Andrew Durbin - Mature Themes

I went to my friend’s house to watch a movie while her father was away on business in China. In her BBM to me she had proposed that we watch “something funny like … Clueless .” She made popcorn and whiskey sours in her dad’s kitchen while I stood there watching her, my attention fixed on her hands. I had never seen someone make a drink so elegantly. She dropped ice into the Waterford crystal glasses and the little cubes clinked and flashed in the kitchen’s light like big diamonds. She grabbed me by the arm and took me to her bedroom, where we drank the whiskey sours, took off our clothes, and made out while watching Clueless , visionary film that produced the frenetic self I embody today, adrift in the dreamier American auroras of endless summer. When the movie finished it started again and we watched the sky change. Pollution in the city produces the best sunsets. Tendency in the subject, motivated by spleen, to hate the urban conditions produced by alienation economic and social forces means nothing. I think I just love girls. She jerked me off and I came everywhere. Totalizing systems of thought. “As if,” Cher says in the film a total of four times to vent contemporary spleen against those who misunderstand her. Get rich. Live life to the fullest. Destroy the world.

Later that night my friend said to me, “What do you think, is Cher an exemplary figure of first world mobility and the central conflict of the film is the sudden social intervention against her primary motivating force that she must ‘win back’ through alternative means, that is, as an automobilist whose privilege to a car is revoked and whose life is unshackled to the banality of financial concern of any kind, lack of car equals a death that can only be stopped via some hierarchy-splitting behavior like sleeping with your brother? Or is the film, like, an allegory for the failures of US ecological policy? That whole thing about the Clean Air Act and Wallace Shawn. Something totally dumb like that.” She took a sip of her (second) whiskey sour and put her underwear and bra back on. She sat cross-legged across from me and smiled. I remained still and naked, thinking. “Also you look like the Buddha,” she said.

“Paul Rudd plays her stepbrother… and I don’t know what that means. Are you, like, calling me fat?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “I’m saying you look like the Buddha. Smart, you know.”

I slipped into my form-fitting Calvin Klein briefs. The tight fabric felt good against my cock and made me hard again. She noticed my dick as it grew against my thigh and began to play with it through my underwear, laughing as I squirmed a little. I pushed her hand away.

“I don’t think Clueless is an allegory for the Clinton Administration, with its various failures to respond to the emergent ecological crisis,” I said. “Or any administration for that matter. Rather, I think that Cher is a flâneuse whose primary objective is to be carried through urban space without having to engage it herself. Like, no maps, just the directional privilege of wealth in which events and places simply materialize as though they were designed exclusively for her. Antiflâneuse, really. Like Baudelaire, who walked around but depended on his mother for financial support (like so many male geniuses of the nineteenth century) but updated for a culture on the cusp of GPS. Cher is perfect for LA’s virtually unknowable supersprawl. Like, why bother? The central conflict of the film is not immobility, which, as you say, can only be rectified by some outrageous act against the traditional hierarchy. It is the fact that she does not want to go where she is going if she has to know how to get there. That was her original violation: driving around omnidirectionally without any attention to the regulating restrictions that give form to driving around in the first place. Stop signs, speed limits. Sure, she’s only fifteen, about to turn sixteen, but not driving changes her position in the world such that she has to know how to get somewhere. Not driving allows her to give directions, to be picked up, to be taken somewhere. It’s executive, easier — a non-problem. Sex with her stepbrother only paves over the problem of her position by eliding hers with his such that the unity of their relationship erases the issue that brought them together in the first place. Chauffeur becomes lover: all becomes one. Being a pop film, of course the act is watered down in that she sleeps with her cute but dirty stepbrother, Paul Rudd, instead of a blood relative, which would have been so much more interesting. But Baudelaire didn’t sleep with his mother either, I guess.”

“Um, I didn’t need you to lecture me,” she said.

“Urgh, I wasn’t,” I said.

I woke up late the next day in my friend’s bed, but she was gone. It was the first day of spring break and she had gone ahead to the beach without me. She left a sticky note on the lampshade next to the bed: “Went to beach. Come!” Clueless was still playing on the TV. Cher was in class with the famous playwright Wallace Shawn. In my friend’s soft pillows, I thought about Wallace Shawn and Deborah Eisenberg having breakfast together in Manhattan, saying things like, “Don’t you think The Times made a serious error in its review of Zero Dark Thirty ?” Wallace Shawn nods his head and sips his Nespresso. “I do,” he says. On the TV Cher said, “Then I promised Miss Giest I’d start a letter-writing campaign to my congressman about violations of the Clean Air Act. But Mr. Hall”—Wallace Shawn—“was totally rigid. He said my debates were unresearched, unstructured, and unconvincing. As if! I felt impotent and out of control, which I really hate. I needed to find a place where I could gather my thoughts and regain my strength.”

there are ghosts in Paris at the Place de La Concorde

where Baudelaire still wanders for cash

you can’t find them in the obelisk that encodes their presence there

in his poem “Spleen” Baudelaire says the sky is like a lid

that covers the spirit. I imagine Tupperware for the soul

unthinkable to Cher but not to the Home Shopping Network

ur-web of unlimited purchasing power

revved in an engine of love

to perfect for you a home

the pleasure of homemaking is so absolute

if not force in the network in the first place as is the assumption

of both a soul and its container. Above me, the sky is the color

of the Home Shopping Network. In Clueless it’s the same

except it’s also a blue that sweeps toward the ocean in undulation

of wealth’s confidence that it will go on forever

in the lush Hills Clueless foregrounds

in “Spleen,” the speaker is most disturbed to find any attempt

to regain strength is necessarily thwarted by the endless natural

phenomena that surround him. Save the world and nevertheless

it will skinny-dip in a malaise as white as midnight in Dostoevsky

everything is habitual and the soul denatures along these lines to find

the earth and its pollutants describe a transformation

unstoppably beautiful, like, the world is gorgeous

and I am gorgeous and you are gorgeous, even in the inky dark

even on the CalTrain, rising off the horizon

surrounding us to form, as Baudelaire writes, “un chochet humide,”

or as Cher might say: a locker room of gross boys

the fact still remains that the sky is boundless and rumbling

toward us to unchain the light hiding below it, where light

like massive beach balls

comes tumbling down to get MTV’s spring break coverage started

we can fully expect it will wreck us. But to return