TheFader

I saw Vicky Christina Barcelona and read about it after. Everyone talked about Penelope Cruz, Rebecca Hall, Javier Bardem and Scarlett Johnanson. Nobody mentioned Chris Messina, who played Doug. When the narrator says “Doug” it makes him sound like a total herb, which he is. There is a scene of him coming up an escalator wearing baggy Dockers and a tucked-in buttondown he bought at the boring loser dweeb store. He’s Vicky’s businessman fiancé who wants to move to Bedford Hills and work in business and talk about how to completely wire your house for maximum audio/visual efficiency. Everyone else in the movie talks about loving each other enough that they want to stab/shoot each other and not knowing what you want in life pulling you primally towards impermanent but wild joy. They all have a dyspeptic pleasure in the icky flow of steadiness and flustering mental upheaval. It’s exciting, their lives, but also taxing and tiring. Certainly all of them are cooler and sexier than Doug, but they are all less content. I have no interest in being Doug (or, really, any of the characters in the film. Maybe a less lonely version of Javier Bardem’s leathery-tan poet father), and Doug has no interest in being any of them. And while that same self-content may have been true of Bardem and Cruz’s characters, they were also crazy. Vicky and Christina are simply corny in their striving. Not that it is not genuine or strained, but they are so constantly uncomfortable that it can scratch away any progress at our perception of their budding happiness. Doug has no qualms about his lack of flight of fancy and is content with his mild crescendos of excitement. He, like all of them, is wowed by Spain, simply less eloquent about it. He dresses awfully but with a certain pride, he is a member of a pack the same way all the other actors wear linen pants. There is something to be admired about a person open to otherness but content with regularity.

Dirty Projectors, and specifically Dave Longstreth, the group’s core, was okay with having a drawing of a fat naked hairy man on the cover of its 2003 album The Glad Fact (the woman who was going to hold the record and wear my glasses, however, was not). And, like Bardem and Cruz in the film (who are seemingly terrible painters who enjoy credit due to their local reputations as flailingly passionate lovers. Not that Dirty Projectors are horrible, but with the same ecstatic spirit), Longstreth goes for complete broke. Glad Fact’s opener and title track begins with muddy organ and grimier drums, something that sound like they could be sampled for a rap record. This happens for two minutes straight until Longstreth howls like a soft bird and then strums his guitar and sings “Well, here I go again,” even though he is just beginning. Half a record later, emerged from gloomy sound and foggy songs, is “Naked We Made It,” a crystalline ode to having sex with someone specific but no one in particular. It’s a tender song, minus the bear panting, with its incessant refrain of “I loved it,” self-satisfied and fairly so. There is no deception here or (inter-)personal qualms. In a scene in Vicky Christina Barcelona, Doug and Vicky are in bed after sex. He looks happy. He gives her a compliment, which she accepts awkwardly, because he gave it awkwardly. But he didn’t mean to. Because he couldn’t mean to. That would take too much difficult self-reflection and he’s only looking powerfully, if narrowly, forward.