Carole Eastman’s screenwriting career might have spanned decades, but there were only so few scripts she was able to give us considering the amount of time she was in the business. Among her earliest works is 1970’s Five Easy Pieces (likely named as an homage to Igor Stravinsky). At that time, she was still using her pseudonym, Adrien Joyce. Working with director Bob Rafelson, her deftness in the art of the tragi-comedic was immediately noticed, with Rafelson later commenting, “I don’t think I ever met anybody—male or female—with such audacious and bold imagination,” such “rare insights, both into the culture and its inhabitants. Here she was, this rather thin and kind of fragile-looking woman, and she could easily write about the most obscure things like waitresses, Tammy Wynette, bowling alleys, oil fields… There was nothing common about what Carole chose to write about.”
Speaking of “common,” it is “common people” that Robert “Bobby” Dupea (Jack Nicholson, a favorite of Eastman’s to work with) prefers to be among after abandoning his life of privilege and comfort in the San Juan Islands, where he was trained in a family of classical pianists. As we later learn, it’s an oppressive and perpetually distant father that also contributes to his decision to flee, explaining, “I move around a lot because things tend to get bad when I stay… I’m looking for auspicious beginnings and all that…” Everything is, after all, always better at the beginning, that moment in a narrative of your life when things are still filled with promise, hope and potential. Best of all, things are in a state of “least amount of commitment” at the beginning. Even if it’s spent among the “lesser” folk of the milieu that one finds himself in.
Released ten years prior (proving European cinema was always ahead of the game) in 1960, the protagonist in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita is cut from the same cloth. Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni), a gossip journalist living in Rome, is also one who prefers to live among the “riffraff.” Though they aren’t necessarily categorizable as such because of their monetary class, so much as their penchant for debauchery. Possessing the same appreciation for it that the working classes of the oil rig fields do. Specifically Bobby’s “best friend” (as much as a man like Bobby can have a best friend), Elton (Billy “Green” Bush), who also understands the temptations of other women despite being married and having a child with Stoney (Fannie Flagg). While Bobby, too, has an “old lady,” they’re not married and he certainly doesn’t feel beholden to her in any way despite her overt emotions for him. Her obsession with the music of Tammy Wynette (the film, indeed, tellingly opens with “Stand By Your Man”) later colors the fate of the relationship with even more dramatic irony.
Marcello is similarly oblivious and callous to his “steady”/fiancée, Emma (Yvonna Furneaux), who is prone to extreme bouts of depression, spurred by her knowledge of Marcello’s gravitation toward the life of a lothario—and that his lifestyle in general allows him plenty of exposure to available WAP (not to be confused with the, especially in this instance, more offensive “wop”). Emma’s quotidian predispositions often leave Marcello feeling both cold and disgusted, sending him into the arms of one of his go-to paramours, Maddalena (Anouk Aimée) when he can’t find another pair of arms to keep him warm for at least half a night. Bobby is comparably inclined, seeing fit to act however he wants in terms of dalliances with other women, and then apologizing half-heartedly to Rayette whenever she finds out. Knowing how easy it is to take advantage of her unwavering devotion to him (after all, she is a woman who believes in the scripture of Tammy Wynette), he continues to leave her on his hook.
When Bobby is forced to reconcile with the past he’s been running from for about three years, it comes at a time when Rayette is pregnant (though Elton is the one to inform him of this, and we never specifically see Rayette tell him). In other words, the perfect time to defect from his entire run-of-the-mill working class life in Kern County (that’s California, for those who don’t exalt a connoisseurship of the Golden State). Yet when he sees her lying there in their bedroom (her bedroom, really), all pathetic and listening to Wynette’s “D-I-V-O-R-C-E,” he can’t bring himself to abandon her just yet, going back inside to invite her along on the road trip.
In the same vein, Marcello still lies to Emma, telling her that he’ll love her eternally, all for the sake, ultimately, of sparing her feelings. Feelings that only end up getting more wounded in the long run as a result of being strung along for such an extended period. Finally, Marcello snaps at her in the car one night after they’ve driven to an isolated road, where she essentially begs him to show her more affection, to stop being so impervious to her love. She demands, “What are you afraid of?” He seethes, “Of you. Of your selfishness, of the miserable bleakness of your ideals. Don’t you see you offer me the life of a spineless worm? You can only talk of cooking and bed. A man who accepts to live like this is a finished man. He’s nothing but a worm! I don’t believe in your aggressive, sticky, maternal love! I don’t want it, I have no use for it! This isn’t love, it’s brutalization!”
Try as Bobby might to see Rayette in a different light, this is how he views her as well. After arriving in Washington State at a motel where Bobby will break away from her to go to the San Juan Islands, she pleas to come with him. He rebuffs, “They wouldn’t be prepared for you—for me bringing anyone, I mean.” Of course, the hidden message here is that Rayette is too trashy for them to understand, to even remotely fathom as someone who could exist in the world. She with her caked on mascara and leopard print coat. Her sad waitressing job and even sadder aspiration to become a country singer herself—Bobby can’t take it much longer, and ditching her comes at a moment when he might really fly off the handle at her.
It’s seeing the elegance and poise of Catherine (Susan Anspach), the pianist his brother, Carl (Ralph Waite), has taken under his wing and then some, that reminds Bobby of why he still occasionally falls for the trap of such a notion as “love.” Catherine, in contrast, seems only to see Bobby as a casual curiosity, a strange anomaly the likes of which she’s never encountered before. She’s most intrigued of all by how he could simply give up playing with such a talent as his. At the dinner table one night she asks, “How could you not play anymore at all? I think that’s very strange.” He shrugs in response, deflecting any real analysis of why by saying that he played the piano for some Las Vegas revue not too long ago.
Catherine’s inevitable rejection of Bobby leaves him feeling all the more as though he’s “saddled with” Rayette. Sweet, simpering, slobbering Rayette. No better than a dumb dog who keeps returning to its abusive master. Emma screams at Marcello in the car, “What are you going to do with your life? Who could love you like I do?” Rayette, in turn, insists (also in the car), “There isn’t anyone gonna look after you and love you better than I do, you know that.” These women, having little respect for themselves, can’t help but be pulled toward men who are self-loathing, turning that loathing outward onto them. Possibly both Marcello and Bobby do know that no other woman will love them like these ones, and that’s why each needs to run as far and as fast as possible away from such cloying, maternal love. It’s too oppressive, too smothering. Just as it was for Bobby to live on the San Juan Islands and perform like a trained monkey in the name of servicing his talent. Well his only talent now is knowing when to cut and run.
Catherine’s comment on his lack of interest in, or rather, “love for” anything is what firmly repels her from Bobby, in addition to, during the final minutes of the film, making him look very harshly in the mirror (both literally and figuratively) at himself. A poetic full-circle moment considering the first time we see Rayette, she’s primping in the mirror as Bobby stalks past her in an eye-rolling fashion. But it is, in truth, a revulsion he feels for himself most of all, same as Marcello, who goes down the rabbit hole of a hollow party lifestyle to numb his emptiness.
What it all boils down to for these men in the end is a lack of self-love, a deep-seated awareness, whether objectively true or completely solipsistic, that they are total pieces of shit unworthy of any form of real love. Either that, or, of course, there’s always the notion that they are, in fact, genuinely pieces of shit who don’t want to be bothered with the saccharine nature of human sentiment. The weighted feeling of being tied to any one person. And whether it’s the music of Nino Rota or Tammy Wynette to tell that story, it comes across with unsparingly bittersweet cruelty in both films.
