My Term Paper for Roger Dodger

Roger Swanson (Campbell Scott) does not have a stable grip on his life. He has a good job in advertising, he dresses well, has his own apartment, but he does not have the self esteem to maintain a relationship with his family or a woman.
The first time we see Roger is in a café, smoking and talking with fellow colleagues. A steadicam was used through most of the film which produced a very shaky image of Roger which resembles his unstable life. This style was also used in the opening scene. Roger is the only one smoking amongst his friends in the café, this shows his seemingly phallic power. He talks about artificial insemination and the time when women can move heavy objects telepathically, leading to the conclusion that in the future, men will no longer be needed. The other men at the table feel a bit intimidated, but not Roger, he stands strong trying to show off his charisma.
After the café scene, we see Roger riding in the back of a cab, he gets out in front of an apartment building and goes inside. He sits down on a bed and starts to undress when Joyce (Isabella Rossellini) comes out from her bathroom and is surprised by the sight of Roger. This is not his apartment – he is scared to go home alone. He is not scared because of robbers, but of being alone. He is not Joyce’s boyfriend, nor is he dating her. He is just there to fulfill her sexual desires. In another scene on another day when Roger gets out in front of the apartment building and goes inside, the security guard stops him. Roger says that he needs to see Joyce Maynard and the security guard asks if he can take a message for her. Roger is not allowed up to see her because Joyce has gained some stability – she has gotten a boyfriend, and it is not Roger. She has to have the security guard stop Roger because he cannot stop himself – he almost gets into a fight with the guard. Roger even calls himself “her boy,” not “man,” because he hasn’t lived up to manhood yet. It is at this time we see Roger in a different light – he has been defeated, temporarily. He loses the power he once had and resorts to childish behavior in a later scene – he writes a demeaning and harsh message to Joyce’s boyfriend about her on her bathroom mirror.
When Roger’s nephew Nick (Jess Eisenberg) stops by to see him after a visit to Columbia University, Roger does not really know how to handle him. At first, the two don’t talk much and their moments of silence seem awkward. Then at lunch, Roger casually asks Nick if he has a girlfriend. Nick replies with, “No, not really.” Right then, Roger’s new role in the movie was to become a mentor and a father figure for Nick. Nick’s parents got divorced, so maybe the lack of a constant father is why he doesn’t have a girlfriend. Either way, Roger is determined to help him score, not get a girlfriend or a date, but to have sex. This is another aspect of Roger’s instability. He should be teaching Nick about what girls like and how to speak to them in a polite manner, but instead, he takes Nick into a bar and buys him an alcoholic drink and brings two women to the table that are twice Nick’s age. During the bar scene, Roger doesn’t smoke at all, it is the two women who have the power and the phallic symbol they hold is their straws. Neither Nick nor Roger have straws in their drinks and the women’s intuition rises over theirs. What they say seems to be more important. When Roger and Sophie (Jennifer Beals) go to get the second round of drinks for the table, Nick is left alone with Andrea (Elizabeth Birkley) who asks Nick to pick up a straw that she dropped on the floor on purpose. Nick tenses up and just as he is about to retrieve the straw for her, Roger and Sophie come back to the table. This is ironic in that Roger is trying to help Nick to score, yet he interrupts a moment of sensuality. It is significant and is also foreshadowing for the whore house scene that happens later on that night. In that scene, Roger interrupts another chance that Nick has to score. Roger pushed and pushed Nick to get sex that night, but at the moment that Nick is about to “go down swinging,” Roger rescues him realizing the err he had made and also realizing something about himself that he wants to change.
There are a few scenes of misogyny in the movie. They aren’t brutal beatings of women, but rather verbal abuse and harassment by Roger. He will sit at a bar and when a woman sits down will start talking to them about the way they are, their imperfections, their “choice of partner for this evening,” “the ways in which your father ignores you.” He feeds them these lines about their life which are probably true, failing to notice what’s good about them. He thinks that demeaning them will get them to sleep with him. Cooper Thompson in his article We Should Reject Traditional Masculinity says, “The flip side of toughness – nurturance – is not a quality perceived as masculine and thus not valued.” Roger is tough with the ladies he tries to pick up, he belittles them and thinks they will succumb because they have lost their character and need to make up for it in bed. “Whether the setting is a sexual relationship, the family, the streets, or the battle field, men are continuously engaged in efforts to dominate.”
Nick lives with his mother, he is an only child. Roger has not spoken to his sister since his mother’s funeral and he has a hate for his father. Their relationship falls under a few categories in Freud’s psychoanalysis. From her article Psychoanalytic Criticism, Gail T. Houston notes a quote from Freud – Roger is “an introvert, not far removed from neurosis. He is oppressed by excessively powerful instinctual needs. He desires to win honor, power, wealth, fame and the love of women.” It seems that Roger is stuck in the “phallic phase” of the Freudian Developmental Stages, he has also experienced the Oedipus Complex. Not clear on the details of what happened at Roger’s mother’s funeral, we know there was a conflict between him and his father. It might go a bit too far to say that Roger is a “necrophilist (someone who has erotic desires toward dead bodies)” – his mother’s, but it is at her funeral, and the Oedipus Complex suggests that “the boy subconsciously desires to kill the rival father in order to possess the mother.” We don’t know if Roger wants to kill his father, but there are harsh emotions toward him.
Nick is a computer programmer; this is an important aspect because it reveals that he is desensitized from falling to the technical world. Roger still works with pencil and paper as we see him in his cubicle, showing that modern technology does not have an affect on him and that classic male ways of thinking (shown by lack of technology) – misogyny, the male gaze – have not changed within him. At one point in a conversation, Roger even mentions the male gaze, showing that he knows what he is doing when he degrades women – it is not something he does not understand.
I previously talked about the steadicam and how it was used throughout the entire movie, but another large element of film language used in the movie is the use of close ups. The entire first scene is composed of close ups of each of the character’s faces during conversation. Close ups in most movies resemble concentration on what the character is saying. This is so for Roger Dodger but the close ups of Roger seem to try and get us closer to him, to see inside and find out where the problem with his self esteem is. Sometimes we get to claustrophobic with so many close ups that in the scene in the park involving Roger, Nick and the two other ladies, the claustrophobia lightens by use of wide shots. Another use of film language that really makes the movie is the lighting, of which, the most part, is just ambient light. This affects the movie in a positive way – it is believable because it is real. The characters are seen in the same light, the filmmakers didn’t use “star lighting” to spruce up the appearance of the characters as John Belton suggests in his article, Classical Hollywood Cinema: Style. The characters appear as they would if we were sitting at the same table they were talking with them and that is realistic rather than seeing something that is too unbelievable due to lighting.
This film is not necessarily a celebration of women, rather, the realization for the male character to look deeper into women – seeing them for what is good; their fine qualities, rather than their imperfections. By the end, Roger has lost his job. This can be a huge insecurity to anyone, yet this insecurity he handles quite well. Roger goes to Nick’s school to talk to his friends about girls. At first, we think he’s going to teach them how he tried to teach Nick the first time, but then we hear him talking about talking to girls politely rather than honing in on her weaknesses. Roger has changed, not a lot, but enough so far that if he keeps going the way he is, there will be redemption for him. The final time that we see Roger in the movie, he is not smoking, he is in a school and that provides some authority against it, but it is also symbolic that he has lost his power and he must regain it. Also the fact that he’s in a school shows that he must rebuild himself, returning to previous venues in his life to establish a sense of being. Also, the camera is more stable in the end – again to signify stability – and to show that this time, Roger has some.