How The Squid and the Whale and Shopgirl ruined my older-man fantasy
by Kara Jesella
March 27, 2006
Goodbye Professor F, who thrillingly said I was a pretty girl. Adios to the counselor who made this camper swoon when he told her that he loved her "glass blue earrings." Adieu to the father whose eyes I got lost in while I was a college tour guide and he, an editor at Scientific American, earnestly and enthrallingly told me about his job while I was supposed to be coercing his not-much-younger-than-me daughter into attending my school. I cherished all of these memories, and more, but two of last year's films may have banished older men from my erotic imagination forever.
The first is Shopgirl. I'm embarrassed to admit it, but I liked the book. I even met my longtime boyfriend (who is, in fact, almost a decade older than me) at the coffee shop where he works so I could act out its love-across-the-countertop scenario. In the movie, Steve Martin (the book's author) plays Ray Porter, a rich, emotionally unavailable businessman who sees Claire Danes, née Mirabelle Buttersfield, staring off into space as she mans the rarely visited glove department at Saks. Mesmerized by her vacuous gaze and prim outfits, he invites her to dinner. "Be honest: if this were a TV dating show, would I be kicked off by now?" Ray asks Mirabelle.
And Mirabelle — poor, bland Mirabelle — bats her eyes, cocks her head and flips her hair as she falls under his un-charming spell. (The character, perhaps because she is not supposed to be fully formed, doesn't so much have a personality as a
recognizable set of tics that are supposed to signify flirting. If Claire had been nominated for an Oscar for this role, as early buzz predicted, then so should your average teenage girl.) This all culminates in the first big sex scene, from which my advice is to shield your eyes.
Now, I like gray hair and paunches; my repulsion points to something else. Up to that scene, Martin has poked a little fun at the clichéd peccadillos of his older character. He makes fun of his bad back when he can't get off Mirabelle's futon (of course, he's also making fun of Mirabelle's futon) and he makes fun of himself eating Chinese food all alone in his designer house. Yet the sex is deadly serious.
Yes, Ray is attracted to Mirabelle, but fetishizing her youth seems to be central to that desire. He is obsessed with the fact that he's too old for her, and so goes on an age-appropriate date with a woman who, after hearing that he has a younger
Ray's treatment of Mirabelle is enough to make a first wife warm and fuzzy inside.
girlfriend, offers to take him home and make him feel like he's in Thailand. "You don't have to do a thing," she breathes.
This is gross. It commits the sneaky trick of fulfilling Martin's non-reciprocal X-rated fantasy while instantly transforming said older woman into a whore, not worthy of Ray's romantic investment, so he can have his cake and eat it, too. Worse, while monogamous romantic love might be a zero-sum game, the way Martin pits older women vs. younger women is highly unsavory.
But by indulging in this extra-curricular activity, he now has a reason to make Mirabelle, his sleeping beauty, feel bad. And so she preens. She sobs. She does a striptease for him, peeling off the dress and gloves he gave her — because if he can't be a loyal boyfriend, at least he can give her some gifts she could never afford herself. And yet he seems more impressed by his power and money than she does. He offers to bring her a dinner of "private plane food" and takes her as his trophy date to a black-tie party, where he seems to take satisfaction in her social clumsiness and the way that the older women whisper to one another threateningly.
Certainly there are women willing to trade their nubile bodies to more established Svengalis in exchange for expensive dinners and a pair of gloves. But Mirabelle doesn't seem to be one of them. In fact, Ray's treatment of her is enough to make a first wife warm and fuzzy inside. Mirabelle is simply a prop in a man's unfolding mid-life crisis. The movie ends with Mirabelle's sugar daddy making it right again. We are supposed to believe that he spiritually sets her on a course towards Jeremy, a man her age who is so obnoxious that he seemed like an elder man's dystopian view of his youthful rival. I didn't think anyone could make me dislike Jason Schwartzman, but his character in this movie is cheap, socially awkward and generally annoying, even after he's supposedly transformed by listening to self-help tapes. He does really love Mirabelle, and according to Martin, this is consolation. But it seems unfair that Mirabelle's only erotic options are older and disaffected or younger and overbearing.
Well, I never wanted to sleep with a businessman anyway. My imaginary older man was a professor. Director Noah Baumbach knows this fantasy is one of the top ten reasons heterosexual women go to college. Even now, seven years after graduation, my female friend corresponds with a flirtatious professor whose online dating profile says he digs Richard Rorty. Who cares if he lives across the country? Here's her opportunity to "check off 'sleep with a professor' from my college-era mental list," she told me.
In Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale, Anna Paquin plays Lili, a predatory collegiate feminist and aspiring literati. When she tells her newly separated English professor, Bernard Berkman (Jeff Daniels), that she needs a place to stay, he eagerly invites her to live with him and his two sons — to whom he repeatedly points out Lili's liberal use of the word "cunt" in her short stories. Unlike robotron Mirabelle, Lili has a personality. Not a great one — her attempt to seduce Bernard's teenage son, while impressive, does not make her a sympathetic character — but one that hit a little closer to home. Lili has a schoolgirl's idea of what it means to be sexy, and she is constantly testing it out. "I've been wondering what it would be like to fuck you," she says at the inception of the affair. She may be the male, don't-stand-so-close-to-me stereotype, but she's also the kind of coed a lot of us wanted — but in the end, weren't brave or stupid enough — to be.
We learn that Bernard's restless wife has been cheating on him, so we understand why he would be taken with a young girl who's reveling in her newfound sexual powers. Beyond the fact that Jeff Daniels looks hotter than ever with his middle-aged spread and burly beard — oops, my proclivities are showing — it's clear why Lili would want Bernard, too. She's pretentious, and so is he.
But Squid shows the folly in the fantasy, the way that an intellectual crush taken to a physical level can come undone when reality intervenes. When Bernard takes Lili to see his son perform in a talent show, what could be a nice gesture devolves into something silly and pathetic when they sit with his soon-to-be-ex-wife and her new paramour. But the scene that really undoes the illusions is
Squid shows the way that an intellectual crush taken to a physical level can come undone when reality intervenes.
when, standing in her room in his apartment, Bernard begs a struggling, fully-clothed Lili to "just take me in your mouth." Even if he can rank J.D. Salinger's major and minor works, the professor suddenly doesn't seem much more sexually adept than a barely deflowered boy. His son, who is closer to Lili's age than Bernard is, didn't handle his own bedroom fumblings much better — a fact we're reminded of when the boy walks in on the unhappy tryst.
In some weird way, I enjoyed both movies, maybe because clichés can be comforting. But they also made me want to see more films like 2001's Ghost World, in which a high school student — the uncommonly sexy Thora Burch as Enid — falls for an older man who isn't smarter, isn't richer, isn't even attractive. He's a fortysomething, vinyl-collecting nerd whom Enid initially mocks before realizing that he "is the opposite of everything I hate." If only there were more films that explored relationships between older men and younger women where "older" and "man" weren't code for "rich, smart, and powerful" and "younger" and "woman" didn't necessarily equate with the opposite. My boyfriend saw Risky Business in the theater; I was probably home playing Barbies. True, it's not exactly May-December if you have the same set of pop culture references. But I have many friends who've paired off with older men who are not necessarily more conventionally successful (Maureen Dowd should hang out). It would be nice to see a little bit of our reality reflected. Then I might be able to get back on board with the fantasy.
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