July 30th, 2007
8. Happiness (Rufus Read)
In another grim late-'90s indie flick, Happiness, writer-director Todd Solondz suggests that the only true happiness comes at orgasm. Young Rufus Read, whose family has had a really, really rough year, wants to masturbate, but his efforts fail until the end of the film, when the sight of a blonde in a bikini finally brings him to finish. He ejaculates on the balcony railing, and in one of the film's only bursts of comic relief, the family dog licks it up, then runs back inside to lick Read's mother (Cynthia Stevenson) square on the kisser. Read follows him in and announces to his whole family, "I came!" Finally, he's happy—fleetingly—and the family has a great story to tell at Thanksgiving get-togethers.
9. Mulholland Dr. (Naomi Watts)
David Lynch's thriller Mulholland Dr. can be broken into two halves—the "fantasy" section, followed by the shorter "reality" section, which kicks off when Naomi Watts' fresh-faced naïveté collapses into a haggard expression, haunted eyes, and a hint of a snaggletooth. But nothing in that section looks as real as Watts masturbating on the couch, sweating and struggling and coming to tears at her inability to climax. The blurred shots of the wall across the room have been interpreted as her attempt to disappear into fantasy, only to crash right back into real life. Watts has described her character as "full of self-loathing," and said that "I kept on weeping and falling to pieces, because I just felt so embarrassed and humiliated."
10. American Beauty (Kevin Spacey)
Kevin Spacey opens American Beauty in the shower, explaining that his few moments alone with himself will be "the high point of the day." Masturbation sums up the death-like routine of his suburban life, but later in the film, it's the turning point: Smitten with his daughter's high-school friend, he starts to pleasure himself in bed while a comically frigid Annette Bening sleeps beside him. (Still a wimp, Spacey timidly fantasizes that he's pleasuring the girl, and not the other way around.) When the rapid thumping motion wakes Bening, they get into a fight, and Spacey finally declares his independence—even throwing her threat of a divorce back in her face. Says Spacey, "It's a great thing when you realize you still have the ability to surprise yourself"—especially when it comes from something you've been doing since you were 13.
Side note: Alan Ball's Six Feet Under uses the same gesture in the third season, when Peter Krause, stalling for time on his way home to a loveless marriage, pulls over and masturbates in his car. And just as in American Beauty, the writers couldn't find a way to fix the marriage without offing one of the spouses.
11. Babel (Boubker Ait El Caid)
At the beginning of Babel, a young Moroccan boy—after looking at his sister, naked, through a hole in the wall of her hut—takes a break from herding goats to drop trou and masturbate. However, his brother interrupts him by taking potshots at coyotes with their brand-new rifle, and that leads to a shooting contest between the brothers—which only stops after they wound an American tourist (Cate Blanchett) on a tour bus. Had the boy not been interrupted, Blanchett might never have done a bedpan scene, Gael García Bernal couldn't have shown us the best way to twist the head off a rooster, and Rinko Kikuchi would've gotten a lot less naked. In other words, had the kid gotten off, the whole movie could have been avoided.
12. Little Children (Gregg Edelman, Jackie Earle Haley)
As a bored, overeducated suburban housewife, Kate Winslet is an easy mark for an adulterous affair. But to keep viewers sympathetic to her needs, Little Children writes off her husband, Gregg Edelman, as a total drip. The pale, cave-bug-like Edelman can't stop surfing an amateur sex site run by "Slutty Kay." His obsession grows until Winslet walks in on him at his computer, masturbating to Kay with her mail-order panties stretched like a mask across his face, making him look like a polka-dotted gynecologist. After that, Winslet feels a lot less guilty about messing around behind his back.
A more horrifying scene comes later in the film, when Jackie Earle Haley—a sex offender who served time for indecent exposure—takes unlucky date Jane Adams to dinner. When she drives him home, he asks her to pull over and kill the lights. As she tells him how bad her last date was, she notices a strange sound and looks over to see him masturbating and gazing at her like a snake, hissing, "You better not tell on me… or I'll fucking get you." A swing-set in the background completes the film's most disturbing moment.
13. Bad Lieutenant (Harvey Keitel)
Of course, Harvey Keitel perfected the "jerking off in front of girls trapped in a car" scene in Bad Lieutenant, when he catches two young Jersey girls on the town without their licenses and threatens to tell their father unless they do what he says. Keitel's abuse of his authority, crossed with the pathetic sight of him playing with himself as the girls humiliate themselves in sexual poses, gruesomely proves the depth of his corruption.
14. Fast Times At Ridgemont High (Judge Reinhold)
There's no worse nightmare than coming back from your fast-food job, still wearing your sweaty pirate uniform, and getting caught in the bathroom by the girl you're fantasizing about. Still, Reinhold plays this legendary caught-in-the-act scene for laughs, and 30 years' worth of guys have staged their own run-throughs thanks to the vivid shots of Phoebe Cates striding across a misty swimming pool and unsnapping her bikini top. After she finds him, Cates cringes away—but Reinhold wins the round with an exasperated, "Doesn't anybody fucking knock anymore?" Nice save, dude!
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