Scoop's
notes:
The Rachel Papers is about a conniving young Brit
who uses his high level of intelligence to seduce women. He plans
out and scripts every encounter, every phone call, every move, with
computerized assistance. He communicates his strategies directly to
the audience by speaking into the camera and offering "takes" for
the camera's benefit.
When he finally seems to have met the girl of his
dreams, he pursues her long enough to get her. They then live together
for two weeks behind their parents' backs, and the sex is all he dreamed
it would be, but he gradually becomes disenchanted with his dream girl
when he sees her peeing, or her period starts in bed, or she leaves
half-eaten food under the bed, or she sings along with the radio without
knowing the tune or the words. He dumps her by mouthing some insincere
bullshit. She calls him on it, and asks him to stop posturing and
manipulating and trying to look smart. She asks him to just show his
true feelings and say what is on his mind.
When he turns in his exams at Oxford, the professor
who reads his papers tells him the same thing Rachel said, that he
should stop using flowery phrases which are designed to make him seem
smart, and try instead to communicate his real feelings accurately.
Martin Amis wrote the eponymous novel when he was 24,
and it is interesting to note that the criticisms leveled against the
young boy in this story are the very same criticisms leveled against
Martin Amis himself by literary critics to this day, including the
comments made by his own famous father, Kingsley Amis. Martin has a
reputation for showing off his vocabulary and trying to appear as smart
as possible, ala Joyce or Nabokov, but not being able to deal with or to
understand human feelings. John Updike called one of Amis's novels
"post-human."
I guess The Rachel Papers, written thirty years ago,
shows that Amis was not lacking in self-awareness. It's interesting that
he has been aware of this weakness all along, yet could not or would not
mitigate it!
Looking back at this movie, I guess it's more
important to celebrity nudity history than to movie history. The most
important thing about it was that it marked Ione Skye's nude debut. She
had just turned 18, and she looked very luscious and ripe. If you didn't
know, she is the daughter of the hippie of hippies, the wimp-rock
balladeer Donovan.
Shortly after she split from Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz
in 1999, Ione revealed on the Howard Stern show that she is bisexual and
that model Jenny Shimizu "brought her into the Lesbian nation."
I don't think the whole lesbian thing did a lot for
her career. One cannot point to carpet hunger as the definitive cause,
but looking back at the promise Ione showed in this film and elsewhere
in her early career, and then comparing that to her recent career, one
would conclude that something went wrong somewhere.
