What Lies Beneath

There may be no such thing as perfection, but some movies get closer to cinematically perfect than you could possibly hope. This list of films is a short one: Back to the Future. Ghostbusters. The Fugitive. Submitted for your approval: What Lies Beneath as the latest addition.

Not that What Lies Beneath is exactly a new film; I was surprised to realize that the movie is now twelve years old. But brother does it hold up!

Like every haunted house film, What Lies Beneath picks and chooses from a stock list of cliches. Appliances turn on by themselves. Electrical lights don't work when you need them to. Faint whispers are heard from the corner of the ear. Strictly speaking, you could argue that What Lies Beneath is a big case of "been there, seen that."

But Roger Ebert is fond of saying that "a movie is not about what it's about; it's about how it's about it," and What Lies Beneath is the perfect example. Yes, we've seen most of these elements before, in countless haunted house films, but rarely, if ever, have these elements been presented so skillfully. Every aspect of this film hits the perfect note: Actors Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer, who play the happily married Norman and Claire Spencer, transcend their star personas to create a very believable married couple. They are aided by the under-rated writing team of Clark Gregg and Sarah Kernochan, whose dialogue perfectly captures the sound of two people whose clear mutual affection is informed -- but not tarnished -- by familiar routine. Together, these actors and writers really convince you that the characters exist.

The writers should also be praised for framing their ghost story with a compelling, intelligent mystery. Other ghost stories present us with passive victims, whose job is merely to react to the creepy events that surround them. Not Claire Spencer, Pfeiffer's feisty housewife who grows determined to figure out the ghost's identity, and whose investigation is thoroughly believable. Claire is neither an idiot nor a Sherlock Holmes, but an average woman who goes about her legwork and research pretty much the way you or I would.

When Norman convinces her to see a psychiatrist, the shrink is equally convincing as a real person. "Don't worry," Dr. Drayton (played by the always reliable Joe Morton) tells Claire. "I am required to see you for a minimum of three sessions, before I can have you committed." It's exactly the type of awkward, lame joke that a therapist might say. Dr. Drayton's character, who proves surprisingly open-minded toward Claire's assertion that her house is haunted, is especially interesting when contrasted with Claire's husband Norman, whose skepticism ostensibly stems from the fact that he is a research scientist. Yet Dr. Drayton is also a man of science, and is willing to believe or at least indulge Claire's claim that her house is haunted.

Cinematographer Don Burgess and director Robert Zemeckis capture all of this with beautiful camera work; every frame is a work of art. Zemeckis also works well with composer Alan Silvestri to create a non-intrusive, but highly effective musical score. Together, Burgess, Silvestri, and Zemeckis create a wonderful atmosphere of domestic tranquility punctuated by the creepy goings-on, and because we care about the characters in the center of it all, the events are that much more terrifying. But all of this is a long way of saying that What Lies Beneath is simply a fun, intelligent, scary horror flick. The movies don't get any better than this.

An Open Letter to eHarmony

I understand that you probably receive many emails to this effect, but I nevertheless feel I must submit this complaint about your rejection practices, which I feel, with some justification, are both flawed and offensive.

They are flawed because one particular reason for rejection, if I understand correctly, is if a prospective eHarmony member provides contradictory answers to your personality profile. I think I'm right to question what counts as "contradictory." If I encounter two variations of the question, "I think of myself as a leader," and then have to answer them both on a ten-point "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree" scale, would a 5 and a 6 count as contradictory answers? Must I remember my answer to the earlier question to avoid coming across as "contradictory"? The flaw here is an absurdly obvious one, that you are asking people to measure the most immeasurable aspects of their personality -- and to do so on a standardized scale!

The biggest problem here is that the questionairre in which Dr. Warren takes such pride doesn't take context into account. To stick with the "I think of myself as a leader" example (which may be purely hypothetical; I can't remember if that's actually one of the questions, but it will do to serve my point), a person can be a bona-fide, natural-born leader under certain circumstances, and invariably a follower in others. The same guy who actively leads a social group might desperately look for a savior in a crisis. The same person who's an aggressive go-getter at the office might be a laid-back, 'I'll do anything you guys want" fellow with his friends. The possibilities even for this one "I think of myself as a leader" question are endless -- and that's just one of many, many such ambiguous questions in your profile.

Now I know that one possible response to the above complaint is, "well, if he's a leader sometimes and a follower other times, then he should just click on the mid-range between "strongly agree" and "strongly disagree." This makes sense only ostensibly. Such a solution robs that person of an opportunity to advocate his genuine leadership skills to the personality profile. More to the point, the lack of context forces that person to make a ridiculous decision. "Am I a leader? Sometimes. So I should click in the mid-range. Except. . . when I am a leader, I'm a powerful leader. So maybe I agree. But wait, I am kinda laid back too, so maybe I don't agree. I guess I strongly agree, strongly disagree, and only sort of agree. Now what?"

I must emphasize that such thoughts aren't a sign of a wishy-washy individual, but rather a natural and in fact unavoidable consequence of the nature of asking applicants to measure the immeasurable, to provide answers with no frame of reference despite a desperate need for context.

I should also point out that your rejection statistics are probably flawed too. Granted, you're in a better position to understand your own statistics than I am, but consider: When I was first rejected by eHarmony, I complained about it to anyone who would listen (and probably a few who didn't). Out of sheer curiosity, several of my friends and family members then tried to sign up with eHarmony -- and every single one of them was rejected too. If I understand correctly, you claim that the statistics are an average of one rejection out of every five applications. With me, my friends, and our relatives, we found the statistic to be five rejections out of every five applicants. Admittedly, we were hardly a random sampling, but I fail to see how we're not a representative sampling. Even if there's something about this particular group that somehow makes us different than the rest of the world, I'd think we still represent some sort of microcosm of society -- and yet there's a huge statistical difference between "one out of every five" and "five out of every five." Not that I'm making the ludicrous claim that you don't accept anybody at all, all I'm saying is, there seems to be a bit of a discrepency here.

Yet even if you disagreed with all of the above -- although I think you'd have a difficult argument to make if you did -- I am sure that your rejectees would nearly unanimously agree that your rejection practices are offensive. The rejection message that you give to your applicants is two-fold: 1) that eHarmony has certain (albeit mysterious) standards that the rejectee has failed to meet; and 2) that eHarmony is so sure that this person is difficult, if not impossible, to match -- in other words, so sure that none of its thousands of members would want this particular person -- that you can't even take their money. Yes, I am, of course, paraphrasing, as eHarmony makes an extremely half-hearted attempt to use diplomatic diction, but those two messages are impossible to ignore. It's not a matter of interpretation or "reading between the lines" -- eHarmony is telling its rejectees, in so many words, one thing, and one thing only: You're not good enough. Harsh.

This Blog Contains a Spoiler for a Film You'll Probably Never See Anyway

Here's a movie pitch for you: it's the story of a gambling addict named Tom Carver. Cast some guy who's good at playing sleazy leading roles. Maybe Ray Liotta. Unfortunately for Tom, he lives right outside of Atlantic City, so he is able to indulge his addiction on a daily basis.

Tom likes the slots. He initially thinks they're fun, but as he loses more and more money, he starts to get desperate for a big pay-out, and devotes even more time to playing the slots -- thus losing even more money, making him even more desperate for a pay-out, motivating him to spend even more time in the casinos, which causes him to lose even more money, etc.

Problem is, Tom's got a wife and kid, and he's got to justify all this time he's spending at the casinos, so he cooks up a lie that quickly becomes routine. He's an author, and claims that he's been spending time at a coffee shop, working on his next novel. The truth is that he never got past the first sentence of this alleged novel, but it's been keeping his wife off his back, and he's been telling the lie for so long that he no longer feels even a hint of remorse for the dishonesty.

The thing is that Tom's spending so much time at the casinos, his family, once patient, now starts to feel neglected. The nature of Tom's lie means that his family eventually starts asking, more out of curiosity and hope than anything else, "hey, how long are you gonna work on that thing, anyway? Isn't it ever gonna be finished?" "Soon," Tom starts promising, which turns out to be a mistake, because when "soon" doesn't arrive, his family finally starts losing patience.

Coincidentally or not, Tom's wife Carolyn finds a new route home from work that just happens to pass the coffee shop Tom's been claiming that he spends time in. Uh oh, now he needs to elaborate his lie, so he explains that he doesn't always go to the same coffee shop. It's an innocuous claim, but it raises Carolyn's suspicions, and she starts to wonder if Tom's having an affair -- a possibility their daughter has already been considering for a while. At one point, Carolyn decides to call Tom's bluff, and goes to the coffee shop to see if Tom's really there or if she'll catch him in a lie, and he races over, arriving in the nick of time to make it look like he's been there the whole time. The immediate crisis has been averted, but things are clearly getting out of control.

Despite Carolyn's increasing suspicions that Tom's been having an affair, his only mistress has been the slot machines, but by the time Carolyn gets up the nerve to ask if he's been having an affair, the answer is a little more complicated. Tom has started to spend a lot of time with a show-biz gal named Danni, and while their time together is ostensibly innocent -- no lines have been crossed into outright romance -- Danni clearly has a crush on Tom.

Now here's where the stakes get raised. Danni, unaware that Tom is a gambling addict, introduces him to the blackjack table. Tom's first visit to the table results in a streak of beginner's luck, and he makes a small fortune. Not enough to compensate all of the money he lost at the slots, but it's still a thrill. This is, of course, the worst thing that could possibly happen to a gambling addict, because now he starts spending all of his money and time at the blackjack table. Soon, he has gambled away his family's entire savings, including his daughter's college fund.

Carolyn finally realizes what's been going on, but when she confronts Tom, his apology quickly segues into the old "I'm not perfect" defense, which in turn becomes a cruel verbal attack on Carolyn, whose patience and all-around sweetness are thrown in her face as "boring." Tom runs off to Danni, but returns later that night to beg forgiveness and promise that things will be different. Carolyn, however, has finally had enough -- the loss of the college fund was the last straw -- and asks for a divorce.

Tom decides to quit gambling cold turkey, in the hopes that this will win Carolyn back, but then Danni comes to Tom with a "sure thing", and they conspire to make one last big bet. Tom is confident that a big score will win Carolyn back, and is truly clueless that the mere knowledge that he's betting again would be enough to estrange Carolyn once and for all. When the "sure thing" turns out to be a bust, Tom is so upset that he doesn't care that Danni has lost everything she owned, and responds by angrily hitting her before storming out, leaving poor Danni in tears.

All of this may sound like a fairly by-the-numbers story of a loser whose flaws lead him to hurt everyone around him. I'll admit we've seen variations of this story countless times before, but here's the first part of the twist: I'm describing one of the plots of an actual movie, Even Money. The movie stars Kim Basinger as Carolyn and Ray Liotta as Tom. And here's the real twist: In the movie, Carolyn is the gambling addict and Liotta plays the loving spouse who is victimized by his wife's dishonesty.

Now, I could commend writer Robert Tannen for his inspiration to switch the genders of otherwise familiar roles, putting a new perspective on an old story. Or I could condemn him for the exact same thing, using the gender switch to hide the fact that his story is full of cliches and and tired melodrama. Both reactions would probably be equally valid. But I'm not interested in either of these messages.

Instead, I want you to consider how you felt about these characters while you were reading about the sleazy Liotta and the loyal but victimized and ultimately defiant wife played by Kim Basinger. And compare that to how you'd feel watching Carolyn's desperate attempts to win back the money she'd lost, and Tom's furious accusations and futile attempt to catch her in the act of her lie. How do you feel about the main character's almost-not platonic relationship with the exciting stranger now that you know that she's not some busty red-head, but he's a humble Danny DeVito? How do you feel about the scene in which Carolyn loses her temper and repeatedly strikes her male friend? Is it o.k. now, because it's a woman hitting a man instead of the other way around? Does the gambler go from "what a jerk!" status to "poor woman's got a problem"? Do the actions of the jealous spouse become less justified and more disturbing?

You should consider these questions and ponder what the answers say about you and the society in which you live. Maybe that's what Robert Tannen had in mind all along.