Warning: this review gives away the ending.

Me and Will (1999)
Directed and written by Melissa Behr and Sherrie Rose
Starring Melissa Behr and Sherrie Rose
A Melissa Behr and Sherrie Rose joint.

This is not a good movie.

It is a long movie. An unintentionally funny movie. An erratically dramatic movie. A very, very badly edited movie. But it is not a good movie.

Gory Losers? Groinal Lodgings?

Why, if it was so bad, did we watch the whole thing?

I’ll tell you why. Because the cable movie ratings warned us about how it had AC and GL and so forth, and my roommate was convinced that GL stood for Gay and Lesbian.

To be fair, we had plenty of reasons to think that they might, as I think my roommate put it, “realize that they really loved each other all along and then do it.” First of all, it was on Showtime, home of the cornier American version of Queer as Folk and of The L Word.

Secondly, it’s a buddy movie about two hot tough femme women riding motorcycles across the country, which is usually Hollywood code for lesbian. They even code one of them as “butch,” making her “the tough one” and naming her Will, of all things. Why Will? Because she’s butch, I guess. We didn’t really get any other explanation. The other one is named Jane, which at first I thought was just a pseudonym she was giving out. Nope. Her name’s actually Jane.

Thirdly, the only actual city we see on their road trip is San Francisco, in which they spend a ludicrous amount of time considering that they’re going from Los Angeles to Montana. They rave about how they’re going to move there. All right, they’re saying it because hot men are passing them – and there’s a reason they’re passing you, ladies – but then they go into a diner with a ridiculously flirty waitress (played by Traci Lords). We are just getting so many mixed messages here.

The Good, the Bad, the Plot, and the Editing

The plot. The plot? The plot….

Well, there was a plot. I remember it; we drove by it several times. Occasionally we even slowed down enough to see what was supposed to be going on.

See, they’re in rehab. And they hate rehab. And they like motorcycles. And one of them knows where the motorcycle from Easy Rider is, because her dad’s friend owns it.

So of course they break out of rehab, get ahold of some motorcycles of their own, and drive up to Montana to get it. I mean, wouldn’t you?

The rehab angle actually provides much of the movie’s unintentional humor. I watched it with my roommate, who had two years in Alcoholics Anonymous at the time, and a friend of ours who had a year, along with my own year and a half in various other twelve step programs. As my roommate remarked, it seemed like it was written by someone who had a month sober and said, “Oh wow! I should make a movie about this!”

This inspiration, you see, provided the subplot, which is that… well, it’s that Will has a drug problem, basically.

The subplot is supposed to be that Will and Jane make a passionate commitment to each other to stay sober until they find the famous chopper – and then get totally wasted. The movie has a very difficult time sticking to a plot, so this subplot basically turns into “Hey! Addictions sure are tough to shake, huh?” But we do get a lot of accidentally funny moments where one of them, out of nowhere, starts spouting twelve-step slogans, or yelping about “the committee in my head!” or reciting the Serenity Prayer – and then they go right back to their standard “bad girl” personas.

Pacing and Plot Problems

This would be a pretty good plot if it made any sense. I mean, yes, break out of rehab. But how? What are the dangers? Where are the wacky or dramatic chase scenes? How the hell did they get those motorcycles? We don’t know; I mean, we’re only the viewers. We only planted our butts in those seats for two entire commercial-free hours for this movie. Why should we know what’s going on?

I’m not bitter at all.

That’s one example of the terrible editing. We repeatedly go from Dramatic Disclosure to Sudden Resolution without much thought. The editing is problematic on another level as well. For example, when they go to San Francisco – inexplicable as that already is – we are treated to at least two separate montages in which they appear to cross the Golden Gate Bridge repeatedly. It’s not that they like to ride their bikes across the bridge and pay that stiff $5 toll over and over – it’s simple overuse of “Hey! Look! They’re in San Francisco! You know ’cause you can see that bridge!”

And that’s not even the bridge they would take if they were coming from L.A.

Then there’s the amount of time they spend in San Francisco. See? Why would they do this if they weren’t setting us up for that all-important lesbian subplot? Damnit. This movie – like the bad hustler movie we saw afterward, and the really terrible softcore porn after that – has a little difficulty with pacing. There are long pauses, slowly delivered dialogue, and a lot of scenes that just show people walking, or sitting, or putting their clothes on.

Possibly the most egregious examples of the movie’s rocky pacing are in their relationships with their parents. Quite a way into the movie, with no warning and no previous voiceovers, we are suddenly assaulted by the sound of Jane’s voice reading what appear to be cheesy song lyrics. But no: it turns out that she is telling us that Will was sexually abused by her father, and that Will suddenly realizes at this point that she needs to confront him. No sooner do we learn this than Will goes to a pay phone. She calls him, freaks out, hangs up, goes into a bar, does shots, vomits up blood, and they never, ever speak of it again.

The same time and effort are put into the five or ten minute scene with Jane’s mother. Her mom is clearly supposed to have obsessive-compulsive disorder; they play it subtle by not telling us this outright, but they are thwarted by the incredibly over-the-top OCD stereotypes. She twitches, she mutters numbers and counts fish sticks under her breath, she washes her hands every five seconds… they’re not taking any chances that we might not get it. She’s also quite abusive: she screams at her daughter at the drop of a hat, hits Jane’s hand when she puts a drink down without a coaster, and manipulates her shamelessly. Jane apologizes meekly and wipes off the coaster (not the counter) with the hem of her shirt. Yet after five or ten minutes of this cavalcade of scenery-chewing, Jane takes her mother’s hand and has a Meaningful Moment where All is Made Right Between Them.

Man… those two days of rehab must have been good.

Credit Where Credit’s Due

This movie did keep us guessing. It never took the easy solution to a crisis: although the famous chopper was ridiculously easy to get, none of the other plot points were resolved. Will does not confront or reconcile with her father, who we never see. She does not resolve her drug and alcohol abuse problems; in fact, she overdoses at the end and dies. When her boyfriend turns out to have been following her throughout the road trip and she gets back in his car, she doesn’t go back with him; he just comes along for the ride. When they stop to fix one of the bikes and a cop hits his wife with a flashlight, throws her out of the truck, and then Will and Jane try to rescue her and he comes back and assaults Will, they just let her get back in his truck. Nobody gets easy answers, least of all the audience.

The movie also gets some credit because it was written by the two leads, Melissa Behr and Sherrie Rose. One review raved about them; apparently they’ve been unjustly relegated to roles in “exploitation (movies) and cheap TV shows,” and wrote and produced this movie on their own. That’s pretty impressive, and this movie has great potential. Someday, perhaps, someone will remake it — or just edit the version that’s already out there.

I’ve heard a couple of people condemn this series as badly-written, “trashy” in the bad way. I don’t really get that; I’m INCREDIBLY picky about writing, how can anyone be pickier than me? They must have a different meaning for “trashy.” And for bad writing.

I really enjoy Charlaine Harris’ writing style. Her other mysteries tend to be a little on the depressing (or in some cases just depressed) side for me, but what we now call the “True Blood” series is saved from that by heroine Sookie Stackhouse’s determined optimism.

It took me a while to figure out what Harris was doing that I liked so much, stylistically. I finally realized that she is in touch with the sensory world here in a way I haven’t seen in her other novels or in many books in general. The pacing alternates between action and regular, everyday experiences like sunbathing or taking a bubble bath. Sookie, as the narrator of the series, shares her feelings about everything, often subtly – both physical feelings and emotional ones. Harris doesn’t hit us over the head with “THIS IS HOW SOOKIE FEELS ABOUT THIS GUY,” either; she weaves all these psychological and sensory impressions into the narrative so deftly that it’s easy not to notice they’re there, even as they flavor the entire experience of reading her books.

I enjoy the fact, too, that these are survivor novels. It’s made perfectly clear from the beginning that Sookie was abused by her “funny uncle”. It’s a more active plot line in this first book, but Harris doesn’t just drop it after that; the fact comes up from time to time in later books as appropriate, just as it would in real life. Sookie occasionally gives some thought to how it’s affected her, and we can see more ways that she may not even realize: her self-image, for example, starts out fairly low and slowly blossoms over the course of the books, and she is a 26-year-old (if I remember right) virgin when the books start, which supposedly is because she is also telepathic but can’t be totally unconnected to the abuse.

Fun, adventurous reads, although I will say it gets pretty violent from time to time. There’s always the sense that the good guys will win, as opposed to in real life, plus the excitement of seeing HOW they will win – since werewolves, magic, fairies, and all kinds of other really well-thought-out supernatural nuttiness keeps getting thrown into the equation.

Really, my ultimate recommendation for these books comes from a gut level: no matter how many times I read them, I still just want to read them over and over and over again. There aren’t a whole lot of books that work that way for me, so the Sookie Stackhouse books hold a special place in my heart.

Sidebar: I enjoy the HBO series a great deal too; although they often take extreme liberties with the plot and characters, so far (halfway through the first season – yes, I’m behind) the plotlines still seem very true to the original characters. Cut for spoilers: Read the rest of this entry »

[I started to write about how being an addict is like being LGBT. Actually, being an active addict is like being a closeted attacked member of the LGBT community; being in recovery has a lot in common with being out and proud. But before I could explain all that, I got into this digression and I'm going to share it as its own post....]

Addiction seems very complicated. In reality, it’s incredibly simple. Simple like gravity. You drop a ball, it falls to the ground. Sure, you can get all obsessive and detailed – what’s the ball made of? How heavy is it? Are we outside? How far away is the ground? What’s the ground made of? Is there wind? Is the ground level? Am I dropping it, or sort of throwing it a little bit? – but ultimately none of that stuff really matters. The bottom line is still that the ball is going to hit the ground. (And I once took a class called Physics for Liberal Arts Majors, which I thought would be all about the lyrical splendor of the universe and which in fact was basically physics for people who hadn’t yet noticed that things fall when you drop them. So I know what I’m talking about here.)

Here is what happens. People are abused. (“How” and “for how long” matter, but so does “by whom.” Pretend I drew you a little graph here where intense infrequent abuse is high up on the chart, and so is living with people who have ever abused you in any way – and living with people who frequently abuse you intensely is especially crazy-making – and we’ll move on.)

More specifically, children are abused. And, since they are children and developmentally are supposed to think everything is about them, are in fact in a molten crucible of diverse experiences which are constantly creating and re-creating their vision of the world, what they learn from the abuse is that they are not worthy human beings. They learn that they deserve shame, pain, and disrespect; often, the bottom line to them is that they are not worthy of life. That’s the message of abuse, after all; that’s what distinguishes abuse and trauma.

Trauma, like falling out of a tree and breaking your leg, or losing your house to a hurricane, is genuinely random and obviously not about you. The only time that people take messages like “I’m not worthy” from trauma is if they’ve already been set up with those messages by abuse. Abuse, on the other hand, carries those messages whether it’s done on purpose or not – and it’s rarely on purpose. Most adults who abuse children think that they are doing their best, that yelling at their kids, hitting their kids, raping their kids, is an example of their shining love and excellent boundaries. Most adults who abuse children are kind of crazy. (Sidebar: it’s not always adults. Sometimes it’s the classmate or neighbor kid or babysitter, acting out their own abuse. Doesn’t make a huge amount of difference, in terms of its effects.)

So, abused kids melt that down. Their molten worldview hardens around “I am not good enough.” It can be conscious or subconscious, but it is there, rock-hard and deeply embedded.

And they do two things with it: dissociate, in any way they can, and choose more pain, because they think that is what they deserve. Which becomes a vicious cycle: more pain brings with it more need to dissociate, which means choosing more pain in an attempt to feel anything, which means dissociating from the feelings, which means worse choices because we can’t really make good choices if we can’t feel the effects of what we choose, (not to mention if we think that we don’t deserve good things), which means dissociating harder, which….

That cycle is addiction. That’s all that you need to know about addiction. It means doing something to check out of our feelings, or our lives. The popular perception is that it has to be something inherently harmful – but the reality is that checking out like that is the most harmful part. (All right, yes, there are drugs that will kill your body and soul faster than checking out. On the other hand, you could argue that people can’t really choose to keep doing drugs that harmful without checking out in the first place.)

Addiction doesn’t necessarily mean beer, pot, heroin, cigarettes, nice recognizable drugs. Just about every addict (abuse survivor) has a whole lot of options for what lets them check out. That’s why Alcoholics Anonymous, for example, has an implicit rule against “thirteenth-stepping,” hitting on newcomers: because so many people put down the alcohol and switch right over to the sex and love addiction that they don’t even realize is a problem. That’s also why there is so much caffeine and cigarette consumption at a lot of meetings. People quit things in the order that those things are killing them, or at least in the order of most to least immediately painful killers. Not everyone can even stand to use drugs to check out: substance addictions have a genetic switch that gets flipped on by abuse, and lots of people lack that genetic component. But process addictions (codependency, emotional eating, sex addiction, compulsive debting, et cetera) are available to everyone who’s been abused. Isn’t that great? In fact, every addict, every abuse survivor, is a codependent, because codependency is all about trying to control the uncontrollable (like trying to control our emotions and histories) – and what else are these other addictions there for but the illusion of control?

There are more details. (Wind velocity. Density of the ball.) On another level, checking out is a way to try to avoid the emotional pain of the abuse, and of beliefs like “I am not good enough.” The flipside of that is that pain tells the body to check out – it presses the same “oh no, terrible things are happening and I have no other options – dissociate!” button that is installed by abuse. And seeking out pain is also a way to try to control the abuse. That’s why people date people who are like their parents – why they choose jobs and relationships and situations, over and over, that don’t work for them. Our brains, deep down, think “If I can get THIS one to treat me right, that will stop all the pain! It’ll erase all the abuse I ever experienced!” Maybe it’s a lizard-brain thing. It seems fine until we get it out into the open and actually give it some conscious thought.

But once you know all this, it boils down to something deeply simple. Abuse a kid, and they learn to harm themselves in order to check out. Abuse kids, and they become addicts.

Someone in our youth group at work asked me last week, “What do grownups do to have fun?”

It brought back vivid memories of having the same question myself. I didn’t care about or understand adult life when I was a kid, but as I faced young adulthood I started wondering. What did grownups do that was so special? Weren’t they supposed to get to have so much more fun and do such cooler things than kids? What was I going to get to do? When was I going to get invited to the party?

I think this is a huge part of the cycle of abuse and addiction. I mean, there’s even a whole 12-step program devoted to people figuring out how to have fun and joy in their life: Workaholics Anonymous. Basically, as I understand it, it works like this:

Abuse, and dysfunction, separate us from ourselves. We get separated from what we feel, and need, and want, when it becomes clear that those feelings won’t be respected by those around us or that those needs and wants aren’t going to get met, for whatever reason.

Where that gets mixed up with addiction is when we try to fill that hole between us and our needs/wants/feelings with something else: TV, work, drugs, food, sugar, sex, whatever. Our needs – and that pretty much invariably, in my experience, includes our need for fun, for fulfilling, joyful experiences – continue to go unmet. And on top of that, whatever we’re using instead is turning into an addictive spiral that puts more and more space between us and our feelings. Which makes it harder and harder to know what we actually want and get it.

I used to have the worst time figuring out what my hobbies were. I would look at all those online profiles, on dating sites or journaling sites or wherever, that asked me what my hobbies were. And I’d just draw a blank. I knew I liked writing, but that was about it – and mostly I wasn’t writing, anyway. And I didn’t want to put “reading” or “watching TV,” because even then I knew that to me those sounded like the most boring, passive “hobbies” ever. I mean, I liked them, but weren’t hobbies supposed to be interests that had some active part in my life? Maybe if I were MAKING a TV show….

And I just couldn’t come up with the time or energy or interest or know-how to do anything different. I was just marooned out there without a good sense of what I wanted or how to get it. Which is a pretty common stage of abuse or effect of abuse, I think. It’s a natural step after leaving the abusive situation – it’s the “So… now what?? Isn’t my life supposed to be different?!”

I thought I was going to make this a list of things that I think are fun. But I also want to write about how I got to the point of being able to identify fun things for myself and do them. So many choices! I’ll do them all eventually, probably this week, of course…. Fun things first, I think. I realized recently that I was looking at a free day and coming up with tons of things I wanted to do, things that were fun and interesting to me and which I actually try to do regularly now, and I thought: OH! HOBBIES!!  Here are some now: tune in later for the next installment of this story!

1. 1. Gardening: messing around in the dirt, watering, watching things grow
   2. Preserving: making stuff out of what is growing!
   3. Being in nature: barefoot usually, listening to birds, meeting trees, seeing crazy plants and animals and insects and places I never knew existed
   4. Cooking: all kinds of stuff, anything I ever wanted to eat and never believed I was capable of making – and things I invent myself
   5. Writing: like now!
   6. Painting: especially fruit and plants
   7. Drawing: whatever comes to mind
   8. Yoga: I like this a lot, and I was doing it about every day before I started this job! I am very bendy.
   9. Learning about abuse and addiction: and working on my own recovery, which is a constant string of mind-blowing realizations and discoveries and excitement
   10. Dancing: especially in my own living room
   11. Playing with my cats: they are each insanely individual, loving, bizarre geniuses. also: very very soft.
   12. Reading: yes, it’s true. and it seems more of an actual hobby, like, more ACTIVE than watching TV
   13. Hanging out with my friends: especially doing karaoke, playing board games, going out to eat, wandering around stores looking at shiny things, and talking about stuff.