David O. Russell seems like the kind of guy who sees his life and work as necromantic offerings, a series of hocuses and pocuses in the hopes of summoning Dr. Freud back from the grave. His debut, Spanking the Monkey (1994) is about the taboo (you know the one). More recently he’s admitted to (his version) inappropriately checking up on the development of his trans-niece or (her version) unwantedly fondling her in a garage. Russell seems like a man who likes imagining what happens when you brush up against a limit or, put more mundanely, f*ck around and find out.
His second feature, Flirting with Disaster (1996) is superficially a bit less shocking. This black comedy with screwball characteristics tracks Mel Coplin (Ben Stiller) as he seeks out his birth parents, feeling unable to name his newborn son until he knows “who he is.” His adoptive parents, Pearl (Mary Tyler Moore) and Ed (George Segal) ask him over and over what they’ve done wrong to not be his “real parents.” Mel’s wife, Nancy (Patricia Arquette) just wants to be able to have sex again and so sets off with her husband and sexy adoption agency attaché, Tina (Téa Leoni) to see his newly discovered biological mother. And so, we get from good ole New York City to the California suburbs.
Things only get whackier from there in a way that, were I to summarize it, would sound totally insane, but, while viewing feelings organic. These are mostly ill-restrained, discontented, some might even say “bad” (which is to say average/normal) people. Besides, life is weird. Sometimes your would-be biological sisters are a pair of beach volleyball players who take back the t-shirt they’ve gifted you because it turns out you aren’t related. Sometimes your newly found brother megadoses a gay cop (whose bisexual partner is trying to steal your wife) with LSD and gives him “an experience.” Other times two sets of your parents mix up their cars then get in an accident somewhere in rural New Mexico. C’est la vie. There’s a reason the Old English “wyrd,” (“fate”) gives us our “weird” (“weird”).
That strangeness is what happens when you probe the limits of human experience (and usually hurt yourself in the process). Russell seems to think so anyway, since, of course, Mel’s quest for self-discovery is funny, destructive, and, in its own twisted way, affirming, a cheerier ending than what we got when boundaries were skedaddled across in Spanking the Monkey. In other words, his films seem possessed of that morbid curiosity that both animates and upends human life. Curiosity killed the cat, sure—but what? You’re not gonna look?
Watching Flirting with Disaster, I (incorrigible antiquarian bore that I am) couldn’t help but think of Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale,” in which a handsy student moves in with an old, fat, bald, jealous (did I mentioned bald and fat?) carpenter and his weasel-like (Chaucer’s words, not mine) young wife. The student and his paramour decide to pull one over on the husband by convincing him there’s going to be another capital-F Noah-style Flood. While he’s in hiding they plan to have sex. Part of this ruse involves convincing the poor ugly fat jealous bald husband that the young man has seen some awful signs in the heavens of what’s to come, so awful, in fact, that it’s shocked him into paralysis.
John, the carpenter, launches into a lecture on “Goddes pryvetee,” (“God’s privacy”), those things it’s just best not to know. The irony, of course, is that it would be much better for him to not know about this fake disaster. He’s not following his own advice. On the other hand, he is totally ignorant of the truth that his wife wants to fool around behind is back (he watches her like a hawk otherwise, but not in this case), and, in that sense, hasn’t tried hard enough. Watching David O. Russell movies never fails to bring these barbed ironies to my mind, which seems sensible enough—Chaucer was the early career Woody Allen of his day (right down, lamentably, to the raptus charge):
Men sholde nat knowe of Goddes pryvetee.
Ye, blessed be alwey a lewed man
That noght but oonly his bileve kan!
(Men should not know of God’s secrets.
Yes, blessed be always an unlearned man
Who knows nothing but only his belief!)
(ll. 3454-3456)
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