Shuffling through the final papers of the semester, I encounter one that discusses Richard Wright’s Lawd Today! and the genius of how Jake’s quotidian routine is parasyntactically laminated over Lincoln’s birthday radio speeches and other media pronouncements that render his activities patently and ironically more meaningless by playing the myth over them, to which I stand back and think “Amazing how a writer who could hardly grasp basic syntax three weeks ago really digs deep to produce this type of polysyllabic, erudite analysis for his/her final paper … and who thinks I’m genuinely retarded.”
Entering the line in Google, I discover the true scholar is Eugene Miller, and while I’m not surprised the work is plagiarized, I am dumbfounded by the astounding belief that students who use Google assume I am incapable of using it as well. Moreover, I contemplate the source of the desire to cheat by plagiarizing, passing someone else’s idea off as your own. Perhaps Tap and Pell push students to achieve higher grades. Maybe their relatives offer monetary rewards for certain letters. There’s always the off-chance that they are taking part in a grand social experiment to prove that classroom education is negligible and the ability to note you have a diploma far outweighs how you earn the diploma, disregarding the notion that you could just lie on your resume and claim to have earned a degree that you hadn’t.
Regardless of the motives or the catalysts to plagiarize, I often wonder if our society leans toward cheating solely because it is often overlooked and shrugged off. I promise this is not a curmudgeonly rant, but think for a second about former Presidents Bill Clinton and John F. Kennedy, two of the most popular infidelity aficionados in the last fifty years.
Need we talk about cheating in sports via steroids? Sure, there was a committee in 2005 that made Palmeiro wag a defiant finger and McGwire refuse to “talk about the past,” but since then, few have been publicly ostracized, and steroid use is often chalked up to the notion that “it was just an era,” and now it’s over – until you look at the 2600 abnormally-sized men playing football, the most profitable sport in America. Likewise, there’s no test for HGH, so ignorance gives us permission to relish in spectacular feats and exciting plays while arbitrarily finding victims to pillory.
I think what might be most disturbing about this cheating-culture is the way it perpetuates unoriginality, particularly when popular figures – like vampires and then zombies – are ridden to death so much so that the corpse is petrified. We could also look at apocalypse films and films of redemption like Country Strong, which borrows heavily from Crazy Heart, last year’s version of The Wrestler, a testosterone-filled version of A Star is Born.
Coincidentally enough, my experience with plagiarism this morning was exacerbated when I saw a trailer for The Roommate, 2011’s not-so-subtle teenish version of Single White Female. Now, the original wasn’t great, but there were moments that definitely made me wonder whether I would have to stop talking to my stuffed animals when my roommate comes home. They hardly ever understand. (The roommates, not the stuffed animals. They always get me. Isn’t that right, Pogo?) But, as the tagline for Single White Female attests, “Living with a roommate can be murder.”
So, overlooking the fact that The Roommate is a version of Single White Female that blatantly borrows its title from the former’s tagline, the trailer for The Roommate informs us there are “2000 colleges in the United States” and “16 million students,” making us wonder which one we will be paired with. Like Single White Female, the two women, Rebecca (Leighton Meester) and Sarah (Minka Kelly) instantly click, so much so that Rebecca informs Sarah that she can “borrow anything she wants,” echoing Single White Female’s definition of a roommate as “someone who shares; someone who borrows.”
Soon after, Rebecca confides “I’ve always wanted a sister,” which immediately fashions her as a needy character, an only child who is socially retarded, and given the wealth of clothes in her closet, probably well-off. Clearly, this makes her crazy a la Hedy (Jennifer Jason Leigh’s characters in SWF), who was also a socially retarded only child. Luckily, we are given insight into Rebecca’s source of crazy when Sarah visits her home and speaks to a woman (mother?) who asks if Rebecca is still taking her medication? Medication!? She is crazy!
Aside from the crazy, socially stunted roommate with an obsessive personality, there are three other eerie similarities between these films. One is the adopting of a pet. In Single White Female, Hedy comes home with a dog, an attempt to further bond with Allison (Bridget Fonda) as if it were a small child, rendering them a couple. Similarly, The Roommate trailer shows Sarah slipping a kitten out of her hoodie, to which Rebecca’s face brightens up as she says, “It’ll be our secret,” making them not only de-facto parents but confidants as well. Under my assumption that this follows the SWF plot line, I’ll bet twenty dollars the cat perishes. If it falls out the window or down a garbage chute, I get an extra five. Given that it’s a kitten, it may disappear and then reappear in the last scene. If so, it’s a push, but I require everyone to perform a facepalm.
The second convenient similarity is the introduction of a male to spur jealousy. In Single White Female, Allison initially places the ad in order to replace Sam (Steven Weber), her philandering ex-boyfriend whom she kicks out. In The Roommate trailer, Sarah meets Steve (Cam Gigandet) while dancing in a club and comes home later than Rebecca, re-kindling potential issues of abandonment. However, in both movies, the blood-driven motives of Hedy and Rebecca stem from their need to “protect” the other woman. In Single White Female, Hedy is jealously protecting Allison from being hurt again by the same cheating ex-boyfriend. In The Roommate, we only know that Rebecca “just wanted to protect” Sarah.
These “protection” motifs also potentially tie the film together in another respect. To prove that Sam is still untrustworthy, Hedy dresses like Allison, sneaks into his apartment and performs oral sex on him, proving that Sam – though he believes it is Allison – will still cheat. The logic is a bit wonky, but whatever.
It seems the same wonky logic will appear in The Roommate as the trailer offers a scene in which Rebecca is in bed, straddling Cam with a knife secured in her bra strap. Now, perhaps this is a dream, but probably not. If Rebecca feels the need to protect Sarah, she needs to rationalize a reason, and tricking Cam would be the best way to accomplish this. If, on the other hand, it is a dream, then Cam becomes a scumbag for fantasizing about another woman, thus justifying Rebecca’s actions in the eyes of the audience, and this wouldn’t make much sense.
In the end, take two needy characters that cling on to their respective roommates, convincing themselves they are the ultimate protectors from philandering men. Add a dash of pets that create a couple-like bond and will most likely perish as the victims of jealousy-fed rage. Mix with quickly-thought-out sex-based schemes, and you have nearly the same movie, just in case this generation hasn’t found Single White Female on Netflix quite yet.
