Best Keanu: “I guess I’m just not pretty enough for you.”

Best Keanu (honorable mention): “Yeah [I’m crazy]. But at least I don’t drool anymore.”

Flying is one of those movies about which I anticipated I wouldn’t have much to say, but I’m actually flooded with things I want to talk about. Let’s get to the mandatory “this reminded me of how crappy the 80s were” out of the way first, and then move on to talk about the philosophy of aesthetics, and Keanu Reeves, and hard work.

Flying reminded me of how crappy the 80s were. I suspected this movie was Canadian, because it felt Canadian. I say that as a Canadian who grew up in British Columbia at a time when what was “Canadian” was synonymous with “Toronto.” Flying — or Dream to Believe, or Teenage Dream, or Love at the Edge, or whatever other titles this movie has — is very 1980s Canadian (Toronto) filmmaking. So it went right to my gut of that miserable period of time.

Flying inadvertently does a good job of summing up what it was like to be a girl in the 1980s: you can’t be a lesbian, or look like one (Robin, the film’s protagonist, is scolded by her abusive stepfather: “Look at the way you’re dressed. You’re dressed like one of those damn lezbos or something.”); if a guy likes you, and you don’t like him back, it’s your fault (Tommy, the film’s love interest, tries several tactics to get Robin interested; when she reaches the point of ambivalence, he says he’s not good looking or rich like the guy she does like, and takes a stance of moral superiority by spouting, “if that’s not good enough for you…”); you should have a boyfriend, or need a good excuse why you don’t (her friend asks her the question point blank, “do you have a boyfriend?” because being single is just not acceptable, let alone the non-heteronormative alternative).

Is any of this still true, in 2023? I doubt it, but admittedly it’s probably been replaced by other pressures women face that amount to, “do this, but not too much.” I don’t want to say men don’t have pressures — I am sure they exist, and are of legitimate concern. But I’m a girl so can’t relate.

Flying also has the cliquey-ness and casual bullying of Heathers (and real life). There’s reference to the crazy diets (one character in Flying tells Robin she “has to lose 5lbs by the end of the week.” I often heard similar things, almost word-for-word, as I was growing up). The low balance beam in several gymnastics scenes reminded me of phys ed class. And yes, Robin is too old to be a gymnast, but when you learn the goal here is not the Olympics but the regional championships, as a viewer, you let that go.

There’s an extended love scene between Robin and Tommy after she fulfills the 1980s movie trope that if a guy is interested in a girl, the girl is eventually obliged to return his affection, as long as he’s not on the extreme end of abusiveness. It is a woman’s role, after all, to return the advances of men. Because if she doesn’t, and he’s basically a good guy, what is she? A lesbian?

The love scene takes place over a weekend. Robin, who’s somehow managing from recent trauma like she’s just had a bad hangover — she was in the car when her father died in an accident, leading to a long-term knee injury; by the time she sleeps with Tommy (to the melodic accompaniment of “The First Time,”) her mother has died suddenly. She’s overcome with grief enough to move out of the home they shared with her abusive stepfather, but apparently ok enough to crash at Tommy’s and to (spoiler) win gold at the regional gymnastics competition.

Let’s step back to some fun trivia: according to Wikipedia, Flying was filmed between August 1984 and October 1984 in Toronto. I like dates and basic math. So, the woman who played Robin, Olivia d’Abo (whom I had a serious crush on during her time on The Wonder Years), was 15 years old when she made this movie, and the man who played Tommy, Keanu Reeves, was 19 turning 20. If we take the story Keanu often tells about driving from Toronto to Hollywood when he was 20 to be true, he would have filmed this movie shortly before taking off for California (never to come home again).

That’s all I have to say about Flying. That is the extent of my random thoughts.

[*]

Now on to aesthetics, Keanu Reeves, and hard work.

Keanu Reeves pops up early in Flying; he’s a goofy, good-natured high school student who’s clearly taken with the Olivia d’Abo character. This is Keanu at his geeky best, kinda tall and awkward, silly. And if you told any audience in the mid-1980s, seeing Keanu for the first time in this film, that he would become one of cinema’s all-time greatest action stars, no one would believe it. Insisting he would have a long and very successful career would also strain credibility. Seeing Keanu then, you would think he might — at best —have a good decade or two of second-rate films and might show up thereafter in bit parts here and there. They would never anticipate Speed, The Matrix, or John Wick.

And that says something about Keanu Reeves and his commitment to hard work. Which sounds trite, but it’s not. You don’t get a career like that by accident. It takes work, even if you have a little help or random luck along the way. I don’t know how Keanu Reeves actually drove his career to this point, but he is a model of what you can achieve if you put the work in, not just in making the right connections or being a professional so people want to cast you, but in improving the craft. Keanu Reeves clearly not only wanted to keep making movies; he’s clearly wanted to get better as an actor. I’ve spent a year and a half watching (almost) every project Keanu Reeves has been involved in. It started as a campy sort of side project but has ended up giving me immense respect for this artist who is very committed to his art.

It’s easier to see what I mean if you compare Keanu to other actors who achieved legendary status, but whose signature style was evident from their first performances on screen. Take Jack Nicholson. Recently, I watched Easy Rider at a local independent theatre, a double feature with (of course) Speed (actually, it was a Dennis Hopper triple feature, but I didn’t stick around for Blue Velvet). I’ve wanted to see Easy Rider for years — I even mentioned it on my Speed post — but never got around to it until last weekend.

Easy Rider stars a young Jack Nicholson as an ACLU lawyer. It was a breakthrough role for Nicholson — although, admittedly, 11 years after his first movie — but even then he was “Jack.” In the Easy Rider performance is the same Jack Nicholson we’d see, in some form or another, for the next 50 years or so.

In early Keanu Reeves, there’s little hint of the later Keanu Reeves. In every role, he looks different, as an actor should. He grew as an actor, over time; he got better but still kept the essence of whatever it is about him that makes him (usually) interesting to watch.

I’m taking university classes right now. It’s not my first time around, by a long shot. I’m surrounded by adults much, much younger than I who still feel the pressure to be really good right away. But that’s not the way it works, I think, for most of us. Most of us just make a commitment, and keep trying. That’s probably why Keanu, if the gossip is true, is so humble. He was probably never held up as the next great actor or cinema star. He just worked hard. He had (and has) talent; but talent is useless without hard work.

He’s also physically beautiful, which brings me to the other thing I wanted to talk about: aesthetics.

I’m currently finishing a Philosophy degree. (I should say I’m finished, as I’ve completed all of my major requirements with one last Intro to Ethics course — that I grit my teeth through because I hate ethics courses so much — but I’m in no rush to graduate.) I discovered there’s a branch of Philosophy called aesthetics, or the philosophy of beauty or the philosophy of taste. Yes — there are people in this world whose job it is not to create art or manifest beauty or even to judge what is beautiful, but to think about why something is beautiful. Here’s a snippet from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Rationalism about beauty is the view that judgments of beauty are judgments of reason, i.e., that we judge things to be beautiful by reasoning it out, where reasoning it out typically involves inferring from principles or applying concepts. … It was against this, and against more moderate forms of rationalism about beauty, that mainly British philosophers working mainly within an empiricist framework began to develop theories of taste. The fundamental idea behind any such theory—which we may call the immediacy thesis—is that judgments of beauty are not (or at least not canonically) mediated by inferences from principles or applications of concepts, but rather have all the immediacy of straightforwardly sensory judgments. It is the idea, in other words, that we do not reason to the conclusion that things are beautiful, but rather “sense” that they are.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aesthetic-concept/ (James Shelley <shelljr@auburn.edu>, 2022)

That’s just the beginning. It goes on.

Strange as it might seem, and perhaps evidence that I either have too active a brain or too little of an actual life, it was the question of “why is Keanu Reeves beautiful,” or more abstractly, “what makes someone beautiful,” that rang in my head as I was watching Flying.

Because Keanu isn’t exactly beautiful in Flying and beautiful isn’t synonymous with handsome. And about a year ago I wrote a really long post on Point Break where I said I would never talk about Keanu and “that face,” “that body.” These things change over time but beauty tends to last a bit longer. If you were to ask me absent a particular context, “is Keanu Reeves beautiful?” I would say yes, absolutely. Either my reason or my sensory perception tells me this is so.

But I don’t have a deeper answer for these questions of aesthetics, so I’ll stop here. You never know, I might think of an answer when I finally get around to watching Toy Story 4, where Keanu does voice but never appears on-screen.

[August 2023]