DEAR PORCH: EVERYBODY WANTS SOME!! & THE GREEN RAY - Morgan Meis

Dear Porch,

I’m not gonna say that Everybody Wants Some!!, the film by Richard Linklater, is a great movie. It is not. But it’s pretty good. We should also just appreciate a film that has not one but two!! exclamation marks in its official title. And yet, something nags at me about the title, that sentence, everybody wants some. What is it that everybody wants? Some. Some what? Well sex, of course, everbody wants some sex. And most of the people in the film are chasing after sex, especially the jocks on the baseball team, our ostensive heroes, the protagonists of the film if there are any protagonists in this film. They want to have as much sex as possible, those baseball jocks, and a few of them get just that. They also want something to do with baseball. They want to become baseball players of a professional sort. They want some fame, some glory, the glory of sport. Probably they want some money also, the money that goes along with the glory and that overlaps to at least some degree with the sex. Sex, glory, and money. That is what they want some of. 

One amazing thing that Linklater achieves in the film, to my mind, dearest Porch, I don’t know if you had the same experience with the film, but I’ve noticed that many reviewers of the film say something along these same lines, they say that you can’t really dislike these jocks. It is a funny point but one I’d have to agree with. On paper, we’d expect to disapprove of these jocks from the 1970s, an age that now seems so terribly unreconstructed in terms of its attitude especially to sex and sexuality and all of that. We are going to loathe these baseball players. But we do not. There is an indefinable sense of compassion that permeates every frame of this movie, compassion for all of the human, all too human individuals who stumble breezily through this film that is, itself, without much shape or contour and which contains almost nothing in the way of a story and very little that one would normally call substance. Did you have that same experience, Porch?

By way of thinking about this little film from Richard Linklater, this almost throw-away offering from a person whom I am coming more and more to see as one of the great artists of his generation, this Richard Linklater, the director who has made such seemingly hard to connect films as the Sunset trilogy, School of Rock, and A Scanner Darkly, this oddly inconsistent, inconsistent maybe to quite a sneaky purpose, but this guy happens to be a big fan of Éric Rohmer. Now here’s the thing, Porch, here’s the thing I have to confess. I just hadn’t really watched any Rohmer films until very recently. Somehow, I missed it. Maybe I saw a Rohmer film or two in my younger days. I really can’t remember. If I did, the film or films had no impact on me. Zero. That’s a difficult and somewhat embarrassing thing to confess, though I believe that there should be no secrets between you and me, Porch. No secrets when it comes to movie watching, at least. No secrets about the real thoughts and feelings and emotions and experiences and stories that have to do with movies.   

So very recently, last year, actually, I finally watched The Green Ray. Holy shit is that an incredible film. I’m nearly certain you agree with me on that, Porch. I cried a bit at the end. I am not ashamed to admit that to you, Porch. The thing I love about watching myself, in my mind’s eye, as it were, observing myself in retrospect watching The Green Ray, the thing that delights me about myself is that I am extremely frustrated with Delphine. Of course, it is probably true that everyone who watches The Green Ray gets frustrated with Delphine. But so do I! I really do. Sometimes, I just want her to go to one of the places where she’s been invited and stop complaining about it all. Or to just have sex with one of the boys giving her attentions. Or to actually engage with one of the conversations happening around her without being so damned difficult. You can be so difficult, Delphine. You are so awkward, Delphine. You ruin your own chance at everything, Delphine. Delphine is a person who just cannot and will not take what is given to her. And we blame her for it! That is one extremely important aspect of the magic of the film. Rohmer manages to turn us against Delphine for most of the movie. We are tortured by her own tortuous resistance to the world, to people, to herself. We are tortured by her constant negations. The film is an extended torture scene. Wicked.   

And then the green ray happens. And the young fellow with whom she experiences the green ray at the end of the film, I can’t remember his name and can’t be bothered to look it up. It doesn’t matter. The two of them near the beach. She was right. Delphine was right. She had more patience then we did. She was willing to wait. She was willing to say no the correct number of times. Because you can go too far with no. We all know that. You can get stuck in no, which is what scares us about Delphine the whole way through ninety percent of the film, where her constant no feels utterly self-defeating. And then the miracle. No turns into yes. The dance of no and yes throughout the whole film, the way that emptiness drives scene after scene in that film, conversations that aren’t quite there, people who aren’t quite there, a way of filming lived experience that lets us dive deeply into the squalor and meaninglessness of being alive, the quiet despair. He savors that, Rohmer does. He savors the oblivion with his long, too long, just amazingly languorous scenes where experience itself is failing for everyone and no one connects.

And then the magic happens. Delphine has earned it, in a sense, by willing to go through the suffering of no. Her heart somehow knows exactly what it must suffer. She accepts the most annoying parts of her own character because she knows also, deep down, she knows that she has the capacity to want, to need, to fully take in the green ray. 

Which makes me think, dear Porch, that the ‘some’ that everybody wants in Everybody Wants Some!! can be given another name. Everybody wants some green ray. And sex too. Sure. But the green ray is there, lurking in the depths, behind all the screwing. Or maybe not behind but embedded in there somehow, the thing that makes the wanting really want, the aching nature that drives desire as desire. We could get into some Lacan here, Porch, but I will resist that temptation. You get what I mean, I hope. Everybody Wants Some!! Is Richard Linklater’s Green Ray, in a sense. In a sneaky Richard Linklater way. Because Everybody Wants Some!! is a lot of fun, on the face of it, whereas The Green Ray is torture on the face of it. But both films are willing to swim around for most of their run-time in empty time. Both films do this in order finally, at the last moment to dive down into the nameless thing at the depths of desire. Am I going too far with that, Porch? I don’t think so. I think I am on to something. I think that all of the films of Rohmer and all of the films of Linklater are basically doing that same aimless swimming and then deep dive again and again. 

I want to talk with you more about this, Porch. I want to talk with you more about Richard Linklater and about Éric Rohmer and to get your help in understanding why these films are meaning so much to me right now. I want to share these experiences with you, Porch, because I think you get it. I think you can help me, Porch, I think we can talk.

In friendship and love,

morgan meis

Morgan Meis is a contributor at The New Yorker. He has a PhD in Philosophy and has written for Slate and Harper’s Magazine, among many others. He won the Whiting Award for nonfiction in 2013.