Poetry & the Movies: The Hot Tub Rhyme Machine

Regular P&PC readers might have surmised by now that someone in the P&PC office has an abiding interest in Hollywood's ongoing relationship with poetry. Not only are there lots of movies explicitly about poets and poetry, but film after film—ranging from Citizen Kane to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Long Hot Summer, Groundhog Day, and Fight Club (just to name a few)—makes use of poetry as a plot device, as shorthand for one type of character development or another, or (seemingly) as an almost entirely gratuitous detail.

Think back to Woody Allen's 1977 masterpiece Annie Hall, for example. Alvy Singer (Allen) and Annie Hall (Diane Keaton) have just met while playing tennis. She gives him a harrowing ride home, weaving in and out of traffic on New York's narrow streets, and ultimately invites him to her place for a glass of wine. There—on what is more or less their first date—Alvy peruses Annie's bookshelves and pulls out a copy of Sylvia Plath's Ariel. Here's that exchange:

Alvy: Sylvia Plath. Interesting poetess whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic by the college girl mentality.

Annie: Oh yeah. Right. Well, I don’t know. I mean, some of her poems seem neat.

Alvy: Neat?

Annie: Neat, yeah.

Alvy: I hate to tell you, this is 1975, you know? Neat went out, I would say, at the turn of the century.

Predictable? Maybe in Annie Hall. But what about Steve Pink's 2010 comedy Hot Tub Time Machine in which three unhappy friends—Adam (John Cusack), Lou (Rob Corddry), and Nick (Craig Robinson)—are transported, along with Adam's teenage nephew Jacob (Clark Duke), back to "Winterfest '86" which was a pivotal weekend in all of their lives. Caught between the need to recreate the past exactly (so that the future is unaffected and Jacob still gets born) and an understandable desire to change the events that led to their current unhappiness, the three are forced in hilarious fashion to re-live and/or revise some of their most humiliating moments: Lou gets abandoned by his friends and beaten up by the psychotic head of the ski patrol; Nick gets a second chance to rock the house at what was an otherwise uninspiring concert the first time around; and Adam gets a second shot at finding the woman of his dreams.

Part of Adam's respon- sibility in this process is to recreate his break up with his high school girlfriend Jennie, who stabbed him in the eye for splitting with her the first time around. This time, however, Adam is fraught by second thoughts and delays the break, giving Jennie time to beat him to the punch. (She gives Adam a break-up note but still ends up stabbing him in the eye.) Devastated to have things turn out even worse than they did the first time around (or so he thinks), Adam retreats to his hotel room and gets stoned out of his mind. This is where Jacob finds him: in darkness, wallowing in self-pity while listening to The Cutting Crew's song "(I Just Died) In Your Arms Tonight," and—what else?—writing poetry. Here's that scene:

Jacob: Adam, hey. Thank God you’re back. Awesome. What’s going on here? Where are the guys?

[Cusack hands him the breakup note.]

What’s this?

[Jacob reads] "Dear Adam, you are a super terrific guy, and I love you, which is why this is so hard for me. I cherish our friendship…”

[Jacob laughs]

She broke up with you? And you still fucking got stabbed in the eye?

Adam [while writing]: Leave me alone. Get out of here.

Jacob: What are you doing here? Are you writing poetry?

Adam: Just leave me alone and get out of here. No.

Jacob: You’re writing fucking break-up poetry.

Adam: Alright, I’m writing break-up poetry, ok? … Because my heart hurts.

Jacob [looking around at all the drugs]: What is this shit? You’re wasted!

Adam: I’ve had like two wine kills, Captain Buzzcooler. God!

Jacob: You’re fucked up.

[Jacob picks up Adam's poem and reads]

"Jennie’s eyes,
like a gypsy’s lies,
cut right through the night.
Now those eyes
are another guy’s,
and I’m alone with my pain."

Adam: That was clean!

Jacob: Are you shitting me with this, Adam!?

Adam: Look, you can recite it straight or to the tune of "Sweet Child O’ Mine." It doesn’t matter.

Jacob: Are these mushrooms? Did you eat these mushrooms, Adam?

Adam: I like to eat 'em, you know. A couple of 'em.

Jacob: Holy fuck, man, you gotta stay straight. You’ve got to help me get the guys back.

Adam: You know, it’s not always about my emotional journey. It can be about yours.

Jacob: Put the coke down!

It's a funny, riotous scene in which the grown-up Adam revisits the genre of teenage poetry, and the ridiculousness of the entire endeavor (aside from the Guns N Roses homage, of course) serves to illustrate in miniature why the three adult men can't be entirely held hostage by the past. No matter how much poetry may express longing for a time it can't recover (as in pastoral poetry), or despite poetry's attempt to escape time altogether (as in many conceptions of the lyric), time must move forward and the guys must re-enter and make history. As if suggesting this very thing, the movie interrupts the argument between Adam and Jacob with the arrival of Chevy Chase who plays "the mystical time travel guide guy" come to remind them—as the thunder and lightning of a Romantic poem storm in the background—that the hot tub time portal will be closing soon. To get things done (or to make things happen, as Auden might put it), one needs more than the self-indulgence or reflection that poetry as a genre offers; one needs a plan or a plot to move forward in time (and/or through the pain of a breakup)—the exact thing, or so the movie's logic goes, that Hollywood provides that poetry cannot.

What all these movies have in common— Hot Tub Time Machine, Annie Hall, Citizen Kane, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, Groundhog Day, and Fight Club—is their substantial focus on moving through time in one way or another. In Steve Pink's comedy, that movement is backwards and forwards; in Groundhog Day, Bill Murray is stuck repeating the same day over and over; in Fight Club and Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, characters completely lose sense of time when they change into their alter egos. And Annie Hall and Citizen Kane are about sorting through the past, reflecting on what is now unattainable and what might have been. Thus, at some level, all these films must confront the fact that they are treading on poetry's traditional and culturally-sanctioned terrain, and they solve the resulting rivalry in different ways, all of which end up—no surprise here—privileging the technology of film and leaving P&PC, like Adam in Hot Tub Time Machine, alone with our pain.

Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Asshole, and the Haiku of Fight Club

Last week, Poetry & Popular Culture tried—via some amateur and possibly dubious ornithological sleuthing—to argue for the singular importance of John Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" in understanding Rouben Mamoulian's 1931 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Make no mistake: the P&PC Office wasn't allowed to carry off this claim unchallenged. Some respondents contended that whether or not the nightingale in the park scene was actually a nightingale makes no difference and that, in that scene, "bird" is understood to signify "nightingale" simply enough. Other whistle blowers argued that Jekyll's transformation into Hyde wasn't precipitated by poetry at all all but by the fact that Jekyll witnessed a cat eating a bird; observing an instinctual predator at work hailed Mr. Hyde and prompted his manifestation. Still other naysayers argued that Victor Fleming's 1941 remake is more sophisticated than P&PC gave it credit for being even though Fleming axed Keats from the script and left Jekyll whistling a song he first heard, as Hyde, in the company of Ivy.

Fair enough, we say, while nevertheless sticking to our guns: the fact that Jekyll's first-ever involuntary transformation into Hyde occurs immediately after he addresses a poem to another creature makes that moment particularly significant. It suggests that the re-appearance of Hyde has less to do with the return of the repressed than it does with either 1) the ability (or inability) to communicate to the proper auditor, or 2) the gap between reality and the world imagined by poetry. It's not poetry, per se, that the film associates with Jekyll's propriety, or with learning, or with class, or with culture, but, rather, the activity of saying or thinking about poetry as a way of relating to the specifics of this world.

Admittedly, part of our obstinacy in this matter is due to temperament, but part stems from the fact that one of the most recent Jekyll-and-Hyde movies—David Fincher's 1999 Fight Club starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton—also suggests the central importance of poetry to the destabilization of the self. Fight Club centers on two characters, played by Pitt and Norton, who begin an underground amateur fight-club scene as a way of recruiting disaffected men into a terrorist network intent on breaking the power of financial institutions, especially the credit system and its record of debt. Pitt plays Tyler Durden, the impulsive, charismatic Hyde to Norton's nameless, conservative, insomniac Jekyll. As the movie develops [SPOILER ALERT], we discover that Norton's character is a delusional schizophrenic and that Tyler is really his alter ego with a six pack full of wish fulfillment. (At one point, his girlfriend Marla Singer, played by Helena Bonham Carter, describes Norton as "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Asshole" to sum up her feelings of being mistreated by both his selves.) How Norton ultimately untangles himself from himself—how he even discovers himself within himself—is the primary "fight" at the center of Fight Club.

There's a scene in the middle of the movie where Norton's heretofore cautious character begins to embrace Tyler's life philosophy in earnest; he detaches himself from the mind-numbing trappings of consumerist America in order to experience LIFE in all of its brutal vitality. He goes to work with blood on his shirt. He smokes cigarettes in his cubicle. You know, productive, radical stuff. In a little poetic series of voice-over I statements accompanying this change, he explains:

I was the Zen master.
I became the calm little center of the world.
I wrote little haiku poems.
I emailed them to everyone.
I got right in everyone's hostile little face.

That's not the poetry, however. As Norton is explaining this, we get a close-up view of his computer screen where he is in the process of word processing one of those "little haiku poems" that symbolizes his new attitude. Here's that haiku:

Worker bees can leave
Even drones can fly away
The queen is their slave

Unlike Dr. Jekyll in the 1931 film, who becomes a performer of the Keats poem prior to his trans- formation, Norton's character becomes an author. And the haiku may be the perfect poetic form to bring his two selves into some sort of alignment: it's as lean as Tyler's six pack and has the sort of Spartan ethos Tyler would advocate, yet its regular 5-7-5 form would appeal to the structure Norton's other half needs. And it's a poetic form as at home in the iconoclastic, seventeenth-century, world-renouncing hands of Basho as it is in the the 21st-Century American cubicle. (See how Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster has been writing haiku in lieu of error messages to help police disruptive activity on the online site.) Rather than separating Norton from his alter ego, as it does with Jekyll, poetry appears, however uneasily, to synchronize the two.

All of this isn't to say that Jekyll's recitation of "Ode to a Nightingale" in 1931 and Norton's composition of seventeen syllables in 1999 are equivalent acts. Far from it. While both do occur at a significant moment of transformation from Jekyll to Hyde—or from Jekyll to Mr. Asshole—those transformations are complicated by the nature of authorship (Norton is an author, Jekyll is not), the media entailed (Jekyll uses his voice, Norton uses email), their respective cultures (Jekyll is in 19th-century Britain, Norton is not), etc. That is, if the 1931 flick is about the birds (the Nightingale), then the 1999 film is about the bees (drones, workers, queens). But the simple fact that this Jekyll-Hyde transformation is articulated in both cases via poetry should be enough to create some buzz—if not give one something to sing about.