voxpoptart's Full Review: How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
When I hit “Recommended: Yes” on a movie – as I’m doing for How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days – I am saying two things are true. One, I enjoyed the movie (and/or was fascinated, but for Lose a Guy we can stick to “enjoyed”). The second is that I’m morally and intellectually comfortable with liking the movie.
The relevance of the first seems obvious, until you look at it. That I had fun watching Lose a Guy has, honestly, no effect on whether you will, any more than my love for my wife Cindy should make you leave your partner and try to win Cindy’s hand. (Please don’t.) The relevance of the second – the moral/intellectual part – is far less obvious to a lot of people, maybe including you. “Movies are just entertainment!”, scream (for example) hundreds of readers in Slate’s “the Fray” to the critics conducting its year-end movie discussion. “Don’t force them to be more!” The Fraysters don’t seem bright, but they do seem passionate. What do values and mind have to do with entertainment?
I won’t convince a skeptic of perhaps my truest answer: that thinking about movie messages is, itself, fun. Instead I’ll ask: why would I need a manipulative, dishonest, robotically molded, life-denying film? The world is full of movies that are lots of fun _and_ value creation over destruction, frolicking over frowning, love over dismissal, internal logic over the braindrizzles of desperate screenwriters, and human complication over stereotypes from central casting. I can see the Muppet Movie and a Bug’s Life and Spirited Away. I can see (and will someday defend) Wayne’s World and Revenge of the Nerds and Mystery Men. I can rent all six DVDs of the sitcom Sports Night or the ingeniously layered heresies of the Family Guy. I can dance ineptly to music, or run to the beach and back, or cook for friends, or read Epinions.
I have more entertainment than I need. I don’t need to be entertained by a movie that wants me to root for the betrayal of a nice man, in favor of a cute-but-ordinary newcomer (Sleepless in Seattle). I don’t want to be tricked into believing in past lives so that a bad 1947 brutal murder can be repaid with a happy, satisfying 1991 brutal murder (Dead Again). I don’t need to root so hard for a random central character that I’m hoping innocent people will be tortured (Thelma and Louise) or murdered (the hidden logic of Minority Report). Any of us with the time and material comfort to be reading Epinions has the time and comfort to have all the fun we need, without sour compromises.
Why did How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days cause me to think this rant? Because I strongly suspect it was meant to be a half-hearted and one-eighth-brained formula pic. It’s fun on merit. But that it’s fairly smart, and mostly honest, is an extraordinary little accident.
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The plot gimmick is a brilliant what-if. You probably know it: the beautiful blonde girl in a new relationship is trying to get the guy to dump her within ten days, proving a point and finishing an article. The guy is determined to win an important bet by making the girl fall in love with him, also within ten days. Wildly improbable, sure, but none of the movie’s dishonesty is here: it _could_ happen, so therefore it could be a good story. An epic battles of wills, like Hepburn versus Grant, or Hitler versus Churchill.
More specifically: Andie Anderson, who converted her M.A. in Journalism into a stint as how-to columnist for (essentially) Cosmopolitan, has gotten sick of researching articles like “How to Talk Cops out of a Traffic Ticket”. Her attempt to branch out – a foreign policy article on “How to Bring Peace to Tadjikistan” – is rejected: women don’t want to bother their fluffy little heads with war and peace, they want to read about makeovers and dating.
Meanwhile, Andie’s best friend is Michelle, who we know is only the best friend because she’s a brunette. Michelle is convinced that she’s only able to screw up all her promising relationships because she’s not as pretty as Andie. Andie, supportive friend, vows to her that she too would ruin her relationships if she did the clingy things Michelle does. When Andie needs an article idea fast, she tells her editor, who draws the headline: “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days”. “Why ten?”, asks Andie. “Five is too short, and we go to press in eleven”, replies the editor. Works for me.
Ben Barry works in advertising, so goal-oriented subterfuge is nothing new for him. He’s used to seducing women and dumping them, which his friends turn into an attack on his talents: maybe he's just unable to make the girl put up with him. The ten-days bet is with his boss: okay, Ben, you want a promotion to a new account, selling diamonds? Prove you can make a woman want _your_ diamond. This woman here: she’s blonde and cute. Go for it.
The banter of Ben and Andie’s first meeting, and their first date, is warm and mildly amusing; I’d quote their funnier lines if I hadn't returned the movie already. Andie’s quick wit and journalistic earnestness, and her interest in sports, make Ben's ten-day challenge seem less like hell than it otherwise would.
Ben has every reason to be surprised when, in the last minute of a Knicks’ playoff game (their second date), she insists that he get up and buy her a Coke right now. When he heroically rushes to the stand and back, leaving fifteen seconds of a very tight game to watch, he has even more reason to be surprised when she crunkles her face and points out that she can’t drink it because it isn’t Diet, and she’s reeeeaaally thirsty, and could he go replace it now? He misses seeing the come-from-behind winning Knicks shot, but Andie’s pretty, and her brief moment of legally blonde Reese Witherspoon-ness is gone. She's back to being Kate Hudson. He doesn’t kill her.
And so it is that, for the next week or so, Andie escalates her demands on Ben’s life: buying them both a non-housetrained poodle, making composite photo projections of their likely children, telling him before Game 5 of the NBA playoffs that “I have tickets! Front row!” and not mentioning that the tickets are to see Celine Dion. Ben has a lot of money at stake, though: that diamond account would be profitable in the short term, and establish him as a major player in the firm. He has friends who would benefit, too. Day ten approaches, his courage steadfast.
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The climax will involve both parties finding out about the bet. That’s a mid-level spoiler, but it’s pre-spoiled because you knew that already, right? Of course you did. It’s a generic and unlikely tool, but How to Lose a Guy’s critics make more important complaints. That most of the complaints are wrong is luck – but it is still the defense case I’ll be making.
Criticism one: Andie’s behavior renders the entire scenario a cowardly PG-13 lie because she doesn’t sleep with him right away. A fair point: it is true (although to me mystifying) that real women, her best friend Michelle included, lose guys faster when they sleep with them. It is equally true, though, that most women don't want to feel like prostitutes. Andie writes articles for pay; she doesn't have sex for pay.
Besides, sex isn’t avoided as a topic. Ben pushes himself away from it at first, because sex on the first date is what guys who aren’t ready to commit do, and he’s pretending to commit. Date five finds Andie ingeniously delaying the issue for days more (fun scene). And, y'know, maybe she won’t spend the entire ten days chasing him away after all.
Criticism two: A related point, that Andie’s behavior with Ben has nothing to teach Michelle. True, she’s quickly inventing guy-losing tactics that no woman trying to keep a guy would be dumb enough to try. But that’s where the battle of wills comes in, not to mention the entertainment. Non-gambling men would’ve been chased away by day three; Ben's determination forces her to be clever.
Criticism three: A bigger point. That Andie would fall for Ben makes sense: he’s handsome, he’s charming, he’s tolerant of her nonsense. Why, Cindy asked me, would Ben fall for Andie? I’m willing to bet the scriptwriter has no good answer.
But I believe it. Experimental psychologists have long ago confirmed the power of “cognitive dissonance”, which I’ll explain shortly. Where it comes from is the fact that you have no special insight into your emotions, and I have no special insight into my emotions: we judge our feelings the way an onlooker would (though with far more data to go by). On a simple level, that means you can smile broadly and make yourself feel happier, or frown and make yourself displeased. If you exercised on a treadmill 45 minutes ago, and you meet a woman and your heart beats rapidly, you’ll assume that the woman is making your heart beat rapidly, and treat her accordingly. If you make a bunch of drawings in your spare time, you’ll assume you like to draw, and keep going; but if someone pays you to make those same drawings, then stops paying you, you’ll probably stop drawing.
“Cognitive dissonance” is what a man feels if he has beliefs about himself, and then he sees himself doing something that doesn’t accord with those beliefs. He can resolve the issue in two ways, of which the rare and difficult one is to change his behavior. The far more common way is to adjust his beliefs.
Ben started out assuming that his kindness to Andie was an act designed to win him career success. But by a week into the dare, she has behaved much, much worse than he’d ever imagined. If he had known what Andie would do to his Knicks games and his pool table, he would never have agreed to the bet. Therefore, he can’t be acting because of the bet. Therefore, he must be falling for her charms.
Another psychological truth is involved, of course. All of us tend to rate pretty women as being smarter, nicer, and more fun than less pretty women. This especially true for a man rating the woman in his apartment who’s thinking up names for his penis.
Criticism four: This one’s the biggest. Why, ask the critics, should we root for a relationship built on deception and false behavior?
I might have an unfair advantage over you, because I watched season three of the Gilmore Girls, back when the show was well-written. I saw the Korean-American Lane’s budding relationship with white-American Dave: a relationship built on the need to evade Lane’s harshly Christian-fundamentalist mother, who doesn’t even know that Lane is a drummer, let alone that she is a drummer in a band with three boys, one of whom is kissing her out of wedlock. Lane has needed to live on lies for years. But as guitarist Dave – won over by her geeky cuteness and her encyclopedic knowledge of indie music – starts to woo her, he is forced to invent a new persona and occupation to deal with Lane’s mom, and dozens of James-Bond-lite schemes to let him and Lane rendezvous. Watch them, and you realize that conspiracy is, like singing together, sexy. Dave’s willingness to work so hard to be with Lane is the romantic bond, and the teamwork behind their schemes is the proof that they belong together.
Okay, so Ben and Andie are lying to each other, not with each other. Their relationship is still a joint creative production, one that gets more creative over time. Most people aren’t qualified for an epic battle of wills: Andie and Ben are perfect together because they care enough to fight one, and because they think outside the Chinese boxes.
Criticism five: See, I was going to rate Lose a Guy four stars. It’s a fun movie, with a clever premise, where two unusual people who belong together end up together. Criticism five is one I thought of myself, but I couldn’t explain it away, and now I realize why it matters.
Now, I don’t give a crap about Tadjikistan. Oh sure, if I could make sacrifices in my life that would massively benefit a hundred people there, I would: but I’m certainly not bothering to find out what those ways would be. I pay attention to the U.S. government, and any poll on the gubernmental knowledge of the American voter shows that I’m unusual enough in that way. I pay some attention to Iraq and Afghanistan, because of our wars; and England, so I can understand British protest songs; and to Russia, because I still miss Gorbachev; and to Brazil and Argentina and Venezuela, because their leaders have a much better chance of stopping the Bush Administration’s schemes than any Democrat I’ve noticed. I don’t follow Tadjikistan, and you probably don’t, and you know what? That's fine.
But nonetheless: we never see that Tadjikistan article or the work behind it. We see nothing to suggest that _anyone_ involved in Lose a Guy cares about Tadjikistan. Or, really, about anything except makeovers and dating. We value Andie for a worldliness and concern we never see.
The ending of the movie even depends on this. We must feel superior to Cosmopolitan, because we and Andie want it printing serious articles that – wink, wink – we'll never be asked to read or think about. This is the movie-makers' crisis of faith: they don't really believe you should watch something this shallow.
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