Reflections on Grand Canyon

There's this thing that we all have in common, a secret thing that, for whatever reason, we're all embarrassed about and don't like to admit or talk about with others, even though we know we're all keeping the same secret, and everybody knows everybody knows.

I'm talking, of course, about your personal list of "Films I Know I Should Have Seen By Now But Haven't". Because unless you watch movies for a living, I doubt anybody is completely caught up -- maybe that's Netflix's key to success.

Lawrence Kasdan's Grand Canyon (1991) somehow found its way onto (and now, having watched it, off of) my list. It features Kevin Kline the Flippant, Danny Glover the Affable, Mary McDonnell the Earnest, Steve Martin the Steve Martin, and a young Mary Louise Parker in the role of that secretary Don Draper sleeps with and then cold-shoulders so she throws things at him and storms out of the office. It's also got an awesome Halo-esque score by James Newton Howard.

In the last few months I have screened several other old movies -- Tron, Silence of the Lambs -- which were considered quite groundbreaking/original at the time, but which now come off as clichéd, presumably because they've been imitated so much over the years. Exegetical appreciation presents us with the challenge of discerning between the original and conventional elements of such works.

Grand Canyon reminds me a lot of Crash (2004), which I'm sure borrows heavily -- both films are humanist treatises that deliver an overt thematic message of interconnectedness/deeper hidden meaning underlying our petty, surface-level, contemporary urban anxiety and alienation.

Yet, for all its "realism", Crash doesn't actually depict how people behave or interact -- rather, it presents hyped-up, straw-dog versions of the issues, especially racial friction. (Perhaps such portrayals are justified with an argument along the lines of "Yeah, people wouldn't really say this stuff, but it's what they're thinking.") Crash is safe in its "critique" of racism because it paints a version of racism that's so arch, of course it's contemptible.

Grand Canyon purports to be a portrait of ordinary life in LA at the time, but I'll wager it's a similarly unreliable snapshot, with its various tensions being cranked up for the sake of drama. Notwithstanding, there are also plenty of unintentional historical elements to Grand Canyon -- such is the nature of any deliberately contemporary work. But a danger lies in taking its depiction of racial issues, for instance, as historically accurate, because (like Crash, and like pretty much every other mainstream studio-produced flick) I bet it did more to affirm what people felt and thought and believed at the time than to challenge.

At any rate, it's got one of my all-time favorite lines:

MARY LOUISE PARKER: Jane, do you ever feel like you're just this far from being completely hysterical twenty-four hours a day?

ALFRE WOODARD: Half the people I know feel that way -- the lucky ones feel that way. The rest of the people ARE hysterical twenty-four hours a day!