What can you say about blogging?  It’s a fun word to say, especially for the older generations who would still call it “new,” but blogging is a behavior that ultimately ranges from sloppy short to endless chatty, all beyond the reproach of publication and promotion that normally save readers from experiences in mediocrity.  And yet, publication and promotion themselves have gotten into the wrong hands these days (read:  media conglomerates), so what the hell.  I am stuck in that Midwestern ice storm you’ve been hearing about, so…

And even so, I would not saunter into this hermeneutic hash save for just getting kicked in the ass by the only business still open in snowed-in Carbondale, Illinois:  the cinema house, our collective campfire, America’s billion-dollar marketplace of ideas – the movie theatre.  “Revolutionary Road” is a canker-sore of a movie helmed by the medium’s most pretentious poseur Sam Mendes who in turn is clearly whipped by his gorgeous wife Kate Winslet who in turn cannot, under his direction, possibly do wrong.  I am beginning with that because I have written about movies in the past only to hear, most often, that it is impossible to tell whether I liked them.

But what I really want to begin with is a stipulation, that being enraged by a film is not necessarily a revelation of unsettled psychosis, nor the slam-dunk fulfillment of a director’s vision to create art that stimulates different reactions from different points of view.  We would do well to defend ourselves readily from that kind of elitism.  Artists always create with a specific agenda (their own revolutionary road), and the extent to which they would deny this is the extent to which they themselves suffer unsettled psychoses.  The notion that “all great art must affect people differently” is the tired rhetoric of community college English literature adjunct professors, who are most often found taking that vow because at some point they finally understood Beowulf after their twentieth read-through, and now live to tell.  But I digress…

The briefest background on “Revolutionary Road” is that it re-interprets a classic Richard Yates novel from the same point of view that resulted in “American Beauty,” which won the hearts of the Hollywood Establishment in the year 2000 and resulted in an Oscar slaughter for Sam Mendes and crew.  You can think of “Revolutionary Road” as a prequel if you share the simple-minded view of Mr. and Mrs. Mendes (from across the Atlantic no less) that there is some sort of definable “American dream,” and moreover that it is the stuff of great drama.

And the problem is, it isn’t.  Not even if it exists.  So we look for something more in “Revolutionary Road.”  Why is this marriage so fragile?  What prevents Frank and April Wheeler from finding real fulfillment?  If the peril is not to be found in some villainous American dream, then I propose it is in the American pandemic of relativism against something so orthodox that mainstream filmmakers can only shrug:  morality.

The ironic trick that I find almost comical here is that Mendes winds up concocting a simple morality tale, surely against his aim but roughly within the vision of Yates’ 1961 novel.  Knowing that the contemporary aspiration of much movie making is to “punk rock” out from any attempt at moral structure (think of the awesome subversive violent power of Green Day, then finish popping your bubblegum) – there are a few things we know better about marriage.  First, it is utterly unnatural.  The animal kingdom (from which men and women can claim no exemption) would risk extinction by staying monogamous, right?  Under that chaos, you also have the fact that marriage introduces extraordinary layers of vulnerability for the initiated.  That is to say, emotions become open sores within a marriage when they would otherwise be as turtles that can readily regress into their shells.  And another thing:  Marriage is, of course, a decision to compromise.  It is not a compromise of good decisions – but if that is how it’s understood, the marriage may be doomed to fail.

So why do people even bother?  I have a rich memory from the days when Bill Maher hosted a show called Politically Incorrect and when he had some real credibility as a classical liberal rather than a hitman for the Democratic Party.  My favorite living composer, Philip Glass, was one of the motley guests, and Mr. Maher – himself a frequent guest of Hugh Hefner’s crib – introduced the idea that marriage as an institution is utterly obsolete.  Maestro Glass, in his usual zen demeanor (a Tibetan-Buddhist-lapsed-Jew-math-genius, repeat that measure 42 times prestissimo), could only offer a simple sentiment – minimalist, if you will:  People keep doing it, so what can we say?  And he could be read to say, that these are not just plumbers and taxicab drivers (though he had been those things too between the years of math and music); these are highly educated people who associate visions of sunsets with deep philosophical eurekas and psychic self-awareness.  In other words, not folk who git hitched jes cuz.  All of that insight was met with cocked heads and nods, but what made it memorable is that Maher suddenly got confused, looked down at his blue notecard, checked it again and exclaimed, “But it says here you’re on your fifth marriage!”

Was the great Philip Glass even qualified to opine about marriage, having failed four times?  (As chronicled in a new documentary, his subsequent fifth also failed.)  Well, who knows?  There are seventy-times-seven reasons a marriage could fail, starting with the basic defiance of nature that I mentioned earlier.  And you can keep going down the list by tuning into daytime gab-fests.  However, what brings us back to “Revolutionary Road” is the simple fact of no controversy, that the fastest and surest way to end a marriage is to violate it with another body, outside the marriage.  Adultery is the monarch of all harbingers, the Talmud of consequence, the hairline fracture in a trembling zeppelin.  (And God help me before my prose goes past purple…)

If nothing else, the critical failing of “Revolutionary Road” (and the failing of critics who have lavished praise) is that this nasty trump card is a matter of small detail to Frank and April.  Here you can see at work the great option available to the cineaste, whose visual sleight-of-hand can violate any page of literature’s meticulous attempt to depict the reality above, and below, and inside a scene.  What you would see in “Revolutionary Road,” if you chose to torture yourself with a screening, are blank reactions to confessions of adultery that are utterly un-human, let alone un-animal (we cannot deny that beasts are jealous).  Truly, Bjork got it right when she sang, “There’s definitely definitely definitely no logic to human behaviour,” and the human beast will cover the gamut in its contraindications.  But there is no doubt that “Revolutionary Road” is a novel by Mr. Richard Yates and not a case study by Dr. Oliver Sacks.  In other words, Kate Winslet in particular is doing either a great job at depicting a sociopath, or a poor job at depicting the character devised by Yates.  In spite of the latter truth, nothing can stop her performance from being honored next month as the absolute finest among many thousands supposedly being weighed by the keepers of the golden statue.  The cowboy media engine that is Hollywood bespeaks a level of sophistication that would attend a ballet with cheers for acrobatic feats, but boredom for narrative, nuanced movement that would abandon tired routines of twirling and tip-toeing en pointe.

From Sam Mendes’ reading and especially his wife’s award-winning performance, Frank and April represent quite clearly the fundamental struggle that defines whether a marriage will or will not survive:  satisfaction.  (Women’s Studies academic programs are incapable of seeing this story any other way, of course, and the sad truth is that mainstream America has pretty much become her bedfellow.)  Hours and hours of psychotherapy may associate broader concepts like compatibility, sexuality, filial dysfunction and so on, but ultimately the centerpiece of the contemporary divorce is the “I don’t get no.”

Frank and April are not satisfied with a whole list of things:  they wanted a nice big house but now they hate the suburbs; Frank hates his sales job yet April fashions a doctrine that he is destined for higher callings than mere commerce; April believes that her own true calling is to be an actress yet it cannot possibly be her talents at fault (it must be the shackles of marriage); and of course, for the big kill, Frank and April are not satisfied with each other.  They used to feel bliss, through the haze of courtship, but as things evolved they simply moved right along from dissatisfaction between themselves, to sexual satisfaction from others.  You cannot say that their affairs alone damned their marriage, while you certainly cannot say that the adultery was one little vial among the rack of toxins.

That litany of dissatisfactions has something plainly and simply in common with the social attitude, psychological dogma, and divorce rate of our time:  lack of gratitude (and its companions “humility” and “awe”).  Whatever your faith background may be, you cannot deny that the most frequent guest lecturer at the American nuptial is the Christian Apostle Paul, who had more to say than that love is greater than faith, hope and charity.  When he wrote “but now abideth” to preface that famous last verse of the chapter, he necessarily allocated the smaller ecstasy to what we can taste and see in our darkly-lit lives; he really means to contrast the penultimate verses:  “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child:  but when I became a man, I put away childish things.  For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face:  now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

We are a world of animals who can hardly see anything of Heaven, caught as we are in our eternal quest for a fountain of youth that would spurt every vain satisfaction:  passion, beauty, newness, pleasure.  We are still children who touch the hot stove time and time again, even though mommy said that we would get burned.  We are vigilant about what we do not have, while reliably ignorant about what we could lose.

Even as I began to write this monstrously long tome, I found myself in a “cranky” state of mind, having been booked for one thing and another on a digital television transition outreach tour of the Midwest, and found every event canceled because of an ice storm that has been recorded as the most destructive ever.  It started during my visit to Mayfield, Kentucky and did not stop for a week, as I chased electricity from one town to the next and plumbed for vacant motel rooms.  I even suffered the great indignity of anxiously putting my phone number on a waiting list for a motor inn called “Hospitality House” in Union City, Tennessee!  But when God answered my desperate cry for help and I got that magic call back, it was later that night, in the tacky room with floral-print polyester bed sheets and a clacking heater, that I sulked in front of my television and watched local news segments:  One after another, camera crews would blare their battery-powered lights onto the rooms of low-income houses, asking people how they’re staying warm.  The answers were far away from my state of mind – since I had never experienced a power outage for more than a few minutes, I had been conjuring cynical theories that the utility companies were not being efficient or not even showing up for work.  As I thought these things, with my tacky bed sheets and loud heater keeping me un-stylishly warm, I saw and heard these people speak into the camera that they were just thankful to have each other, to keep each other warm.  Not just for my few minutes, but for days and days of freezing temperature and no assurance of anything, anytime to come.

That is marriage, and all of life.  People are wired to understand that, or they are not.  And the great spoiler of “Revolutionary Road” is that April kills herself by trying to abort the baby that she conceived with a man who fails to satisfy her.  There can be no doubt that the scene packages sympathy rather than disdain, of the kind smarmy and academic:  This is what happens in a world that condemns, that draws moral boundaries, that entraps women into domestic roles.  This is the tragedy of precious people who by some stellar exception to human birth are not meant to live integrated lives.  This is what it would be like for you, sitting as you do in your velour theater seat, if only you woke up and saw what the artist-caste sees from the luxury of living without limits – it is the Nietzschean enlightenment of a soul that knows the vanity of boundaries, but cannot escape society’s torturous moral order.

Against that backdrop of bunny ranch seduction, what remains visible through a glass, darkly, is an irreligious moral order that you will or will not believe was gifted from a god…or God.  Thus whether you call it divine intervention or just part of a social compact, cold-blooded immorality remains mostly rarified behavior among those in society who possess a mere competent understanding of civility.  But we still quest for that fountain of youth, with pop culture’s cheap megaphones to nourish the journey, and there is much suffering in the knowledge of what we lack.  Yet by some kind of magical osmosis, the fountain ultimately finds its aim to Heaven.  And that brings us back to what I started with, the idea that “Revolutionary Road” suffers an ironic twist:  Frank and April, together with the cineastes behind them, get their just desserts.  This is not to say that death and despair for the free spirits (and their tabloid break-ups to boot) amount to vengeance fulfilled.  Rather, there is always the possibility of humble witness, met with likelihood of rejection.  That’s how we roll.  And that is the literary allusion of Armageddon that came as a vision to a prisoner in a cave in our first century A.D.; or for that matter, it is the endless history of humanity turning away from enlightenment.  Of course, I would only be a fool to think of myself, with all the tragic arrogance of the “Revolutionary Road” protagonists, as above it all.  These days, even as I am landlocked in the Midwest, I see myself as something more like Richard Wagner’s “Flying Dutchman,” who roams the opens seas in search of faithfulness.  I am writing this long-winded thesis alone.

If you’ve made it this far, your endurance is stronger than mine were I a fresh reader, in mind of the assumption I started with here – that blogging basically amounts to unfettered yammering.  But if you were expecting that this would be some kind of movie review, I’d say skip it for sure, and go spend your money on “Doubt” and “Gran Torino,” two truly religious experiences for every heart open to the optical illusion that is cinema.  Amen, and amen.