Back in the Gray Flannel Days Before Mankind Discovered the Clitoris

Rating: 8/10 (29 January 2009)

After seeing yet another existential evocation of dystopian lives in 1950s suburbia (try the far more campy melodrama, Far From Heaven , or the far more gentle satire, Pleasantville, for a set of comparisons) it is obvious why the next step in American cultural evolution following Frank Lloyd Wright's inspired masculine tract house angularity involved both the "Feminine Mystique" and the "Hite Report." The sex in these 'burbs was just god-awful. Dicaprio's office stud was, at best, a six to seven pump chump fighting to beat a soft boiled egg timer when he played kitchen man to Winslet's unfulfilled housewife. Not surprisingly, she cheated to find better, but the guy next door was a truly pitiful front seat three stroker, if that. Did people of this type during this time period really screw so industrially? I mean I know the proverbial back seat drive-in movie thing was likely a fast, furtive and mostly clothed affair, but if this movie makes any statement about the banality and hopelessness of these characters' predicament, it is in the bump and grind of their everyday lives, or the lack of any to be precise. These well-suited and fedora clad men had won the war, then came home to fight meaningless memo battles within art deco wood and frosted glass foxhole versions of Dilbert's future cubicle hell. They wound up all pea and no cock, and their poor drab hens paid the real price.
I can easily picture Eddie Haskell as a selfish and quick lout bumbling about darkly in the back seat of a Studebaker between double creature features, but. I wonder if this is what it was like in Ward and June Cleaver's bedroom, or in their kitchen when Wally and Beaver were off somewhere being all American boys?
(Curious Note: Actor Dylan Baker, who plays DiCaprio's cubicle inmate at work, strikingly resembles the model for the father subject in the infamous 1930s anti-Depression propaganda billboard, "World's Highest Standard of Living, There is No Way Like the American Way." This billboard was made world famous through Margaret Bourke-White's classic ironic black and white photograph showing poor African-American flood victims lining up for relief in front of one in Louisville, KY in 1937. The billboard artwork, though it depicted an upper middle class white family enjoying "prosperity" as the Depression presumably ebbed in the late 1930s, is nonetheless eerily prescient for, and evocative of post war 1950s material culture.)