Solitary Man, 2009

As a medievalist, I have been trained to accept a work on its own terms. I don’t like to imagine what a work could have been, criticize it for what it is not. I take the work as it is given to me and think about what it is, its advantages and its limitations.

“Solitary Man” is Hollywood’s version of an aging playboy confronted with reality. Only in Hollywood can a man in his mid-sixties (actually the film pretends that Ben Kalmen is in his late fifties, but we are not blind) hit on an 18-year-old and be successful. We all know that in Hollywood or the entertainment industry more generally very young women really do sleep with old men whom they have reason to believe have some connection to the business. We have seen the Girls of the Playboy Mansion. But in New York, an aging failed car salesman simply cannot have any teenager he wants. And he certainly cannot show up at a university party with a beer in his hand and start propositioning the students. Security would be on to him before he knew what was happening.

What we have, then, is a film whose premise, that a broke guy in his mid-sixties who used to be a car salesman can have pretty much any woman he wants no matter what her age, is, on the surface, ludicrous. We can either accept the film as a displaced story of the Hollywood version of aging, in which case we wonder why the directors bothered to set the film in New York instead of just letting it be what it was meant to be, or we can puzzle over what the premise really means, figure out a way to make the incredible credible.

How to explain Ben Kalmen’s success with every woman he hits on? I am going to opt for this: the film is actually meant to depict the interior fantasy life of Ben Kalmen, who is in REALITY just an ordinary failed car salesman – probably undone by the recession – who would really enjoy slutting around, if he could ever find any takers. In his fantasy he becomes the most successful car salesman in New York history, wildly rich, sought after by women. He re-imagines his current situation as a the result of a spectacular fall from money and power due to his own fraud, dreaming himself up a fantasy version of going out of business (after all, we all incorporate realistic detail in our fantasies – we don’t reinvent ourselves wholesale). In his dreams he accompanies his girlfriend’s beautiful daughter to a university interview where he gets invited to a dorm party and sleeps with the daughter. Then we follow Ben's meandering fantasy through other women, growing money problems, all excuses for his real-life failure.

One of the most astonishing elements of the film - if one takes it as a straightforward story of aging - is the information given by Ben’s wife in the last few minutes: that Ben’s sexual escapades only began about six years ago when he discovered that he had some unspecified heart condition. In addition to being asked to believe that this sagging ordinary man before us is a sexual god of infinite charisma we are now asked to believe that he suddenly transformed from a family man into a ho overnight and has been working women only since his late fifties? But let’s imagine this bombshell as part of Ben’s fantasy – it gives him a justification for his guilty daydreams.

This film received generally very positive reviews, praised as authentic, etc. Those reviews were written by men. It seems that men have an emotional investment in this fantasy, the fantasy that 18-year-olds are ready to sleep with really old guys. Maybe the same need that drove the films’ directors to spin this tale out fuels the male film-going audience in general. But as a female I have to say that I am getting a little tired of this narrative, of sexually potent old guys with nice aging wives successfully putting the moves on gorgeous young women.