Lost In Emotion by Lisa Lisa or BEHIND THE CANDELABRA - The Cinema of Disappointment by Steven Soderbergh

Mired more in disappointment than in desire, Steven Soderbergh's reportedly final film is also thick with intense emotion.

BEHIND THE CANDELABRA opens with  explosions of hope.  Summer and Moroder throb as a disco styled HBO logo brights the screen.  Action commences with  an expectation of pleasure:  Bob (Scott Bakula) and Scott (Matt Damon) exchange gazes across a (gay) bar, Summer and Moroder still feeling love in the background.  Bob approaches and first names are shared; the synth pop phantasm faded, the quick scene already over, intensity of  expectations deflated.

The promise of passion and adoration is renewed when Bob introduces Scott to his newest fan, Liberace (Michael Douglas.)

As Scott and Lee become enmeshed, the story is revealed in a series of physical and emotional changes unleashed in Scott.  He pursues plastic surgery, he stops actively working in his field, he develops a drug problem and he is emotionally all over the fucking map.
 Lee, on the other hand, is unchanged gloss. We learn little about him besides a few calmly revealed anecdotes. His mother (Debbie Reynolds) is present yet unknowable under a thick Polish accent and a preoccupation with being given money.

Scott and Lee remain together while Lee is protected and Scott descends into a loss of identity.

Watching their relationship on film is like watching a bird fly into a mirror.  Time and time again the bird thinks it is looking at a possible mate, unable to understand there is only a glass that can not be entered.

The love of Liberace is studied less for homosexuality than as a love of co dependency.
These lacks are measures of unmet expectations; of images that lie, and surfaces that  can't be permeated.

 Scott seeks in Lee a  promise of love, personal beauty and protection, and he is disappointed on all fronts.

Perhaps Soderbergh  is evoking, by way of heightened emotions and sexy disco soap opera, the failures he sees reflected back in his own creations.

FOOL ME TWICE

I'm thinking about Rabbit Angstrom and how luck and desperation convened on this unimpressive prick.

He could cheat, disappear and run out on Janice, but she would fall in love with him each time, and she would take him back.

He is written as a bit of a louse, a crotchety, bitter yet unflappable guy.   Modern sensibilities tinged with a vaguely racist and  reactionary worldview.  He is likeable because he is authentic and he is terribly flawed, and it is reasonable to accept that women love and forgive and fall for him, and that this is a pattern that repeats itself.



It is less believable to see the women who refuse to fall.

That is why PRETTY WOMAN is as realistic as the RABBIT books.  Only the movie hides some of the humiliation, though it is directly inferred, since the relationship begins as transactional.

In MS. 45 the trauma of repeated male to female harm (rape by a street attacker) is tempered by the revenge murders the victim begins to carry out; once transformed, fantastically,  into a super sexualized killer.

In reality women are no strangers to repeated humiliation.
They are disgusting yet recognizable and they have no one to blame but themselves.

MS. 45