Check out Roissy/Heartist’s analysis of the scene Glenn Stanton can’t get enough of* (youtube clip included).
Mr. Stanton tells us in his book Secure Daughters, Confident Sons: How Parents Guide Their Children into Authentic Masculinity and Femininity that he and his wife make it a point to watch this movie once a year. Stanton references the same scene Heartiste explains from a game perspective. To Stanton it is a teachable moment explaining how an unwed mother can make a man better:
She is a confident and attractive young single mother, Carol Connelly, (Helen Hunt). Even as they grow closer, he is helpless to keep from insulting her regularly.
In one scene, they find themselves out for a nice evening at a fancy restaurant. When Melvin criticizes Carol’s dress, she tells him he has no idea how much his words hurt her and that he’d better come up with a compliment pretty quick. She even reminds him that a compliment is something nice that one person says to another.
Heartiste of course has a different perspective on what is going on in the scene.
*Note that the post itself is pretty tame but you are on your own if you click on any other links or read the comments.
I still don’t understand why Stanton or anyone else thinks “As Good As It Gets” is a good relationship movie. At best it’s about two very flawed, very broken people trying to connect, in a Hollywood comedy, extremely unrealistic way.
Here are the problems:
1. In the movie, Carol is a cute single mom with pluck and aplomb. In real life Carol doesn’t look or act like Helen Hunt. She’s frazzled from working a full time job, fighting with her baby daddy over child support and visitation, is about 30 pounds overweight, is always broke or teetering on the edge of deep financial trouble, clubhops, and hangs out with her harpie friends. She’s also got a partner count of at least 6 or 7, is off a failed relationship or three, can’t keep a relationship together, and has a taste for alpha bad boys that would lead her as far away from a man like Melvin as she could get.
2. In the movie, Melvin is an oddly amusing misanthrope. His mental illness (obsessive-compulsive disorder) is shown as acute, active and severe, and is used as a plot device and played for comic effect. But in real life, OCD is a serious and debilitating disease. Melvin is really a very sick man in the literal sense of the word. He needs heavy duty therapy, not a woman. And if that’s not bad enough, Melvin is one of the most insufferable, unlikeable human beings portrayed on film in recent memory. He’s intentionally rude. He’s caustic, self-centered, vulgar, mildly homophobic, and severely xenophobic. He’s thoughtless and abusive to everyone around him.
3. Melvin is played by Jack Nicholson. But let’s not forget that Nicholson is one of the most gifted actors of his generation, one of the most celebrated actors of all time, one of the most famous men alive, and in real life is a notorious womanizer. Jack is as alpha as they come. Whatever he lacks in looks he more than makes up for in status and attitude, which he has in spades. There has never been, nor will there ever be, another like him. He does what he wants, with whom he wants, when and where he wants, and you can’t say f**k-all about it.
4. Melvin’s behavior works in the film as alpha because you’re not really seeing Melvin. You’re seeing Nicholson as Melvin. Nicholson can pull off this assholery in the film because he’s Jack Nicholson. See Par. 3 above.
5. In real life, Carol ends up alone after several more pump and dumps. Melvin is institutionalized, or jailed after snarking off to a cop, or hospitalized after being beaten within an inch of his life by some thugs on the street whom he said one too many words to.
Deti
I still don’t understand why Stanton or anyone else thinks “As Good As It Gets” is a good relationship movie.
You answer your own question in the next sentence.
At best it’s about two very flawed, very broken people trying to connect, in a Hollywood comedy, extremely unrealistic way.
I’m all but certain that Mrs. Stanton likes the movie very much, because it is about “brokenness” that is “healed” in an extremely unrealistic way, with a nice dollop of “taming the alpha” at the very end, it appears. Well, that’s pretty much the simple summary of many, many romantic comedy / women’s movies. So if Mrs. Stanton likes this chick flick, Mr. Stanton better get with the program and find something to like in it, too. Because that’s what a he-man patriarch does, on Planet Stanton – anything his wife orders…er…suggests he should do.
Disclaimer: I’ve not seen the movie. So o I read the “Cliff’s Notes” version here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_Good_as_It_Gets
Any errors in plot details are thus mine, mine, all mine.
That said, the scene linked to at Heartiste is not very long, and the analysis at Heartiste seems accurate to me.
I just watched the scene for the first time. The first five minutes made me uncomfortable, and I can see what Deti’s saying about the OCD. In hingsight reading Heartiste’s blog I can see what lessons he’s teaching. However, the final minute with that compliment was brilliant.
Deti.
Being neither pedantic or cruel in my intent when I say this:
I would be surprised were her “N” that low.
Admittedly, that may just be in my part of the USA [close to where the story takes place] but it’s still more of a “good girl N” than a “bad girl N” here.
Make of that what you will.
The movie is only useful for Melvin’s quote about how he writes “realistic” female characters. Otherwise it’s actually pretty terrible.
Deti beat me to my comment with his #1: most (all?) single moms look and act nothing like Helen Hunt. They’re not in her league. To paraphrase James Lileks, they wouldn’t even know where to get tickets to watch her league play.
Looking glass:
Yeah. that’s become a classic, hasn’t it?
Woman, to Melvin, marveling at his literary genius: “How do you write women so realistically!?”
Melvin: “I think of a man. Then I take away reason and accountability.”
Cail:
Yeah. I have never, ever seen a single mom who looks or acts like Helen Hunt. Most single moms are stressed out, out of shape, overweight, frazzled, unpleasant, and slightly bitchy.
All the hot single moms must live in Texas, near Professor Mentu.
@deti:
It’s one of those statements that 50% of guys are nodding along to and the other 50% are wanting to nod along to. And women love this film, haha.
As for “hot single moms”, there are always exceptions. There’s always the red herring widows.
Cali, Deti
Yeah. I have never, ever seen a single mom who looks or acts like Helen Hunt.
But they should be able to look like Helen Hunt. And she should be able to “tame the alpha” who looks and acts like Jack Nicholson, too. It’s not fair that they don’t look, or act, like Helen Hunt and can’t tame an alpha.
That’s the point of fantasy.
And that’s why it is appropriate to refer to such romantic fiction as “emotional porn”, emoporn for short.
@Deti
No way is her N count that low. Even good girls have a half dozen or more by 20. Her age and single mom, i’d estimate a conservative 25. But then i have known girls with N counts in 50s by 22 and single moms that have done gang bangs of 12+ guys.
Enjoy the decline, just don’t wife these gals up. The words “damaged goods” don’t even begin to describe the average woman, and single moms are even more of a trainwreck. Joke with my friends that i would rather lose a hand then get tired down with one and paying for her crotch fruit.
Carol is actually portrayed in the movie as having major problems being a single mother. She has a sick son whom she cannot get properly treated. She gets lucky when a doctor (played by one of the Ghostbusters actors, almost unrecognisable) takes pity on her. She has trouble “dating” because of her sick son.
The Jack Nicholson character is a successful writer of romance novels, in an ironic touch. I would say he is what Alte once called an Aspergery Alpha (her post is back at the Traditional Christianity site, last time I looked.) The movie was admired because Nicholson’s character got to be blunt and honest, at a time when PC had started to lock in. Melvin (Nicholson) calls Carol a “waitress” and the homosexual character a “fag”.
I remember the scene being discussed, but didn’t give it much significance. The relationship is shown as tenuous even at the end of the movie. I don’t think we were meant to draw any broad conclusions. It was just a story.
@ Deti,
These days most SINGLE WOMEN are stressed out, out of shape, overweight, frazzled, unpleasant and slightly bitchy.
How long has the glamorization of single mothers been going on, I wonder? The spunky, moxie-filled, takes-no-guff-from-any-man, uber-competent mother who’s always right, if not at the start of the show then always by the end. The totally independent woman who just happens to benefit from unseen men…
Thinking about some of the rotten sitcoms and dramadies, many of them reruns, that I had to sit through at relatives houses when I was younger, I recalled this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Day_at_a_Time
There could be others. I just can’t, or don’t, want to think of them. But “One Day at a Time” started in 1975, that’s definitely a 2nd stage feminist TV show.
“Where do they teach you to talk like this? In some Panama City “Sailor wanna hump-hump” bar, or is it getaway day and your last shot at his whiskey? Sell crazy someplace else, we’re all stocked up here.” – Melvin Udall
@deti, THIS was always my second fave quote after yours about writing good women…
The JN character is not “alpha” at all. He would be “omega” but for the fact that he is a rich and successful writer. And that aspect is more or less ignored in the movie, other than to set up the situation in which JN is able to help the HH character by paying for her son’s doctor. What CH sees as “game,” is, or is supposed to be, anyway, disfunctionality. The JN character does NOT live the succesful love life of an alpha gamester. Just the contraray. He is alone in every way…no wife, no girlfriend, no one night stands, and also no real friends. His best friend, apparently, is the gay guy who he only knows at all because he happens to be his neighbor. The JN charater is disfunctional. He can’t go to any restuarant but one, and that one only because the HH waitress character is able to deal with his craziness. He is a misanthrope. A loner. Despite his succes, a loser. And actually mentally ill besides.
Of course, JN himself is about as “alpha” as they come, and that does shine through in this scene and throughout the movie.
But the character is not supposed to be seen as working successful game, not even un or sub consciously. Rather he is supposed to be a sick and troubled man. He’s like someone with asperger. He honestly doesn’t realize that what he says is hurtful or even uncomplimentary. What he says is not the clever, playful, tactical “neg” of a gamester, but the honest but blundering comment of someone who doesn’t understand the basics of human interaction.
Must everything be seen as “game?”
As for the HH character, of course she is more attactive than the average single mother. But, contra to Stanton, she is not really all that “confident.” She has a seriously ill son and is struggling to barely get by on a waitress’ salary. Despite all of her goodness, it is really only happenstance, an accident, that she gets hooked up with a guy with money.On the other hand, there is no notion in the movie that she has fallen for JN because of his game. Rather, at first she feels grateful to him because he helped solve the medical issue, and then sees him more or less as a person in need, just as she was. She sees in him a better guy who could come to the surface if he dealt with his mental illness by taking his meds and working at getting better, rather than wallowing in it. She’s not trying to “tame” him, but rather to help him. And he, perhaps unlike most guys, does actually NEED help, does need to change.
He’s not “Gaming” her and she’s not “Taming” him. Rather, the filmmakers saw it as two people who could help each other and maybe have a relationship even though both have big problems. Both have what the other one lacks and needs.Trite and conventional, to be sure, but it is actually quite entertaining. JN is a legend, of course, and HH is very good.
They used “as good as it gets” to relay wisdom on relationships? Wow.
Honestly, how can an individual like Nichaolson’s character in that movie be a good “study subject” on the psychology of dating advice?
This is what happens when too much bad gouge has sunk in; and people get to the point where they can no longer think better for themesevles; they look to Hollywood’s “art in film” to get their “deep truths.” Man, we are in trouble if that is what will be used by everyone now for rlational advice.
When will people get it? It is the male gender, not the female’s, who is the more noble sex. Until men get the credit they deserve in all respects, or close to, our society is courting the same disaster that destroyed Rome.
How can any movie be wisdom on relationships? ITS SCRIPTED!!!
Lol @ game
> Must everything be seen as “game?” (ruddyturnston)
Good question. It’s exactly like how in feminism a woman tying her shoes is a “feminist act”. (-Or is it an oppressive, misogynistic tradition imposed upon women by the patriarchy? lolz)
Even the crummiest model of reality is better than none at all.
The word “misandry” starts to go mainstream:
http://catallaxyfiles.com/2012/10/12/misogyny-or-misandry/
Glenn Stanton says whatever the women who send him money would like to hear.
This way he can afford to keep his demanding wifey.
Helen Hunt played the floundering single mom,Jack played guy who is close to death and desperate,a coupling made in heaven.They are not married whilst engaging in intercourse,and excellent stance for the family focus.Make the baby first,then marriage will come, I read in the book of Oprah.(His Bible)
Watching Nicholson in “Wolf” right now,a far better movie.He’s more honest to himself.
Must be bored,actually read the gamers site.
Most alpha game move of all:Taking a shit whilst the women is in the shower adjacent to the toilet.The steam gathers up your alpha shit smell and forces it up her nostrils.
How can any movie be wisdom on relationships?
It’s easy. It’s the fantasy of every woman and Stanton knows his public.
A woman taming an alpha. A woman rescuing him not only from his selfishness but also from his insanity. The magical p*ssy in action.
Furthermore, the girl is a single mom and she is picture as an example of good will and good sense. The “new-born” virgins of Stanton’s church must be very happy.
The point Mr/Mz Stanton is missing is this is indeed a teachable moment. But the real lesson is polar opposite of hat he thinks it should be. The real lesson for the daughter is that odds are, Jack’s character in the movie may be better than a single mom with a child that has an expensive medical condition can get, with all of his warts and PC “issues”. For Helen Hunts’ character, it may indeed be as good as it gets if she failed to find and keep a man when she was younger and more desirable.
Well, I just watched the scene – never seen it before – and I am sorry, but, this is what I think:
1. What is he doing with an old dog like her?
2. If he is so alpha, why at the beginning is he mooching around as if unsure.
3. His immitating her smile and wave look weak.
4. Shouting at a distant waiter is just the mark of an oaf.
5. His ‘compliment’ had me reaching for the sick bucket – although his refusal to dance was good.
Nothing Alpha about it at all. The dress is indeed awful – and like most strong women she cannot cope with reality or straight talk. Some of my put-downs have been far more damming, – after all a dress is only a dress, and does not go to the heart of the person.
I therefore do not agree with the Heartiste view that this is alpha behaviour, so I am wondering, as I often do, whether this is a case of cultural difference, that is to say what goes down well here would not go down well where you all are.
Having said that if you want to observe really good seduction in a movie and doing the very opposite of what Game says you should do, watch Rock Hudson seduce Doris Day in Lover Come Back!
Here’s the thing: in this scripted case, that may have actually been true — he was a sick guy who needed help and could change. But the point, and the reason it’s relevant here, is that most women use that same rationalization any time an inappropriate guy gives them enough tingles to look past his faults. So you get the good church girl who ignores the polite beta suitors at church, but starts dating a pagan drummer whom she has to pick up for their dates because he lost his license when he got his third DUI. She tells her friends he’s a tortured soul who just never had a chance because his parents blah blah blah abused as a child blah blah blah only cheated that one time and was really sorry blah blah blah can’t get a break. He may not be tortured at all; he may be perfectly happy bumming around gig-to-rare-gig and banging her and a couple other girls. But she has to tell herself a story to make it the right thing to do, even though he violates 80% of the requirements on her Mr. Right list.
That’s a reality that nice guys have to come to terms with. If a scene from a movie helps with that, even though it’s not really what the writers had in mind, fine. When we see yet another girl who gave us the ‘not ready for a relationship’ talk climb on the back of some grubby guy’s Harley, our own hamsters kick in: she’s confused because of past abuse, she’s afraid of commitment, she’s not ready to settle down, we scared her off, NAWALT. We conclude that it was just bad luck or bad timing that things didn’t work out, so we go on and treat the next one the same way. It’s critical to accept that AWALT, so we can make our own choices based on reality. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, though, so every bit of reinforcement helps.
Also, as others said, Nicholson oozes alpha through everything he does. (I haven’t seen this movie, but having seen others, I can imagine.) So there’s a meta lesson to consider here: would a woman like this be attracted to a man like that if he didn’t have Nicholson’s personality showing through? Grateful, sure, but grateful never gets you more than a pity f—, and even those are rare. Take away Nicholson’s aura, and you’ve just got a sick guy who insults people without realizing it. That might intrigue a woman for a moment until she realizes it’s illness, not edge. But it’s not going to spark attraction. It might trigger her mothering instinct, but not her tingles.
Which leads to the core principle of Game: it’s not the details of what you say or do that matter so much. Most guys worry that an insult, or a lack of compliments, or waiting too long to call, or some other detail, will turn her off. It doesn’t work that way. If you have a tenth of Nicholson’s attitude, she won’t even notice those things — or she’ll rationalize them into positives somehow. Have a beta frame, and she can build one slight into a reason to leave.
Crazy Game?
With apologies to Tracy Cabot…
There are five major reasons why perfectly nice women wind up with perfectly rotten men.
1) It takes a very nice woman to put up with some of these men. Crazy men aren’t dumb. They always pick nice women, women who won’t leave at the first sign of craziness, women who want to help, women who will wait for sanity to return.
2) By picking men who treat them badly, some women are able to avoid a committed relationship. The worse he acts, the more justified the woman is in avoiding commitment. Sometimes a woman even drives a man to act crazy and then says, “See, I knew I shouldn’t get too involved”.
3) Often a nice woman will find a perfectly nice man and, by letting him get away with bad behavior, will accidentally teach him how to act like an “alpha” and walk all over her, never realizing what she’s doing.
4) Sometimes a woman needs the excitement a truly crazy guy brings to her life. At any minute he may attempt suicide, crash the car, burn down the house, leave, or have a disastrous affair. What thrill can compete with the living soap opera a truly crazy man brings to her dreary everyday life?
5) There are other “advantages” to having a crazy man in your life. If you’re the type who needs to take care of someone, you have a built-in outlet for your caretaking instincts. If you’re insecure and have low self-esteem, you always have someone to whom you feel superior. If you need a victim, someone to abuse, either physically or verbally, he’ll probably fill the bill. You can torment him as if you were a little girl taunting a little boy, and he won’t leave — he’ll just get crazier.
Helen Hunt is an “actress” if you establish that she plays the same shrill emasculating ball-buster in every role she approaches, just like Nicholson plays the same untamed @**hole in every one of his “roles”.
For what it’s worth, when I think of Helen Hunt, I see her in that white tank top from Twister. She was sweet in that movie, but maybe that was an unusual role for her. (Or I’m just remembering the sweet parts.) Haven’t seen her in anything since then.
“5) There are other “advantages” to having a crazy man in your life. If you’re the type who needs to take care of someone, you have a built-in outlet for your caretaking instincts. If you’re insecure and have low self-esteem, you always have someone to whom you feel superior. If you need a victim, someone to abuse, either physically or verbally, he’ll probably fill the bill. You can torment him as if you were a little girl taunting a little boy, and he won’t leave — he’ll just get crazier.”
This is an illumination point (or at least should be) about ALL women.
@ Cail
Yeah, funny that women who feel compelled to fix a “broken” man or to tame an uncivilized man usually want nothing to do with the men who are already fixed, or who are already tamed and civilized. And it’s funny that they would want to clean up their bad boy alpha lovers and transform them into slightly edgier versions of the beta nice guys they friend-zone by the dozen, but there you go.
Stanton likes the film because it portrays the woman as the victim and the man as the problem.
Speaking of movies, I remember hearing two pastors make references to “Pretty Woman” back in the early 90s. You know, the whole prostitute-with-a-heart-of-gold garbage. Both said they really liked the movie, too.
You can find more scriptural truths in “disturbing/trashy” movies like Blue Velvet or Pulp Fiction than Pretty Woman. Sheesh, no wonder we’re in such sad shape now.
@Opus
Its not a cultural difference. Game is fake, and cheesy to boot. Its just another product pitched to a niche market.
Try this- google “game and Mystery” then decide for yourself!
@ybm
One of my favorite Steve Sailer riffs is: “Feminism, with its emphasis on self-pity, resentment of greatness, hatred of logic, insistence upon social validation of personal feelings, and demand for lying and browbeating the honest into silence…” (emphasis mine)
So, Shakespeare for these feminist times goes like this:
Some are born crazy, some achieve craziness, and some have craziness thrust upon them.
OR
Some are born to “Game”, some achieve “Game”-yness, and some have “Game” thrust upon them!
@hf
I get quite a lot of flack for being somewhat sceptical about Game. I fail to see much difference between Game and ordinary assertive masculinity. There are however cultural differences between where I am and the U.S. and it is as hard for me to always judge them as for Americans always to grasp where I might be coming from. There is (fwiw) a very good response to this video from our own King A over at Heartistes.
I was laughing just reading the title. Do you see how “successful daughter” is paired grammatically with “masculine” and “confident son” is paired with “feminine”? I think this tells me everything I need to know.
LOL.
Melvin is arguably an “Aspergery Alpha”:
http://traditionalchristianity.wordpress.com/2011/10/29/the-aspergery-alpha/
Melvin has power over Carol because he is a wealthy author and she is a waitress and single mother who needs money for medical treatment for her son.
Helen Hunt is quite sweet in that role, on the whole. She also played a reasonably feminine wife as Jamie Buckman in that sitcom whose name escapes me.
Her role in As Good As It Gets is not a feminist portrayal. She is shown as disempowered by her single mother status, stressed, lonely, in a humiliating job, and apparently not very socially adept. She has to humble herself before two more powerful men – the doctor and Melvin – to get what she needs. The scene in which she reads a letter of thanks makes one cringe at her ineptitude and desperation.
I think the movie is being misread here.
“She also played a reasonably feminine wife as Jamie Buckman in that sitcom whose name escapes me.”
Mad about You
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Just another voice in the ether.
I don’t know exactly how to parse things given the character’s mental illness, and I only watched about half of the clip, but I didn’t see alpha behavior in what I watched. My analysis certainly didn’t match up with that of Roissy.
“She is a confident and attractive young single mother”
I don’t understand why it’s so hard for Stanton to understand this: single mothers have damaged sexual market value. In the typical SMP, it’s probably a 3-point minus.
One exception: for men who are in the market to become fathers (that is, for whom family is a proximal life goal), an attractive single mother is a good fast-track to the lifestyle you want, as long as you’ve screened for non-entitlement and no baby-daddy wackiness (big ifs). This is probably especially true for men who have kids of their own, setting up a Brady Bunch scenario where both partners get a supplemental parenting of their own children by the new husband/wife.
I have a friend who married a woman who had a toddler from her first marriage, which ended due to serial infidelity by her husband. They quickly banged out (see what I did there?) two more children, and have a very nice family life going on. I got the idea he was eager to become a father, and so her extant child was either neutral or a positive factor, socially proofing her as a matron.
Theory – Stanton can’t understand it because of:
1. He’s got typical Churchianity pedestalization of women as intrinsically good and pure, and thus can’t think to examine her weaknesses
2. He’s got a flawed mental frame wherein anything bad that happens to a woman is because someone did something to her, not because she made bad choices of her own.
1b. He presumes that women, ipso facto, have higher SMV than men and thus can’t compute that men would dare to judge her at all.
@ Badger:
This is such a major problem in evangelical churchianity. No matter what the woman does, there is always an excuse. Everyone has problems in their past, but now anything at all that has happened to her is her get-out-of-consequences free card. We’ve been discussing this at length on my blog lately (the case of a young Christian woman whose first sexual partner refused to marry her, which she now writes is the reason she took a good, long ride on the carousel), and I really think it’s one of the root causes of White Knightery.
(p.s. I tried to leave a comment on your blog earlier this week but was thwarted by your spam filter)
Much of the “alphaness” of the character comes from the fact that Jack Nicholson play it.
He did a great job of portraying an ocd character. I cringed the whole way through, but didnt see him as alpha. More Homer Simpson, but with charm.
Ssm,
At a church conference this week.
I intend to raise genesis 3 and culpability as a discussion question.
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My favorite line line (after the “remove accountability”): When the gay guy gets beat up, and is complaining, and JN tells him: “Quit worrying. You’ll be back on your knees in no time.”
Classic non-PC stuff.