`Looking for Mr. Goodbar' takes you back to an era a mere 24 autumns ago when people thought a bit differently about certain things. Regular people weren't beyond imagining that if they went to enough booty-shake discotheques they could 'mack it up' on a Hefner-Guccione level with a grease monkey's paycheck.. But for most of these regular garden variety heterosexuals, the levels of sexual promiscuity did not increase all that dramatically in the '70s (as documented by some famous surveys). Attitudes toward sex changed much more than the actual amount of sex. But because of all the myths floating around the zeitgeist, there was a constant weird anxiety in the air about being left behind and missing the party and the wild sexual adventures that everyone else was supposed to be having. In order to 'keep up with the Disco Bunny Jonses' a lot of people did a lot of stupid things that were majorly frowned upon by rock'n'roll-disco-haters (themselves busy worshipping idols often quite beyond ridiculous) for a good decade and a half to come (no one could go anywhere near a late '70s disco record without plenty of embarrassment before Quentin Tarantino decided to make Travolta hip again in '95 and everything once associated with Travolta followed suit).
Using recreations of 'scenes' that were a common occurrence in that era of getting lost in 'a fool's ecstatic paradise of Disco fever, casual sex and cocaine sniffing' Brooks has a field day satirizing those multitudes whose commitment to experimentation had came out of purely superficial, hedonistic, or even just 'faddish' motives, not any deeper need to find themselves, and how these superficialities often short-changed people like the Diane Keaton character who were maybe, more or less, trying for a genuine personal liberation and growth (the first wave of counter-culture values had already been mass-media commercialized and completely marginalized by ten-zillion pseudo-poseur-suburban-middle-class-hippies devaluing completely in a few years what the original small community of hippies had tried to build, and the two major popular-culture backlashes against that were Punk rock and Disco music, both retaining certain segments of the hippies' drugs and sex angle and heightening it to an extreme while dumping the pseudo-philosophy for much shallower hedonistic or nihilistic pseudo ones of their own brand) .
`Looking for Mr. Goodbar' stars Diane Keaton as a young woman from a strict Catholic family who had to overcame a spinal handicap in childhood by being confined to a bed for a year, and through that trial of prolonged suffering at an early age has gained an existential understanding, a temperate maturity or 'humble madman's communion with the absurd' that her sister (Tuesday Weld) and most of the people she meets, don't have. At first, she has low-self-esteem and feels insecure about the scar on her back, but gradually, as many men are turned on by her quiet strength, sense of humor and shy charm, find her beautiful, make love to her and don't mind the scar, she realizes that she can ditch the headaches of her dysfunctional family and live on her own terms: as a liberated post-feminist-era '70s woman. When her married teacher and first lover quickly and bizarrely transforms from initially seeming to be her ideal 'soul mate' to not much more than a conceited, 'traditional' manipulative jerk with 'hipster' lingo (who, among other things, initiates her in the ways of 'post-sexual-revolution' 'let's-all-be-hip-and-brutally-honest-and-beyond-that-square-jive' ritual, throws a tantrum when she gives him a Christmas present , and tells her he doesn't like touching a woman after he's just f'd her) she decides to see if she can't do much better than him, get a bit hedonistic and take revenge, sleep around some to see who's got what and what's out there from first-hand experience, just like only men would've been privileged to do with impunity and without loss of reputation until just a few years before. She's not too confident about being able to score another man, but not as shy as before either, now that she's had some experience. She knows it's time to move on or she'll be taken advantage of forever. The great, unsentimental '70s thing about it all which doesn't happen quite often enough these days (in the movies or real life) is that she takes her very real disappointment and hurt in a 'hip' and wise perspective and doesn't let it bother her beyond the 'suicide-attempt-fantasy' she indulges, fully aware of how ridiculous and vain it would be. There's a humorous tone to the whole fantasy sequence as she laughs at the absurd, farcical forces she'd be manipulating and what pathetic motivators they are for taking your own life. She's definitely hip to a `Broken Hearts are for A--holes' anti-sentimental, anti-masochistic attitude as being the right one for progressive spirits and that's the one she adopts with much mirth and a smile on her face.
She gets a job teaching deaf first graders, and is able to be extra-patient with them because she understands their struggle and suffering, having gone through a form of it herself. She's super-nice, proper, and respectable; yet at night, true to her plans for liberating her sexuality , she's ready to be 'wild.' `Mr. Goodbar' is somewhere to be found but she feels the need to loosen 'up and out' of her upbringing. She starts hitting the singles bars and is flattered and surprised when a guy with some grade A looks ( Richard Gere) picks her to hit on. In the bedroom, she's amazed that Gere/Tony can bang away without expiring, take a break and do slap-pushups in a g-string jockstrap (Brooks poking fun here at the ratings system which lets you show as much naked buttock as you want within an R-rating but definitely no penis), and then get back again to the sex when the mood strikes him. She prefers Gere's 'street-wise' stupidity and hang-up-less sexuality to William Atherton's intelligent but repressed liberal who also tries to see her. After Gere stands her up on a date and turns out to be too much of a hustler and gigolo to provide her with what she needs, she even starts to turn a couple of casual tricks for fun, pretending to be a hooker and accepting money. Why this `Bell de Jour' syndrome of trying to break out of bourgeois morality at any cost? Because the alternative seems a hopelessly depressing dead-end of mediocre comforts with no real charge or excitement just as in Bunuel's film for Catherine Deuneuve. That's one of the many important observations made in the film: that reaching a certain transcendence through sexuality is damn near impossible within a bourgeois value system and morality, and it seems even more so to someone who's been trapped in that system her whole life. Even glamorous self-destruction and pointless 'kicks' seem eminently preferable to going back to that kind of stifling mediocrity and misery.
Brooks doesn't try to moralize or show that Diane Keaton's liberated attitude in wanting lots of sexual experiences 'just for the hell of it' is wrong. Why should she not be the venerated 'stud' or 'Don Juan' that a man would be considered in her place and instead be disvalued as a 'trollop' or 'slut'? In fact, Keaton's a heroine of sorts in the film in the way she guiltlessly gravitates toward further sexual awakenings without sinking into outright decadence, even after she poses as a hooker for fun. Her problem in picking men is similar in some respects to Ellen Burstyn's in `Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore,' where she goes from an abusive husband to a similar guy in a different shell (Harvey Keitel) who appears charming at first but soon reveals his psychotic side. Burstyn skips town to avoid the guy, while Keaton, after having just gone through a lot of trouble trying to get rid of Gere, goes to a bar, picks up psycho-ex-convict-repressed-homosexual 'I'm-a pitcher-not-a catcher' Tom Berenger (who seems nice at first, but soon turns into a much more deranged version of Gere), and ends up making one mistake too many. Brooks shows her as a bit misguided but courageous and sympathetic (much like Scorsese does Burstyn), and also shows the tragedy that can result from the seemingly most trivial things when even the nicest of people rubs a psychotic, tortured individual the wrong way, because that person then becomes the symbol of everything in society that has made that psychotic suffer his or her whole life (Berenger's character as well as Gere's low-rent version of his later star-making role in `American Gigolo' are both different existentially empty characters, not literal 'God's lonely Man' types but with quite a few things in common with De Niro's Travis Bickle nevertheless, including, for Berenger, Bickle's bottled-up inner rage that is overdue to explode at any time in the catharsis of an ultraviolent impulsive act). What it all comes down to for Diane Keaton is this: she's too naive in thinking she can,---as Bob Hughes (the character portrayed by Matt Dillon in `Drugstore Cowboy) would say `buck the system and buck the dark forces that are hiding underneath the surface.'. That unifying statement of the Bob-Hughes-Matt-Dillon character regarding what happens to him at the end of `Drugstore Cowboy' applies directly to what happens to Diane Keaton at the end of this film. She's just beginning to recognize the dark forces and stay clear of them, when they engulf her and it's all over: another victim of society's ills..
How's Keaton's character trying to find herself? By finding herself a man that complements her sexually first-and-foremost, to compensate for her deprived and repressed past. The `Goodbar' or a man's ability to please sexually is the important factor. That's why she prefers a sexually confident ignoramus like the Richard Gere character `Tony' to William Atherton's repressed, moralistic liberal intellectual who's the flipside of the coin to her abusive father, an emotional yoke she doesn't need. What she finds out slowly and painfully and through many short-lived relationships is that she's the most 'normal' neurotic of any of the people she meets in bars and discos. They keep disappointing her and sooner or later, if she hadn't been killed off, she would've had to look elsewhere than the 'swinging' scene (where all things 'sexual' were to be had easily but with not much value).
From the opening montage of dramatic black and white photographs set to shifting songs which quickly change moods from disco to funk to a bizarre nauseating ballad sung by Thelma Houston, Brooks tries to make the film operate on many levels simultaneously. The shot that states the theme of the film right away, is the one of the lady with the cleavage and a Jesus on the cross hanging between her breasts: the conflicts and contradictions between traditional morality and the sudden emergence of a new looser morality because of the so-called 'sexual revolution' ; can they be reconciled without tragic consequences? Can the system be bucked without sabotage from the residual dark forces underneath (as Bob Hughes would say) , even if official, popular dogma and the mainstream culture has decided that it's safe to be on the side of the rebels? Is it not a bad sign when everyone fancies himself a rebel; when rebellion has become safe and fashionable? All these questions and many more are raised by this film in a way that something as shallow as `Saturday Night Fever' only managed in a couple of scenes. Richard Brooks, after all, in addition to directing `Blackboard Jungle' and `Elmer Gantry,' also directed maybe the most coldly horrifying and bleakly naturalistic of all naturalistic films `In Cold Blood,' in 1968. Here he's trying for a multifaceted transcendent existentialism which also operates as satire. Its acting style is slightly over-the-top on purpose to bring out the satirical elements, everything parodying itself as well as being serious simultaneously. Keaton is perfect for her role because she's naturally glad to be a bit goofy and awkward, intense, and slightly 'over the top,' and the other actors play up to her than she down to them. The mood of a single scene can change quickly from different levels of tragedy to different shades of comedy. A perfect example is the scene where Gere smacks Keaton around for insisting that he leave her apartment and Tuesday Weld runs to the rescue just as Gere is leaving. The mood is a bit sad, at first, as we see the bruise on Keaton's face (Weld asking her what happened? what did that s.o.b. do to you? etc.), a bruise she certainly did not deserve; but when Weld goes to get some ice to put on the bruise and instead gets a yellow popsicle we start smiling knowing what's coming next. She puts the popsicle to the bruise and Keaton utters a loud owww! When Weld gets a cloth from the sink to wipe Keaton's face, there are cockroaches all over it and they get on Keaton, making her jump around all over the place in hilarity trying to get them off her. The scene that started as semi-tragic is now farcical comedy in a way that's very touching and sympathetic.
One of the main things I don't like about the film are the incredibly cheap looking exterior pick-up shots done to connect the main scenes together. They look more obviously done on a studio backlot than a cheap TV show and lit so bright you can almost feel the presence of the whole film crew in the shot. Aside from that one minor annoyance, the rest of film is, in all its many whimsical aspects, quite transcendentally cinematic and valuable. It moves very quickly and there are no dead-spots. Diane Keaton's daring performance alone makes it a classic study of '70s female sexuality from a decidedly 'woman's angle.' But Brooks manages to take the film further and create a multifaceted work full of satirical elements worthy of Agnes Varda's `Cleo from 5 to 7,' and Martin Scorsese's `Alice Doesn't Live here Anymore."
Using recreations of 'scenes' that were a common occurrence in that era of getting lost in 'a fool's ecstatic paradise of Disco fever, casual sex and cocaine sniffing' Brooks has a field day satirizing those multitudes whose commitment to experimentation had came out of purely superficial, hedonistic, or even just 'faddish' motives, not any deeper need to find themselves, and how these superficialities often short-changed people like the Diane Keaton character who were maybe, more or less, trying for a genuine personal liberation and growth (the first wave of counter-culture values had already been mass-media commercialized and completely marginalized by ten-zillion pseudo-poseur-suburban-middle-class-hippies devaluing completely in a few years what the original small community of hippies had tried to build, and the two major popular-culture backlashes against that were Punk rock and Disco music, both retaining certain segments of the hippies' drugs and sex angle and heightening it to an extreme while dumping the pseudo-philosophy for much shallower hedonistic or nihilistic pseudo ones of their own brand) .
`Looking for Mr. Goodbar' stars Diane Keaton as a young woman from a strict Catholic family who had to overcame a spinal handicap in childhood by being confined to a bed for a year, and through that trial of prolonged suffering at an early age has gained an existential understanding, a temperate maturity or 'humble madman's communion with the absurd' that her sister (Tuesday Weld) and most of the people she meets, don't have. At first, she has low-self-esteem and feels insecure about the scar on her back, but gradually, as many men are turned on by her quiet strength, sense of humor and shy charm, find her beautiful, make love to her and don't mind the scar, she realizes that she can ditch the headaches of her dysfunctional family and live on her own terms: as a liberated post-feminist-era '70s woman. When her married teacher and first lover quickly and bizarrely transforms from initially seeming to be her ideal 'soul mate' to not much more than a conceited, 'traditional' manipulative jerk with 'hipster' lingo (who, among other things, initiates her in the ways of 'post-sexual-revolution' 'let's-all-be-hip-and-brutally-honest-and-beyond-that-square-jive' ritual, throws a tantrum when she gives him a Christmas present , and tells her he doesn't like touching a woman after he's just f'd her) she decides to see if she can't do much better than him, get a bit hedonistic and take revenge, sleep around some to see who's got what and what's out there from first-hand experience, just like only men would've been privileged to do with impunity and without loss of reputation until just a few years before. She's not too confident about being able to score another man, but not as shy as before either, now that she's had some experience. She knows it's time to move on or she'll be taken advantage of forever. The great, unsentimental '70s thing about it all which doesn't happen quite often enough these days (in the movies or real life) is that she takes her very real disappointment and hurt in a 'hip' and wise perspective and doesn't let it bother her beyond the 'suicide-attempt-fantasy' she indulges, fully aware of how ridiculous and vain it would be. There's a humorous tone to the whole fantasy sequence as she laughs at the absurd, farcical forces she'd be manipulating and what pathetic motivators they are for taking your own life. She's definitely hip to a `Broken Hearts are for A--holes' anti-sentimental, anti-masochistic attitude as being the right one for progressive spirits and that's the one she adopts with much mirth and a smile on her face.
She gets a job teaching deaf first graders, and is able to be extra-patient with them because she understands their struggle and suffering, having gone through a form of it herself. She's super-nice, proper, and respectable; yet at night, true to her plans for liberating her sexuality , she's ready to be 'wild.' `Mr. Goodbar' is somewhere to be found but she feels the need to loosen 'up and out' of her upbringing. She starts hitting the singles bars and is flattered and surprised when a guy with some grade A looks ( Richard Gere) picks her to hit on. In the bedroom, she's amazed that Gere/Tony can bang away without expiring, take a break and do slap-pushups in a g-string jockstrap (Brooks poking fun here at the ratings system which lets you show as much naked buttock as you want within an R-rating but definitely no penis), and then get back again to the sex when the mood strikes him. She prefers Gere's 'street-wise' stupidity and hang-up-less sexuality to William Atherton's intelligent but repressed liberal who also tries to see her. After Gere stands her up on a date and turns out to be too much of a hustler and gigolo to provide her with what she needs, she even starts to turn a couple of casual tricks for fun, pretending to be a hooker and accepting money. Why this `Bell de Jour' syndrome of trying to break out of bourgeois morality at any cost? Because the alternative seems a hopelessly depressing dead-end of mediocre comforts with no real charge or excitement just as in Bunuel's film for Catherine Deuneuve. That's one of the many important observations made in the film: that reaching a certain transcendence through sexuality is damn near impossible within a bourgeois value system and morality, and it seems even more so to someone who's been trapped in that system her whole life. Even glamorous self-destruction and pointless 'kicks' seem eminently preferable to going back to that kind of stifling mediocrity and misery.
Brooks doesn't try to moralize or show that Diane Keaton's liberated attitude in wanting lots of sexual experiences 'just for the hell of it' is wrong. Why should she not be the venerated 'stud' or 'Don Juan' that a man would be considered in her place and instead be disvalued as a 'trollop' or 'slut'? In fact, Keaton's a heroine of sorts in the film in the way she guiltlessly gravitates toward further sexual awakenings without sinking into outright decadence, even after she poses as a hooker for fun. Her problem in picking men is similar in some respects to Ellen Burstyn's in `Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore,' where she goes from an abusive husband to a similar guy in a different shell (Harvey Keitel) who appears charming at first but soon reveals his psychotic side. Burstyn skips town to avoid the guy, while Keaton, after having just gone through a lot of trouble trying to get rid of Gere, goes to a bar, picks up psycho-ex-convict-repressed-homosexual 'I'm-a pitcher-not-a catcher' Tom Berenger (who seems nice at first, but soon turns into a much more deranged version of Gere), and ends up making one mistake too many. Brooks shows her as a bit misguided but courageous and sympathetic (much like Scorsese does Burstyn), and also shows the tragedy that can result from the seemingly most trivial things when even the nicest of people rubs a psychotic, tortured individual the wrong way, because that person then becomes the symbol of everything in society that has made that psychotic suffer his or her whole life (Berenger's character as well as Gere's low-rent version of his later star-making role in `American Gigolo' are both different existentially empty characters, not literal 'God's lonely Man' types but with quite a few things in common with De Niro's Travis Bickle nevertheless, including, for Berenger, Bickle's bottled-up inner rage that is overdue to explode at any time in the catharsis of an ultraviolent impulsive act). What it all comes down to for Diane Keaton is this: she's too naive in thinking she can,---as Bob Hughes (the character portrayed by Matt Dillon in `Drugstore Cowboy) would say `buck the system and buck the dark forces that are hiding underneath the surface.'. That unifying statement of the Bob-Hughes-Matt-Dillon character regarding what happens to him at the end of `Drugstore Cowboy' applies directly to what happens to Diane Keaton at the end of this film. She's just beginning to recognize the dark forces and stay clear of them, when they engulf her and it's all over: another victim of society's ills..
How's Keaton's character trying to find herself? By finding herself a man that complements her sexually first-and-foremost, to compensate for her deprived and repressed past. The `Goodbar' or a man's ability to please sexually is the important factor. That's why she prefers a sexually confident ignoramus like the Richard Gere character `Tony' to William Atherton's repressed, moralistic liberal intellectual who's the flipside of the coin to her abusive father, an emotional yoke she doesn't need. What she finds out slowly and painfully and through many short-lived relationships is that she's the most 'normal' neurotic of any of the people she meets in bars and discos. They keep disappointing her and sooner or later, if she hadn't been killed off, she would've had to look elsewhere than the 'swinging' scene (where all things 'sexual' were to be had easily but with not much value).
From the opening montage of dramatic black and white photographs set to shifting songs which quickly change moods from disco to funk to a bizarre nauseating ballad sung by Thelma Houston, Brooks tries to make the film operate on many levels simultaneously. The shot that states the theme of the film right away, is the one of the lady with the cleavage and a Jesus on the cross hanging between her breasts: the conflicts and contradictions between traditional morality and the sudden emergence of a new looser morality because of the so-called 'sexual revolution' ; can they be reconciled without tragic consequences? Can the system be bucked without sabotage from the residual dark forces underneath (as Bob Hughes would say) , even if official, popular dogma and the mainstream culture has decided that it's safe to be on the side of the rebels? Is it not a bad sign when everyone fancies himself a rebel; when rebellion has become safe and fashionable? All these questions and many more are raised by this film in a way that something as shallow as `Saturday Night Fever' only managed in a couple of scenes. Richard Brooks, after all, in addition to directing `Blackboard Jungle' and `Elmer Gantry,' also directed maybe the most coldly horrifying and bleakly naturalistic of all naturalistic films `In Cold Blood,' in 1968. Here he's trying for a multifaceted transcendent existentialism which also operates as satire. Its acting style is slightly over-the-top on purpose to bring out the satirical elements, everything parodying itself as well as being serious simultaneously. Keaton is perfect for her role because she's naturally glad to be a bit goofy and awkward, intense, and slightly 'over the top,' and the other actors play up to her than she down to them. The mood of a single scene can change quickly from different levels of tragedy to different shades of comedy. A perfect example is the scene where Gere smacks Keaton around for insisting that he leave her apartment and Tuesday Weld runs to the rescue just as Gere is leaving. The mood is a bit sad, at first, as we see the bruise on Keaton's face (Weld asking her what happened? what did that s.o.b. do to you? etc.), a bruise she certainly did not deserve; but when Weld goes to get some ice to put on the bruise and instead gets a yellow popsicle we start smiling knowing what's coming next. She puts the popsicle to the bruise and Keaton utters a loud owww! When Weld gets a cloth from the sink to wipe Keaton's face, there are cockroaches all over it and they get on Keaton, making her jump around all over the place in hilarity trying to get them off her. The scene that started as semi-tragic is now farcical comedy in a way that's very touching and sympathetic.
One of the main things I don't like about the film are the incredibly cheap looking exterior pick-up shots done to connect the main scenes together. They look more obviously done on a studio backlot than a cheap TV show and lit so bright you can almost feel the presence of the whole film crew in the shot. Aside from that one minor annoyance, the rest of film is, in all its many whimsical aspects, quite transcendentally cinematic and valuable. It moves very quickly and there are no dead-spots. Diane Keaton's daring performance alone makes it a classic study of '70s female sexuality from a decidedly 'woman's angle.' But Brooks manages to take the film further and create a multifaceted work full of satirical elements worthy of Agnes Varda's `Cleo from 5 to 7,' and Martin Scorsese's `Alice Doesn't Live here Anymore."