I’m watching an incredibly irritating movie. One of those movies you can watch while folding laundry — five loads of it. It’s called Gone and the entire plot so far hinges on whether one character reveals to the girlfriend of another character that the boyfriend had a one-night stand before meeting his girlfriend on holiday in Australia. That’s the plot. No, really.
It’s billed as a thriller because we’re supposed to be thrilled that young people — already predisposed to sleeping around — magically have the moral queasiness of conservatives three times their age. It’s a disgusting display of moral immaturity, and it’s been infecting Hollywood movies for as long as I can remember. It’s never been stronger than in the Naughts, however, and I wonder when we’ll get back our sense of sex as fun, void of guilt, the sort of thing normal people do with each other that doesn’t turn into wafer-thin fodder for silly little thrillers.
If you were a 25-year-old straight guy and you arrived in a new country, went out to a club, got drunk, and slept with a really pretty girl, tell me — please — how you could squeeze 90 minutes of drama out of the possibility that your girlfriend might find out that you had a good root? Why is that entertainment? What is so insecure and petty-minded about the filmmakers that they thought this would “thrill?”
It’s this sort of normative, traditional, conservative bullshit that keeps a useless movie like Gone from simply evaporating before the end of the first reel.
A character just said — no kidding — “I don’t think I know who you are, anymore.” Enough. I’d rather watch Fatal Attraction, a movie that knows how to milk drama from the otherwise completely boring conceit of infidelity.