October 16–23, 1997

movie shorts

The Yes Man

Talking with the director of The House of Yes.

by Sam Adams

If you imagine The Fall of the House of Usher as interpreted by a filthy-minded Howard Hawks, you'll have a good feeling for the sensibility of The House of Yes. Set in 1983, at the height of the Reagan years, Mark Waters' black farce peeks inside the gloomy mansion of the Pascal family, fading aristocrats clinging to the last tatters of privilege as the world outside them marches on.

Based on Wendy MacLeod's play, The House of Yes covers a frenetic Thanksgiving in the Pascal household, as Marty (Josh Hamilton) arrives home from college with an unexpected guest:his fiancée Lesly (Tori Spelling). The presence of an outsider throws the Pascals into turmoil, particularly Marty's lunatic twin sister, Jackie-O (Parker Posey). Marty's mother, played byGeneviève Bujold, desperately tries to keep the family from blowing apart, but by the end of the movie, the aristocracy has breathed its last.

Mark Waters, interviewed during a recent trip to Philadelphia,said he first saw MacLeod's play (subtitled "A Suburban Jacobean Revenge Drama") in San Francisco in 1990. Although he "didn't know jack-all about making movies" at the time, he called MacLeod's agent the next day, lied about being a film producer,and got himself a copy of the script.

Along with the central character of Jackie-O, it was the play's"non-naturalistic" qualities that most appealed to Waters,which is obvious from the first frame of The House of Yes.The movie plunges the audience into a stylized, fast-talking world where the Pascal family's general insanity is taken for granted."I wanted people to get used to the feeling that the characters in this movie are not going to talk like normal people,"said Waters. "Jackie's behavior is so extreme, and I wanted people to know that right away. Eventually, they get to see that there's a little more shading to her character."

When it came to portraying the incestuous relationship between Jackie-O and Marty, Waters was even more determined to be upfront."This isn't The Crying Game. I didn't want any of that TV movie of the week, incest is a deep, dark secret stuff.When Marty comes in [with Lesly] and Jackie screams, I want the audience to be in on the joke. We're making a satire not only of this story, but of all the seriousness that people lend the incest taboo in general."

The House of Yes has received most attention for Parker Posey's performance in the main role, which won her an acting prize at Sundance earlier this year. Almost without exception,Posey's numerous film roles have been one-note extensions of her ditzy, freewheeling public persona, but in The House of Yesshe shows an emotional range only hinted at in her other movies.The scream Posey lets out when Marty reveals that he's engaged is a shriek that transforms itself into breathless, hysterical laughter. It's a great display of technique, but more importantly,it paints a vivid picture of how close Jackie-O is to going over the edge.

Waters is justifiably proud of Posey's performance. "A lot of the movies that Parker is in, there's no real story or emotion,it's just 'Look how fabulous she is.' And she is fabulous, but with [The House of Yes] she was allowed to pull back and show more quiet emotion. Sometimes I let her take [a scene] way over the top, just so she'd see where she could go, and usually the take after that was the great take. When she had tired herself out being fabulous, she could sit down and actually be in the scene."

Every farce needs one genuinely shocking idea. The House of Yes has "the game" - the device Jackie-O and Marty have invented for consummating their incestuous passion. It goes something like this: Jackie puts on her pink Chanel suit and pillbox hat. Marty sits on the couch and waves to an imaginary crowd,smiling blankly. Jackie pulls out a gun loaded with blanks, fires,and Marty drops as if he's been shot. Then, of course, they screw.

The shots of Josh Hamilton waving in slow motion are the most eerily unsettling thing in The House of Yes, but Waters doesn't seem interested in talking about the cultural significance of Marty and Jackie-O's bizarre ritual, or about the "obvious political metaphor" that connects the absent Pascal patriarch with the murdered JFK. "The movie's not about JFK. It's about obsession with JFK… We don't show the Zapruder film."

Although The House of Yes is effective as a farcical character study, Waters' lack of self-consciousness prevents the movie from working as satire. Worse, it allows the film to replicate the same conventions it's supposed to be skewering. What emerges fromThe House of Yes is the idea that a house without a father degenerates into a permissive, amoral wasteland, and whether or not that idea emerges with a smirk is really beside the point.