“No offense, Professor Tripp, but you look kinda crappy.”
Since the conception of this series, I had planned to write about In The Mood For Love for my 2000 installment. What better movie to usher in the summer than a masterpiece, one where everything went right: costumes, casting, music, locations, lighting, everything. And I’d talk about how we were transitioning out of the COVID quarantine now that everyone was vaccinated, and how we’d be moving on with our lives. As in In The Mood For Love, though, life rarely goes as one hopes, and we’re still waiting on appeals to decency and logic to sway people who operate entirely on appeals to emotion.
You wanna know a good movie that is all about life zigging when you wanted it to zag, about how a glimmer of promise can make a person fat and complacent? Further, do you wanna know a movie about how a dude named Grady Tripp can have a long-term affair with a great lady, a steady job in a field where there are no longer steady jobs, a consistently good stash of weed, and a big ol’ house in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh?
(There is, of course, the small matter of his prized student shooting a dog and stealing a coat, and Tripp driving around with said dead dog in his trunk… this likely played a lot better in the novel than on the screen.)
I’m talkin’ Wonder Boys.
In 2000, the year this movie released, I skipped out on a computer programming scholarship to pursue a degree in journalism. Then I worked for a regional newspaper but got shitcanned. Then I changed my major to English, then I dropped out of college when it became apparent that balancing two jobs and full-time classes meant that something had to give (and it couldn’t be the things that, combined, barely paid the rent). Then I got back into college and thought about journalism again until I realized that I don’t like interviewing people. Then I worked at the university newspaper and realized that I really don’t like interviewing people, but I don’t hate editing and layout. Then I dropped out of college again because the newspaper job didn’t pay the rent. Then I moved to a new state and started at a new college. Then I transferred to another college and finished an English degree. Then I moved to a new city and worked in publishing for a decade. Then I decided that I should go to yet another college, maybe take a real swing at that whole computer programming thing.
There was also a lot of fun and heartache in between the lines.
But the thing is, no one cares about a writer’s life when they are alive (unless their writing is inseparable from their life). People want the next story, the next essay, the next great American novel. Wonder Boys is built upon that premise: Tripp wrote an incredible novel called The Arsonist’s Daughter, got really famous off of it, got a cushy teaching job… then he got complacent for about a decade. The movie seems to exist in that held breath, that moment when one pulls deep on a joint but before one exhales. And Tripp just never exhaled. His follow-up manuscript is 2,000 pages and counting, with no end in sight. His literary agent is desperate for good news, but Tripp blows him off. His marriage fell apart. He won’t commit to his lover, even though he claims that he wants her to leave her husband (his dean) and she just revealed that she is pregnant. He exists in a zone where he can’t make a decision on anything. The whole city is seemingly waiting for him to exhale.
A different movie might take this idea and spin off in a much different direction. To someone who has experienced the stress of financial insecurity, the idea of a safe job and a nice house seem very appealing. Tripp put in the work on his first book and now he is reaping the rewards. But Wonder Boys sees Tripp’s life as stagnancy, his indecision as a brick weighing down his chance at greatness. I think the ways that the movie treats this idea are novel (outside of the very-troubled dog shooter and compulsive liar James, played by Tobey Maguire). Further, Michael Douglas is just a goddamned marvel; this might be his most anti-Michael Douglas role that he’s ever played. An earlier Michael Douglas character would have preyed upon the advances of the young coed Hannah (Katie Holmes) who rents a room in his house, or he would have coopted James’ stories as his own. But Tripp, despite being frozen with indecision, is mostly a decent guy.
I can’t shake the movie, though. Wonder Boys has always resonated with me above most of the other five billion stories about writers. Fear of success, fear of legacy, fear of lost legacy, fear of being boring, fear of being gifted and pissing it away, fear of making a decision… it me. I don’t claim to be much of a writer, but I am blighted with self-reflection, I write compulsively, and my favorite topic is myself (e.g., see every prior entry in this 40-part series). OK, writing that out felt gross. OK, that was a lie.
Most of what I have written has already been lost to time. I wrapped up my movie critic career just as newspapers were thinking about one day digitizing their archives, and everything that I’ve written since then has been a painful reminder that one should always save copies of one’s writing because once a publisher or website goes under, you are screwed. I also wrote a novel that is very bad and was rightfully rejected fiftyish times by literary agents, its main novelty being that it was a detective novel narrated in the present tense. There are also fragments of screenplays and short stories peppered across hard drives and cloud storage. And the music… other than a few songs that I am proud of, everything else that I’ve found scribbled in notebooks has been sub-Dylan, sub-Leonard Cohen navel-gazing. So I don’t have illusions that I’m in the same league as Tripp is in Wonder Boys. But even though the movie released when I was a freshman in college, and thus when I should have identified with James of infinite youth and potential, I saw myself in Tripp, just ready to be over it despite there not really being an it to be over at that point.
Now I am 39 and get to say that I’m over working in publishing, and I guess I mean it? Being back in school at least lets me punt that decision to next summer at the earliest. Or maybe we can wait to decide until the fall. Why rush things?
Other 2000 candidates: Traffic; Gladiator; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; The Beach; Drowning Mona; High Fidelity; The Virgin Suicides; Snatch
I turn 40 in December. To commemorate the milestone, I’m writing 40 short biographical essays pertaining to a movie per year of my life.