The Rachel Papers (1989) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski) and Tuna

Looking back at this movie,  I guess it's more important to celebrity nudity history than to movie history. The most important thing about it was that it marked Ione Skye's nude debut. She had just turned 18, and she looked very luscious and ripe. If you didn't know, she is the daughter of the hippie of hippies, the wimp-rock balladeer Donovan. Looking back at the promise Ione showed in this film and elsewhere in her early career, and then comparing that to her career in the past eight years, it certainly seems that something went wrong somewhere.  She is working in truly obscure films these days. Of her last six projects, not one has more than 15 votes at IMDb.

Shortly after she split from Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz in 1999, Ione revealed on the Howard Stern show that she is bisexual and that model Jenny Shimizu "brought her into the Lesbian nation." I don't think the whole lesbian thing did a lot for her career.

The Rachel Papers is about a conniving young Brit who uses his high level of intelligence to seduce women. He plans out and scripts every encounter, every phone call, every move, with computerized assistance. He communicates his strategies directly to the audience by speaking into the camera and offering "takes" for the camera's benefit.

When he finally seems to have met the girl of his dreams, he pursues her long enough to get her. They then live together for two weeks behind their parents' backs, and the sex is all he dreamed it would be, but he gradually becomes disenchanted with his dream girl when he sees her peeing, or her period starts in bed, or she leaves half-eaten food under the bed, or she sings along with the radio without knowing the tune or the words. He dumps her by mouthing some insincere bullshit. She calls him on it, and asks him to stop posturing and manipulating and trying to look smart. She asks him to just show his true feelings and say what is on his mind.

When he turns in his exams at Oxford, the professor who reads his papers tells him the same thing Rachel said, that he should stop using flowery phrases which are designed to make him seem smart, and try instead to communicate his real feelings accurately.

Martin Amis wrote the eponymous novel when he was 24, and it is interesting to note that the criticisms leveled against the young boy in this story are the very same criticisms leveled against Martin Amis himself by literary critics to this day, including the comments made by his own famous father, Kingsley Amis. Martin has a reputation for showing off his vocabulary and trying to appear as smart as possible, ala Joyce or Nabokov, but not being able to deal with or to understand human feelings. John Updike called one of Amis's novels "post-human".

I guess The Rachel Papers, written thirty years ago, shows that Amis was not lacking in self-awareness. It's interesting that he has been aware of this weakness all along, yet could not or would not mitigate it!