In Search for an Idealized Female: Mike Nichols' Carnal Knowledge (1971)

Mike Nichols’ Carnal Knowledge (1971), starring Jack Nicholson, Arthur Garfunkel, and Ann-Margret is a quintessential anti-rom-com movie in which the traditional and reality surpassing triumph of love and ambition is not produced in the end, but quite the opposite: a mundane, dull, and fading love affairs and liaisons. The plot revolves around the lives and love affairs of Jonathan (Jack Nicholson) and Sandy (Arthur Garfunkel).

The two consider each other best friends even though some of the actions that Jonathan takes at the disadvantage of Sandy negate their relationship to something lesser in the audience’s perspective. Jonathan is the more “carnal” with his expectations from women around him—he wants his potential partner or love interest to have the qualifications to be considered as ‘built,’ them being primarily big breasts and outstanding physical appearance—while Sandy is perceived as insecure and more passive around women due to his expectations from women fall under not in the physical but incorporeal domain. However, their lofty expectations without taking reality into play and, most importantly, not realizing that women are also human beings with faults and errors and that they can never live up to their high expectations become their undoing—both became victims of mundane affairs with an empty life accompanying them.

Both characters’ search for better and better women and boasting about their achievements in that regard can be interpreted as an inherent emotional and sexual insecurity—Jonathan’s being less evident while Sandy’s insecurity is manifest. This sexual back-and-forth derring-do is the main cause of their depressed and melancholic lives that they are leading at the ending sequences of the film, presumably both characters are now in their forties and struggling with mid-life crises as well. At some point, the bravado of Jonathan withers away as he is no longer virile and potent in bed, struggling to maintain his manhood and former prowess as he faces erection problems.

Both Jonathan and Sandy fail miserably to attain their dream women in their endless search, a search that can be likened to that of the Holy Grail. This only causes more and more destruction and unhappiness as both the women around them and themselves are getting hurt rather than being cured by the warm embrace of their idealized woman. The issue is, however, that neither Jonathan nor Sandy face any repercussions for the havoc they had wrought: they continue with impunity and the fault is never entrenched upon them, it is always the women. If only their opinions and thoughts were less misogynistic and they could regard women as contemporary peers, rather than pleasurable objects of flesh, all of that suffering could have been avoided for all the affair martyrs. We infer from the beginning monologue that the blame was never going to be shifted over to men because, as Sandy asserts, they had been acting in such a manner because the societal norms of the day were forcing them to be that way, the same case with how society pressurizes one into going to college. 

To summarize everything that has been stated so far, Mike Nichols’ Carnal Knowledge (1971) dawdles about the immature and fantastical search of idealized woman through its two main characters. Both of them in worse condition that the other, they fail to properly levitate their expectations to the achievable standards and feasible measurements because they are unable to disembark from their similar utopias. That, in turn, causes all of the involved parties to suffer and lead unfulfilling lives.