Sometimes, ‘creepy’ is good

The question was fair enough: Do you think that your not finding “School for Scoundrels” funny (which I didn’t) is merely a difference between what your generation thinks is funny and what today’s college-age moviegoers might find funny?

I’ve paraphrased the question, of course. But the gist is correct. And as I say, it’s a fair question.

How can I answer that? I graduated from high school in 1965 . There is no way that I can understand the life pressures that today’s 20-somethings face anymore than they can understand what wakes me up at 3 in the morning.

But, look, comedy is comedy. And temperament is temperament. I told the young guy (who was in a Gonzaga University class taught by Bud Hazel ) that I had no idea – but that I doubted so. After all, I did like the first “Jackass” and still can’t wait to see the second.

So I may be far older than he and his classmates, but am I any more mature?

What surprised me more was the reaction that one of the students had toward the film “The Hours,” Stephen Daldry’s adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s novel (screenplay by David Hare) – the film that Prof. Hazel was screening for this particular class on rhetorical criticism.

If you’ll recall, “The Hours” tells three stories at once, focusing on a different woman character in each: Nicole Kidman as the real-life writer Virginia Woolf , Julianne Moore as a character named Laura Brown and Meryl Streep as a character named Clarissa Vaughan.

Professor Hazel screened about 20 minutes of the film, and when he turned the lights back on I asked the students what they thought. Several mentioned the music, how it seemed to underscore the dark feelings that lay just below the movie’s surface.

One young woman said that the movie felt “creepy.”

Fair enough. But that’s not enough. The whole point of looking at art critically is to figure out why you react the way you do. Is it because of the subject material (the movie has to do with repression, oppression and the blatant sexism forced on women at various times because of cultural conventions)? Is it by intent? Is it merely accidental and your way of recognizing crap when you see it?

To me, that sequence of “The Hours” is superbly rendered. Not just the direction, which seems flawless, but also the way the screenplay flows from one scene, one emotion to the next and how each of the actresses – including Toni Collette in one riveting sequence – is able to capture the barely-able-to-fend-off-insanity feeling that Cunningham/Hare/Daldry is trying to convey.

The movie feels “creepy”? Of course, it does. Each of the women is trapped somehow – by a loveless relationship, by her inability to express her true self, by the insistence of those around her that she conform to a manner of behavior that has more to do with expectation than with any real interior emotion, or motivation, of her own. The film is SUPPOSED to make you uncomfortable.

That is the artistic intent. Just ask yourself: If you had no idea what love is … or, better yet, if you suspected that your definition of love was something that was not only looked down upon but was going to forever be denied you, how would you feel? Like as not you’d act like any of these three women – one of whom commits suicide (in real life, as Woolf did, though not before creating some of the world’s great literature).

It would most likely feel “creepy.”

For me to see that and a 20-something college student of today not to, might be a question of age. I do come from a generation that, in the circles I ran in at least, demanded that film move us, provoke us, in some cases infuriate us. And many of the filmmakers who came out of the 1950s and ’60s, and especially those American directors of the ’70s , certainly did.

More likely, though, it’s less a question of age than it is of a difference in what we expect of art. And, in the end, it involves how we judge that art in terms of quality.

“The Hours,” at times, does feel “creepy.” It’s supposed to. There are times that real life feels that way, too. The good artist helps explain why that it.

You just just have to pay attention to hear what’s being said.