What Planet Are You From? (2000)
The title of Mike Nichols’ sixteenth feature film, What Planet Are You From?, refers to the profound, gendered difference in perspective and thus in communication between men and women, a phenomenon articulated to vast popular influence by John Gray in his 1992 bestseller Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. Yet the title could as well have reflected a legitimate question on the part of Hollywood financiers, wondering how Nichols could be serious about moving from the earnestness of Primary Colors to the unapologetic silliness of an alien sex comedy. Composed by committee, with four writers sharing credit (including the star/producer, Garry Shandling), What Planet seems on its surface more like an early Woody Allen comedy or a Mel Brooks or Carl Reiner film than like a Mike Nichols film. The silliness is not atypical of Nichols; it is present in films as different and made as far apart as Catch-22 (1970), The Fortune (1975), and The Birdcage (1996). Yet What Planet ultimately yields less substance than any of these earlier films, despite the fact that “the movie wants its satire to be taken seriously.”1 Though boasting Nichols’ usual command of Hollywood star power (with Annette Bening from Regarding Henry in another major role, alongside prominent Hollywood personalities like Shandling, Ben Kingsley, John Goodman, Linda Fiorentino, and Greg Kinnear), the film has less for them to do than a Nichols film usually does. It’s the least substantial film of Nichols’ career.
What Planet continues many of Nichols’ functional preoccupations: the socially proscribed default toward restless accumulation as a means of compensation for the ache of spiritual emptiness; the objectification particularly of gender and the attendant disintegration of connection and communication that proceeds naturally from a failure fully to recognize personhood. The film ultimately has more in common with Woody Allen’s existential laughter than with Brooks’ or Reiner’s two-dimensional parodic silliness, which parodies genre in the single-minded service of the joke. Even in Nichols’ giddiest films (as in Woody Allen’s), genre serves metaphor as much as punchline. The high-concept premise of What Planet is a comic riff on the gender wars while delighting in sound gags about humming sex organs.
At the center of the film are two characters on accidentally intersecting “missions” (a word ironically used not by the alien sent to impregnate an Earth woman and bring the planet to its knees but by the Earth woman herself, bent on finding some clearer sense of purpose for her life). As he is charged with administering his planet’s will, H1449–6 (or Harold Anderson, as Shandling’s character comes to be called) is selected for the promise of his “adaptability” and “great capacity for learning.” He thus takes his place in a long line of Nichols characters to emerge during his second phase of production as a Hollywood filmmaker, beginning with the protean evolution of Karen Silkwood. Nichols’ self-reported project as a filmmaker is to create narratives of “transformation,”2 and Harold Anderson takes the universality of this thematic preoccupation to a whole new galaxy. Harold’s partner in transformation is Susan Hart (Bening), a recovering alcoholic and sex addict so committed to conversion that she’s hedged her bets by prominently installing in her bedroom an array of religious votives, icons, and fetishes from an ecumenical spectrum of traditions. When Harold and Susan meet, each is hampered by reified misassumptions. The narrative’s arc is for each of them to unlearn as much as they have to learn.
In their very first conversation, Susan poses the title question, a rhetorical exasperation with the problem of interpersonal communication, particularly between the sexes, that also gives Shandling the opportunity to mug shamelessly for the camera. Susan makes sweepingly dismissive generalizations about men, based in her experience of the bottom-feeding predators (like Perry Gordon, Kinnear’s character) she has met during her years looking at her life from the bottom of a bottle. As for Harold, his conditioning in the gendered transactions of Earthlings constitutes the film’s initial comic set piece: a hologram image of 1950s female servitude (a woman with permed hair at an ironing board) receiving compliments in exchange for sexual favors. Men and women are, indeed, worlds apart in What Planet. Michael Ballhaus’ camera captures Rita (Harmony Smith), the curvaceous “office manager” at the bank where both Perry and Harold work, from a variety of objectifying angles. Perry’s wife Helen (Fiorentino) receives similar cinematographic treatment, and Nichols uses Fiorentino’s notorious femme fatale image from earlier films like The Last Seduction (John Dahl, 1994) and Jade (William Friedkin, 1995) as a further means of establishing how she is typed by the men around her.
For all the sci-fi trappings, What Planet is actually much more interested in engaging with the rules of romantic comedy than the overt scaffolding of science fiction storytelling, with which Nichols is even less at ease than with the supernatural horror of Wolf (1994). In romantic comedy, the introduced stereotypes and resulting miscommunication create the complications that initially drive the plot, and the sort of personal epiphanies that Nichols is always looking for in his characters provide the resolution to the plot’s gendered problems. What Planet may be far more slight than the films that precede and follow it in his oeuvre, but it is, at its core, a Mike Nichols film.
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With What Planet, Nichols argues that the impulses that plague us—the desire to objectify and consume, to dominate and control—are socialized as well as inherited, and should not be assumed to be uniquely earthbound. If there are other races out among the stars, they are likely to have similar impulses to ours. This is the default plot assumption of H. G. Wells’ seminal The War of the Worlds (1898), which informed much of the alien-invasion science fiction released during the classic B-movie era of the 1950s, during the Cold War beginnings of space exploration and paranoia about decidedly terrestrial forms of invasion. The civilization to which H1449–6, aka Harold Anderson, belongs is “a thousand years” more advanced than Earth in its technologies, yet Harold ultimately concludes that as a race, they have been complicit in a final, utter self-objectification. Rather than support their assertion of their superiority and thus of their right to domination of Earth per Graydon’s vision, Harold argues near the film’s climax “we can learn from them and they can remind us of who we were before.”
The dystopia Graydon (Kingsley) has created on his planet is dystopic not because it fails to function or even because its inhabitants are unhappy per se (they are neither happy nor unhappy, not having access to emotion) but rather because its essential impulse must always be dissatisfaction: a bottomless desire for “more.” In its own way, Graydon’s cosmic manifest destiny is no different than the conspicuous consumption of the Braddocks and the Robinsons in The Graduate or the Turners and their circle in Regarding Henry, to take only two examples from two distinct eras of Nichols’ oeuvre. The phallocratic impulse to possessive insertion of one’s will knows no boundaries of time or space. “Is that what it’s about—more, more, more?” demands Harold of Graydon during their confrontation just after Harold has questioned aloud their planet’s domineering mission during a training exercise on the seduction of Earth women. Harold has no stomach for mere conquest any longer; Graydon thinks Harold needs to have his memory wiped. The conceit of brainwashing as metaphor of socialized reification is no less powerful for being a familiar narrative strategy of science fiction’s critique of culture. Graydon’s impulse to consume alien civilizations begins at home; for the alienated, the alien is everywhere, including his own people. This is why the planet engages in groupthink: to subdue threats to hegemony. Nichols and company get comic mileage out of the bland black uniforms of Graydon’s vanishing perspective of minions and their unison responses (“uh-huh”) to the female avatar during the training exercises. There can be no deviation from the norm; all must reflect the will of power. To be distinct is to be alien. In this sense, Harold’s more or less successful (this being romantic comedy at its most generically fantastical) assimilation into Earth’s culture of self-actualization constitutes an act of treachery, because it establishes an alternative to the Graydon way.
There are ideological assumptions made by What Planet that place free-market democratic society at the vanguard of self-actualization. When Harold is sent to Earth by Graydon, his assigned alias is given a comfortably bourgeois vocation in the financial world in one of the boom economies of the American economic system: Phoenix, Arizona. Susan, too, has assumed her place in the economy, as a fledgling realtor. For the film’s initial theatrical audience, the sight of Annette Bening showing houses would have conjured the profound spiritual dysfunction of her breakout, Oscar-nominated performance as Carolyn Burnham the previous year in American Beauty (Sam Mendes), a film Nichols was originally approached to direct.3 Indeed, it’s almost impossible to imagine Mendes’ Oscar-winning film without acknowledging what it owes to Nichols and The Graduate (as part of Nichols’ ongoing body of work in dialogue with the quiet—and sometimes noisy—desperation of reified society). For Harold and Susan, however, the life of material affluence on which they embark with their new son is not in question. What Nichols’ film questions is the gendered, habitualized proscription of how they think about and behave with one another.
Socioeconomics has never mattered less in a Nichols film. In the title’s riff on gendered politics, the narrative asks most of its questions and draws most of its conclusions about reified behavior based in sexual identity and relationships. While Harold gains access to his adaptive emotional range as a dual-planetary citizen by competing with Perry for the boss’ favor and the pay raise to assistant vice president, the film focuses its critique on the ways in which Perry and Harold initially bond but eventually diverge in their understanding of relationship to the opposite sex. When they first meet at the bank, it is ten in the morning, but Harold is ready to procreate. The niceties of the mating ritual have eluded Harold; any time is the right time. His insistent craving for sex even impresses an inveterate horndog like Perry, who can’t quite tell whether Harold is serious or not (as it turns out, Harold is always serious, which is the source of Shandling’s desert-dry delivery as a comedian). Perry is a monster to warm Graydon’s cold gray heart; he is, in all the important respects but one, an ideal model for Harold to have attached himself to in pursuing the successful achievement of Graydon’s assignment. That single exception is the end product of conquest; Perry is not looking for commitment; like Graydon he’s looking for fresh, vulnerable territory to conquer. Yet Graydon does seek the perpetuation of identity via reproduction, where Perry would, of necessity, run from such permanence. He assumes false identities rather than making his identity perpetual. In his professional attachments, the common currency of Perry’s world is power. His daily assignations with Rita take place in the vault, a literal reassertion of her objecthood (she’s “money”) and a symbolic statement of his dominion over even his boss’ property. When Harold initially meets with Perry, then Fisk, Perry asserts that Rita is “taken,” while Fisk asserts that she is “mine.” For each man, Rita has no distinctive trait other than her memorable curves. She is not prized for her ability (an active trait) but rather for her desirability (a passive trait). In the film’s treatment of her, she is a montage of inviting smiles and swinging hips. Possessing her is a statement of mastery.
Helen, Perry’s wife, receives similar treatment but many more lines to establish an inner complicity with her objectification. She and Perry are well matched; she objectifies him as much as he objectifies women. For Helen, the allure of Perry (which otherwise would probably have escaped us) is in his daily, all-day proximity to money. Her sex addiction is more specialized than Susan’s; while Susan falls under the spell of alcohol and surrenders to the disreputable (in the tradition of her mother’s succession of bad taste in men), Helen is a fool for financiers. (One assumes she may have become acquainted at some point with Don Fisk’s weekend condo as well.) Perry’s relationships with men, on the other hand, are all about peer competition and domination. For Fisk and Perry, Rita is an alluring battlefield, and their repeated penetrations of her a way of “sticking it to” each other. Perry’s apparent interest in Harold ultimately reveals itself to be manipulative self-interest; everything in reach is his, including Harold’s masterful third-quarter report. When Harold calls him on this dishonesty, Perry without reflection is able to fall back on a claim of all he’s done for Harold; challenged to name something, Perry is initially at a loss, through we understand how different the two men have become when Perry eventually reminds Harold he took him to the place where he met Susan, his wife. Harold has to grant him this; he’s already learned more about love by this point than Perry is ever likely to know. Perry fades away during the film’s final third, as the focus shifts permanently to the war of wills between Graydon and Harold. At the renewal of vows at film’s end, Perry is a wedding guest, seated between Rita and Helen in a cheerfully and perpetually objectified ensemble. Perry is the comic-narrative parallel to Jack Nicholson’s character Jonathan in Carnal Knowledge or Clive Owen’s character Larry in Closer: grasping, vengefully adversarial, the very image of the misanthropic malcontent.
Susan enters the narrative, like all the women introduced in the film, through Perry’s and Harold’s objectifying eyes. “The set-up allows ‘Planet’ to leer at women and then ridicule that impulse,” writes Elvis Mitchell.4 Their presence at the AA meeting has already relegated her to objecthood; in Perry’s cynicism, the vulnerability of the recovering addict makes for especially easy prey. The two men perch at the room’s periphery in judgment of all they see. When Doreen (Jane Lynch) introduces herself, she quickly identifies herself as lesbian, and Perry dismisses her with pejorative slang. Susan is next; from Perry and Harold’s perspective, we watch her stand up and move to the podium. “Hello,” says Perry, “get the bread—I see something tasty.” In Perry’s imagination, women are to be consumed and, the metaphor organically concluded, eliminated. Her address to the meeting introduces her victimhood, and Perry comments, “I like what I’m hearing” just as Susan declares, “But all that’s changed now.” She tells a story of waking up in an unfamiliar city next to an unfamiliar man and concludes, “I stopped putting myself in situations where I couldn’t respect myself so others didn’t respect me.” To Perry’s disappointed dismissal, “She wants respect—cuts me out,” Harold demands silence. He isn’t yet any different than Perry—but he sees what a liability Perry might prove to be.
In her own way, Nadine Jones (Caroline Aaron, another small-part Nichols regular) is just as locked into default assumptions about sexual identity and relationships as Perry. She has bagged Roland (Goodman) as her husband via an affair that breaks up his previous marriage. When he’s distracted by his first interesting case as an investigator, she can only understand it as a loss of agency to another object of desire. In the comic extremity of tone in What Planet, Nadine comes to find it preferable to think that she’s being supplanted by a more desirable woman—a Rita—than by the naked man whose picture she has found hidden under Roland’s winter pants. Roland, for his part, has long since taken Nadine for granted, forgetting their anniversary, failing to listen to her concerns. At film’s end, however, he demonstrates his ongoing commitment to his marriage by looking for ways to share with her the truth of what has preoccupied him, a professional reengagement that poses no threat to their relationship. At the same time that Harold is telling “the truth” to Susan, Roland wants Harold to come home and tell this same truth to Nadine. That the “truth” comes in the form of a bright white light is a comic acknowledgment of the traditional symbolism of illumination; that it comes from Garry Shandling’s nose is indicative of the film’s essential silliness of tone.
In his subsequent conversations with Susan, Harold evinces a simple candor so “alien” that Susan is disarmed by it and eventually comes to understand it as knowing, deconstructive irony. Asked what his “mission” is on their first dinner-date, Shandling as Harold vamps his double-take before saying, honestly enough, “I believe I was put here on Earth to have a child.” Her response, that she’s “never heard a man say that,” begins to suggest something out of the ordinary about him, but her instincts recommend similar candor: “I don’t trust you […] because all men are the same. They say whatever they have to to get into your pants.” (Variations on this line ensue throughout the film.) “That’s terrible,” he says in reply to her condemnation of his gender, “but what would it be? […] The thing I’d have to say to get into your pants.” Harold seals the inquiry with Shandling’s trademark ingratiating-aggressive toothy grin, and Susan laughs, assuming that Harold is making a joke at the expense of all those tiresome, predictable one-track minds she has previously dated.
She takes him home, but with no default intention to bed him. Like Rachel Samstat (Meryl Streep) in Heartburn, she’s into “fixing up” her living space as an analog of renovating her life, and as such, the breakfast nook, painted and repainted to express her volatile moods, is the central symbol. Harold makes an innocently ingenuous suggestion that she interprets as a philosophical insight: “Why don’t you take that arch-thing out altogether,” he says, indicating the trompe l’oeil image of a window on the world she has painted into the wall. “I have a feeling what’s out there is more interesting anyway.” In the bedroom, inquiring about her array of religious iconography on the chest, he advances on her sexually. “You don’t care about any of this,” she concedes forlornly. “You’re just tricking me.” She scares him away to a consultation with Graydon when she confides the vow of celibacy she’s taken until marriage. Yet alone in her breakfast nook, contemplating yet another makeover, she instead begins to tear down the wall, discovering, just behind it, a beautiful arched window with a view to the Phoenix Mountains. It sends her back to him to ask him to lunch, but before she can, he says, “Would you think about marrying me?” In the literalism of his alien logic, he understands this to be the commodified terms she has proffered for sexual license. She smiles knowingly and says, “All right, I deserved that. […] Everything I said the other night was such a turn-off. I went completely overboard.” But she’s in with the champ of overboard; she’s misheard his earnestness as irony again, and as he drops to a knee to make clear how serious he is about his proposal, she has to reorient herself to the unpredictable nature of this new man in her life. Ironically, he begins to break down her gendered objectifying of him (all of which is actually well-deserved) long before she is able to make any headway beyond his Graydon-trained and Perry-reinforced objectification of her.
Beyond these situational ironies, the script delights in the verbal ironies of woman-alien dialogue. After their physically demanding honeymoon and a failed pregnancy test, they have their first quarrel. She’s (rightly) feeling herself objectified as pure womb and demands that they talk. The scene takes the form of an advanced training session like the ones he undertook on his home planet, but without Graydon’s monomaniacal focus. “This might be a good time to sit next to me and try to comfort me,” she suggests; he fails the test when his procreative mission reasserts itself. She shrugs away from his ill-timed groping and encourages him to talk to her “like a human being.” This prompts another consultation with Graydon. Later, when Harold learns he’s been passed over for the vice-president promotion at the bank, a position that should be meaningless to him given his original mission, he comes home to Susan; in his frustration, he’s crying (which he mistakes for blood). She comforts him with the admonition, “You’re being too hard on yourself. You’re just human, that’s all.” These characterizations of Harold’s latent “humanity” are not played solely or perhaps even primarily for laughs; they are markers of his progress from the reductive state of sperm-gun to something multi-dimensional. The segue to a cosmic starscape for once has nothing to do with Graydon and everything to do with the journey Harold has embarked upon after teleportation. “I always feel so much better when I’m with you,” he says to Susan, and insists without irony that he has no motive but to state this fact. Their tenderness provokes the first non-mission-based stirring of Harold’s libido (irrelevant in Graydon’s terms, now that Susan is pregnant), with the result that, after hundreds of “insertions,” they make love for the first time.
“‘Most young men think about sex, and think that women are sexual objects,’” says Shandling. “‘And as we get older, we realize there are elements that are far more important.’”5 Graydon is, in fact, as one-dimensional as his one-track mission. Kingsley, stiff and terse, his bald head gleaming, is the physical embodiment of phallocracy, a talking analog of the evolutionary drive to reproduce. The columns of rank and file arranged interchangeably in the training amphitheater are the organisms of hypothetical fertility, like spermatozoa awaiting their billions-to-one shot at the egg. Not as literal as Woody Allen’s sketch as the reluctant sperm cell in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* But Were Afraid to Ask (1972), the visual and dramatic treatment of Graydon and his command is ultimately a stylized representation of the male sex urge and patriarchal hegemony. Nichols frames the scene in which Harold discovers a new motivation for sex—not phallocentric primacy but an expression of tender and intimate regard—with a return to the cosmic starscape he’s always contemplating, Harold’s home. His joy at being with Susan is tempered only by his uneasiness about the consequences of his now housing two such profoundly incompatible urges: the prerogative to subdue and exploit at war with the privilege to commune and cherish. His remote agenda remains Graydon’s rigid will for him; but Harold has also discovered a new home here, which What Planet underscores with a jump cut to the house Susan’s still trying to sell, and which Harold surprises her by asserting that they should buy out from under her hesitating, sniping clients.
Harold’s transformation is even more extreme than Susan’s only because he is extraterrestrial. In coming to a committed relationship, they each must liberate themselves from the default inculcation of their culture. In this sense, a Nichols film once again foregrounds the motif of education—as often a process of unlearning as of learning. This is the transformative quality Bewes finds alive in reified anxiety.6 Susan is able to articulate her complicity in her objectification in front of the AA meeting. For Harold, the process is only beginning as he listens to her bold, self-critical words. Susan accurately presumes Harold, like other men, to be motivated by “tricking” her; this is mandated policy from Graydon, who has sworn Harold to secrecy as part of the conspiracy of conquest and counsels Harold to the further duplicity of an affair when Susan is not immediately fertile. But in the best sense of the generic conventions of romantic comedy, Susan feminizes Harold. One of the first markers of this transformation is his turn towards self-revelatory candor as an improvement upon his earlier, merely ingenuous candor, as when he inquires what he would need to say to get into her pants or when he proposes to her as a means of ensuring his access to sex. “I don’t know who I am anymore,” confides a Harold in transition, deviating from the phallocratic prerogative, in which identity is as simple as sex drive. Later, seeing Graydon hovering in the maternity ward, he resigns himself to the fate of his original mission, but can’t bear not to say goodbye. “Maybe I should have just left,” he says, as he watches Susan’s heart break. “This seems much worse.” Back on his planet, Shandling also gets comic mileage out of delivering lines traditionally assigned by genre formula to women: “You know, if you don’t talk to me, I won’t know what’s wrong,” and “See what you did? I told you you were scaring the baby.”7
When Harold takes over the instruction of Graydon’s rank and file spermtroopers after his return, he brings an enlightened perspective to the curriculum. The men make the same mistakes he did when confronted with the melodramatic verbal irony of a woman’s anger. Urged by Susan’s hologram to “go” and shop for a new remote control, they of course interpret her literally. “There’s a whole layer here you’re missing,” Harold instructs them. In Postcards from the Edge, Suzanne Vale (Meryl Streep) encounters a Malibu version of Perry Gordon in Jack Faulkner (Dennis Quaid). Still wearing her cop uniform from a day’s work on a bad buddy-cop movie, she launches a rhetorical assault against him with the claim that she isn’t bothered by his sleeping around but by his lying about it; he summons a vindicated indignation when he counters by calling her the liar: she is bothered by his promiscuity and—the coup de grâce—by her certainty that he will, someday sooner or later, leave. Ever the opportunist, this is Jack’s opportunity to show Suzanne the door, proving to her how committed he is to full disclosure of himself: he would never lie about what a liar he is. Later in the same film, Lowell Kolcheck (Gene Hackman) offers Suzanne a different, more stable image of manhood, albeit with no sexual strings attached. Lowell talks to Suzanne about dramatic structure, specifically recognition, Aristotle’s concept of anagnorisis; his claim is that, unlike in art, self-realizations and transformation are far less instantaneous in life. They take time: character evolves in process. In his indoctrination sessions back on his home planet, Harold is able to draw similar conclusions about the nature—and necessity—of transformation. “Human relationships are filled with conflict,” Harold observes to the spermtroopers. “The whole planet is filled with conflict. Not that that’s a bad thing, because it’s through conflict that we learn about ourselves.” This causes an unsettled stirring in the ranks, the beginning of the end of Graydon’s phallocratic reign. The spermtroopers want to become men like Harold. The title of the film quotes a question Susan asks Harold, but in its playful way, the second person pronoun addresses the audience as well. Harold’s meta-statement, near the crisis of the film, foregrounds the journey an audience takes with a filmmaker each time it submits to the flow of narrative.
Abundant comic evidence exists in their exchanged wedding renewal vows that both Harold and Susan remain works in progress. Susan acknowledges her need for continuing growth and evolution when she refers to the universe as “one big, screwed-up place where everyone’s trying to work out their problems. But I’m honored to work them out with you.” Harold is typically even more direct, confessing that he only married her at first “to get into your pants.” He follows up by launching into a familiar cliché capped by Harold’s brand of full disclosure: “Now I’m [marrying you] because I want to spend the rest of my life getting into your pants.” Though more heartfelt than his perfunctory Vegas-strip avowal, his disarming honesty reveals that his ingrained instincts remain. The film’s coda ends on a road, and with talk of commuting—more journeys still to come as a couple begin negotiating their married life together. The concluding bickering of the newlywed new parents manifests the human (and humanized) pace of our progress, where democratic conflict trumps the reified illusion of conformist harmony. As Lowell concludes in Postcards, transformation isn’t instantaneous but a process of becoming. Susan has no firmer an idea of what love is than an alien. But they’re learning together.
H14496, aka Harold Anderson (Garry Shandling, who also co-wrote the script) performs instructional role-plays with a holographic avatar of Susan Hart (Annette Bening), the woman he has met, married, and impregnated, for the massed citizens of a planet of cloned men bent on colonizing Earth by reproduction. Harold has swiftly adapted to Earth’s individual liberties, and his instruction reflects what he has learned about objectifying women and his own planet’s conformist practices. He inadvertently causes the violent overthrow of his planet’s hegemonic ruler in What Planet Are You From?