Paul Blart: Mall Cop

On Sunday afternoon I decided to treat myself and finally drive over to the nearby town of Maynard to attend a movie at the Fine Arts Theater there. It was a bitter cold afternoon, and I got there just in time for a one o'clock showing. The minute I pulled into the parking lot across the street, I knew I had made the right choice.

From the outside, it has a classic post-war look, with a script neon sign from that era. As I learned from newspaper clippings inside, it was built right after World War II inside an old Lincoln-Mercury dealership from the 1920s. In 1947 it became the site of the first public exhibition of television in New England, with a free showing of the Louis-Walcott fight. Originally it had a single 400-person auditorium, based on a Chinese theme. Eventually the theater added a second auditorium. It fell into hard times, became an art theater for a while, but was renovated in 1989, when the second auditorium was split into two smaller ones. Now it shows first run movies. From the crowds I saw, it is fairly popular.

I bought a ticket for Paul Blart: Mall Cop at the classic outdoor glass ticket booth and entered the teeny-tiny lobby, where I had to snake around the people at the concession stand just to get to the hallway leading to the auditoriums. The mens room is a bit worse for wear and looked like it needed another renovation, but I can forgive such things of an old theater like this.

Unfortunately Paul Blart: Mall Cop wasn't showing in the big main auditorium, but in one of the smaller ones, which was very narrow and a bit claustrophic compared to the wide open expanse of the main one.

The movie itself was harmless. I was expecting to be revolted, given that it was an Adam Sandler production, but it turns out that so long as Sandler stays out of his own movies, they might actually be watchable.

But I certainly was not revolted. In fact something about the movie rather pleased me, in that almost all the characters, with the exception of the female love interest (Jayma Mays), were rather lumpen, as my friend Thor would say. This was not a movie about beautiful people, but ordinary-looking Americans in various unflattering shapes and sizes---quite appropriate given that most of the story takes place in a shopping mall. I felt like I wanted to root for the movie because of the fact that it didn't portray ordinary people as looking like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.

The story is rather goofy and full of plot holes. The caper part of the story needs to be taken with a grain of salt if you want to enjoy this at all. An honorable character switches to dishonorable at the end with no set-up of the betrayal.

What interested me most was the lumpen male hero (Kevin James). As the typical American adult in 2008, he is portrayed as completely terrified of talking to women. In this day and age, only cads are capable of "making love," as they used to call it. Ordinary nice guys cower in fear. As far as romance goes, the hero's plight is hopeless. He can't even get dates online. That this is so taken for granted as normal now shows just how far we have come down the postmodern pike. For a normal guy to wind up dating an attractive woman in this era requires some kind of extraordinary event.

The movie has a little bit of classical sauce in it, however, in that in the classical era, Hollywood movies endorsed the idea that when a man desired a woman, he initially needed to disrupt her body-space or life routine a little in such a way that made her, at least momentarily, a little bit uncomfortable to his advance. Cads did this kind of thing in a whimsical way, without honorable intention, but honorable men were supposed to do it when they truly fancied a woman with the intent of real courtship.

In fact, it was considered incumbent upon a man to do this, to push slightly past the bounds of the normal comfort zone with a woman, in order to demonstrate his sincere desire. The trick was that he was not supposed to be put off by the initial reaction from her, which was normally assumed to be one of pushing him away, or outward annoyance with his advance. The honorable man was supposed to persist with the confidence that she was his true love. Of course, honorable men were supposed to know when to back off as well. This kind of gray-area social nuance is what has been completely lost to us in the postmodern era.

In Paul Blart: Mall Cop, we have a remnant of this principle during a scene in which the hero gets unintentionally drunk. Up until this point, he has been earning the trust of his love interest in a "nice friendly" way, but he seems to spoil it all by getting too "fresh" in a verbal way with her. We see the look of disgust and avoidance on her face. To the American male of 2008, this means he has "blown it."

Yet classically this is exactly what he must do, in some form at least, to break out of his cowering nice guy self, to demonstrate his sincerity in taking an emotional risk with her, and to win her away from the overly-ambitious cad rival who has no compunction about claiming her as his woman.

Eventually he will need to do more than that, however, and to win her hand in this instance, he will need to become a true public hero by thwarting a robbery and kidnapping plot, and saving her and other hostages. A classical hero would not have needed such fantasy derring-do, but the audience of 2008 needs to see such surface "heroism" to believe that she would love him, and that he would think himself "worthy" of her.

Thus we have a perfect x-ray of the dysfunctional nice-guy American male of 2008. He is utterly weak and helpless and no ability to approach or talk to women. Getting a date or hooking up with a desirable woman is like winning the lottery. His courtship ability comes out only when he is smashed drunk, and to win a woman's hand, he has to capture a whole ring of bad guys with machine guns.

None of this made me dislike the movie. In fact it made me like it all the more, that it spelled everything out so clearly. That it was under ninety minutes certainly helped as well. The story didn't linger on anything very long.

It reminded once again of how Myra Breckenridge had it all figured out back in 1970, when Raquel Welch uttered that wonderful line, "American manhood died with Burt Lancaster in Vera Cruz." But in 2008, a lumpenly obese mall cop gets to live the dream for a day, if given the chance to really be a hero.