Chewing on Nick and Nora || Tavia Nyong'o

We have many reasons to be thrilled lately, not the least of which is our first feature from one of our regular contributors and intellectual soulmates--a writer, scholar, Assistant Professor of Performance Studies at NYU, and (we are certain), one of the reasons Pennsylvania stayed blue in 2008--Tavia Nyong'o. The last time many of us saw him was on Halloween night during our own sordid romp through the sonic wilderness of downtown Manhattan. Apparently, the film Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist left Tavia a lot to chew on (so to speak)...

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Queers make excellent ironical readers of the subtexts in teenybop culture. What a surprise then, that the adolescent romp Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist turns the tables on us and begins with a straight protagonist living through the subtexts of queer cultural codes. Nick, the only straight member of a homocore band, complains to his bandmates that they just don’t get the pain and isolation of being heterosexual. The line get a huge laugh, one helped along by the incredible talent of the actor who delivers it: Michael Cera. Cera has cornered the market in alterna-teen masculinity, the very model of the post-geek, post-grunge lovable underdog in the omnipresent, unisex hoodie, this generation’s answer to the flannel shirt. His vulnerable but voluble boyishness fits as seamlessly into this queer scenario as it did in his two prior leads: as the hapless impregnator of Juno, and one half of the hormone-fueled buddies at the center of Superbad. All three films portend a certain collapse of the sex/gender system as heretofore known, at least amongst the rising millennial generation. But are they as queer as they seem?

The topsy-turvy premise of Infinite Playlist, like the film’s title, advertises its up-to-date-ness while slyly sidelining queers to the backdrop of a conventional heterosexual romance. No one in the downtown Brooklyn theater I saw the film in booed or wretched at any of the queer content on-screen. But little effort was made to actually represent straight/queer friendships or just plain friendship in general as nearly as important and exciting as the headlong rush towards heteronormative romance. Since the birth of cinema, black filmgoers have had to sit through onscreen representations of ourselves as loving caregivers and wise confidants to white protagonists. If Infinite Playlist is any indication, queers better gear up for the same treatment. It shouldn’t be surprising that the costs of visibility and inclusion might be tokenization. But it’s disappointing that the disruptive sexual and creative energies of adolescence, captured by such visceral and empathetic performers like Cera and his co-lead Kat Dennings, should in the end veer so closely to the conventional. Superbad held a similar promise in its conclusion, when Seth and Evan confess an intense, awkward love for each other, only to go off on separate double-dates, eyes wistfully locked as they part at the mall. While momentarily daring, this conclusion is actually a bit of a throwback to notions of homosexuality as an adolescent phase, an updated expose of the thesis of Leslie Fiedler’s notorious essay “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey.”

The most radically queer presence in Infinite Playlist turns out not to be the queer sidekick characters so much as a cinematic MacGuffin: a piece of gum that goes from mouth to mouth, into and out of a filthy toilet bowl in Penn Station, for almost the entire running time of the movie. On one hand, this is pretty standard teen gross out fair. But the infinitely elastic gum contained a deeper implication regarding all the anonymous contacts and desires that are inadmissible from the culminating romantic scenario of boy finally getting girl. At the moment Nick and Norah consummate their evening’s lust (on a couch in Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Lady Studio – even groups wholly absented from the screen like black people can nonetheless supply a backdrop and support to its central white romance) the gum reappears between their lips. The audience shrieks and squeals in their seats as the filthy piece of delicious gum crosses from tooth to tooth.

Much as the maturational narrative of the film is obliged to move forward: from homosexuality to heterosexuality, from friendship and collectivity to couplehood, from high school to college, the gum bringing its chewers on a backwards trajectory from the oral stage of mastication to the anal stage of the shit-filled toilet. The chewing gum thus seems to operate as what Lacan called “the lamella” the objective materialization of the libido as a wriggly, palpating (un)dead object, that inscribes the erotic as traumatic disturbance within the very social field that presumes to normalize it as a shattering and queasy real. When one queer door closes, it seems, another one opens. - (TN)