.]

[NOTE: some PLOT SPOILERS below]

So, I didn't like Everyone Else much when I first saw it, either. I thought this criticism from Richard Brody was hilariously correct:

"However, when the information comes, it fits into the schema like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle; the shagginess of the storytelling is actually quite soigné, a narrative bed-head achieved with a blow-dryer and gel."

The film was a little overwritten: the opening scene, the jumping out the window, and the whole section with the other couple all bothered me very much when I first saw it. Yet, of all the films I saw last year, this is the one that's turned around most in my mind and so seemed the most alive to me. I argued about it, then found myself thinking about it in relationship to other films and also to my life and the lives of my friends. There are some scenes and some lines that I've carried around with me:
• "You were the sexiest girl at the club"
• "Do I not seem masculine to you?"
• The grocery shopping scenes, hopping in and out of view in the aisles, in mock conspiracy
• The opening credits on the rug
• Shots of his back and of him walking around in little pink shorts
• Shots of her back, and of her ass in particular
• The timing of the love scenes
• In particular, the timing of the scene in which he straddles her over the stove when she's trying to play the good bourgie hostess. "You're crazy," she says.
• The way she's protective when the others make fun of his mother's hideous, bizarre collections
• The way he hits his head walking into sliding glass doors
• And the pop song moments that they share, too

These were interesting bits to me. As I stated in that write-up, something new. She had more power in the beginning of the relationship (the coolest girl in the club) and they were reaching exactly the point when the power was beginning to shift to his side. There was not much further she could go with her career and his was just beginning. She's paranoid that he'll leave her. He's still dependent on her for confidence, and yet she's also a reminder of his insecurity. This pivot point is interesting because it's a see-saw of exactly equal weight in power, ever shifting within each scene.

I also like the way that, even though I didn't find the characters attractive at first, I saw exactly what they found attractive about each other through the camera, as if it would switch between their point of views, specifically in how they looked at each other's bodies. As mentioned above: her ass, his long limbs, coloring, vulnerability, a slouched or sprightly gait... all this came across visually.

When I first saw this film, I wanted to write something about the American critical tradition of personal projection as opposed to politics; here it was loved, it seemed, because critics could project themselves onto those characters, and most reviews reflected that. (Except Richard Brody who couldn't relate to that couple's dynamics, and hated the film. "That isolated world that they create together isn't real!" he told me. I could only shake my head, in remembrance, "Oh it IS real, Richard.") But the only really interesting review I read was a quick report from the Berlin Film Festival, from a German I think, who talked about the unique contemporary class issues it brought up for a generation that tries to be "classless." And that was exactly right, I thought. It brings in a new commodity of "cool" to the status formula for this willfully classless (out of avoidance) set. Until the unformed Chris and Gitti suddenly have to grow up in their thirties.

But The Awful Truth is a tricky comparison. It works for the timing; Everyone Else ends when The Awful Truth begins. But the class issues in The Awful Truth are unusual compared to other screwballs. But they're there, of course—this role-playing and mocking and switching to see if their core values are in sync—as they are in all screwball comedies. But most often in classic screwball comedies, the class imbalance was a way of balancing out gender power. Runaway heiresses were on equal footing with their sparring partners. And it's the absolute equality that make this genre so unusual, and so fun to watch. And that dead even but precarious equality is why Everyone Else seems to belong in this genre, unlike any other film released for at least thirty years. (I wrote that Certified Copy, a film I saw after this one, was also like a Comedy of Remarriage, but I was wrong; I may have been just projecting.)

"In classical comedy people made for one another find one another; in remarriage comedy people who have found each other find they are made for each other," wrote Stanley Cavell in Pursuits of Happiness. Everyone Else is about two people who may or not be made for each other finding out that this tension just links them further.* So what comes next?

I was reading a DVD review in which the reviewer wrote that he liked the dark turn the film took at the end, but then, when they ended up in laughter, he didn't like it as much. He wrote that it then felt like it could go on forever. I like that.

"It is as though you know you are married when you come to see that you cannot divorce, that is, when you find your lives simply will not disentangle. If your love is lucky, this knowledge will be greeted with laughter." --Stanley Cavell



*on the tension linking them further, I can't help but think of this lovely phrase on the necessity of adding lemon juice when making jam, from Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking: The addition of lemon juice "increases the acidity, which neutralizes the electrical charge and allows the aloof pectin chains to bond to each other into a gel." Maybe I'm projecting, but this seems like a nice comment on the balance of tension and attraction, perhaps even of fighting and laughing, necessary to make something gel.

NOTE: This has been further updated HERE