How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (2008) - by Faro

This movie is a cautionary tale… but not in the way it means to be. It tries, and fails, to be a clever satire and an ethical narrative about the dangers of giving up on your ideals in an attempt to gain success and sex in the facsimile world of Entertainment (... have any celebrity journalists ever actually concerned themselves with ethics?). But, quite unintentionally, this film instead shows the possible dangers of aligning your piece of art with a greater one.

Structurally it is a basic flashback story that begins at the end and then wraps around to the beginning to show us how the protagonist, step by plodding step, has reached his “sad” end. So we watch, with occasional laughs but general boredom, as an obnoxious Brit with a penchant for message t-shirts comes to America to achieve access in the glittering halls of American Media by being a snarky asshole to everyone he comes into contact with. He is rude even to those who attempt to show him some small measure of kindness… like those who inexplicably gave him a job in the first place, or those who continue to speak to him even after he has committed atrocious social offenses without a whiff of either willful anarchy or devious purpose, but merely from idiocy and dumb pride.

As per the logic of such films he predictably gives up on enough of his original ideals and gets his shit together long enough to finally rise to the top of the celebrity journalist hierarchy and is nearly to bed down a truly stunning female specimen with questionable mental faculties... which, of course, is every man’s dream… and then we realize we have come around to the end of the story which was the beginning of the movie, and we know that the character’s defining moment has arrived. At the last possible moment, when all his hollow dreams are about to come true, he has a crisis of faith, and realizes his humanity and blah blah blah.

But the real story of this film is that the love interest for this emotional retard is signified with La Dolce Vita… because, as we learn in two key scenes, it is her favorite movie. Apparently, her writing a novel by hand in a well-worn leather journal is not enough to let us know that she is a true and authentic person, so we must also learn of her love of “classic” cinema. So he buys her a vinyl record of the soundtrack, and has a sweet little scene with her about midway through the film, sowing the narrative seeds that will eventually blossom at the end of the movie to bring us all redemption and validation. In fact, the film will actually end with them dancing in the Empire Fulton Ferry State Park beneath the Brooklyn Bridge on a Thursday night (that’s when they show movies there) as La Dolce Vita plays in the background… by the way, its playing without subtitles, which I guess means that everyone watching in the park that night speaks Italian?

Now, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with referencing other works of art in your own, in fact there is a glorious tradition of doing just that through out the history of Art. Hell, anyone remember the motivation for the Renaissance? Or the intense Humphrey Bogart obsession in Breathless? And there have been many great works of art devoted to detailing the ethical dangers of the world of Entertainment, which would make thematic sense to reference in this particular film. Celebrity by Woody Allen, Fake Plastic Trees by Radiohead, The Anniversary Party by Jennifer Jason Leigh and Alan Cumming, Mullholland Drive by David Lynch, and of course La Dolce Vita by Fellini. And there is no reason I can think of why someone else shouldn’t try to tackle this interesting subject again… all the stories of the world have already been told, but it is in our nature to keep telling and re-telling them in our own voice for our own time.

But this then is the real failure of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People… not that it just makes reference to other works of art greater than itself, but that it is ultimately afraid to speak with its own voice alone when it matters, and feels the need to prop itself up with our memories of La Dolce Vita. Sure, most of the time it seems like a brash and self-satisfied movie, and it sure tries hard to appear that way. But in key moments, it runs for safety and shows its deficiencies in character development and image construction. As already mentioned, it uses La Dolce Vita to inject an air of emotional complexity into the middle of the film for our hero and heroine. And it actually physically provides the backdrop for the heartwarming conclusion. Because, in truth, no other image in the film has even approached being worth repeated at the end. We might not have noticed this lack and just remembered a few tired laughs and some rude t-shirts, but the dearth of emotional imagery is made conspicuous by the interpolation of brilliant cinema from the past. And that is the true cautionary tale of this film… be careful how you reference art that is better than your own, it might just reveal the man behind the curtain.

(And speaking of referencing other films, it also makes several nonsensical allusions to The Big Lebowski, like the protagonist only drinking White Russians and him mistakenly calling one person “Mrs. Lebowski”. Is this only because Jeff Bridges appears in both films? Is there a greater significance? ... I guess we will never know.)