New Jersey: the new heroin.
It has a bad stigma, but damn it if we don't go back for more. We try to escape it, but something keeps drawing us in.
New Jersey has a bad reputation -- Governor Jim McGreevey, pharmaceutical plants, the Mafia, the Net --but she has experienced a resurgence as of late. Garden State alerted the petit bourgeois teens and college crowd to the state of mind that is N.J., but the resurgence goes back further than that. Zach Braff's film is the latest in a long tradition of Garden-variety culture.
Consistent in this culture is an illustration of our struggle: the compulsion to escape the state's stifling atmosphere reconciled with a love for its foibles. Just when we think we're out, it pulls us back. Like Tony Soprano's crew, we can't escape the world we're in.
Kevin Smith tackles this theme more openly than other artists. The Red Bank, N.J. resident has made five "New Jersey movies," excluding his pre-Clerks work and Jersey Girl (because their narratives are not locale-dependent.)
The first three movies, Clerks, Mallrats and Chasing Amy, are not a continuing narrative so much as distinct portrayals of suburban ennui. Characters are quirky and intriguing, but real enough to ground the movies: convenience store clerks, comic book artists, lesbian comic book artists, stoners and mallrats form a familiar cast. All of them are bored so they antagonize "the man." The end product is characters who gloriously wallow in their Jersey-ite tedium.
As Mallrats' tagline asserts, "They're not there to shop, they're not there to work, they're just there." The characters in Mallrats are reminiscent of harmless Romero tropes in Dawn of the Dead, but unlike Romero's vision, trouble does not come to find you -- Smith's characters create it for themselves. Sure, the mall authorities provoke them a little, but they push back just as hard. Mallrats is a model for the Garden State: it may not be paradise, but we like it, so don't bother us.
But what about New Jersey-ites who do leave? What about those souls who try to find peace elsewhere? Smith deals with this question in Dogma and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. Dogma is a religious odyssey about sundry pilgrims returning to Red Bank, Smith's center of the universe. God's Jersey-ites are scattered in this film, but all find their peace one way or another on the Jersey Shore. It is enough to make a local teary.
Jay and Silent Bob, however, depicts a road trip in the opposite direction. Go West, young stoner! But forced out of the comfort of the convenience store, Jay and Silent Bob find nothing but emptiness and lies. ("I hate how fake Hollywood is.") Only upon their return -- along with a new lover, a chimp, and Morris Day and the Time of "Jungle Love" fame -- does the dynamic duo quell the turmoil in their hearts. It is apropos that the movie ends someplace "real," someplace with substance: the Jerz.
Now, a little word association: Movie plus Jersey equals Garden State in the mind of the contemporary moviegoer. Braff's screenwriting debut also follows a wayward son's return, but this homecoming is introspective. Indie-film rookies gobbled up the film for its aesthetics, but its sentimentality glosses over a hackneyed pasticheof a love story. Film elements aside, Garden State's "Jersey-ness" is based in spirit, not in tangibles.
Largeman and Sam (Braff and Natalie Portman), though, are two parts of the Jersey spirit: one disillusioned with life on the West Coast, and the other too quirky to care where she lives. In Braff's feature-film debut, the characters, except Andrew Largeman, are too blithely naïve to be unhappy. The same goes for Jay and Silent Bob. But while they are too stoned and horny to make sense of anything, Garden State's Sam eats from the Tree of Knowledge when she becomes involved with Andrew. Largeman, conversely, after taking on Sam's easygoing worldview, finds that he cannot leave New Jersey. Sam and Largeman's schmaltzy union in the final frames is indicative of the lives of Jersey residents who happily embrace the state, simultaneously yearning to escape but knowing they won't be happy anywhere else.
Despite popular media's depictions, true Jerseyites know the difference between real life and reel life. No New Jersey native believes the characters in Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run" and "Thunder Road" will ever escape. As Bon Jovi says, we're livin' on a prayer.
So with all its grit and quirks, think you're better than Jersey? Fuhgeddaboudit.
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