As if they were recovering from a bad breakup by trying to mimic and outdo the other, Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis have both charted their trajectory from Black Swan toward movies where each female protagonist is just looking for a little symbiotic carnal catharsis. Natalie Portman, fresh off her Academy Award win for Best Actress, began the new year by starring with Ashton Kutcher in No Strings Attached, a movie that pits their long friendship in the oft-pondered sex without relationship conundrum, where Adam (Kutcher) gets to request that Emma (Portman) not “ask [him] what [he] thinks of her body,” absolving him of any responsibility to be emotionally supportive before, during, and after he’s present for sex.
At the same time, Emma is a doctor who works “eighty hours a week” and needs “someone who’s going to be in [her] bed at 2 am and not need [her] to eat breakfast with them.” There’s an interesting dynamic here in that Emma has been given the dominant role in the relationship in a career-oriented and fiscal sense, which makes her the more stereotypically “masculine” of the two characters. This is also suggested when it appears that Emma is the character who is emotionally detached from relationships and really just seeks physical pleasure given that “monogamy goes against our basic biology.” While this sentiment certainly has credence – not hindered by the fact that her intelligence is exposited through her career as a doctor — the primary issue with this dynamic is that it is fraudulent, and like any movie in which a male character says, “I’m not really looking for a relationship,” there is clear foreshadowing that the “desired” end result is not what’s going to come to fruition.
In other words, the intrigue of Emma’s character is that the stereotypical gender roles are reversed; however, the outcome still rides the cliché, so the intrigue fades. Does this make a potentially terrible film? Not necessarily, but it begs the questions as to why the premise was regurgitated for Friends With Benefits, a less mellifluous euphemism for Fuckbuddies.
Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake star in the re-release of Portman’s film, and while there is a more slapstick, comedic feel to Friends With Benefits – as opposed to the more sardonic No Strings Attached — there appears to be little variation from the overall arc of the story. One main difference might be that Jamie (Kunis) isn’t seeking relationship-less sex as a physical necessity, but rather as a catharsis to prove that she could be like the men she’s been dating, one of whom forgets that she is his “soul mate,” noting that it “doesn’t count” because they were in throes of passion for this sentiment. There’s certainly something to be said for an oral and aural filter during sex, but this – and similar – actions seem to be what have driven Jamie to inform Dylan (Timberlake) that she’s “emotionally damaged,” a situation that seemingly fits well with Dylan being “emotionally unavailable.”
Despite the slight differences in Emma and Jamie, the same conflict arises in both films: the female lead that denounces relationships and seeks social promiscuity without emotional repercussions must see the error of her ways and find solace in the one person that she chose as a safe partner to help her “avoid the Hollywood cliché of true love,” which in itself is a transparent line that only serves to set us up for the opposite result.
On the outside, both of these films have merit in that they empower the female characters, that, for the most part, have been imagined as the more emotional of the sexes, a trope that has provided a number of great stories of love, loss, etc. However, I think this clothing is rather illusory in that the events in both films reaffirm the constructed puritan values of past films that ultimately drives the female leads to contradict themselves and renege on their declarations to their friends, their audience, and themselves.
Perhaps these films are a testament to the “power of love,” and our inability to avoid it when it sneaks up behind us. At the same time, there also seems to be an assertion that a woman’s attempt to break free of patriarchal social norms is futile; for despite their aversion toward relationships, this is the final ingredient to happiness, an ingredient that condescendingly undermines each character’s convictions.
