Simple Men

The trouble and desire of Generation X

I am not yet done with elegies for GenX, nor are such elegies done with me. The sad early death of Matthew Perry, aka Chandler Bing, at the age of 54 (one year older than me), has stirred up another momentary ripple in our algorithmic culture. A couple nights ago I saw a film I haven’t watched in thirty-one years and it stirred up something in me that resonates sharply with Justin Ruiu-Smith’s essay, half elegy and half critique. Simple Men is not my favorite Hal Hartley film—that’s Trust—yet watching it again stirred up in me an inchoate emotion, half nostalgia and half protest, that I need to figure out.

I first saw the movie at the Angelika Film Center in New York the month of its release, not too long after my birthday. I had just turned 22. That’s as good a moment as any from which to date my brief involvement with the American independent film scene that flourished in the early 90s, metastasized into the Oscar-bait (and sexual assault) machine that was Miramax, and dissolved sometime just before or just after 9/11. In 1992 I thought I might try to make a career for myself in film, though the path to take was hazy. I had taken a six-week filmmaking course at NYU in 1990, demonstrating no discernible talent in the black-and-white silent 16mm shorts that I and my classmates shot and edited (strips of celluloid! Steenbecks!) and screened for each other. I had a famous classmate, just then emerging as an actor—Julie Delpy was very beautiful and very French and she made beautiful, very French-seeming dreamlike indelible movies that ought to have signaled to the rest of us that as out of our element as the hapless Donnie in The Big Lebowski. No wonder, since Wikipedia tells me she’d been involved with cinema since she was eight, and had already worked with Leos Carax and Jean-Luc Godard. One surreal afternoon I lit Julie’s cigarette for her (the only one-on-one interaction I can recall) and strolled down to the Film Forum to watch her play a committed young Nazi, a would-be mother for the Fatherland, in Agnieszka Holland’s film Europa Europa. In one of her student films I remember the Bunuel-like image of a human figure—probably hers—glimpsed behind a rippling white sheet, somehow passing into or through it. The rest of us stumbled along in a highly literal fashion, confounded by the requirement to make silent films, since we all wanted to write talky little movies in the spirit of sex, lies, and videotape.

That fall I had an internship at a little film company called Good Machine, helmed by a couple of bespectacled academics named Ted Hope and James Schamus, who have since gone on to remarkable careers as producers. Back then they worked out of a tiny, cluttered office in an industrial building in lower Manhattan. Once a week I’d take the Metro North down from Vassar to work there, reading scripts off the slush pile and running errands and doing a little PA work here and there. By the time I was done it would be too late to catch the train home; my cousin Harold, who was a psychotherapist, let me crash in his office . After a restless night tossing and turning on the therapist’s couch, I’d find myself a buttered roll and a coffee and make my bleary way back to Grand Central to catch the train to Poughkeepsie.

I didn’t know then that I was at the epicenter of a cultural moment that would flare as brightly as it was brief. Certainly I could have no notion of the cumulative impact of the filmmakers that Good Machine worked with—Ang Lee, Todd Haynes, Todd Solondz, Nicole Holofcener, and Hal Hartley among them. The work itself was office work for the most part and not particularly interesting, though I remember getting to write a reader’s report on a screenplay adaption of Scott Bradfield’s cult novel The History of Luminous Motion (I liked it). The closest I got to actual filmmaking was a night spent babysitting the apartment being used as a set for a two-hander called What Happened Was, directed by and starring Tom Noonan and Karen Sillas, the latter a one-time darling of the indie scene for whom I nursed a crush. From my limited perspective, the experience was disillusioning: it seemed like Ted and James spent all their time on the phone trying to raise money, the office was chilly and half-abandoned feeling, and the times I got to glimpse or interact with the directors, let alone movie stars, I could count on one hand. (I did meet Ang Lee briefly; a gangly youngish guy with a self-effacing smile. I didn’t get to meet Karen Sillas but I got to watch her and Tom Noonan on set a little bit.) I wasn’t prepared for the slow pace, or the intensively collaborative nature of filmmaking; I had swallowed a bit too gullibly the auteur theory I’d been taught in my film history classes. The hell with sitting around gray gloomy offices, or standing around with a walkie talkie, I said to myself. I’m a writer, damnit! So I went back to school and graduated (eventually) and moved to New Orleans and tried to write a novel before turning to poetry, and the rest of my life took shape from there.

“Don’t move.” These are the first words spoken in Simple Men, spoken in blackout. The first thing we see is Bill (Robert Burke) holding a gun on a blindfolded security guard while his accomplices, one of whom is his girlfriend, rob a computer warehouse. Bill notices the Virgin Mary medallion worn by the guard: “She’s pretty, huh? Can I have it?” The guard nods and Bill takes off the medallion and slips it around his own neck. “Be good to her, and she’ll be good to you,” the guard instructs. A moment later, Bill is betrayed by his accomplices, who run off with nearly all the loot, leaving him a wanted man with three thousand dollars in his pocket and the image of the Mother of God around his neck. He’ll spend the rest of the movie on the run. But toward what?

Simple Men was a Good Machine production (Ted Hope had worked with Hal Hartley from his very first feature, The Unbelievable Truth). I was mesmerized by its stylized aesthetic, the stillness of its camera, the vivid color palette, and the hardboiled, pseudo-philosophical dialogue mouthed by Hartley’s stable of handsome deadpan actors. Hartley’s work often riffs on genre—Simple Men starts off as a heist, turns into a road movie, and then shifts into low-key melodrama and romance. Wearing his Nouvelle Vague influences on his sleeve, with especially hefty doses of Godard and Rohmer, today Hartley reads as a predecessor of filmmaker-stylists like Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Sophia Coppola. There’s something quintessentially GenX about the style of his movies—the visual surface, like the characters themselves, is cooled to a degree that slows without suppressing passion. Hartley’s films never quite broke out to define the era in the manner of Kevin Smith, Richard Linklater, or Cameron Crowe, but if anything, that failure makes them that much more GenX. Hartley, it can be fairly said, never sold out. But what does or could selling out mean now, today?

The premise of Simple Men is simple. Heartbroken Bill and his introspective brother Dennis (Bill Sage) go on a quest to find their missing father, a “radical shortstop” who’s been on the run since allegedly tossing a bomb into the Pentagon in 1968. The trail goes cold on rural Long Island, where the brothers, become involved with two women. Kate (my crush Karen Sillas) is a cafe owner who wants to become a tree farmer; she lives in fear because her “violent, psychotic” ex-husband has just been released from prison. Hanging around the cafe is her friend Elina (Elina Löwensohn), who with her unblinking gaze, black bangs, and black leather jacket gives off powerful Godard-heroine vibes. Elina is an epileptic who turns out to be the much younger girlfriend of McCabe senior (John MacKay, who also played the violent, deadpan father in Trust). Hartley stalwart and alter ego Martin Donovan plays a fisherman who carries a torch for Kate; he’s the one who kicks off the film’s most iconic sequence, when all the characters dance to Sonic Youth’s “Kool Thing”:

It is often said that 9/11 killed irony. Irony had shielded the gaping wounds in my generation’s heart, living in the shadow of the revolutionary values our Boomer parents had commodified and betrayed. For a brief moment, the culture industry did its damndest to pander to us with products like Friends and Reality Bites and Smashing Pumpkins and Christ help us Dave Matthews. The 21st century swept us under the tide of Millennials, and we suffer now the grisly distinction of being the most politically conservative generation. I guess quite a few of us indulged in Reagan’s brand of Kool-Aid individualism and imperial apologetics. We are, it seems, a counter-revolutionary generation, or at least a skeptical one. I am flummoxed by the binary thinking of so many younger people, how quick they are to take sides, how much they lack the impulse to interrogate the side-taking impulse. On the other hand, a taste for irony has not prevented GenX from being labeled the Trumpiest Generation. How the hell did that happen? Is that a product of our queasy attachment to the creature comforts our parents arranged for us, even as the economic basis for those comforts has been laid bare as extractive and exploitative? Whatever, man.

The “Kool Thing” dance sequence encapsulates the wounded desire that I and so many other GenXers once felt and maybe still feel. We could not just cut loose and give ourselves over to music with the expectation that culture alone would liberate us, as the Boomer New Left did. There’s a rigidity to our movements, a duality, captured by the suspicious glance Martin the fisherman (a proto-Trumper if ever there was one) aims at Bill and Kate in the foreground, as desire pulls them together. Some of us, like Elina, might have been politically committed, who starts off the dance with arm motions reminiscent of the worker’s upthrust fist or the march of history that had just ended. The song’s lyrics betray my generation’s real attitude in the face of vulnerability and commitment: I don’t wanna. I don’t think so. When Kim Gordon drawls Are you gonna liberate us girls from white male corporate oppression while Chuck D chuckles in the background, we understand that the answer is gonna be No. The song is a feminist anthem, but it’s an ironized feminism. Not ironic—the desire for liberation is sincere! It’s ironized, because the song understands, perhaps better than the film (which includes a rather silly sub-Tarantinoesque discussion of Madonna and whether her exploitation of her own sexuality is feminist), that art manifests desire, but capitalism commodifies it and turns it into a product.

So understood, the “Kool Thing” dance is refigured as The Dance of Not Selling Out. But that’s not the same thing as working for revolution, culturally or politically. The big tell comes in two scenes from late in the film, when Dennis finally confronts his fugitive father. He asks his dad if he’s guilty of the crime of which he’s been accused: “I need to know if my father’s a murderer.” His father denies it. “So you’ve been on the run my whole life for nothing?” His father shrugs. “I’m good at it.” A bit later, we see the father haranguing his pitiful crew—cynical Martin, bewildered Dennis, and rapturous Elina—with anarchist slogans taken from a book by Errico Malatesta. I can think of no better summary of the dilemma so ably described in “My Generation.” Without a cultural critical mass of our own, GenX faces a Hobson’s choice between fidelity to the revolutionary values of our parents’ generation—values much of that generation cheerfully betrayed—or else surrendering to the self-branding algorithmic virality of capitalist realism that dominates Millennial culture and is doing God knows what to GenZ.

Dennis, the younger, gentler, more introspective brother, is unmoored by his confrontation with his father, a hollow man who fails in every way to satisfy Dennis’ self-abnegating desire for a Big Other. Bill, the criminal, chooses the self-destructive but desire-preserving path of true romance. Having been betrayed by his girlfriend, Bill develops a misogynistic scheme to fuck and forget the next woman he meets, but immediately abandons it on meeting Kate, who wears her vulnerability as a kind of armor. Like a knight errant, he tries to protect her from her ex-husband, only to discover that he’s just another hapless sad sack, who’s only come back home to reclaim his own battered armor, a leather jacket. Finally Bill too confronts his father, wordlessly taking him in and then turning his back; unlike Dennis, he sees all too clearly that there’s nothing there. He returns to Kate, even as the cops surround him, and lays his head on her breast: he has chosen not the Big Other, but the Mother. “Don’t move,” says one of the cops. The movie ends.

Bill McCabe senior went on the run for a political crime he didn’t actually commit. Bill McCabe junior goes on the run for an economic crime that he did commit, but was betrayed in the act of committing. “Don’t move.” There was nowhere for Generation X to go, no Big Other to fight or fight for. I don’t want to be a brand, I don’t want to go viral, I don’t want to be anyone’s product, not even my own. Don’t move. Is paralysis the only possibility?

A minor character early in the film by the name of Ned Rifle (one of Hartley’s own pseudonyms, and the title character of the last film in the Henry Fool trilogy, about which more maybe later) tries to join Bill on his—as Ned sees it—romantic quest. Bill tells him there’s no such thing as adventure or romance—there’s only trouble and desire. (This is just like Matthew’s reduction of love into the formula trust + respect + admiration in Trust). Ned collapses physically and psychically under the weight of this truth, repeating the phrase over and over and Bill and Dennis motorcycle their way out of town. At least they have each other. At least they have, for as long as they remain troubled into motion, their desire.