In Cars Udtñ (Soys: ^^Considering Smootd L^Ac^

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In Cars Udtñ (Soys: ^^Considering Smootd L^Ac^ in Cars udtñ (Soys: ^^considering Smootd l^aC^ Originally published in 1969 and frequently an- thologized in contemporary short story collections Where Are You Going, aimed at high school and university students Joyce Where Have You Beert? Carol Oates's "NXTiere Are You Going, Where Have J«Ci Car« OIIH You Been?" continues to attract significant criti- cal interest from literan- scholars. Most of these scholars are intent on reading past the author's evocatively realistic portrait of a self-absorbed teenager, Connie, who is lured to almost certain sexual \nolation and death by the at once seductive and menacing Arnold Friend, in order to unpack, among other things, the story's fairy-tale herme- neutics, its allegorical allusions, or its intertextual references.' Not so Joyce Chopra's film adaptation of the story, Smooth Talky which garnered wide- spread acclaim upon its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in 1986 (it won the Grand Jury Prize and generated significant buzz for Laura Dern in the role of Connie), only to run afoul, in subsequent years, of feminist film critics who critiqued Chopra for ignoring the story's symbolic register in favor of depicting an admonitory and mor- alistic "coming-of-age story" that serves as a "didactic pronouncement about the perils of promiscuity" (Sumner 96).^ I am sympa- thetic, to a degree, with such an analysis, as 1 believe that Chopra, in translating Oates's story to film, is unable to convey fliUy the stor)''s literal and figurative "doubleness," particularly in terms of a conclusion that the author herself has declared "impos- sible to transfigure into film" (Oates, [Woman] Writer 321). However, I also find it curious, as someone who has successfully taught both texts on more than one occasion, that Chopra's film, which was released on DVD in 2004, has not attracted more attention from scholars of adaptation studies and gender studies alike, par- ticularly for the ways in which its reception highlights our continued investments in fidelit)' criticism as an analytic framework that at once exposes and occludes the narrative/aesthetic andxhç ideological mechanisms that subtend the processes of genre recognition and gender identification across different media. This essay seeks to remedy that critical oversight. In it, I attempt to reconcile what several reviewers have identified as the generic cross-purposes of the film—es- pecially apparent in its supposedly muddled denouement—in terms of a close reading of Chopra's use of metonymy both at the level of montage and mise-ert- scène, imagetrack and soundtrack. In so doing, I hope to demonstrate that lurking 202 Riding in Cars with Boys: Reconsidering Smooth beneath the surface of Chopra's filmic portrait of "a girl who flirts with danger and lives to regret it" (Sumner 89) is a psychological study as complex as Oates's in its sj'mbolic investigation of the overlapping and frequently competing sex and death drives structuring Connie's behavior. Indeed, I will be suggesting that a re- interpretation of Connie—and especially her ambivalent role within and without her family—through a classic Freudian analytic framework paradoxically helps to redress some of the critical tnispercep- tions about the film's intentions. Bringing out how Connie's doubled drives in turn drive the film's narrative means paying attention, I argue, not just to the climactic car ride Connie takes with Arnold in his souped-up gold convertible, but to those she accepts from other male figures as well. Commenting on Smooth Talk shortly after it was released, Oates highlights the impossible representational task faced by Chopra and screenwriter Tom Cole: that, in choosing to depict Connie's stor}' on film within the predominantly realist generic conventions of family romance/coming-of-age melodrama, they would necessarily forfeit the allegorical reading of her protagonist as a figure of van- itj- or innocence, transfortning her instead into a representative adolescent girl, whose relationships with her friends and "boy trouble" inevitably cause conflict with her immediate authorit)' figures, her parents (Oates, ¡Woman] Writer "SX^-X^. In emphasizing this aspect of the original story, the film is, I think, remarkably successfial, with supplementary expository scenes during the first half of the filrn visually and aurally embellishing for the viewer what Oates refers to in her stor)' as the "two-sidedness" of Connie, that is, how she is away from home with her friends, and how she is at home with her family (Oates, "Where" 13). In the case of the former, we have the opening credit sequence, which documents the frantic scramble by Connie, Jill (Sara lnglis), and Laura (Margaret Welsh) to get from the beach they are visiting illicitiy to a pre-arranged rendez\^ous with Laura's mother at the mall; a prolonged staging of the mall scene only sketched by Oates in her story; not one but two visits to Frank's Diner, the second of which results in Con- nie, having gotten carried away with Eddie (David Berridge) in an underground parking lot, walking home alone; and, finally, the arrival of Jill at Connie's house to warn her that Arni)ld (Treat Williams) has been asking after her. This latter scene provides a bridge between the exciting world of Connie's friends and what she perceives to be the staid existence of her family—and it is no accident, in this regard, that it is Jill, the more cautious and reticent of Connie's girifriends (in earlier scenes we see her trepidation about sharing the front seat with the driver of the half-ton that stops to offer the girls a ride home from the beach, her refusal to attend the movie favored by the "eighteen-year-old" boys whom the girls had been shadowing at the mall, and her contempt for the idea of crossing the highway to check out Frank's Diner), who should be the one to effect the link between these two worids and the opposed female spirits/spirited females who dominate them. To this end, as soon as Jill arrives at the Wyatt homestead both 204/Riding in Cars with Boys: Reconsidering Smooth Talk Connie and her mother are quick to vie for her favor, with Mrs. Wyatt (Mary Kay Place)—vexed \et again by the wa\'ward obstinaq' of her daughter—-asking Jill if she would mind trading places with Connie, and Connie whisking Jill off to the family dining room in order to extract whatever information she has to impart about "the guy" who has been asking after her. Before Jill can properly convey her warning about Arnold, Connie jumps up to put James Taylor's "Handy Man" on the stereo, enjoining Jill to dance with her. Jill rebuffs Connie, but in a series of swift and economical cross cuts between Connie's self-absorbed dancing in the dining room and her mother's wistful and contemplative swaying to the same music in the adjoining kitchen, Chopra's film establishes a genealogy of female desire as it is both enabled and constrained by domestic space (the unfinished house, in this regard, and Connie's mother's attempts to stay on top of the work, becomes an apt metaphor for her own unfinished life), a -visual and aural metonymy that will be repeated later on in the coda to the film, when Connie plays the same song again and dances with her sister, June (a scene to which I will return). In this and other scenes of Connie's home life, we have depicted in Chopra's film a particularly fine elaboration of the strained relationship between Connie and her mother, especially what Oates describes in her story as their "pretense of exasperation" with each other ("Where" 15) wonderfully foregrounded in suc- cessive domestic confrontations during the first half of the film: over Connie's selfishness and "trashy daydreams" (a phrase lifted verbatim from Oates's story ["Where" 12]) in Connie's bedroom when she fails to return from the mall with the paint roller and pan her mother asked her to buy; over Connie's idleness and ^'anity at the breakfast table the next morning; over Connie's unresponsiveness when her mother attempts to bond with her while the two are painting the house; and finally over Connie's backtalk, when, in response to rumors Mrs. Wyatt has heard about her daughter fooling around uith boys, Connie suggests that it is somewhat hypocritical of her mother to lecture her about morals when she herself becarne pregnant (uith Connie's older sister, ]une) as a teenager. This proves the final straw for Mrs. Wyatt, who rewards Connie's temeritj' with a slap to the face, a physical blow that ostensibly serves as the motivation for Connie's fateful decision not to accompany her family to the barbecue at her aunt's. During these and other scenes at the Wyatt home, June (Elizabeth Berridge) and Connie's seemingly oblivious father (Levon Helm) are frequentiy present, dternately goading or placating, tak- ing sides or remaining neutral, depending on the nature and stakes of the quarrel between mother and younger daughter. Each also shares important scenes alone with Connie, scenes which, I would argue, contribute to a symbolic reading of the film, and to which I will turn in due course. Taken together, these scenes seem to suggest a familiar generic pattern, one that leads us to expect a certain kind of narrative climax and denouement, in which a minor conflict—like Onnie staving out too late, or falling in love with a boy from the wrong side of the tracks—is eventually resolved, and all is put right within the Wyatt household.
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