An Essay about the Films Rushmore & Juno

Handjobs & Replacement Children By Glenn Marsala

“I knew for sure when I saw them out back skinnydipping & giving each other handjobs while you were taking a nap on the front porch.”

"If I gave you a handjob, would it put an end to all this?"

“What do you call getting a handjob from Mrs. Calloway in the back of a Jaguar?”
“A fucking lie.”

“I’m sorry about what I said, about your mom giving me a handjob.”
“I know, Max. I’m sorry I didn’t take your hand when Buchan kicked your ass.”

“So, this is where the magic happens?”
“What magic?”
“I wouldn’t know.”

Theater full of hands. A thunderous applause. Orgasmic response to Max's "hit play." He gets punched in the face. "Don't fuck with my play!" He's fighting over it like he's fighting over a girl. He's jealous of the play? Yet when Miss Cross asks him if he thinks they are "going to have sex," and he says, "Isn't that a crude way to put it?" she responds, "Not if you've ever fucked before." His imaginative life, the dramas of love, violence, drugs, and even academic heroism, are more masturbatory fantasies, involving little real intimacy. He shakes hands with Mrs. Calloway and Miss Cross. This seems benign enough, as the reporter kid responds to the news of this intimacy with Dirk’s mother with, “Big deal! Buchan said he’d have already banged her by now.” In both of Max's plays he suffers a blow to the head. He also is rewarded by those standing ovations, that affirmation of his worth that he has such a hard time getting from friends or family. Even with these most public of affirmations, through his sufferings and his triumphs, when he recieves personal praise his comments are: "It was better in rehearsals," and, "It went ok. At least no one got hurt." This certainly differs from the bombast of his insistance that he “wrote a hit play and directed it,” so he’s “not sweating it, either.” This posturing comes with the perceived threat of Peter Flynn, Miss Cross’s fellow Harvard alum. Max does hit Peter’s hand with his spoon—he doesn’t shake it.

After the final scene of Heaven and Hell, Blume does not applaud with hands, but with a raised fist, fierce, showing comradery and solidarity—with tears. He is moved. Through emotional infidelity, actual or imagined infidelity, fights with his sons, his divorce, he feels nothing. He runs over Max's bike with no change in expression. He is fierce, but sad. Blume resignedly suffers a buildup of non-emotional inability to feel, a dullness & almost deadness. He even seems lackadaisical about a threat to his life. Max tells him he wanted to have a tree fall on Blume, who says, "It would've flattened me like a pancake." He expresses this profound ennui in a few understatements: "I'm a little bit lonely these days," & "I don't know, Burt." With this, we see a man floundering, with only bursts of rage aimed at his sons, a genuine fondness for Max—perhaps his only real friendship. He has focused on work, probably a contributing factor to his disconnection from his sons, and spends hours after dark at his factory. His physical and emotional distance may explain why his wife flirts with a guy at the twins' birthday party, even as Blume sits nearby, on the other side of the pool. But the pool symbolizes the ocean that divides them. Blume is profoundly alone.

Blume offers the 15-year-old Fischer a job, saying, "I could use someone like you," because he sees the world and companionship as something that needs to be hired to be kept. It's a safe way to bring a person he is truly interested in closer to him. Who's the mentor? I think Max mentors the older Blume. If Max, "one of the worst students we've got," has "got it pretty figured out," then what does this say about how figured out Blume has it? He asks for money to build the aquarium. Fischer obviously has great leadership & planning abilities. He has ideas. He follows his ideas through. He doesn't give up on anything, to the point of self-destruction. Blume has gone about things with a similar drive, but not because it answers a specific calling. The force of momentum, clearly, pushes him through his life. He wants "steel, not alloys." He wants what he knows & trusts, not something different. His life has a sense of sameness.

He tells Max he was "in the shit" in Vietnam, & this carries with it a depth of trauma, of possible abandonment of traits such as friendship or comradery, perhaps because his best friends died. Why does he cry at the end of Heaven and Hell? He finds in it a “spark” of that old “vitality,” which he buried in a meaningless role as husband and father, a thin role as industrialist. His life is empty. His advice for the young is one of competitiveness, survival, bitterness, contempt for people like his sons—children of wealth. His wife is also a beneficiary of his wealth, rather than a producer of it. She and the boys serve as lamprey eels to his shark.

The ocean also symbolizes Miss Cross’s separation from love. Her husband drowned, presumably in the ocean, pursuing his love of the sea. Max is “married to the sea”—Rushmore. He, like Miss Cross and Blume, has “been out to sea a long time.” Time, of course, could be relative. In Miss Cross’s case, her husband died “last year,” Blume has struggled to achieve what he now sees as meaningless for probably a good 25 years, and Max’s mother died when he was seven, eight years earlier. Just as a person could be lost at sea just a few miles offshore, or finally spot land at the furthest distance from the origination of the journey, the emotional distance interposed between these characters and real intimacy—and the psychological time elapsed while they have spent “out to sea”—is indicated by Max’s so aptly vague and suggestive “long time.” “Long” does not measure a specific number of days, months or years, but seems a hard trial, an interminable stretch, to the individual considering where he or she has been, and yet remains.

The relationship of Max to his mother, who died of cancer when he was seven, helped him get into Rushmore. "My mother read it & thought I should go to Rushmore." His mother is the reason he's at Rushmore. She is connected to this situation. He is a performer, wants the glory. He dreams in chapel about being applauded for solving the "hardest geometry problem in the world," which even Dr. Leakey at MIT couldn't solve. He cannot achieve glory through academics, & he probably learned this long before. He doesn't care for private accomplishment or quiet good grades. He seeks applause. It is this recognition that he craves. He has a rather mild & polite relationship with his father. Everything he does is something like Buchan says, "big show, all talk, no results." He brags of the infamous handjob, which is, as Buchan so eloquently puts it, "a fuckin' lie." The show—Max's play or plays—which are really a public performance of talk, with artificial situations and drama, rather than real "results." The resounding applause, the "handjob" writ large, are what he desires. As he turns to stare down the actor who punched him in the face, his triumph—overwhelmingly evidenced by the standing ovation as he crosses the stage—comes as a result of a dangerous drive to overcome obstacles. He pursues Miss Cross with a similar vehemence. He ignores his "sudden death academic probation,” & moves forward, completely in his own world, undeterred.

What of Juno & her pregnancy? Who decides to have sex? Bleeker must have been in on it. The runners. Boys running. Bouncing boys, bouncing balls, always running. Mark runs—away from marriage and, perhaps most of all, fatherhood. Juno's mom runs, to Arizona, and builds a new life, sending annual cacti back to Minnesota on Valentine’s Day. Is this symbolic of defenses she raises against her first child? Are they a warning to "stay away"? Juno, however, expresses her bitterness about this abandonment with typical sarcasm, distancing herself from feeling anything about it. Could a true emotional response threaten to expose her as weak and afraid? If her “uncool” idealism, even in so basic and obvious a truth as her love for Bleeker, were exposed, then the consequences could devastate her. This happens at the Lorings’. She cries, on suspects, for much more than this disillusionment. She cries for her loss of innocence, definitely, but also for her mother, for Brenda’s generosity and motherliness—when she stood up for her to the ultrasound tech and then warned her about “the dynamics of marriage.” She cries for her predicament, for Vanessa’s loss, and she realizes that she loves Bleeker and she needs to give her child to Vanessa. She suddenly becomes clear and decisive. Perhaps she discovers “what kind of girl” she is.

Juno, despite being so clearly “different,” as Bleeker’s mom puts it, appears to really see things a little differently than her image advertises. She wants the "magnificent discarded living room set." She wants the pipe & the old-fashioned American Drean ideal of Leave it to Beaver or Mayberry or something. She believes in true love for a lifetime. Her idiosyncracy is in her innocence, which extends throughout her universe. She makes jokes about her condition, about abortion, about everything, leaving it in a child's way of unimportance. There is nothing to be responsible for, no one to be responsible to. She is a child, and revels in her childishness, “a kraken from the sea,” until she’s not a child anymore. She insists on total freedom and self-will, until she gets pregnant. She still considers herself free, until she declares her love for Bleeker. Of course, he's perfect. Of course, she's beautiful.

The baby boy is a replacement child for the the child Vanessa married. He feels like a teenager, his mom telling him to “get a job,” ridiculing his “jam session,” while he feels he has not had the chance to get out there and live his dream. He speaks with great faith about the “best time for rock and roll,” and longs for nothing more than that feeling. It is his Rushmore. Fatherhood, marriage, “contributing”—this is nothing more or less, to him, in his heart of hearts, than selling out. His scene working on a microwavable brunch jingle, interrupted by a youth who worships at the altar of punk, represents the loss of something profound to his imagination, and the still further, future loss of his last, best chance at freedom. As a father, he will really be expected to contribute. Rock and roll will die.

Juno is the queen of the gods. The only "lay" that Jupitor married. She is the "family values" goddess. If I'm not mistaken, she did not commit adultery. I need to check on that.

Max is obviously delusional about staying at Rushmore "forever." He is also unrealistically dedicated to "getting with" Miss Cross. As long as nothing happens, he can pretend that a relationship is possible, like receiving a handjob from Mrs. Calloway. In his plays, play gunfire, play cocaine, play war. He shoots Buchan with a bb gun. That's the "cap" he "pops" in his "ass."

When Max says, after his play, "At least no one got hurt," Miss Cross glances at his bandaged forehead and responds, "Except you." This statement resonates past the cut on his head, to the punches he took to the face, his expulsion from Rushmore, the loss of his mother at age seven, the feuds with Dirk and Blume, and especially his rejection by Miss Cross herself. Max, however, replies, "I didn't get hurt that bad." Why? Because his world is imaginary? His creativity is unbounded by reality, by possibility; consequently, he can make the impossible happen—dynamite, fire onstage, chainsaws, Latin. As the music at the end seems to insist, Max wishes he had known before what he knows now, "when [he] was younger" and "stronger"—younger not in age, but innocence; stronger not physically, but in his faith that he could go to Rushmore forever, or consummate his love for Miss Cross.