Did the movie change, or did I? Thoughts on films I used to love

It’s a no-brainer, of course. The movie DOESN’T change, because it can't, but everything around it does. When I watch something out of the 1920s or ‘30s or ‘40s, the surrounding culture is so unfamiliar it’s like the Twilight Zone. But what about movies made in my own living memory, that I remember seeing in the theatres or maybe on a VHS tape?

I’m talking about the ‘80s. I’ve been seeing a lot of stuff about the ‘80s lately, and people wax so nostalgic about the decade that it makes me wonder if I lived on the same planet. Of course there were sweet times, going to the Blockbuster to rent a movie, then sitting around the TV with the family, eating popcorn, laughing and crying together – when these days, most families don’t even sit down to dinner together. Everyone cobbles together a semblance of a meal, and eats it alone in their bedroom while watching something streaming on their phone. Even DVDs are considered outdated dinosaurs that no one buys.

It WAS different. There was no internet, and high-tech meant having a VCR and maybe more than one TV in the house. Computers were the villains in science fiction movies, just warm-ups for the ultimate evil computer, HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

They were foreign and mechanical and not to be trusted. They weren’t human, so to put them in charge of things was foolhardy at best. Now, you can’t get away from them. Your refrigerator talks to you, even if your mother doesn’t. But this isn’t about that. It’s about three movies  from the ‘80s that I just watched over the past 3 nights.

 

The first one was a Sherlock Holmes movie called The Seven Per Cent Solution. Right off the top, the casting immediately made me miss Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. THIS Holmes was a drug addict going through agonizing cocaine withdrawal, supervised by no less a figure than Sigmund Freud. Really, it was a completely absurd premise that didn’t quite come off (though Alan Arkin made an interesting, if highly improbable Freud. I’ll watch anything with Alan Arkin in it, he had such a knowing look and the sexiest eyes of any man born).

I guess we just kind of suspended our disbelief in these things, as the plot got more and more absurd. Back then it was seen as a sophisticated thriller. But Nicol Williamson sweating and thrashing and raving seemed almost comical, way over the top, and Robert Duvall as Watson – wait, ROBERT DUVALL as Watson?? It was ridiculous casting, and Duvall could scarcely disguise his Texan accent as he strained to look and sound like an English gentleman.

But back in the ‘80s, cocaine abuse was just coming out of the closet as a really evil thing, rather than the harmless fun it seemed to be in the ‘70s. Drug addiction in a classic literary figure was seen as something really novel and original, even daring. We were more willing to buy this far-fetched stuff due to a kind of – what, innocence? It seems like it, in retrospect. Maybe just ignorance. But even more formally-presented dramas are now kind of hard to swallow, for reasons I can’t quite comprehend.

With great anticipation, I watched  A Room with a View, a movie I absolutely adored when it first came out, loving it just as much when I saw it several more times on VHS tape. This time, well – I WAS charmed by the first half-hour or so, maybe just due to nostalgia. But the best moment in it – dashing George Emerson sweeping up prim Miss Lucy Honeychurch and giving her a ferocious kiss in a field of barley – came in the first twenty minutes or so. It was all downhill from there. Maggie Smith as Lucy’s chaperone made me want to SCREAM, her character was so over-the-top and gratingly annoying. Judi Dench as the “lady novelist” was even worse, just ridiculously overstated, a stereotype I was willing to buy before, but this time - .

And it was LONG. That was the biggest difference of all. When I first watched it an astonishing forty years ago, I didn’t want it to end. This time I kept looking at my watch. It just sort of lumbered along, and it felt stuffy, like the atmosphere in all those ornate parlours it took place in. Denholm Elliot was almost worse than the prissy, twittering ladies we were supposed to find funny. His “yes, and yes, and YES” line embarrassed me. Of course we knew the whole thing was careening towards a highly-unlikely happy ending, but this time I was kind of grateful for that last scene of George and Lucy making out  like bandits in their magical pensione in Florence.

All in all, the best part by far was Kiri te Kanawa singing a glorious aria by Puccini while the lovers kissed in the field of barley.  But even at that, Renee Fleming did it better. 

But the third one. Oh, God, the third one. It was called Lovesick, and I do remember seeing it on TV, feeling it was amusing at least. It had the then-wildly-popular Dudley Moore in it (playing a psychiatrist who was, of course, far more disturbed than his patients), and like a lot of women I found him appealing in a bringing-out-the-maternal-urge way. Speaking of Sigmund Freud, this time he was played by Alec Guinness, and he was just awful, stiff, boring, contrived, spewing horribly dated psychoanalytic cliches.

Like Humphrey Bogart materializing to Woody Allan in Play it Again, Sam, Siggy kept appearing to the Dudley Moore character, who was of course called an “analyst” (and whatever happened to analysts? Now they’re called therapists, I guess). This ersatz Freud spouted intellectual theories about why Dr. Dudley had sexually engulfed a vulnerable young patient, treating it more as an amusing mid-life crisis than something that should rightly be against the law.

 And all this was supposed to be funny.

It was the creepiest thing I’d ever seen. Why didn’t it occur to me before how disgusting and even disturbing his behaviour was, skulking around behind the scenes at the theatre where she worked, following her home, breaking into her apartment when she was out so he could read her diary, and generally acting like a disgusting creep. And, of course, she fell for him. Hard.

The first time I saw it, I remember loving Elizabeth McGovern for some reason. I found her sweet and appealing and had a little girl crush on her, thinking she was adorable. This time I could not even imagine how I ever reacted that way. She just wasn’t any good. Her gawkiness fell flat, and her innocent routine didn’t hold up at all. She had strange eyes that looked almost feral. When the two of them were walking together, McGovern TOWERED over Dudley in a way that was disturbingly like watching a mother and child.

The thing just did not play. Is it because we’re far less tolerant of creepiness in men, in trying to find comedy in a situation like hiding in the woman’s shower while she made out with another man in the next room? (Ewwwwwwww!)

Then, of course, she turns on the shower, and he turns it off, and she turns it on. . . then she discovers him crouching like a criminal in her bathtub, and goes all smiles and gooey affection. Then, of course, they immediately have sex. I barely got through this one, nearly shut it off several times, but had the thought that this was the third ‘80s film I had watched in 3 nights, and that this might Mean Something. Not sure what, except that what was charming and romantic then was just kind of offensive, weak, even dull. 

The eighties just don’t play well for so many reasons. Maybe acting has changed. I don’t know, because acting doesn’t exist any more – it’s all superhero garbage, Lord of the Rings 9 and stuff like that. In the 1990s, I actually went to the movies once a week, and most of them were watchable, enough, if not always worth the price. I have to confess I can’t think of too many examples. It was just something I did, usually alone, part of my weekly routine. Sometimes the popcorn was the best part.

So the options are: the films changed; the culture changed; I changed. The latter two are pretty obvious. I’m no longer entertained by caricatures and people woodenly trying to bring historic figures to life. Alan Arkin was cute and appealing, as always, but bore no resemblance whatsoever to Sigmund Freud. Nicol Williamson shouldn’t have bothered, and Robert Duvall. . . But it seems that movies in the’80s were trying to sell us something, something that now seems so unpalatable that I can’t even imagine why I loved them to begin with. What was it? Caricature over character? Cliché over reality? Contrivance that we can’t get past?

 I just wasn’t buying it. All three of them were disappointing, and oddly confusing. Was I watching the same movie?  It’s funny, because I can watch something from literally 100 years ago (Harold Lloyd, anyone?) and love it every bit as much as the first time. But I didn’t live through those times.

Simpler times, or just more blinkered times? Why did people think an emotionally screwed-up psychiatrist having steamy sex with a vulnerable young patient was charming and fun? I’m beginning to think of the ‘80s as a cultural Dark Ages rather than the warm and cozy time people keep talking about. We seem to be missing something we never had in the first place.

The Victorian corset: it hurts so good!

Why is this woman trapped inside a corset? And why does she look so happy to be there?

In researching the fascinating, slightly kinky topic of the Victorian corset, I came across this amazing quote from one of my favorite actresses.

"Winona Ryder has credited her tight corsets with fueling her performance in The Age of Innocence by allowing her to channel her character's emotional turmoil. The actress insists her restrictive costume allowed her to give an authentic performance as a socialite engaged to a lawyer, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, in the 1993 period drama.

And despite feeling uncomfortable throughout the entire shoot, Ryder admits she is grateful for the painful garments. She tells Britain's Total Film magazine, "The corsets are a tremendous help to the performance, because you're playing a repressed person and you can feel the pain that they endured. My waist had to be 19 inches and they had to measure me every day. I would be on the floor and they would pull the strings until it was 19 inches."

"Daniel would wear his clothes home, he was very in character and I was like, 'You have no idea the pain I'm in right now!' But if I did it again I would want it the same way because it made my performance."

Ah yes, the corset: that curious object of female repression, ruthlessly squeezing a woman's body (no matter what size or shape) into a tiny hard cone, with bosoms thrust upwards and balanced on top like two ripe cantaloupes. In other words, corsets were as much for men as they were for women.

Or was it the other way around?

I adore Victorian costumery  - for that is how I see it, "dresses" being an inadequate term for the sumptuous, 50-pound confections that fit women's waists like a second (and imprisoning) skin. Even more than that, I love the ads, often full of whimsy like this almost unbelievable example for Ball's Corsets.

"Revolution in Corsets," it proclaims, depicting a squeezed-in Amazonian figure holding a sword and staff, her foot planted firmly on what is presumably that old-style thing that nobody wears any more. Meanwhile a herd of frightened women stampedes away in the distance. The Ball's Revolutionary Corset has triumped again!

And just look at the results. This is Miss Lettice Fairfax, and aside from the fact that she was named after a garden vegetable, I know nothing about her. Though frills at the shoulder and massive skirts provided an illusion of contrast, corsets took at least 3 inches off the natural waist, converting women's bodies into the perfect clothes-horse for gowns that must have been unbearably cumbersome and stifling to wear.

In fact, I have read that the ideal size for a woman's waist was the same measurement in inches as her neck.

Nothing is more revealing of attitudes towards corsets than these hokey, strangely beautiful ads.  They speak so clearly of those bizarre times, when a torturing undergarment passed without comment because it was so standard. No doubt no one really perceived the irony of a corset being called Harness. Not only that: this was an electric corset (electric items being a fad then, supposedly conveying some sort of tingly, healthful vitality to the patient), making one wonder if it didn't serve the same purpose as the modern vibrator.  Did it plug in? Did it have batteries? One wonders.

Some of my favorite shots display early celebrities such as a very young and girlish Ethel Barrymore (and these days, the hallowed name of Barrymore is only asociated with Drew, one of the most unattractive young women I've ever seen). In all her photos, her huge dark eyes look sad, her regal costumes displaying her like roast beef on a platter or a hugely oversized wedding bouquet.

Modern actresses probably dread wearing these things: they make the wasp-waisted gowns grip the torso like a very tight glove and provide a sort of crucial undergirding for the weight and volume of the skirt. But the little torture chambers can be surprisingly addictive. A British actress named Karin Cartlidge, starring in a TV version of The Cherry Orchard, told the London Times, "These bloody corsets do a lot for repression: I nearly fainted in one. I find them quite sexy; actually, it's a funny sort of thing. They hold you in like a cold iron hand round your heart, therefore all your emotions just seethe away underneath it. It's like being in a sort of prison and it's quite exciting, there's something erotic about it."

Indeed. I won't get into the sites that celebrate the corset as fetish-wear.  You know how to find them. Unless you're attending a Renaissance fair or working as a barmaid at Heidelberg Days, women don't endure these things any more except as fetish-wear. Most of these sites are extremely creepy. Some particularly slavish devotees "tightlace" day and night, though I don't know why anyone would do that to themselves.

Victorian porn could be very subtle. I wonder how many men found satisfaction (of a sort) in looking at these almost subliminally-erotic ads. Just thinking about what was under a woman's dress must have been completely unacceptable, which is probably why naughty French post cards were so popular. But did the proper Victorian woman somehow identify with the daring sauciness of the Valeine ad, or the soft-focus intimacy of the Royal Worcester?

Helena Bonham-Carter is still the ruling queen of the period costume. In A Room with a View, she smolders. With her masses of chestnut hair piled precariously on top of  her head like those water-jugs in the Middle East and her waist reduced to a thread, she swishes around in these dresses as if to the manor born. It must be tiring to pull a wagonload of suffocatingly heavy drapery around with you all day, but somehow she manages it.

And when she lets her masses of hair down, even in a granny-flanny, she still smolders.

Women had to do everything imprisoned in these things, even ride horses (and sidesaddle! It was somehow considered obscene for women to straddle anything, which makes one wonder about those Victorian families with ten or twelve children.) There were maternity corsets then which must have been agony to wear, and corsets for little girls, just to get them good and used to being squeezed until you couldn't properly breathe. Past the age of ten, normal respiration was left behind with all the other trappings of girlhood.

But over and over again, in researching this strange artifact from a very strange time, I found comments from actresses who had endured wearing these things, then had somehow fallen in love with them.

Emma Williams, star of the British series Bleak House, claims, "You get quite strict about your corset - it's like, 'Come on, tighter, tighter.' I had this gorgeous dress for a wedding scene, but it was ridiculously small. I nearly fainted, my corset was so tight. I wore it for eight hours, breathing really slowly so I wouldn't fall over. I'm sure I cracked a rib that day. . .  I had original Victorian corsets, so they were really heavy. I spent half the day crouching down to take the weight off my back. But you do get addicted to them. I might start wearing one round the house, doing the cleaning in rubber gloves and a corset. I'm a classy girl, me."

CODA: I just found these two incredible corset ads while looking for something else. They reflect two common features, or perhaps obsessions, of Victorian corset advertising: little scantily-dressed cherubs fluttering around and acting strangely, and "health corsets" that were no doubt meant to counter the anti-tightlacing "dress reform" movement of the late 19th century. Though corsets were probably about as healthy as tanning beds, they were pitched just as effectively. The ads often included doctors' endorsements (shades of Lucky Strike!), as if that settled the whole thing.

I have no idea what sort of voyeurism is being practised in this ad. I guess the fact that they're photographing the corset, not the woman in it, lets them get away with this overwhelmingly fetish-y shot. (And why is the corset being used as a planter?) This ad is for Warner Bros. Coraline: not, presumably, the movie studio, which didn't exist then - though I think we still see Warners undergarments of a different sort. Bras and things. Next time you think your bra is digging into you and it's torture, think on this and repent.

Ball's advertisements are without a doubt the best. This one boasts a "coiled wire spring elastic section", which today sounds like medieval torture but which then promised increased comfort and flexibility (i.e. you could take at least half a full breath). The caption reads, "Cupid whispers 'Ball's corsets are the best, wear none other.' And so say the medical fraternity."

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

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Too English

Just as my mother used to claim that you can be "too Irish", it's also possible to be too English.


If the English were really too English, I mean too TOO English, there wouldn't be any more English and the problem would be solved.


In case you think I'm a racist or at least a cultural philistine (whatever that is), be assured I'm both English and Irish, and the two bloods have been clashing in my veins since my birth (if not before). I carry around with me a tiny IRA of the mind.

But never mind all that, I've been trying once again to get my mind around E. M. Forster, a writer I've attempted a few other times (always running away screaming). He's an odd one, always taking twists and turns that seldom make sense. I decided to start with "the gay one", Maurice, a semi-autobiographical novel about a young Englishman (what else?) of wealth and privilege, trying to resist his overwhelming attraction to another Englishman (of same).


Forster is all about class distinction and is often dead-accurate about the hideous emotional damage it can do, repressing the soul unto suicide, but he also plays games with it. When poor closeted Maurice finally has a consummated sexual relationship with another man, it's with a servant, a gamekeeper named Scudder. As if he has to roll in the mud to gratify his senses in such an unthinkable way.

The book was made into a pretty good Merchant-Ivory film in the early '80s, with Hugh Grant playing Maurice's celibate bro-mance (and dishily, I must say). It was to be the first of many. Most people think of A Room with a View when they think of Forster, and that movie with all the singing and Maggie Smith and Helena Bonham-Carter with the teeny corset and her hair all poofy, and, of course. . .that kiss.


The passionate kiss in the field of barley by a virtual stranger, the free-spirited and somewhate declasse George Emerson, is much played up in the movie, but in the book it's pretty tame. Lucy Honeychurch (and what delicious oxymoron in that name!) is a sweet young thing on her first trip to Europe, and while gallivanting in the fields of Tuscany she has her first taste of eroticism. Well, almost; quite. In the book it's a field of violets, and George "stepped quickly forward and kissed her". On the cheek, we later learn. But even this mild little display threatens to ruin Lucy's virginal reputation.

So OK, we have all that class/sex stuff that the author obsessed about. But this isn't what I wanted to write about, at all. As I mush through the forests with Forster, occasionally coming up for great gasps of air, I encounter things so odd, so droll, so English that it beggars description.


Like this sentence. "Playing bumble-puppy with Minnie Beebe, niece to the rector, and aged thirteen - an ancient and most honourable game, which consists in striking tennis-balls high into the air, so that they fall over the net and immoderately bounce; some hit Mrs. Honeychurch; others are lost."


Not a sentence, really - can't follow the syntax, but what's this bumble-puppy? Who ever heard of such a thing? I do like the sound of it though. It evokes images of very young puppies bumbling around, their eyes not yet open and barely able to properly walk.

I think of mud puppy - maybe the assonance, or whatever it is. That 'uh, uh' thing. As a girl, I wanted a mud puppy; I wanted a salamander; I wanted a newt; I wanted a toad. I wanted anything slimy or crawling. I put tadpoles in jars and watched the transfiguration. I took snakes into the house, into my bedroom. I never found a mud puppy, or a salamander for that matter, but it wasn't for lack of trying. I read about them in books. I never knew they grew to this size however. Pretty disgusting.

Bumble-puppy. . . almost sounds like a dessert, doesn't it, a cobbler or a Brown Betty? My Dad, English (but not that kind of English - way down the ladder) used to talk about a pudding called "plum dupp". Turns out it was a mispronunciation of plum duff, though I must say I've never had it.


Should I invent a dessert called bumble-puppy? Could it have bumbleberries in it? Come to think of it, there's no such thing as a bumbleberry. It just means a whole lot of berries mixed together, doesn't it? And what about a hush-puppy? Can you eat them too, or only wear them?


It all gets so confusing.

Trying to find images for bumble-puppy yielded pictures of puppies in bumblebee suits. This reflects the literal way we North Americans interpret things. To the British, at least to Forster's surreal exalted British, it's a made-up game with, it sounds to me, a made-up name.


Lucy sums it all up: "Oh, it has been such a nuisance - first he, then they - no one knowing what they wanted, and every one so tiresome."


Frightfully.

http://www.amazon.com/Mallory-Margaret-Gunning/dp/0888013116/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1319992815&sr=1-1

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