Living In Oz (Part 2): The Family Man's Bachelor Plan

Never Really Lost - Todd Thibaud (mp3)
A Beautiful Life - Everclear (mp3)

I re-watched The Family Man over the Christmas break and found myself amazed at how differently the movie played out for me now as opposed to it's release in 2000. At that time, I was four years married and enjoying the insanity of our first newborn. The movie felt important because it's a very moving argument for the very life we were accidentally forging for ourselves.

Almost a decade later, here's what stuck with me: It's a highly-flawed male-minded fairy tale.

You have a guy -- Jack Campbell -- who's living the Perfect Bachelor Life. He's as wealthy as the day is long. He is king of the hill at his job and enjoys every stinkin' minute he spends there, even Christmas. Screw those family-centered underlings and their whiny babies! Work first! He sleeps with models. And probably other women hot enough to be models yet more enjoyable for dinner conversations. These women arrive at his apartment door in coats covering nothing underneath but really hot lingerie.

He is consummately gifted as a lover. Great wealth, great job, numerous lovers, mad skillz in da sack. In other words: a completely fictional character. This is the fantasy life of most men. In reality, rare are the men who can be all of these things. Rarer are those would can live it for very long.

So, why does Jack Campbell of the Perfect Bachelor Life turn into The Family Man? I love this part...

Campbell dares to tell an "angel" character (played by the always-awesome Don Cheadle) that he's got everything he wants out of life. The hubris of this claim apparently offends the angel, who then forces Campbell to "glimpse" the life he could have had for himself had he married the girlfriend he ditched 13 years prior.

It takes a while, and it's an amusing and sometimes heartwarming (read: cheesy) ride, but of course Campbell eventually realizes he loved -- and could still love -- that woman. Which would be tough, 'cuz Tea Leoni is [sarcasm] soooooo hideous, and her character is a stick in the mud [/sarcasm] . (Although she's not atop my hot list, she never looked better than in this role.)

Don Cheadle forces this guy to realize that his perceived happiness at earning mad quan and getting laid all the time was only holding on because it had never been challenged by alternate possibilities. And now that he's seen what could be, he'll never be happy with what is. Which is to say, his Perfect Bachelor Life now feels meaningless and isolating.

What kind of fucking angel would screw with someone like that? I see that you're happy. In fact, you're TOO damn happy. By God, I'm gonna make you realize you should be sad, alone and depressed!

The movie concludes (SPOILER ALERT! ON A MOVIE THAT CAME OUT EIGHT YEARS AGO!) with Jack thrust back into his real life, searching out that long-lost girlfriend, convincing her in his wacky crazy Nicholas Cagey way to postpone her departure to Paris so she can have coffee with him and hear about the children they never had together and the house they never lived in together. And it's safe to believe they have officially begun their life together, 13 years after they shoulda coulda.

The moral? Jack Campbell gets the best of everything. He gets to enjoy every spoil of disgusting wealth with, apparently, none of the negatives that go with it, for 13 years of his adult life. Then, an angel comes in and makes him realize he should have a family, that he should feel this big gaping hole in his life. And voila!, he finds that woman and will end up marrying her and having a family. Basically, Campbell gets laid a lot, tastes the peak of success, sees the world unencumbered and then still gets the girl of his dreams that he "never stopped loving," even, apparently, while in bed with Amber Valletta.

He is given the best of both worlds and a huge, silver and gold antique platter. It's one helluva Christmas present.

I'm going to write the screenplay for a sequel, The Family Man 2: Nice Glimpse!

The main character (played by Anthony Michael Hall as a slightly more handsome Bill Gates-lookin' fella) is happily married in a middle class neighborhood with a comfortable job and two wonderful children. He doesn't have any regrets, and he's completely satisfied with the way his life has turned out. But Don Cheadle the angel is annoyed at his smug satisfaction. He makes Jack "glimpse" life as a multimillionaire bachelor and forces him to live in the fast lane of financial business and hot women.

(One could argue this movie is made every day and is actually called Married Men Who Go to Las Vegas for Conferences, but that would ruin my pitch.)

At first, Jack is overcome with grief, because his wife, in this "glimpse," is now his ex-girlfriend, and his children were never born. That's one helluva pill to have to swallow, so it takes a while, but he finally adjusts to this new reality. His obsession over his wife ends after she has him arrested for stalking. He draws pictures of his children and frames them as a way of memorializing them.

He hits bottom and has then a breakthrough by screwing five of the Rockettes, and that breaks the seal on his infidelity-phobia. After that he pretty much screws everything. He eventually takes Angelina Jolie from Brad ('cuz, let's be honest, who doesn't wanna see that?). He buys the Yukon Territory from Canada and renames it "Wal-Mart Territory."

Then, just as he gets totally in the groove of this new, materialistic, shallow life, the angel throws him back into his married life. Hijinks ensue!! He forgets to pick up his children! He starts saying Angelina's name when in bed with his wife! He quits his job, starts drinking expensive bourbon by the gallon and ends up living in a hotel in Biloxi and barely getting by as a "professional poker player"! God, it would be soooo hilarious...

"Never Really Lost" is from Todd Thibaud's 1999 album Little Mystery. "A Beautiful Life" is from Everclear's 2003 album, Slow Motion Daydream. The former can be found at iTunes or Amazon.com's mp3 site. The latter ain't much of anywhere..

Living In Oz (Part 1): I Am the Wizard, Koo Koo Ka Choo

The Act We Act - Sugar (mp3)
Whole New You - Shawn Colvin (mp3)

One of life's joys, if you're an English or psychology geek, is finding that your understanding of something does a 180-degree turnaround, offering you an entirely new perspective, allowing you to spend more time looking at, considering, obsessing over something that otherwise would simply sit in the attic of your mind, gathering dust.

I recently had such experiences regarding The Wizard of Oz and The Family Man. With the first, not the movie so much as the character. With the second, not so much the character as the movie. Let's go with the character first.

Before, the revelation of mousy magician Oscar Zoroaster Diggs (thanks Wikipedia!) behind the curtain was deliciously humiliating. I thought we were meant to mock him, to laugh at him. He's using the fire and the big scary green face and the special effects to intimidate and scare and control. Shame on him! How pathetic! What fun to see him panicked, begging them to "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!" The Witch was evil; the Wizard was a con artist. Both were equally deplorable.

For some reason, I now see him as something of a kindred spirit. In the entire cast, perhaps he's more universally human than any other character. *

While it might be the more natural thing to try and identify with one of Dorothy's fellow journeymen -- "yes, I too need a brain!" -- the truth for most adults is that we're most like the Wizard because of the way his life has unfolded. In a way, Oscar Diggs found himself in the same position as Dorothy, a stranger in a strange land. But rather than being the helpless doe-eyed naif who needs good witches and a bunch o' flawed males to help her get home, he just landed and adapted. He created this shell that allowed him to survive and thrive in a place that wasn't his natural environment.

We all create these personae, false fronts meant to simplify our complicated and confusing selves into packages the world beyond our bodies can better digest. It's not lying, exactly. Oftentimes these personae are very much parts of us, but they're more like cartoon versions, more two-dimensional than we really are.

Around my girls, I'm Daddy. Daddy does his best to never let his daughters see the guy who curses with verve and looks for double-entendres in everyday conversation more desperately than Michael at Dunder Mifflin. At work, I'm trying harder -- although frequently failing -- to be Mature Billy, the person who takes serious things seriously and whose observations and ideas deserve serious consideration in return. In New Orleans I'm Husband-on-a-Binge Billy, overwhelmed by a spirit of restlessness, gulping a few too many Hand Grenades and flirting pathetically (thus, harmlessly) with women of all ages.

It's not just me. One of our school's administrators has, during the work day, become a caricature of himself. He has become this persona identified only by his initials and Robert E. Lee quotes about honor. He's just a gruff and intimidating presence who only smiles out of the farthest corner of his mouth and speaks only in self-derived catch phrases... but always with this air of concern that he actually cares about the students. While this more cartoonish version might be occasionally grating to witness for certain adults, it's a very useful and effective persona that works very well on the students. Revealing too much of his soft underbelly to the teen collective would be letting them behind that curtain where they don't belong and aren't invited.

Don't we all do this?

In the tale, Oscar adapts so well to Oz that he ends up trapped. The persona he creates -- The Wizard -- is so essential in Oz that he finds himself either enraptured by their need of him or compelled to fill that gap. A wildly successful co-dependent, if you will. Yet, all along, he knows it's not really his home. Although he fights hard to keep Dorothy et al from revealing his deception, once discovered, he's more than ready to get the fuck outta Dodge. He hands the reins to Scarecrow, grabs the girl, hops in his balloon and heads for the hills. He knows it's time he left that little fantasy world and went back to the real one.

Oscar Diggs leaves because he already has a home. It might be black and white, a little dull. He might even be more of a nobody. But it's where he belongs. It's where he was meant to be. And at some point, he's gotta go back to that life and live it. He'll manage to find happiness and joy in it, even if, on occasion, he yearns for those Technicolor Panavision days of Oz.

Some might consider this use of personae dishonest. Yet rare is the soul who, if we're being truthful, manages to live wholly without deception. We just call it by different, kinder-sounding names.

Maybe when The Wizard departs Oz, he believes he will shed those facades. Maybe the all that fakery has wearied him and he longs to ditch the special effects. And in a way he will. But what he'll discover -- what we all discover -- is that returning home will require a new set of characters, all crafted to help the world understand him, and to help him manage the world.

* -- This could be a "Chester Drawer" moment for me. That is, this could be obvious for most people, but it took me a pathetically long time to realize it, just like I was in my 20s before I discovered they are called "chest of drawers."

"The Act We Act" is from Copper Blue, one of the best 20 albums of the '90s."Whole New You" is from an album of the same name, one of her weaker overall works. Both are on iTunes or Amazon.com's mp3 site.