Dr. Leo Marvin: [pause] I see. So, what you’re saying is that even though you are an almost-paralyzed, multiphobic personality who is in a constant state of panic, your wife did not leave you, you left her because she… liked Neil Diamond?
Unlike The Odd Couple, the annoyance in What about Bob? is asymmetric. In this case, Bob loves Leo. Leo detests Bob. After their initial meeting, Leo tells Bob that he’s going away for summer vacation and will meet with him again after Labor Day. Bob is unhinged by this. He needs round-the-clock access to his shrink.
So Bob manages to track down Leo on vacation and wheedles his way into Leo’s life. “The Richard Dreyfuss character is a control freak,” says Schulman, which has a lot to do with why he finds Bob so annoying. He tries to get rid of Bob, and he can’t. “The things that annoy us most are the things that we can’t control. I find I’m most annoyed by things when I am in the most controlling of moods.”
Schulman says, yes, Bob is annoying. His quirky behavior would make him impossible to live with. His neediness is cloying. He is not someone you’d want to have around for very long. “I think that’s true of a lot of movie characters,” says Schulman. If people like Bob were in our living rooms, “we wouldn’t tolerate them for a second. But on the screen, we root for them because we find the other character they’re up against more distasteful.”
Schulman says that you have to be careful, though. You don’t want to make your annoying character too annoying. He recalls the reaction of the first person who read the script at the studio. “She said, ‘I hate this character Bob. Who would want to spend any time around him, much less watch him for two hours on the screen?’” Schulman says he was taken aback.
“I hadn’t really thought of that, because I found him somehow lovable in spite of that.” More evidence, as if any were needed, that the perception of what’s annoying is very subjective. It’s a fine line. What about Bob? was a successful movie, but there are people who absolutely agreed with that woman at the studio. For those people, it’s not only that Bob is unrelentingly annoying, it’s that some of us will identify with the character he is tormenting. Leo Marvin may be uptight, but it’s hard for some of us to watch him be emotionally eviscerated by Bob.
Screenwriter Mark Silverstein says that to avoid stepping over the too-annoying line, it helps if the characters’ annoying behaviors are familiar. “You should recognize someone you know, you should recognize things you do,” says Silverstein. He and his writing partner Abby Kohn constructed the character Gigi Phillips for a movie they cowrote called He’s Just Not That into You. Phillips is looking for love but does it in a way that puts off potential candidates.
For example, Gigi manages to go on a date with a guy who is commitment-phobic. Gigi, on the other hand, “is already talking about her four-year plan,” says Kohn, “and where she wants to get married and that she’d like to have a summer house, and they could just like leave their parkas there in the winter and leave their bathing suits there in the summer, and this is where they’re going to vacation.”
To the guy, Gigi is an irritating nightmare, says Kohn. Yet her yearning for love and marriage makes her sympathetic. “I think in that way, if you set up a dynamic like that, you can amuse your audience by how much your character is annoying your other character,” says Kohn.
In watching that dynamic, Kohn says you can learn more about the character of the annoyee than the annoyer. She says that this realization came from her real-life relationship with Silverstein. They work together in a comfortable office near Hollywood. It’s not a large office, though, and they’re both in the same room. She says it annoys her when Marc looks over her shoulder while she’s writing something. Marc then becomes the annoyer, while she is the annoyee.
“Why is that annoying to me? Is it annoying because I feel him breathing on my neck? Yeah, that’s annoying,” says Kohn. “Is it annoying because he’s too close? Maybe. But maybe what’s annoying is I don’t quite know the right line yet, and so I’m deleting it five, six, seven times, so I don’t want him to read the crappy version before I get it right.”
Kohn says that her annoyance comes from her fear that Marc will think less of her for writing crappy versions, but she realizes that annoying behavior can also teach you something about the annoyer. “Cracking your knuckles or talking in a high voice are symptoms of insecurity,” she says. “You’re nervous, your voice goes up. You’re nervous, you start cracking your knuckles. You’re nervous, and you tell the same four jokes.”
There are also some actors who simply cannot be made annoying onscreen, and that’s part of what makes them such successful movie stars, says Silverstein. “Tom Hanks or Julia Roberts, those sort of people. You love them, whatever they’re doing.” Silverstein says that if you cast Hanks or Roberts as a character who does unlikable things or who is mean to people, the audience will either forgive them or conclude that they must have a good reason for acting so mean.
Sometimes annoying behaviors depicted onscreen can have positive benefits in real life. For example, there’s one scene in What about Bob? where Bob has weaseled his way into a dinner with Leo Marvin’s family at their vacation home. “Bob is making all kinds of ‘this is so good’ noises,” says screenwriter Tom Schulman. “And that just pushes Marvin over the edge.” It doesn’t sound annoying, but the noises are so excessive and unrelenting that even though they are positive, they become annoying. “That was a habit my wife had, being that demonstrative about the food she was enjoying,” Schulman says. “It cured my wife of that habit when she saw the movie.”
This seems like a lot of work to extinguish an annoying habit in your spouse, but at the same time, you can’t argue with success.
According to University of Louisville psychologist Michael Cunningham, if you want to know why your spouse’s habits drive you nuts—such as being too demonstrative about someone else’s cooking, for example—you should start by thinking about the immune system, particularly allergies.
Allergies are a good example of the immune system gone awry. Dust is nothing more than a nose-tickler for most people, but people with dust allergies will become severely congested, with constant sneezing and reddened eyes. Or take peanuts. Instead of being a tasty snack, to the person with a peanut allergy they become a deadly menace. Or poison ivy. Some people can frolic barefoot in a patch of poison ivy and be no worse off than if they had walked on a shag carpet. For others, all it takes is a sideways look at the distinctive three-leaved plant, and they break out in an incredibly itchy rash. In addition, when the immune system starts to get things wrong, it doesn’t learn from its mistakes. The first exposure to poison ivy can cause a minor rash. Repeated exposure can lead to acute rashes and swelling that may be severe enough to require hospitalization. This heightened reaction with repeated exposure is called sensitization.
Cunningham says that partners are so good at getting under each other’s skin because of behaviors that he calls social allergens: small things that don’t elicit much of a reaction at first can lead to emotional explosions with repeated exposure. This is the unspoken behavior that gets repeated on an occasional basis—sometimes daily, sometimes less frequently—but packs a bigger and bigger punch with the passage of time.
The idea occurred to Cunningham when he was visiting a colleague. They were having an amiable chat when the phone rang. Cunningham’s friend answered the phone, and as the phone conversation progressed, Cunningham watched his friend become agitated. He remained civil, but his face became red. “I could see the irritation, and I knew there must be an issue there.”