"Doctor Spielvogel, this is my life, my only life,
and I'm living it in the middle of a Jewish joke!"
-Alexander Portnoy
The sexual revolution, at least as far as its depiction in motion
pictures, caught American culture with its existential pants down. Nothing in
our country’s repressed, Puritan past is designed to support the normalizing of
human sexual desire, nor encourage its free expression as a thing of joy and
beauty. Advancements in science may have given us “the pill,” shifting social
mores advanced Women’s Liberation, and the ‘60s Youth Movement challenged traditional
codes of sexual conduct; but these progressive winds of change were no match
for the profound overarching influence of the moral dogma of organized
religion.
The paradox of American culture has always been that while
we are a peculiarly sex-obsessed nation, we nevertheless hold deeply-rooted,
firmly-ingrained mindsets conjoining sex with sin, fun with remorse, and feeling
good with being bad. At the moment, shamelessness seems to be holding firm as America's defining characteristic, but for the longest time the country's chief export has been guilt.
Catholic Guilt: Fear that you're disappointing God Jewish Guilt: Fear that you're disappointing your mother |
When Hollywood jumped on the sexual revolution bandwagon, it did so with predictable results. It embraced the movement’s most marketable, superficial characteristics (nudity, profanity, sexual explicitness) while failing to adopt its corresponding philosophy of self-acceptance and self-love. Thus, in a short span of time we were treated to a rash of hip, youth-oriented films cloaked in the timeliness of the “new permissiveness,” yet possessed of the age-old “no sex without guilt-induced moral compensation and/or punishment” mindset.
By way of example--during the early bloom of the sexual
revolution, and later, during its waning days, two major movie studios released
controversial, big-budget, high-profile films dealing with sexual liberation
vis a vis the dilemma of religious guilt; the first (ostensibly) comedic, the
second, tragic. In 1972 Warner Bros. released Portnoy’s Complaint, a curiously humorless comedy examining male compulsive sexuality
through the prism of Jewish Guilt. In 1977 Paramount released Looking for Mr. Goodbar, an
unrelentingly grim look at female compulsive sexuality through the prism of Catholic guilt.
Two films very different in tone, yet uniquely similar in
reflecting our society’s insistence on using religion as a tool to punish ourselves for our natural, healthy interest in sex. A dilemma about which a Mr. Alexander
Portnoy would like to lodge a complaint.
Richard Benjamin as Alexander Portnoy |
Karen Black as Mary Jane "The Monkey" Reid |
Lee Grant as Sophie Portnoy |
Jill Clayburgh as Naomi |
Jeannie Berlin as Rita "Bubbles" Girardi |
Alex Portnoy’s diagnosed complaint, briefly stated, is that at age 33,
he finds it near-impossible to reconcile his intellect and strong social conscience
(he’s a NYC lawyer who works to help the poor) with his compulsive
preoccupation with sex…the more perverse, the better. Worse, it’s a libidinous obsession
from which he derives virtually no pleasure due to overpowering feelings of guilt
and the certainty that he will be punished for his impure thoughts and
deeds. Faulting his early home environment as the source of his “What’s so bad
about feeling good?” anxieties, adolescent Alex resorted to obsessive
masturbation and erotic fantasy as a means of coping with his controlling, suffocating
mother (who wanted him to be the Perfect Son), and his fault-finding, perpetually
constipated dad (who wanted him to be the Perfect Jew).
“Doctor, do you understand what I was up against? My wang was all I really had to call my own!”
“Doctor, do you understand what I was up against? My wang was all I really had to call my own!”
D.P. Barnes as Alex's silent analyst, Dr. Spielvogel |
Alex reacting to Mary Jane moving her lips as she reads |
On the printed page of Philip Roth’s controversial 1969 bestseller (written as a monologue relayed by Alexander to his analyst), Portnoy and his attendant complaint played like the impudent heterosexual answer to the homosexual audacity of Gore Vidal’s 1968 bestseller Myra Breckinridge. Both novels used satire to assault late-60s sexual sensibilities, their sacred prose justifying their profane subject-matter. On the screen, however, their respective film adaptations suffered considerably in translation. Chided for being made by directors selected for their ability to completely misinterpret the original texts, both films were resounding bombs, but for different reasons: the X-rated Myra Breckinridge for being too vulgar; the R-rated Portnoy’s Complaint for not being vulgar enough.
While the whole “How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?” stuff was before my time (Oh, I was
around, just too young to remember it), I fully recall the hubbub surrounding
the unlikelihood that anyone could make a movie of Portnoy’s Complaint. When the film was released (perhaps a year too
late in terms of public interest), fans of Roth’s novel, likely anticipating
something combining the comic coarseness of Mel Brooks with the satirical wit
of Woody Allen, were shocked to discover that one of the most talked-about
books in American literature had been neutered and watered-down to such a degree that it resembled nothing more daring than a particularly smutty episode
of Love, American Style. A coy, almost
circumspect R-rated adaptation devoid of nudity, unless you count 33-year-old
Richard Benjamin’s prominent man-boobs.
Blame for Portnoy's Complaint's faults was easy to affix, being that acclaimed screenwriter Ernest Lehman (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, North by Northwest, Hello Dolly!, The Sound of Music, Sabrina) served as producer, writer, AND director (his debut/swansong).
The talented Jeannie Berlin somehow manages to escape her thankless bit role as Bubbles Girardi with her dignity intact. Berlin, who previously appeared in The Baby Maker , is the daughter of Elaine May, who for a time was up for the role Sophie Portnoy.
WHAT I LOVE ABOUT
THIS FILM
While my adolescent moviegoing memories are peppered with
age-inappropriate films I was granted access to thanks to the lax enforcement
of the motion picture code at my neighborhood theater, Portnoy’s Complaint doesn't number among them.
I was able to get away with seeing X-rated 1969 releases like Midnight Cowboy and Last Summer largely due to my recently-divorced mom’s busy work schedule (she welcomed any opportunity to get my sisters and me out from underfoot), and my ability to convince her that not only was I mature beyond my years, but that these films were Oscar-caliber important works of cinema art. Alas, by 1972 my mom had remarried, so along with having another individual policing my comings and goings, I also had a mom who had more time to read.
I was able to get away with seeing X-rated 1969 releases like Midnight Cowboy and Last Summer largely due to my recently-divorced mom’s busy work schedule (she welcomed any opportunity to get my sisters and me out from underfoot), and my ability to convince her that not only was I mature beyond my years, but that these films were Oscar-caliber important works of cinema art. Alas, by 1972 my mom had remarried, so along with having another individual policing my comings and goings, I also had a mom who had more time to read.
Thus, as was the case with the equally-forbidden Myra Breckinridge, my mom having read Portnoy’s Complaint guaranteed that there was no way in hell she was going to allow me to see it. I was in no position to press the point, lest they catch
on that for at least a year (I was 14 at the time) I’d been sneaking their
hardback copy of Roth’s jaw-dropping book to the bathroom for “inspiration.”
There aren’t many of Portnoy’s exploits I’d have the stomach
to see rendered in widescreen color, so the fact that Lehman resorts to so many
modesty-concealing devices in a film almost entirely about sex may seem
hypocritical, but it’s perfectly fine with me. What’s less easy to take is its
depiction of women (seen from Portnoy’s gynophobic perspective, they’re either
objects or grotesques), and its leaden humorlessness. Claims of anti-Semitism
aside, the biggest crime committed to Roth’s novel is that Lehman, while maintaining
much of the book's dialogue, somehow had the laughs surgically removed. Were not
for Lee Grant’s amusing take on the Jewish mother stereotype, Portnoy’s Complaint would be an entirely
laugh-free affair for me.
Portnoy’s Complaint
is not perfect by a longshot, but the minute Karen Black appears (at the
38-minute point) it morphs, right in front of my eyes, into a movie worth
watching. All at once Portnoy’s Complaint
stops feeling like a broad TV sitcom thanks to Black's ability to find the humanity
in a character written as the punchline to a Playboy magazine dirty joke.
Suddenly, in exploring Alex’s relationship with Mary Jane, the film feels at
last like it has something to say about the crippling effect of selfish love (the
infantilizing Jewish mother) and dehumanizing side of the sexual revolution (the
empty pursuit of physical pleasure as a substitute for emotional intimacy). Lehman’s Portnoy’s
Complaint is not Philip Roth’s (you can tell from the lush, jarringly
incongruous Michel Legrand score), but it’s Lehman’s earnest attempt to tell an
Inability To Love Story.
The more unkind critics were quick to point out that after Goodbye, Columbus (1969) Richard Benjamin was making a career out of being a Philip Roth surrogate. Similarly, it was not lost on many that after garnering an Oscar-nomination for Five Easy Pieces (1970), Karen Black never met a trollop role she didn't like.
PERFORMANCES
Not many people associated with the making of Portnoy’s Complaint look back on the
film with fond memories. Ernest Lehman has said he was disappointed in the
outcome, and Lee Grant in her memoir I Said
Yes to Everything not only recalls the occasion of having to throw Lehman
off his own set for acting like a tyrant (Grant, who became an award-winning
director soon after, took over the directing chores of her hospital scene that
day), but remembers how seeing the completed film in a theater for the first
and last time caused her to “shrink back
in horror. It was not a good reflection of Jewish Family life.”
The Portnoys Lee Grant and Jack Somack as Alex's overdramatizing parents. Grant was only 13 years older than Richard Benjamin |
Grant’s "I said yes to everything" philosophy—born of having spent
12 unemployed years on Hollywood’s McCarty era blacklist—may account for her
appearance in the film, but she really has nothing to be ashamed of. Scenes written
as broad as a barn are salvaged by the anxious energy behind Grant’s delivery
and timing. Her Sophie Portnoy may be a hysterical neurotic whose clinging
over-concern emotionally scars her son for life, but she’s never a monster.
Besides, as we learned from the immortal words of Belle Rosen (The Poseidon Adventure) “It comes from
caring.”
THE STUFF OF DREAMS
To read Portnoy’s
Complaint is to realize the significant role imagination and ingenuity must have played
for sexually-curious adolescents raised before the days of Playboy, television,
and mass-market porn. When I watch the film adaptation, I’m reminded of the
degree to which sex and sexuality were the defining cultural templates of
adulthood when I was growing up. The ‘70s were so flooded with pop-culture references to the new
sexuality that a defining trait of my adolescence was a race to grow up due to the nagging sense that I
was missing out on something.
I read Portnoy’s
Complaint (in installments, see above) at an age when I was far too young
to know what it was really about, but Roth’s frank and explicit descriptions of
adolescent sexual desire and self-experimentation were so true and on-point, it
crossed gender, ethnic, and sexuality lines. It was hard to read that book
without feeling in some ways embarrassed—if not exposed—that ANYONE else entertained
(let alone wrote down) obscene scenarios and vulgar imaginings of the sort I’d barely
acknowledged to myself.
In re-reading the novel before writing this essay, what
strikes me now, some 46 after my first encounter with Portnoy and his neurotic concerns,
is that the single most shocking thing about Portnoy’s Complaint is not its language or the particulars of the
activities described: it's the honesty. It’s Philip Roth speaking about the
reality of life (his life, anyway) without concern for decency, religious propriety,
respectability politics, or perpetuating the lie of pornography that airbrushes
away the unpleasant details in order to sell us the consumer-ready result.
As someone raised Catholic, I relate to Portnoy’s struggles
with his Jewish identity. I relate to the guilt, the issues of religious contradictions, the "good boy" syndrome, and the attempt to breach the dichotomy on matters relating to
sex and sexuality. It’s also clearer to me now that there was a method to Roth’s
madness. The much-discussed language and snickered-about “dirty stuff” weren’t
for sensation, it was an assault on sexual hypocrisy. It’s what many people today fail to grasp about revolution and resistance: in order to overthrow a dominant social order you need assault and insurrection.
There’s no room for civility.
"Why is every little thing I do for pleasure in this life immediately illicit - while the rest of the world rolls around laughing in the mud!" |
Before it morphed into the commodified alienation of the singles bar scene dramatized in Looking for Mr. Goodbar, the sexual revolution was (albeit briefly) a legitimate effort to wrest sex away from the chains of guilt and repression. A call to newfound spiritual and physical freedoms which posed the challenge for us to be moral beings in a world of moral relativity.
To live through the sexual revolution only to arrive at a
time when the prepackaged, bullshit Disney-porn lie of something like E.L. James’
Fifty Shades of Grey passes for sexual
liberation, is to understand that the true legacy of Philip Roth’s novel is its
brazenly honest look at the human condition, not it’s profane reputation.
The movie...not so much.
BONUS MATERIAL
WEB OF STORIES Click on link to see Philip Roth speaking briefly about the films made from his novels |
This essay is part of the Lovely Lee Grant blogathon hosted by Reelweegiemidget Reviews and Angelman's Place. Click on the links to read other posts about the films of Lee Grant.
Copyright © Ken Anderson