#4: Bedazzled (2000)
directed by Harold Ramis
written by Larry Gelbart, Harold Ramis and Peter Tolan
starring Brendan Fraser, Elizabeth Hurley and Frances O’Connor
Ever since I first saw Aladdin’s genie spring out of his magic lamp, I’ve been wondering: what would I ask for, if I’d been granted a finite number of wishes? Everyone knows that you’re supposed to start with “a hundred more wishes”, but honestly it never crossed my mind until I’d reached adulthood — and even then it felt like a grotesque manipulation of the rules. And anyway, I’d never actually been able to come up with THREE wishes: did I need money? Did I need love? Maybe, as a lonely boy with not much desire to reach out of my comfort zone, I needed sympathy, but what else was I supposed to want? My ADHD brain never could come up with a good set of answers before drifting on in search of more immediately-pleasing questions, such as “what’s the 17th station southbound on the Bakerloo line?”
In Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s classic film Bedazzled, as well as its maligned 2000 remake by Harold Ramis, the number of wishes available for transaction increases to seven. While watching this movie and laughing rather half-heartedly at the script’s various hijinks, I started thinking about that question once again: what would I do if I’d been guaranteed seven wishes? (Being the person who set the parameters of this hypothetical scenario, I naturally removed the inconvenient clause wherein my soul would be forfeited upon completion.)
Well for one thing, I’d definitely not be asking for the sort of relationship that Brendan Fraser has with Frances O’Connor in the movie. Back in the early 2000s, Fraser was widely considered the epitome of coolness; to see his character pining over O’Connor’s Alison in the most awkward and cringe-worthy of ways was therefore a real shock. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy him as a wannabe Colombian drug lord, or a dim-witted NBA player — in fact, those scenes showed exactly why his eventual Oscar was definitely warranted — but it was uncomfortably reflective of some of my own personal experiences, and I didn’t really like being reminded of how pathetic it could be. I can therefore say for sure that this movie instilled a sense of clarity within me: that an obsession with the goddess of my dreams, however marvellous it may seem, is not the sort of thing that I’m looking for.
Or can I?
The first lesson I was taught in Economics class is that every human has an unlimited number of wants and desires. We might have enough to sustain ourselves, but that’s never enough: we want more, we want better. That simple theory has underpinned a lot of great work: Mad Men and Breaking Bad are just two obvious examples. The funny thing about these desires is that we’re very rarely conscious that they exist: we spend days and weeks convincing ourselves that we’re happy with our current situation, but given the slightest opportunity to do so, we might find ourselves wanting so much more. Look at the scene where the Devil lets Elliot into his crush’s bedroom: he didn’t even ask to be there in the first place, but as the temptations pile up his thirst becomes hard to slake — peering in her diary, watching her strip naked right in front of him.
This is what worries me so much: can we really ever know what we want? It was so easy for the Devil to find chinks in Elliot’s armour, and exploit them: granted, he wasn’t actually refusing any of those enticements, but throughout the movie she (he? They?) have him in the palm of her hand. Perhaps my own upbringing has taught me to jump at the first sign of temptation, to see possible places to fall everywhere — but at the same time, I feel like this is a question that everyone’s asking in media these days as well. Can we ever reach a point where we look at what we have and go “okay, that’s enough”? Or are we as animals primed to keep on hoarding, keep on hungering after things that we don’t even really need?
The endings of both the Cook-Moore Bedazzled and the Ramis remake offer us an answer — but different ones. In the 1967 original, Moore actually uses up all seven of his wishes and only escapes eternal damnation because Cook’s devilish proxy is feeling generous; he returns to his lowly job as a cook at a fast-food shop and is still an insecure man without his dream girl, only now he recognises the virtue (?) of achieving his goals without shortcuts. That’s one tiny, miniscule change, expressed in one short line (“no thanks, I’d like to try it my way”), but it’s still significant: he’s still the same guy, he’s not completely freed from desire, but he learns to live with it all.
By contrast, Elliot Richards basically turns into Brendan Fraser by the end of the remake: suave, debonair, self-assured. Sure, he doesn’t get the girl of his dreams, but that’s because he gets someone better: a quirky girl who’s just moved next door, who shares his interest, and who — get this — looks EXACTLY like the woman he’s just left behind. His desires are either fulfilled (in the case of the Alison surrogate) or just completely removed from the conversation — since he’s now a different man, his desires are different, too.
Now, this is very much the position of quite a few mainstream romcoms these days; in fact it’s actually quite refreshing that a romantic comedy had the guts to take this path in 2000, and had Elliot improve himself before allowing him the hope of pairing up with someone else. But at the same time I can’t help but have doubts: Elliot seems like a completely different person, all because the Prince of Darkness herself talked some sense into him. Is it really possible that somebody can will themselves into becoming a different (better?) person? And is it possible that in doing so, they’ll let go of whatever insecurities and unedifying wants they have?
I don’t know. Perhaps I’ve never really given it a try. Or it might just be another part of the fantasy that Bedazzled sells: that a person can just get rid of their own desires, that they can learn to live with a lack of fulfilment. The movie ends with the Devil and a figure who’s all-but-implied to be God observing Elliot and his new girlfriend in a park; it’s meant to be a bookend in showing that him and Nicole are perfect for each other — yet I can’t help but wonder why the Devil was still keeping tabs on this guy, even after they’d parted on friendly terms. Is it possible, I wonder, that she knows something about his character that he doesn’t? Has she really let him go, or is she waiting for just another moment of weakness to come back into his life, and tempt him with his old desires once more?
NEXT UP
Several snapshots of death.
Inkpot Shuffles in the Twilight 