Dark non-victory: why we still watch this shit

I wasn’t going to watch Now, Voyager last night:  geez, no. I’d just seen it about three weeks ago on Turner Classics, my fallback system when reality TV turns unbearably sour.  But it’s one of those films, like Taxi Driver, that’s a virtual La Brea Tar Pit of absorption. Once the thing starts, you can’t get away even if you want to.

As with Gone With the Wind, you can dip in anywhere and enter the flow, but it’s better to plunge in right at the beginning, when the lush Max Steiner score swells with erotic longing. Gather ‘round, children, and I’ll tell you a tale, of a poor little rich girl named Charlotte Vale.

Charlotte is the crème de la crème of repressed spinsterhood, her wealthy Bostonian mother slashing and lashing her personality into meek submission. Charlotte was the “child of her old age”, and therefore stigmatized (and though they don’t come right out and say it, that means you shouldn’t fuck after age forty) and bound to a life of unpaid servitude (even though Ma could probably afford dozens of servants).

This is 1942, so how can thick-browed, tremulous Bette escape such hell? Enter the male rescue figure, in the person of Dr. Jaquith, a psychiatrist played to perfection by one of the great character actors of all time, Claude Rains. If Claude Rains were MY psychiatrist, I might just be able to finally get off the couch. This man who oozes erudite understanding runs a sanatorium that resembles a cross between a holiday resort and a self-help ranch retreat, with smiling staff and cozy rooms with fireplaces (in fact, when Charlotte bolts back to the place after a romantic reversal, the smiling nurse/receptionist/whatever-she-is cheerfully says, “I’ve put you back in your old room,” like it’s a luxury hotel or a college dorm.)

Something happens at this dorm, some sort of transformation, so that when Charlotte is given the chance to assume someone else’s name and wardrobe on a luxury cruise, she takes it. The shot where Dr. Jaquith literally sends her off on the gangplank is pure Hollywood: remember, be interested in everything and everyone! Go, girl, go! Charlotte’s newly-plucked eyebrows and stunning ‘40s wardrobe can’t help but attract the attention of a (MARRIED, MARRIED, MARRIED) elegant and somewhat androgynous hunk named Jerry Durrance (foreign name, God, foreign name - excuse me while I have an orgasm). He’s played by Paul Henreid, the murmuring, slightly bedroomy resistance worker in Casablanca, the one who gets the girl (or re-gets the girl) in the end.

For some reason, the fact that Jerry stays in a miserable marriage because of his disturbed daughter, Tina makes him into some sort of a hero. In truth, he’s a wuss, a cad, an emotional gigolo, and the sort of man who wants a fuck in every port. But his dashing habit of lighting two cigarettes at a time and giving one to Charlotte (implying, in subtle Hollywood code, that they’d slept together) seems to forgive all his little flaws.

Charlotte’s in love with a good-smelling skunk she can never have, but for some reason this just enriches the bubbling, seething stew of this women’s-novel-made-into-women’s-picture. Charlotte identifies with Tina’s screeching pathology, and she begins to claim her through emotional manipulation and ice cream: though in truth she’s just a cheap device to keep Jerry on the hook. Other things happen: Ma dies and Charlotte thinks it’s her fault (which it is), and she gets engaged and then unengaged to a dull, sexless rich guy who doesn’t even smoke. In one of the most turgid scenes in the whole picture, she and her fiance sit next to each other at the symphony, surrounded by the tumescent strains of Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique: but Jerry sits on the other side. God, on the other side. . .on the other side. . . can’t she just reach over and grab his crotch?

Charlotte’s whole existence is Jerry.  Jerry, Jerry, Jerry. God, JERRY. I’ve had a Jerry; I don’t want to tell you how many times I’ve had a Jerry. It both sickens and thrills me. In a way, this is a Beantown Gone with the Wind, with hapless, passive Jerry playing the part of hapless, passive Ashley. They might have had sex, but it’s never spelled out (and in that era, who knows?). My Jerries never have sex with me, because they barely know I exist.

The capper in this splendid weepie is Davis’ classic line, “Oh Jerry, don’t let’s ask for the moon. We have the stars.” Every sploppy, soaky, drippy line in this thing is totally transformed by Bette Davis’ sheer genius: her smoky inflections, toned-down intelligence, the shy and slightly birdlike way she turns her head. Her hair, once straggly and ugly, is smoothed around her head like a shining helmet, and for some reason the Carol-Burnett-playing-Scarlett-O’Hara linebacker shoulders don’t look ridiculous on her.

I keep reading Bette Davis bios, and all of them seem to conclude that she was crazy, that she had some sort of fatal personality disorder that allowed her to tap into the darkness of the human psyche. Right. Then how did she last ‘til age 80, ravaged by cancer but still working right to the end? Granted, she married four unsuitable men, but is that so unusual in Hollywood? (Didn’t Mickey Rooney have seven – wives, I mean?). These biographers also conclude, all of them, that her emotionally fragile sister Bobby was mentally ill because she wasn’t able to have a career like her sister’s. Had she been able to, she would have been stable, joyful, happy in her personal life, and multiply orgasmic.

What a strange brew is old Hollywood. We couldn’t have a Now, Voyager now: it just wouldn’t play. It’s a pretty strange transformation, for one thing: from dowdy spinster with bad hair to elegant spinster with a better wardrobe and a million emotional frustrations. She still doesn’t get to marry or have children, as she longs to. She gets the old lady’s house, but that’s just because the old bird died at the right time. But ah! She has the stars. And thus she sails forth, to seek and find. Find what? A life forever on the emotional hook, with happiness just beyond the tips of her fingers.

NOW I get it, why I'm always watching this shit.

Just a total douche!

I'm sorry, it's late, but I had to show you this. I hope you can read the text. I had to look at it twice, or more likely about 600 times to believe what I was seeing.

Women were conned into believing they were so stinky and drippy, the only solution was to douche every day with LYSOL. What did they have, bugs up their vagina? Were their twats so desperately in need of disinfection?

The add doesn't say this, in fact nobody ever says it, but MEN are the main reason women get stinky in the first place. You try getting ejaculated into, and not smell like an elderly salmon.

This ad is more horrific than the one about "more doctors recommend Camels". But if it doesn't work as a douche, I guess you could always drink it.

(Discovery! This ad wasn't a fluke: now I find a slew of them. A whole sociological treatise! If a woman smells, her marriage is over. If she smells like Lysol, however. . . va-va-VOOM!)

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

An Easter Parade of Jesus gifs

Jesus is pretty big business at this time of year. As in: let's go to church on Easter Sunday, because aside from Christmas Eve we never go, and if we go twice a year at least we can say we're "churchgoers".

I myself, a recovering churchgoer, have found much that's interesting about the Jesus Industry. In fact, it's hard to find a Jesus without a sense of industry, in these days of universal commerce.

Hey, I wouldn't even DO this, I wouldn't "make fun of" the Holy of Holies (and I'm not, just displaying some of the more interesting representations of him in a new medium) were it not for the fact that my former church went a certain way with things. They decided to try to dispense with their stuffy, outdated image, not to mention the sinking-ship feeling that accompanied all their efforts, and came up with a hip new web site. I will not and cannot quote it here, except to say that it was the first place I encountered Bobblehead Jesus.

Why did I feel this awful sinking in my gut, this anger, this fuming feeling, this desecration, this - hey, what's the matter with you? What ARE you, an old lady (and obviously not welcome)? Everyone else either accepted this atrocity without question, or laughed at it. Aren't we generous, don't we take it on the chin for Jesus, proving we really ARE relevant, hip and leading the way in modern attitudes?

Spare me.

Having dispensed with that odious topic, let's get on with something more sincere (and I mean this! These gifs, tacky and strange as some of them are, were made with sincerity. None of them reflect the jeering satire of the "sendup" ones. Hey, we're on holy ground here.)

This group of gifs represents what I call the "walk with Jesus" collection. Though he walks, he doesn't walk very smoothly. In the walking-on-water ones which I decided not to include (hey, I can't do everything, can I? And it's Good Friday, a day off work, for God's sake), he seems to slide on ice, saving him energy to pull Peter out of the soup.

Minimal walking in this Blingee, but you can see his foot moving. (Didn't know he smoked. He should've given it up for Lent.)

Love this one. If it doesn't work, just click on the image and he'll come a-slidin' down.,

I don't know if these are supposed to be stairs or not, or an old rope bridge. I wonder why they can't just have him sit on a sled?

Now we're getting into the black-lit Disco Jesus images. There's something a wee bit Satanic about the spiky background, which I suppose is meant to represent the crown of thorns. But don't look for this one for too long, or you'll be seeing a spiky-looking skull (meant to represent Golgotha, perhaps?) all day long.

You gotta wonder about this one. Jesus seems to be flashing back and forth (and let me ask you: what WERE those little images that flashed back and forth between two religious scenes called? Why hasn't anyone else ever heard of them?) The background is the color of Kraft Dinner, pulsating wildly around a nasty-looking Christ who suddenly turns into a negative, a la the Shroud of Turin. Colorful.

This is Migraine Christ. Meaning, you'll get one if you look at him too long.

These are just icky, except for the hair blowing in the second one and the fact that he looks sort of like Richard Gere.

There's only one way he could've gotten out to that rock, if his clothes are this dry. But the graphics are gentler in this one, and the reflection rather effective. The probably-unintentional seagull is a nice touch.

This is Ghost Jesus: the best of all the gifs, and for some reason, after one cycle (if you're lucky), he often disappears. (Hint: try clicking on the image and see if you can bring him back from the dead. It worked before, didn't it?)  This could represent a number of things:

The attendance in this church has hit a new low.

They don't pay their electric bill.

They wouldn't know Jesus if he showed up in their own sanctuary.

God left this place a long, long time ago.

Marlon Brando's Home Movies (or: Wild Kingdom)

Before Sacheen Littlefeather, before being hung upside-down in the bathroom, before turning into something that could be rolled down the street like a 300-pound hula hoop, there was This, this rare footage cutting up with Monty Clift that does make you wonder about both of them. It's a little heartbreaking however, for the scalp-prickling Look of Eagles that Brando had in his youth eventually collapsed into a macabre death- mask. He became tiresome, even boring, obsessed with his own legend. The nasal voice that worked so well as the adenoidal Terry Malloy made him sound as if he had swallowed a pound of guppies. The world is still obsessed with Brando because it loves decay, and it loves decay because it makes us feel A WHOLE LOT BETTER ABOUT OURSELVES.

Why I won't think about Marlon Brando

I am not reading Brando, the behemoth biography by Peter Manso which I somehow stumbled through (I think) back in 1994. I am not reading it because it is too big. I can't accomodate it in bed, which is where I read. It slides off my lap or collapses on to my knees.

When I don't read a book, which happens quite a lot, it's an interesting process. I guess you can say I connect the dots. I keep coming around to the same parts again and again. By the end of it, I know almost nothing about my subject matter.

Having been a book reviewer for approximately one billion years, I got myself into this habit of Reading Critically. Kind of like fucking critically, when you think about it. I had lost all the pleasure. Wrestling around with this beached whale of a book, NOT reading it, is a guilty gratification.

Nobody cares what I think about it anyway, which is good. Frankly I think Manso could've cut about 850 pages out of it. A judicious little trim.

Of course there are a million stories, many of them pretty unsavory. But my favorite anecdote (and I'm going to have to transcribe this out of the book, which I hate, and I can't even use my little paper-holding frame because it would fall apart from all the weight) concerns itself with Brando hanging upside-down.

"Marlon, in one of his frequent attempts at losing weight, decided to try the current fad of hanging from the ceiling. He had already purchased a rotating hoop-frame device and special hooked boots, but because of his girth, he found that he was unable to flip himself over in the frame. He sent Papke and two other assistants out to the garage for a winch that had been mounted on his truck, then had them bolt it to the ceiling of his bathroom.

After six hours had been spent locating the jousts in the ceiling and
setting up a twelve-volt power supply for an on/off switch, the homemade apparatus was in place and the mounting had been tested.

Soon, using the shoes from the discarded store-bought machine, Marlon was hanging in the air. A new problem quickly became apparent, though. "He was hanging head down," Papke explained, "and because of his weight, the blubber started to roll forward, almost choking him. He was coughing and muttering, unable to speak."

They immediately lowered him to the floor. Brando, however, was determined to stretch, and the solution he proposed was to try to use the winch and frame horizontally. The assistants fixed another heavy screw eye into the wall of the bathroom opposite the doorway, and once again, Marlon readied himself."

For what? Whale-stretching time? Why would anyone that fat want to hang upside-down anyway and how could it possibly help him lose weight? Maybe none of it even happened. The book begins with a long quote by Primo Levi about how most writers are bullshitters, making half the stuff up or whatever. Maybe he stretched way out about a mile thin and then snapped back like an elastic band. Maybe he turned into Rubber Man, or a giant condom, or Gumby. And who's this Papke? Sounds like a Hungarian dish to me, or half of one.

I won't be able to sleep tonight, with this vision of a 380-pound man being dragged up to his bathroom ceiling with a winch.

I coulda had class: gifs from On the Waterfront

"Things are looking up on the docks!"

"You don't remember me, do you."

"You wanna know my philosophy of life? Do it to them before they do it to you."

"I ain't no cheese eater."

"Shut up about that conscience!"

"Edie, you love me."

"I didn't say I didn't love you. I said STAY AWAY FROM ME."

"All you have to do is walk."

"Am I on my feet?"

Tahiti Trot: the twisted genius of Marlon Brando

Oh boy, Marlon Brando dancing in tight pants. I wouldn't even be on this subject at all today, were it not for Turner Classics and their insidious habit of showing movies that drag back whole chunks of your emotional history.

I don't want to think about this even now, because for a while there the musical score of this movie haunted me every damn minute, to the point that I had to purposely force myself to remember the William Tell Overture to drown it out.  The movie is On the Waterfront, and every few years I watch it, almost against my will. It's the movie for my life, and every time I see it I tell myself, "THIS time I won't cry. I know what's going to happen. I won't get caught up in it."

"This" time, I sobbed my guts out and didn't even know why, any more than I'd known all the other times. It had embedded itself in me: or has it ever NOT been embedded in me since the first time I saw it?

I was thirteen years old and "sleeping in the den", a special treat: I got to sleep on a creaky, lumpy pull-out sofa with brutal cold hardware on the sides, so I could stay up and watch a movie (or movies, depending on how long I could stay awake). This movie, this On the Waterfront just came on, and after a while my brother Arthur came in from wherever he'd been - out drinking, I think. We watched it together, and I recorded the sound track on an old Webcor reel-to-reel.

Is this why it became so embedded in my brain stem, because I listened to the sound track so many times? Is this why the glorious, ferocious Leonard Bernstein score still thunders through my brain whether I want it to or not? Or is it the fact that Arthur died in 1980, and this is one of the few fragments I have left of him? I remember we did a highly disrespectful satire of the movie, the two of us playing all the roles (I was Edie, Charlie and the priest) and recorded it on the Webcor. But I am sure it wasn't just a sendup. The movie had gotten to both of us.

I don't want to go into the details of the story, except to say it's the classic good-versus-evil struggle, integrity versus an almost cartoonish oppression. Brando plays Terry Malloy, a washed-up prizefighter ("I coulda had class! I coulda been a contend-ah! I coulda been somebody.") singlehandedly taking on savagely corrupt waterfront powerbrokers and winning. But not before a lot of compelling scenes with the virginal Eva Marie Saint, and a thunderous performance by Karl Malden as a renegade priest. "Boys: this IS my church!"

Somehow it comes around again, mysteriously, like a season. I've forced friends of mine to watch it with me over the years just to show them how it's the best movie ever made, even though I am sure they don't get it ("Look, look, there's a cross on the roof! An unintential cross! It means Charlie is going to be sacrificed, you know?"). Instead of losing intensity, as it probably should, its power seems to accumulate so that it now has the capacity to completely mow me down.

At thirteen, I found myself in a Marlon Brando phase. On the Waterfront came out in 1954, so it was as old as I was, and it was a little disappointing to discover that Brando was not the same man. Already he had turned very strange, had started to lose his astonishing good looks and charisma and gain a distressing amount of weight around his middle (later to transform him into a literal square, broad as he was long). He was hanging around with all these Tahitian women and having a whole lot of children with them. All this I had to find out at the library, in old books. Some movie mags had scandalous stories about him. But that was nothing to what came later.

I don't know what it is about the brilliantly talented, why they are so fucked up and so spookily gifted at throwing all their advantages away. For decades, actors and directors thought it was the greatest opportunity in the world to work with Brando, even as his reputation for being completely unprofessional and even nasty to his fellow actors had become legendary. That, and his alarming tendency to split his pants when he bent over. In a 1000-page biography by Peter Manso which is almost as heavy as Brando himself, one wardrobe mistress claimed that she had made him seventeen pairs of pants for a single movie, One-Eyed Jacks. I'm not buying it, but you get the idea.

When I recently watched On the Waterfront again, when I saw Brando eerily foreshadowing his own decline playing the slouching, seedy ex-boxer oppressed by forces he didn't understand, I saw an almost religious surrender, a willingness or even a need to lay open his own chest: "They got Charlie," he murmurs when he finds his brother (crucifixion-like!) hanging dead on a longshoreman's hook. It's more of a statement than a lament. Then comes a muted wail of grief: "I'm gonna take it out on their skulls." No other actor in history could pronounce a line like that, not even aware of what he was doing. When technique dissolves and an actor so astonishingly "becomes", there is simply no name for it.

Brando died a number of years ago, a huge man holed up in a mansion on Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles, Citizen Kane-like in his isolation and bizarre self-destructive habits. Supposedly on a strict diet, he bribed delivery boys from McDonalds to throw bags of burgers over the wall of his fortress-like home. He went a strange kind of crazy, and I won't even get into the horrors of his family, the madness, the murder, craziness and death of every kind. He even told one interviewer that he had nine children, when in truth he barely had eight (some of them the stepchildren of divorce). And at least one of them was sired with his Mexican maid.

But there is something about the cab scene in On the Waterfront - the scene sometimes called the most compelling and perfect in all of movie history - the way his brother Charlie pulls the gun on him, and Brando's response - almost gently pushing the barrel of the gun away from him and breathing in a kind of tender disbelief: "Wow, Charlie." In that moment he realizes (and somehow spookily telegraphs to us) that his brother is already dead, or, perhaps, has never really been alive.

We will never understand such genius and its frightening, illuminating, appalling ways.