Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Confessions
of a Desperate Mind
(Choke, 10/6/08)
By Nicholas Nicastro
Here's
one piece of evidence that sex addiction is not yet taken seriously
as a destroyer of lives: you can still make comedies like Choke
about it. Imagine a movie about, say, a guy who abandons his family
to go gamble away his kids' college funds, or about somebody who drinks
himself to a dismal death, face down in a pool of Woolite-colored vomit.
Not so funny, huh?
True, our culture doesn't need any
more hectoring sanctimony. Chuck (Fight Club) Palahniuk, the
off-beat novelist on whose work Choke is based, has a way of
finding the juicy roach at the bottom of any peccadillo salad. His creation
this time is Victor (Sam Rockwell), an unapologetic horn-dog who works
as a historical reenactor in a colonial-era theme park. When he's not
busy "thou-ing" and "thining" museum patrons, he's
trying to soil the petticoats of the girl playing the village milkmaid
(Bijou Phillips), or skipping out of sex-addict rehab to have bathroom
sex with his sponsoree (Paz de la Huerta). He's got an institutionalized
mother (Anjelica Huston) who doesn't recognize him anymore—a bit
of personal pain he relieves by working his way through the hospital's
female staff. His sidekick Denny (Brad William Henke) is the healthier
of the two, being merely a masturbator so compulsive "he can no
longer make a fist." It's not a pretty picture.
The thing is redeemed by the fact
that, unlike most folks who would rather consign them to our collective
garbage pail, Palahniuk and Cregg actually have compassion for these
guys. One of Victor's characteristic ploys (and the rationale for the
title) is to stuff food down his throat in restaurants, expecting that
someone will rush to save him from choking. Supposedly, his saviors
then feel response for his welfare, to the point of sending him money.
As con-games go, this is reaching a bit (personally, I expect saving
someone's life obliges them to send me cash), but cynics like
me miss the point. Like the constant trolling for sex, it's a cry of
loneliness that epitomizes our born-alone, die-alone existence, and
shouldn't be scorned any more than a newborn's cry. When Victor makes
his inevitable play for the cute new doctor at his mother's hospital
(Kelly MacDonald), she instantly diagnoses the root of his existential
desperation, then asks "Now sleeping with me isn't going to make
that better, is it?" "Only one way to find out," he replies,
more charming that ever for being pegged. (Spoiler alert—he gets
the doctor.)
Along with his role as Chuck Barris
in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and Charley Ford in The
Assassination of Jesse James, Victor is another portrait in Sam
Rockwell's growing gallery of intriguing losers. Casting Anjelica Huston
as his grafter of a mother saved Cregg a dozen pages of exposition by
itself—just looking at her, we are convinced any son of hers would
spend his blighted life searching for her equal.
It's a guess, but there are probably
a lot of people who are getting tired of the Judd Apatow apologia for
male sexuality, which purchases the right to be raunchy by imagining
it's ultimately rooted in devotion to your guy pals. Sure thing, Judd:
next time I get a lap-dance, I'll check if thoughts of my high school
D&D partners ever enter my head. Palahniuk and Cregg make no such
excuses, never gild the commode, and deserve credit for that. Victor,
meanwhile, would probably use Apatow's lame conceit to frame a proposition,
as in "Sleep with me, beautiful, so I can get in touch with my
love for my buddies." It probably wouldn't work—but there's
only one way to find out.
©2008 Nicholas Nicastro
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