Boobs Gone Wild

Hubris explains the poor box-office reception for The Real Cancun. Producers Mary-Ellis Bunim and Jon Murray, the tycoons behind MTV’s The Real World, thought they could further transform popular culture by pandering to the public’s lowest instincts one more time. After assessing The Real World’s effect on the zeitgeist (it’s probably the single biggest influence on contemporary tv), Bunim and Murray had every reason to think they were infallible. But their exploitation in The Real Cancun—which follows a group of hand-picked American youths to a spring break bacchanal in Mexico—is too half-assed to be compelling. We already get enough Ugly Americanism for free on shows from Survivor to Joe Millionaire, Temptation Island to The Amazing Race. Plus, Bunim and Murray’s degrading of the tv documentary has been out-sleazed by cannier imitators such as the Girls Gone Wild home-video series.

"I wanna see some boobies!" screams a dorky, virginal, teetotaling kid named Alan (who, of course, gets his wish), yet The Real Cancun is so low on boobage, there’s no doubt that this video (shot only a month ago) was meant to be anything other than a tease. It’s the arrogant dishonesty of the Bunim and Murray braintrust—a central component of MTV’s ever-alert manipulation of the youth market—that makes even the flop of The Real Cancun significant. Bunim and Murray bet that if MTV can bilk cable subscribers with softcore, quasi-verite soap operas, then movie audiences might be as easy to cheat.

Something more base than flashing is being sold here; The Real Cancun—flop or not—is part of the indoctrination of mindlessness that has become pop culture’s chronic condition. The Real Cancun isn’t miscalculated so much as it’s a premature effort to expand MTV’s domination of pop culture. Bunim and Murray’s ability to shape the future of popular entertainment shouldn’t be doubted, because their tv-huckster mentality has already altered the way people view the media presentation of life. (Each season, The Real World discourages viewers from analyzing flammable race tensions or rethinking sexual equality. It should be retitled Civility Gone Wild.)

MTV is so religiously devoted to the commercial cutting-edge, it can’t be examined without steel-mesh gloves. That’s why commentators have fumblingly compared The Real Cancun to last year’s Jackass: The Movie. This is less tenable because it’s simply less interesting. The techniques of deception and manipulation that Bunim and Murray have mastered on The Real World are barely bothered with here. Having shrewdly orchestrated post-Reagan fantasies of high living into fake documentary formulas, MTV here goes into contest mode, dangling the free-booze, no-rules playland that the Everyteen might luckily attain.

By now we all know it’s phony. Sadder still, we know that the participants willingly subject themselves to MTV manipulation in exchange for temporary stardom. But their desire to get drunk or get laid is harmless compared to the ruthless narcissism of showing off and one-upping a roommate or romantic conquest. And somehow even that is less appalling than MTV’s diabolical determination to pervert kids’ yen for pleasure into mind-control. Allow me a William Bennett moment in order to point out the difference between a widely released tv show like The Real Cancun that simply exploits teenage recklessness and the long-ago melodrama of Where the Boys Are (1960) that, while moralizing about heedless youth, also respected them as human beings whose decisions always have a cost.

What The Real Cancun takes in stride is the resilience of young people being bent into a variety of consumer grotesques. We aren’t asked to consider how one girl stupidly breaks her heart over a smiley player, how a burly kid suffers neglect, or the exacerbation of one couple’s near-violent, out-of-control emotions. Even the celebrity guest-spot is dishonest; we aren’t shown how Snoop Dogg—emcee of the orgies—exerts his privilege among the revelers. (Compared to a Luke Campbell party video, this film’s idea of fun is boring.) The only instructive moment occurs when a girl calls home to brag about Snoop Dogg partying in the MTV digs. "Snoop Dogg is in our pool!" she exclaims. But Mom struggles to understand the message: "A loose dog is in your pool?"

The Real Cancun Directed by Rick De Oliveira

The Shape of Things

"I HATE false art" says the bitch-heroine at the start of Neil LaBute’s The Shape of Things. I groaned, because there are few filmmakers whose work I hate more than LaBute’s. Not just false art, LaBute makes poor art. Did the critics who praised his previous films actually look at them? Did they time the palsied movements and rigid compositions? Did they actually listen to LaBute’s insipid but vicious dialogue?

Proof that LaBute’s ugliness is fatuous can be found in this film’s premise. The issue of offensive art gets argued by a young performance artist, Evelyn (Rachel Weisz), who’s dating a nerdy curator, Adam (Paul Rudd), and mounts an intricate plan to humiliate him in public—as an art project. But why should the widely praised, award-winning, commercial LaBute be concerned with art controversy? Because he’s a fake. And a late one at that.

Evelyn’s Karen Finleyish figure evokes a tired polemic. When first seen, she is about to deface an overly decorous statue of a male semi-nude as if she were a champion of brutal honesty. She says of Adam, "My pliable material of choice is human flesh and human will." That’s just LaBute trying to elevate his own cruelty into art when he’s not even as clever as Bunim and Murray. The only mystery in The Shape of Things is why anyone tolerates LaBute’s inexact dramatization of woman’s inhumanity to man. These yuppie characters are not probed for the politics of narcissism or fashion. His critique is superficial, but apparently that surface holds (guilt-ridden) middle-brow reviewers in awe.

It’s a sad state when critics become as gullible as actors. The Shape of Things is based on LaBute’s stage play; he attracts actors who are starved for (or clearly ignorant of) a dramatic theater that expresses today’s anxieties. LaBute merely adds to them, delighting in malice. But any theater student should realize that he’s merely bad Mamet, maladroit Pinter. A character who threatens to put a knife to someone’s throat crudely explains, "That’s just an expression from the Transylvania handbook." Later, Adam is told, "You look distinguished." He responds, "I look like a hockey player." Then comes the rejoinder, "Yeah, but a distinguished one." Such repartee shouldn’t be called LaButian—just lousy. Bland talk is confused with drama. Have moviegoers forgotten the visual concentration and verbal splendor that Kazan and other directors brought from the stage to the screen?

If LaBute’s style doesn’t disgust people, it’s because his temerity fools them. Puzzled by incivility, they assume LaBute is explicating it. But to drop in the line, "She fingerpaints portraits of her daddy using menstrual blood," is just being nasty. And bewildered listeners lack the confidence to reject it. The Shape of Things plays on this insecurity through meaningless references to Shakespeare ("Next you’re going to tell me that the handkerchief with the strawberries is missing") and Ibsen (standing near a Hedda Gabler poster, the image of a gun points at Adam’s head). LaBute nearly got away with such elitism in Possession, with its bitter imitation of Merchant-Ivory Anglophilia, but this film’s Americancampus setting (Evelyn’s exhibition hall, inscribed MORALISTS HAVE NO PLACE IN AN ART GALLERY, looks like a Target department-store ad) is easily derided. LaBute’s misogyny never seemed more out of date, nor his homophobia so out of place.

Most of all, I detest LaBute’s defiling of one of the great works of pop art, Elvis Costello’s 1978 This Year’s Model. That album, and other Costello tunes, smugly intrude on the soundtrack as a sign of boomer hipness (as well as Costello’s recent, horrible decline). Not much in pop has been as thrilling and shocking as the palpable tension in This Year’s Model. It's still vibrant and still awesome for the way Costello turned personal turmoil into a commentary on the ethics of sex and pop music. (Costello’s "Don’t ask me to apologize/I won’t ask you to forgive me" has not been bested.)

Every moment in The Shape of Things denies Costello’s honesty and heart. LaBute is the one man in pop culture who misunderstands what Costello himself once labeled as the extent of his knowledge: "revenge and guilt." Not knowing how to make you understand your own shameful instincts, LaBute settles for spreading his mange. His aim is false.

The Shape of Things Directed by Neil LaBute