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While watching the indie film Garden State the other night, in which an unnecessarily medicated young man with a dark past romances an aggressively wacky young woman who is a compulsive liar and has a hamster cemetery in her front yard, I realized that they represented two archetypes which I used to often see as a romantic couple in fiction, but haven't come across much lately: the sad, silent, brooding man with the tragic violent past, and the colorfully eccentric motormouth woman who just might actually be insane-- Annie Hall to the nth degree.
They used to be a particular staple of plays and indie films, though Angel's brooding title character set against wacky Fred is another example. But I'm mostly thinking of movies where the crazy woman teaches the depressed hero to Live! and stand in the rain with his arms spread wide and his face tilted up to the sky to indicate that he has finally learned to do so. After which point, depending on just how much indie cred the story has, they either live happily ever after or she goes insane and commits suicide or must be institutionalized, leaving the now-awakened hero with a new appreciation of life.
When I was more involved in theatre, not to mention indie filmmaking, I think I saw about a hundred of those those stories; I recall John Patrick Shanley's Joe vs. the Volcano and about five hundred others by the same author, John Olive's Standing on my Knees, Don Nigro's Seascape with Sharks and Dancer (this one has the lamest dark past I've ever encountered in fiction-- the heroine was traumatized by living by a highway and seeing animals squashed by trucks), David and Lisa, Betty Blue. And I know I saw a lot more of these, but they're now all blending together into a blur of indieness.
I wonder if the wacky woman really does represent some powerful romantic archetype for men, like the angst-ridden man with the dark past seems to for women. And why the two of them matched seemed inescapable in the eighties and early nineties, not to mention the sixties, but then went underground.
I enjoyed Garden State, but I hope it and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind don't herald a resurgence of fictional charmingly strange women who wear eccentric headgear and talk like auctioneers and teach men to experience their emotions and really live. But then, they aren't my fantasy.
They used to be a particular staple of plays and indie films, though Angel's brooding title character set against wacky Fred is another example. But I'm mostly thinking of movies where the crazy woman teaches the depressed hero to Live! and stand in the rain with his arms spread wide and his face tilted up to the sky to indicate that he has finally learned to do so. After which point, depending on just how much indie cred the story has, they either live happily ever after or she goes insane and commits suicide or must be institutionalized, leaving the now-awakened hero with a new appreciation of life.
When I was more involved in theatre, not to mention indie filmmaking, I think I saw about a hundred of those those stories; I recall John Patrick Shanley's Joe vs. the Volcano and about five hundred others by the same author, John Olive's Standing on my Knees, Don Nigro's Seascape with Sharks and Dancer (this one has the lamest dark past I've ever encountered in fiction-- the heroine was traumatized by living by a highway and seeing animals squashed by trucks), David and Lisa, Betty Blue. And I know I saw a lot more of these, but they're now all blending together into a blur of indieness.
I wonder if the wacky woman really does represent some powerful romantic archetype for men, like the angst-ridden man with the dark past seems to for women. And why the two of them matched seemed inescapable in the eighties and early nineties, not to mention the sixties, but then went underground.
I enjoyed Garden State, but I hope it and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind don't herald a resurgence of fictional charmingly strange women who wear eccentric headgear and talk like auctioneers and teach men to experience their emotions and really live. But then, they aren't my fantasy.
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