Me, You, and Our Heroes

July 3, 2007

The film Me, You, and Dupree is obviously not standard Old Roads material.. but allow me an extended comment. Matt Dillon plays a guy who gets married and then gets promoted at the real estate development company of his father in law. He has an idea for an eco-friendly small community.. named "The Oaks at Monte Vista" (or something like that). His father-in-law (played by Michael Douglas) claims to like the idea, but then transforms it into a mega-development. The above scene shows Matt Dillon reacting violently to the model of the proposed project. He is angry at seeing a faceless housing development, which is nothing like the one he had proposed.

The father-in-law is the bad guy of the story.. greedily maximizing the development and imposing a dull geometric order onto it. This could simply be an example of Hollywood imposing a liberal order onto the film.. but I think it reflects something deeper than that: as a culture we actually do dislike the guy who is out solely for profit and designs faceless places. The contradiction is that any trip though the suburbs of our large cities reveals faceless housing developments that are only slightly less profit-hungry and faceless than the one Matt Dillon reacts against in the film.

To me the mystery is why we can't recognize ourselves in films like this. Somehow "we" are the ones who would rather live in an eco-friendly small community.. not the ones who buy into the faceless development.

A few years back I thought something similar when I saw The Incredibles.

In this case a family of superheroes with natural talents goes up against a jealous young upstart who is inferior because he has no natural talents—he gets everything from his own technological artifice. The valorizing of what is "natural" over what is derived from technology has a long pedigree in American film.. and without thinking we root for the naturals (i.e. the "incredibles"). But if there has ever been a civilization that relies on technology.. it is us. So why can't we see ourselves in the bad guy for The Incredibles? There is a certain willful blindness at work..