Swingers
starring Jon Favreau, Vince Vaughn and Ron Livingston
written by Jon Favreau
directed by Doug Liman
Written by, and featuring Jon Favreau, Swingers is the story of four young Los Angeles men, would-be actors, 20-ish, trying to live the lives of 1940s or 50s jazz hep cats in the 1990s.
The film, actually, is quite a clever comedy. It would help you to understand it if you have some acquaintance with American jazz music and culture, and with the Beatnik cut lure of the 1950s, daddio.
The clothes the men wear, the cars they drive, the music they listen to, the facial hair they sport, the vocabulary they use and the nightclubs they frequent are all out of a bygone era of American Cool.
Cool Secrets About Women
You can’t do anything to make her want to come back. In fact, you can only do things to make her not want to come back.
Cool Secrets About Being Cool
Only the person who isn’t looking for it will find it.
The comedy in this film stems from the fact that although the men are on a quest for the ultimate cool, they themselves are really not so cool. Yet they think they are. They think they are “money,” God’s gift to women.
In the end their quest brings them nowhere - out of work actors trying to make a career inHollywood, but living on handouts from Mom and Dad in the meantime, finding rejection by women at every turn, and passing up opportunities out of a sense of the necessity to preserve the integrity of their cool.
The film opens with a scene in a diner where one hipster is lamenting his lost girlfriend. His friends’ advice is some kind of key to the mystery of cool: “You can’t do anything to make her want to come back. In fact, you can only do things to make her notwant to come back.”
Perhaps being cool is like being an astronaut as American author tom wolf describe dit inhis 1979 book The Right Stuff. To be successfully cool, like being a successful test pilot, a person needs It. But what is It? It’s a certain indefinable right stuff. In Swingers four young men are looking for it in this modern, nihilistic age, andof them olnly lone finds it - and he is the least likely candidate. Maybe that’s another secret of cool: Only the person who isn’t looking for it will find it.
Isn’t that how life always is?