I'm tagging this "comedy," but Don Jon isn't exactly that; it's a little bit of a rom-com about a man who meets a woman who he thinks he loves, and then meets a woman who he can really fall in love with. If you wanted to, you could break it down along to pretty traditional romance tropes, with maybe a gender swap: there's the guy with the flaw, the person who looks perfect for him, and the person who actually is perfect for him though she has something of a flaw. Take Pride and Prejudice: Elizabeth Bennett (flawed), Wickham (secretly terrible), and Mr. Darcy (secretly wonderful once his main flaw is overcome).
(Note: Pride and Prejudice is amazing and wonderful as a romance because Darcy really is flawed. The book doesn't tell Elizabeth that she needs to get over his problem and accept him for who he is. The book says, Sure, Elizabeth is flawed and needs to get her shit together, but so is Darcy. One of the main problems of 1980s romance books--according to Janice Radway's Reading the Romance--is that these books let the guy off the hook: either the woman needs to just love him for his flaws or has to be gaslighted into accepting that she was wrong about his flaws in the first place. "He's not really a jerk" or "Get over it--this jerk is pretty good." Pride and Prejudice says screw that: everyone is flawed and people should try to be better, not force people to love them.)
Don Jon plays with this format by swapping genders: Jon is the main character looking for love (even though he doesn't know it); he meets Barbara, who seems perfect and also makes Jon work for her attention and affection; and eventually he meets an older woman named Esther who seems to not fit in with his life--they first meet with her sobbing uncontrollably and then move on to her catching him watching something on his phone--but who turns out to be just what Jon needs.
That's the first big change this story makes to the rom-com formula. The second is Jon's flaw: he's addicted to pornography. Which you're not going to see in most Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan rom-coms. The movie is pretty awkward to watch because of that explicit sexual content--you may not want to watch this movie with your parents or kids. (On the other hand, you could use this as an example of how we're still much more prudish about sex than we are about violence. On the other other hand--god, what sex we could have with three hand!--the film does take some jabs at the use of sex all over to sell things.)
So Jon is addicted to pornography, even though he meets the "perfect" woman (Barbara, played by Scarlett Johansson). But eventually he learns, through Esther, that porn is a way to ignore the other person and that what he's really missing is that emotional connection. If you wanted to write a paper on it, you could say that she's the one to teach him that since her problem is that she's got too much emotional connection--with her dead husband and child.
But there's two other changes that Don Jon makes to the rom-com formula that makes it feel a little fresh and interesting. The first (well, third, if you're counting) is that the movie avoid love triangles, thank god. Jon and Barbara break up because Barbara discovers that he was lying to her about watching porn. By the time he gets together with Esther, he's a free agent. (The film also doesn't exactly let him off for this lie to Barbara: part of his redemption in the end is his apology to her, not for watching porn, but for lying to her about it.)
And the second/fourth change that Don Jon makes is that it ties Barbara's secret flaw (controlling, manipulative) to her own interest-verging-on-addiction to romantic comedies. It's not a big part of the movie and it's not exactly subtle, since Barbara references romantic comedies as the model of her life; but it feels like a nice commentary on the multiple forms of one-sidedness that can form in relationships.
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