I wasn't planning on posting here this week. (Though I may still be among the guest bloggers at Steve M.'s place if anything happens in the news besides a bunch of idiots screaming that Obama doesn't want you to know what's in Soylent Green, or if I can think of something to say about them besides, "Kill 'em! Kill 'em before they breed!!") But before I switch the lights off, I did just want to expand on my previous post and clarify that I'm only planning a hiatus so that I can recharge my batteries, get my personal life in order, and investigate this "proof-reading" of which you speak. An awful lot of people who reacted to that post took it to me that I was kicking the computer out the window, burning down the blog, and salting the earth on which it stood. Upon reflection, I can understand why long-term readers in particular might have gotten that impression, since they'd had to sit through the occasional maudlin hissy-fit. (Also, my pal David tells me that the clip from Dr. Strangelove may have sent the wrong message. I patiently pointed out to David that the lyrics of that song clearly state that "we will meet again", even if we "don't know where, don't know when." He even more patiently explained to me that the nuclear explosions in that scene cast the literal meaning of the lyrics in an ironic and doubtful light. Go figure.) Right now it's just a hunch, but I'm thinking I'll be back here come October or November, with bells on. There was still a 5% chance that I'd hang myself before fall just to see if maybe Hell is cooler, but that just got blown out of the water by the news that Macy Gray is going to be on the next season of Dancing with the Stars. She is one of the record-smashing ten of sixteen contestants who I've actually heard of before, and she's plenty.
So long as I'm here, I might as well mention that the movie of the summer has finally arrived, and it is Ponyo, Japanese animation god Hayao Miyazaki's take on "The Little Mermaid." In the course of expanding the boundaries of traditional animation, Miyazaki has made some movies (such as the mythic eco-catastrophe nightmare that is the climax of Princess Mononoke) that might be risky viewing for small children. Ponyo is his most family-friendly movie in ages; it's a love story set inside the pre-sexual romantic mindset of small kids who are eager to pledge eternal devotion to their first playground crush. The five-year-old hero, Sosuke, has a love-hate relationship with the ocean; his father is a ship's captain whose work is constantly, physically pulling him away from Sosuke and his mother. The title character starts out as a small aquatic creature with a baby face encircled by red hair. She seems to be a infant, guppyish mermaid, though Sosuke, who catches her and carries her around in a bucket, thinks she looks like a goldfish and calls her Ponyo. After they're separated, she refuses to answer anymore to the name her father has given her, "Brünnhilde". (I half expected her to declare that it was her slave name.) And, having licked a bit of Sosuke's blood after he'd accidentally cut himself, she's already begun to mutate into human form. Soon she's flown the nest and is literally running atop dolphin-shaped waves to rejoin her boyfriend, in the midst of a storm that might be the first flowering of unruly passions making themselves felt and demanding to be recognized as the true center of the world.
Ponyo has none of the pathos and tragic feeling of Hans Christian Anderson's "Little Mermaid." The 1989 Disney cartoon version didn't either, but where that movie felt compromised to me, this one feels simple and direct in its breezy romanticism, as if, at 68, Miyazaki were saying that he has no particular inclination to punish his characters or put them through hell and begone before letting them get a little happiness if they deserve, and he'd love to know who's going to stop him. Not me; everything about this movie, starting from the look of it, marks it as the work of someone who's figured out what matters. It's a pretty low-pressure narrative, considering that it includes assurances that the fate of the planet, always a series matter in a Miyazaki movie, depends on achieving some kind of ideal balance regarding Ponyo's place in the world. The father-wizard character, who in the English-language version that Disney is distributing here is distractingly voiced by Liam Neeson, likes to perform diatribes about how human beings screw everything up, but even he turns out to be a soft touch where his daughter's happiness is concerned. Not that he has a lot of choice in the matter when it comes down to it: whenever he tries to step in, Ponyo's hundreds of tiny sisters form a swimming wedge against him, as if they had built-in instincts about when it's their duty to lock dad in the bathroom when their big sister wants to sneak out to meet a cute guy at the Tastee-Freez. I imagine Disney executives looking at these scenes and thinking they might be able to break off a hundred direct-to-video sequels, with each sister falling in love with a human kid voiced by a different Jonas brother. Then I imagine Miyazaki showing up on the West Coast with a flamethrower.
Obviously, Ponyo will have an especially deep appeal for those who can get far enough into its innocent frame of mind that they won't giggle when Sosuke boasts of Ponyo's ability to make his candle bigger. (Don't ask.) But as ideal as it is for a family outing, it's also an instant classic in the modern tradition of the innocent-seeming animated fantasy as visual trip-fest, the closest some of us have come to dropping acid since we first saw Yellow Submarine. The first images of life under the sea are disarmingly, and gorgeously, childlike, as if they'd been drawn by a six-year-old who can share with your senses his ability to imagine the world he's created in full motion, and Ponyo's father looks like the Tom Baker-era Dr. Who after a spending spree on Caranaby Street circa 1967. Everybody I know saw this past weekend, and to those of you who had a heck of a time, I'm happy for you. Now go see dessert.
My grandma and I sure would like to thank everybody for checking in here from time to time. I've been doing this since 2003, starting the night before the bombs started falling on Iraq, at a site that is now lost in the sands of time, and I like to think that, at some point not long from now, I will eventually get it right. But all good things must come to an end, and I hope that many visitors of this site would agree that my Internet connection was a good thing. That'll be getting cut off next week until I can scrape together enough money to rejoin the community of the financially semi-respectable. I have no way of knowing when that'll be, but as soon as it happens, I hope to be back here with bells on. Anything all of you can do to make sure that nothing interesting happens in the meantime will be greatly appreciated.
If I can rustle up a connection and a thought in my head at roughly the same time, I may do a little guest-blogging next week at Steve M.'s place, which is always recommended as an excellent alternate destination to the Experience. I'm most likely to be there next Monday or maybe Tuesday, since I don't expect Cablevision's representatives to show up with the final turn-off notice and the bolt cutters before then. In the meantime, as the summer continues to burn itself off, just remember:
As I remember it, back in 1998, I was watching President Clinton's State of the Union address on some cable news network or another, and after he finished speaking, there was one of those gasbag exchanges between some of the network's TV-"journalist" stars about what he'd said and the state of the country in general. And I can't remember how this came up or who the woman was, but some woman who was a fixture on that network brought up the subject of health care in America. She explained that it was on her mind because of something very strange that had happened to her the previous weekend. She had gone to see As Good as It Gets in a packed theater, and there was a scene in it where, as she put it, "a woman says that she hates her HMO"--I believe the actual line is actually something along the lines of, "Fucking HMO bastards!"--and, the TV reporter said, she was shocked by the audience response: people in the theater applauded, as if they agreed with it. This was five years after the failure of the Clinton administration to pass universal health care; in that distant, pre-Fox News time, that effort was destroyed largely by the combined efforts of the insurance companies and the Republicans, but also by Democratic congressmen who made it clear that they thought the important thing was to show that they were united with their Republican peers in Congress against these uppity hillbillies who'd taken over the White House from George Bush the Elder, a proper Beltway resident who'd been born and bred for the job, and the wise media folk who didn't understand why anyone would make a fuss about health care when they themselves had such a splendid dental plan. The TV reporter had been shaken by the cheers in that theater; was it possible, she wondered aloud to her colleagues, that there might actually be grounds for dissatisfaction among the rabble with the cost and quality of American health care for the non-mediagenic? I forget how that conversation went from there, but I suspect that the consensus among those on the air was that the people in that theater must have been on something.
It's hard to recall now how different the atmosphere was in Washington in 1993, before Fox News and the Contract with America. There was right wing talk radio and a lot of crazy shit, of course, but there was also an entrenched Democratic majority made up of hacks whose most schlerotic members really did see themselves as closer to the old guys on the other side of the aisle than the first Democratic President in twelve years and who were eager to join forces with the Republicans to show Hippie Bill who was boss, even as Newt Gingrich and his acolytes were plotting to drive these sages out of their jobs in 2004. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who had become chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, threw all his weight behind the defeat of the bill, even going so far as to publicly declare that there was no health care crisis in this country. Later. Moynihan would acknowledge that he did this because he assumed that, after the Clinton bill had been shot down and the tyro president sufficiently humbled, his dear Republican friends would jump in and cobble together a bill everyone could live with that would address the very real problem he knew health care to be, and he was stunned and disappointed, to say the least, when he was informed that, as far as his dear friends were concerned, the whole point of the exercise had been to cripple Clinton from the beginning of his presidency by handing him a major, humiliating defeat and that the Republicans couldn't care less about further attempts to address health care. This could be taken as a story about how utterly naive Moynhihan was about bipartisan politics or if could be taken as a story about the moment when the Republican party, which just a few years earlier had cared about fixing a few things that were wrong with this country, had degenerated into a completely cynical partisan gang, and no one who knows much about Daniel Patrick Moynihan would entertain the possibility that it's mostly about the first possibility.
Two things that have changed in the past sixteen years are that now, no one much seriously disputes the validity of the term "health care crisis", just as no one much seriously disputes the validity of the term "climate change", and the Republican Party now has a fully functioning alternate take on reality in place and a many-headed media operation set up to promulgate that view for those who draw upon it the way Bruce Banner drew upon anger and gamma rays. And I've been at a loss for anything much to say about all this because what can you say? When you see people fervently declaring that a plan whose whole point is to extend the reach of medical care to those who can't freely pay for it will have the effect of costing more lives, or when you see a bunch of people who are protesting the very idea of government getting involved in medical care acknowledging that they're on Medicare and have no plans to divest themselves of it, you can't tell whether they're dupes or whether they're people setting an example for those they mean to dupe. When you spend some time at a health-care blog and notice that the comments section seems to feature some fellow who's there to say that he "respects" some of the people he disagrees with on health care but there have been inaccuracies on both sides--like, you know, Obama is overly confident that his program will pay for itself, and then there are people on the other side who think that it'll include a panel whose job is to kill Trig Palin--and, you know, there may be some good ideas in that mess Obama is pushing, but who in their right mind could ever support end-of-life counseling, you don't know whether to log in and gently explain what end-of-life counseling really is and all the ways that it would have been beneficial to the reputation of the Republican party if Terri Schiavo and her family had availed themselves of it, yet at the same time a part of you wonders if you should just assume that every blog on the subject has one of these characters issued to it by the GOP, to confuse everyone by acting dim as hell but, still, polite. And the first time you hear the one about the guy who insisted that Stephen Hawking wouldn't have lived if he'd been British, you have to wonder if you're the only person whose first reaction was, as in my case, to laugh out loud at something that you immediately assumed was meant as a joke? The issues at hand get lost somewhere in the swirl of trying to decide who's lying and who, like the editorial writer who made that blooper about Hawking, simply as dumb as a goddamned post.
Of course, the question that's hardest to answer is how much the fact that this is supposed to be about health care actually has anything to do with motivating all these people to audition for a remake of The Ox-Bow Incident. When you see people shutting down public forums by screaming the voices coming out of their red faces raw that they have to do what they're doing because letting their elected representatives get a word in edgewise would be too great a violation of the spirit of the American Way, you have to expect that something is going on under the surface that has no real connection to the topic at hand, and that's pretty much confirmed when you see guys on TV who not only showed up at the event strapped but who seem to see this as their chance to argue that anybody who doesn't go everywhere with a loaded gun isn't holding up his end in his duty to prove himself as good an American as Aaron Burr or Pecos Bill. It's pretty scary when you see somebody like that showing up at a presidential appearance wearing Timothy McVeigh's favorite quote from Thomas Jefferson emblazened on his T-shirt, but what makes it so scary is that this is apparently what a harmless nut looks like these days. I mean, when Travis Bickle was spotted by the Secret Service at a rally with a gun on him, he didn't stick around for his fifteen minutes with Chris Matthews. The really dangerous people probably aren't at these events calling attention to themselves so they can give the FBI an excuse to fatten up their dossiers. They're in the shadows, soaking it all in, and maybe being made to feel, as McVeigh came to feel in the time of Gingrich, that the country was primed for his kind of revolution and just waiting for somebody to step up and ante.
For those who, like Michael Steele and maybe John McCain and God knows how you can tell who else without an MRI scan, aren't nuts themselves but would dearly like to continue to build careers for themselves in a political party whose core base best resembles the cast of Marat/Sade, the big question here is the same one that the birthers posed: how far can you go in being seen to "benefit" from this without turning off those who might not see frothing insanity as a viable plan for governing the country? Seen in this light, the new USA Today poll that seems to show that the loud crazy people have had the effect of making some presumably sane, quiet people more receptive to their complaints has to be seen as discouraging. I do wonder, though, exactly what people mean when they say that the noise these lunatics have been making has caused them to be more receptive to their views. One woman seen at a town hall the other night was shrieking that "this is not the kind of change" people voted for last fall; I don't know whether this banshee voted for Obama and/or for change herself, and I shudder to think what kind of change she'd like compared to what she's getting, but I do suspect that a lot of people voted for Obama last year to get a semblance of order back into their lives, and to get the feeling, after many years of having George Junior and his G.I. Joe Commandos running amok to little discernible purpose, that somebody once again had a steady hand on the tiller. Now they switch on their news channels and it always looks like that episode of Get Smart where KAOS slipped LSD into the water supply. Gee, I dunno, maybe affordable health care for everybody seemed like a workable no-brainer a minute ago but now OMIGOD, KILL IT, WHATEVER THESE PEOPLE WANT, GIVE IT TO THEM, TAKE IT AWAY, JUST MAKE THE NOISE STOP!!
A lot of the coverage of the town halls up to now seems to have been done with the underlying assumption that if everyone could just see how ludicrous and unsightly all this was, the nation, in its shared common sense, would rise up as one and say "No!" to all this flagrant, bullying stupidity. (This approach was not uncommon among the "coverage" of the Swift Boaters and Reagan and Bush's tinniest and tawdriest campaign antics, too.) But, to whatever degree this bullshit has been orchestrated or is otherwise a "spontaneous" explosion of directed rage by talk-radio addicts, the anti-Obama forces seem to have stumbled on a way to get people to shift public opinion, whether they agree with them or not, in the hopes of getting a little peace and quiet: sort of like getting your way by threatening to hold your breath until you turn blue, except in reverse. I'm not sure that it's a viable plan for long-term success; at some point, people will either adjust to the noise or notice that giving in on one thing only encourages such people to scream even louder the next time they want a little attention. But the Republicans themselves are counting on the idea that if they can hand Obama just one splashy defeat, the media will declare him dead in the water and that'll be that. This was the idea behind defeating Bill Clinton on the exact same issue, and it worked, for a while. Can it work as well a second time? Maybe not, but I'm almost leery of any developments that might leave the Republican Party feeling that it needs to come up with more than one or two ideas.
I have a guest post up at Seebelow*, a comics-related site that regularly features work by my Internet friends and generally splendid fellows "Calamity Jon" Morris, Leonard Pierce, and Austin Swinburn. In my contribution, I make vicious fun of the comments made in his recent Comics Journal interview by artist Trevor Von Eeden, a man who has never done me any harm.
Seeing new work by a moviemaker whose stuff you've liked after a long wait can be a little like catching up with an old friend who lives far away, or maybe catching up with an old friend who's been in prison. Both the 56-year-old Austrian director Ulrich Seidl and the 66-year-old Swedish director Roy Andersson have their own sardonic styles and distinctive dark humor. Both of them also like to break their narratives up into brief scenes divided among a broad cast of characters, many of whom have no connection to each other, and who inhabit elegantly designed, frozen compositions that convey how thoroughly these people's lives lack for any way to move up or forward. But what they really share is a degree of near-invisibility in this country that belies the richness of their work. I first discovered both of them in 2002, when Seidl's Dog Days and Andersson's Songs from the Second Floor (which was made in 2000) opened in New York. (Both pictures were eventually issued here on DVD, though Songs is no longer in print.) This past couple of weeks, New Yorkers had the chance to catch up with their first non-documentary features since then, which both date from 2007: Seidl's Import Export ran for a week at Anthology Film Archives as part of a mini-retrospective of his documentary work, and Andersson's You, the Living just wrapped a two-week visit at Film Forum. Andersson is due to revisit the city in September for a retrospective tribute at MOMA, but aside from that, I don't know how you could go about seeing them, until--unless--somebody gets around to slipping them into the home video market. But I can suggest that if you get the chance, you ought to take it.
Seidl has earned comparisons to such European provocateurs as Gaspar Noe and his ilk, which hasn't done much good for his international public profile; even the bad reception that Import Export received at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival didn't get Seidl much of the cultish buzz that such directors as Noe and Lars von Trier groove on. It's easy to see why: Seidl puts awful things onscreen without any detectable smugness or feeling of superiority, so that the audience may be put in the unwelcome position of relating to, or God forbid understanding, people they'd really enjoy snickering at. This strategy wasn't as readily apparent in Dog Days as it was in the newer film; some of the characters and situations in Dog Days, such as a bizarrely charismatic, bare-chested lout with a sleazy grin and even sleazier blond tresses, who hangs out in his shabby apparent inviting his mousy-seeming pal to watch as he mistreats his slavish lady friend, had an in-your-face ghastliness that made their scenes play as if in 3-D. But even when that guy was on, there was something unusual and deeply textured about the movie's sourness; Seidl might have sometimes seemed to be examining people as if they were under a microscope, but he did show signs of having an artist's desire to come up from the viewfinder with something more complicated to say about them than "Ewwww!" And when the tables turned even in that unhealthy triangle situation, the viewer was left with reactions that couldn't be easily sorted out.
It's much easier to feel sympathy from the start for the leading characters of Import Export, but that doesn't have anything to do with Seidl's having gone soft. The film cuts back and forth between two working-class young people trying not to sink any farther down the holes they're in: Olga (Ekateryna Rak), a single mother living in the Ukraine who, after trying to supplement her barely existent pay as a nurse by presenting her bare body to the patron of a pornographic web-cam operation, winds up as a cleaning woman in a geriatric ward of an Austrian hospital where, despite her professional training, she's not allowed to touch the patients; and Paul (Paul Hofmann), an inarticulate, basically decent-minded but seething young man who can't hang onto a job in his native Austria and who ends up accompanying his stepfather (Michael Thomas) on a paid delivery trip to the Ukraine.
Import Export is a movie about making a living and all the degradations, petty and otherwise, that can go into that struggle in an age that has abandoned such niceties as the social safety net and any other pretense that there might be some shared benefit in all of us giving two shits about each other. As such, it isn't pretty, but its stubborn honesty, which is informed by the energy of a director who is too interested in human beings to reduce his characters to figures in a political pamphlet, made it seem exhilarating to me. The movie doesn't throw up its hands in horror when a young mother is presenting her ass to the camera so she can feed her kid; it's more interested in observing the practicalities she has to master to do the job, such as making sense of what's wanted from her as she receives instructions that aren't spoken in her first language. Nor does it rub your nose in the things that are obvious, such as the fact that Olga, the harried mother, is a kid herself. (She originally arrives in Austria to work as household help for a middle-aged woman who brusquely fires her for having made her feel cold and inadequate as she watches Olga get along too well with her own kids.) It gets to you in the area of the little indelible touches, such as Olga's hard-to-read smile as a male orderly badgers the bedridden old men of the ward on her behalf, demanding to know which if them was so inconsiderate as to leave his soiled diaper lying in the corridor. Seidl uses a non-professional cast here, and this is that rare movie where you couldn't tell it: Paul Hofmann and Michael Thomas, in particular, have the freshness you're supposed to see in non-actors but also the strong presence and sureness and economy of physical action that non-actors are seldom directed to deliver. Thomas, with his beefy but slackening physique and deceptively sensitive-looking eyes, is the very image of aging macho vanity, especially in a hotel room scene where it doesn't seem likely to ever occur to him that his stepson might have a problem watching him get it on with some piece of tail he met in a bar. He's everything the younger man wouldn't want to grow up to be; what gives their scenes together their sting is that for all his scumminess, he's still winning enough to make you understand why, for a drifting man with no other obvious future options, it's a valid concern.
Songs from the Second Floor was built as a series of what amounted to blackout sketches, a string of dry little skits strung together, but with a special echo of melancholy that deepened the material without killing the wit. You, the Living, which begins with a woman in a lonely, sad mood driving off her boyfriend so she can sing to the camera a Dixieland-flavored tune about how badly she wants a motorcycle, is in much the same style. The music, which is tied to one of the characters, who plays in a funeral band--he gets to deliver a monologue to the camera about the cratering of his retirement fund while straddled by a large naked woman wearing a military helmet that gives the image the look of a Tijuana Bible edition of Hagar the Horrible--calls up memories of early Woody Allen, and at times Andersson's movies are a little like one of Allen's early, masochistic-surreal monologues staged as dioramas and given a fine visual polish. They can come perilously close to wearing out their welcome as they approach the ninety-minute mark, and You, the Living dances on the tightrope for ninety-five. But the reward comes in a magnificent climactic fantasy, the staging of a dream enjoyed by a lovesick young groupie about marrying the down-to-earth rock god of her dreams and being seen off on their way to a new life, aboard a train, by a small mob of people who crowd onto the departure platform to wish them well and request a song. It's topped by the mysteriously beautiful, daringly extended final image: a wing-sitter's view of a squad of bomber planes clustering over the city.
When I learned of the death of John Hughes, director of eight movies between 1984 and 1991 (including Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and the career-flattening Curly Sue and hands-on writer and/or producer of a shitload more (Mr. Mom, National Lampoon's Vacation, Home Alone, Beethoven, Baby's Day Out the remade Miracle on 34th Street, the live-actioned 101 Dalamations, and on and on), my first thought was, gee, 59 is kinda young. My second thought was, at least here's one dead celebrity I won't be writing about. I didn't know the fellow, which meant that anything I had to say would be inspired by his work, and who could possibly feel inspired to say anything about a body of work like that? Now I'm sitting here typing away because I feel moved to comment of what people have been saying about it. And I don't mean the people at the book club who we put up with because their mom bakes us brownies. I mean people who are paid for their opinions on these things by editors who must assume that they have some savvy regarding their chosen area of expertise. In the New York Times, A. O. Scott calls Hughes "our Godard, the filmmaker who crystallized our attitudes and anxieties with just the right blend of teasing and sympathy." Anticipating the outbreak of mass vomiting this comparison has to set off, Scott quickly huffs that "The response, which will never satisfy some critics, is that his films are fables, not documentaries."
Silly A.O.! A fable--and I'm a little surprised that I have to explain this to someone whose hiring by the Times was criticized by Roger Ebert at the time on the ground that he had read a suspicious number of books to properly evaluate the work of Jerry Bruckheimer--is a brief morally instructive tale using anthropomorphic animal characters. It's true that the performances that Jon Cryer and Judd Nelson gave under Hughes's direction could be cited as evidence that they should not be categorized as fully human, but that doesn't make them talking animals. (If anything, Nelson can perhaps best be classified as a snorting vegetable.) Nor are Hughes's movies really useful on the level of moral instruction, because the morals they would teach us are invariably wrong. It is not true that when you grow up, your heart dies. It is not true that a beautiful, intelligent, intoxicatingly freaky geek girl like Ally Sheedy's character in The Breakfast Club is making a change for the better if she agrees to have the prom queen give her a hideously unbecoming, personality-obliterating makeover so that she can hook up with the poleaxed-looking Emilio Estevez. It is not true that if you are a boy who dresses like Meg Ryan in high-flying kook mode and you perform an eye-rotting dance number to "Try a Little Tenderness" in a public place where people are trying to shop for records, the sweet pretty girl who tolerates you hanging around her out of pity will still talk to you, and it is not true that she should. It is certainly not true that the sweet pretty girl's romantic options would ever be limited to this walking embarrassment and a rich cipher who's like a character who was banished from a Bret Easton Ellis character for never having any coke on him.
What Hughes's movies, whatever his degree of involvement with them, all are, pretty much without exception, are terrible movies. They're dim, formulaic, boring, and badly made, and only occasionally redeemed by their performers, by which I mostly mean Molly Ringwald. (Hughes made her a star, but she was on the way there anyway. Maybe if they'd never met, she would have managed to not only become a star but to stay one instead of having the kind of "face of her generation" career that got her callously tagged as a has-been as soon as she was old enough to really take off.) I can understand the attraction to the junk that seemed to speak to you as a kid; God knows I could cite my own examples of same. But most of the supposedly knowledgable observers I've seen weigh in on Hughes's work since last Thursday don't throw around phrases like "potent junk"; they write, as Dana Stevens does in Slate of "the good ones, those five or six gems" Hughes bequeathed to our shared cultural bounty in the 1980s. Five or six gems? Assuming she's ruling out Curly Sue and Uncle Buck, she appears to be leaving room for Weird Science and She's Having a Baby to sneak in on a pass. I don't mean to be a bully about this, but when you write for a living, you ought to have a stake in whether words mean anything. Calling Hughes's movies "good" does just as much to devalue the English language as calling Barack Obama a Nazi. And it's not that I don't think that intelligent people can disagree on matters of taste. It's just that calling The Breakfast Club "good" is not so much an expression of taste as an error along the lines of saying that Mount Rushmore is a natural rock formation. It makes you wonder, if Stevens means it, what she thinks of work in other media that are fully aesthetic comparable to these movies. Never mind The Catcher in the Rye, which she is quick to cite--does she think it's a disgrace that the writing staff of The Facts of Life has never been up for the Nobel Prize in Literature? And if not, why not?
It's not that I am wholly blind to Hughes's charms. I remember thinking that Sixteen Candles was pretty funny and kind of sweet; for me, it'll do as the Portable John Hughes. It has everything that was good about his work--Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall at full strength, the funny use of contemporary, often computer-geek-based slang--and enough of what was coarse and crappy about his work to leave you feeling sure that the guy got lucky this once and there was no need to seek out the rest of his oveure. As it happens, it is also the only movie of his that I've seen more than once. One recurring theme from the Hughes obituary essays is that we were all supposed to have wasted great swaths of our lives in the '80s watching and -rewatching these pieces of shit until our videocassettes shredded themselves in self-defense. But once was enough for me with all of them. I'm grateful that if I had to see one of them more than once, it was Sixteen Candles, but that wouldn't have happened if my little sister hadn't gotten ahold of the cassette when it came out. Blessedly, by the time the other stuff started coming out on cassette, I was safely away at college. Incidentally, I feel confirmed by this that the real, hardcore audience for Hughes's teenpics in their day were tweeners and maybe even younger kids who wanted to look forward to the thrill and moody drama of being teenagers. When I was a teenager what I wanted to see were movies about grown-ups, so that I could get some hot tips on how to comport myself when I got the hell out of high school and my goddamn life could finally begin. Unfortunately, thanks in no small part to Hughes and his influence on the industry, in the 1980s it was mighty hard to find movies that weren't about teenagers, and those that weren't tended to star Meryl Streep. And I thought Duckie versus Blaine was a no-win choice...
Hughes's movies also seem to have been highly attractive to people who as kids wanted, and God help, may still want, to think of themselves as part of a "generation." This is a hankering that I have never understood in the least. Knowing that my desire, as a teen, to see movies about people older than myself--people who, you know, might live lives exciting enough that there was a reason to make a movie about them--may have already gotten me typed as some kind of freak, I'll go all the way and say that, even as a kid, I wanted to part of a circle of people who had interests similar to my own and were involved in activities that I found stimulating, and it didn't take too long--it didn't take two seconds--to figure out that this meant that about the last reason you might have for feeling a bond with someone is that they happened to have a birth date that didn't fall too far on the historical dateline than your own. But some bad ideas-- and as bad ideas go, surely the idea of self-consciously defining oneself as part of a "generation" is much worse than anything advocated by the birthers or the Flat Earth Society--are here to stay, and people who want to consider Hughes not just as the successful maker of crappy hit movies but as a poet of their "generation" are ready to embarrass themselves as thoroughly as possible to make the case.
To see just how silly this sort of thing looks at full gush, check out an essay at The Smart Set by someone named Morgan Meis, who appears to be one of those jaspers--I knew a few of them back in the day--who felt that it was vitally important that we who were "twentysomething" by the time thirtysomething premiered so that we could all provide a united front and tell the Baby Boomers, "The most self-absorbed generation ever to lumber across this solid Earth," that we could be plenty self-absorbed ourselves, thank you, and demanded our own stupid false generational mythology that our own kids could regard as just as pathetic as, say, a Dave Marsh riff about how Lollapalooza weren't nothin' compared to good old Woodstock. Meis's essay actually reminded me of something that I was happy to have forgotten, namely that, back in the last pure white-hot summer of Reagan before the Iran-Contra scandal broke, there was actually a generational pissing war over, God help me, Ferris Bueller's Day Off. In this corner, we had George Will, who in a column celebrated the poreless smug dickweed Ferris as an example that America's youth had come to its sense and, instead of wanting to do bad treasonous things like read books and protest apartheid, they wanted to do red, white, and blue things like date proto-supermodel girlfriends who, like Ferris himself, seemed to have received a smugness transplant from the Moonlighting-era Bruce Willis, and tie up traffic to lead a zombie cult production number set to "Twist and Shout." In response, critics like Dave Kehr pointed out that Ferris's activities seemed a little, well, lame. To this, Meis responds: Sorry, Dave, that Ferris didn't go on a Freedom Ride, or invent aerobics, or speculate on mortgage-backed securities. Instead, he has lunch, goes to a Cubs game, and looks at some art." (Meis argues that Ferris is a "master of the little things," without dwelling on the fact that the self-admiring douchebag edge to his mastery, which does not preclude his sadly conceding to the camera that his best friend is a pathetic load, marks him as a future market trader who, after his spirit is broken during his prison term for insider trading, will spend the bulk of his thirties pursuing his new life goal of having a national televised spazz attack in front of the studio where they're broadcasting MTV's Total Request Live.) Meis, who's given to such statements as "Like all Generation Xers, his heroism lies in his anti-heroism," takes this business about uniform generational identity so seriously that it eliminates any reason to even consider the possibility that he's packing anything in his skull besides resentment and old box scores, but he makes it clear where his twisted heart is when he spells it out: "John Hughes was born in 1950, putting him squarely in the Boomer camp. But his heart was always with us. He was a generation traitor." Back on the farm where I grew up, we had a cat that wandered off from the other cats and started hanging out with the dogs. The dogs did seem to get a kick out of it.
Another essay at The Smart Set, by Greg Beato, actually goes a bit farther in helping me understand why these disposable movies might have meant so much to some putatively intelligent people. Noting that the kids in that snorefest talk too much, Beato writes that, at the time, "this was a fairly radical notion. Throughout the early 1980s, in movies like Porky’s, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and dozens of similar knock-offs, Hollywood depicted teens as raging hedonists devoted to the pleasures of the body." It's interesting that Beato roped Fast Times at Ridgemont High in there, since it, like the director Amy Heckerling's later Clueless, differs from all of Hughes's non-Sixteen Candles work in that it's a good movie. Not is it a movie that depicts a devotion to "the pleasures of the body" as being without danger. Jennifer Jason Leigh has two indelible bad-courtship scenes--one in which the nice boy runs off, the other in which the not-so-nice boy, unfortunately for everyone involved, doesn't run off--in which it's made clear that sex for her is hardly a hedonist pursuit but what she's willing to experiment with as the price of having a boyfriend. She then winds up having to get an abortion, in a remarkably nonjudgmental and still emotionally jangling scene that cuts deeper than anything, not just in The Breakfast Club, but in Hughes's whole body of work. It's a balanced movie about all the phases and colors of teen life.
So maybe the special appeal of Hughes's work for adolescents of all ages is that his view of teenage life wasn't balanced, and that his slipped his thumb onto the part of the scale that was loaded with what far too many articles about this shit are going to refer to as "angst." Because when you're a teenager, maybe a big part of your life is wanting to believe that you're loaded down with angst, that your pain is deeper than anyone can understand, and that, yes, all the adults are against you because, when they grew up, their hearts died. (But it won't happen to me! It won't happen to me!) If you're devoted enough to that view of the experience, you might even be a little resentful of a Fast Times at Ridgemont High for reminding you that you did have some fun in there sometimes. I'll even go so far as to say that this attitude might be deepest among some people who were the BMOCs and the cheerleaders in high school and who had a blast in the teenage years, but who'll never admit it now, and whio may have even repressed those memories and replaced them with scenes out a James Dean meltdown crying jag, because they know that people who turn out to be cool adults are supposed to have found high school to be a miserable experience, tainted by conformity and the bullying of people for whom high school really was the best years of their lives, which leaves them with what, exactly, to say in favor of the decades they have left? This is the attitude that Hughes nursed, caressed, and flattered, but never, ever examined and never again, after Sixteen Candles, satirized. It's only one of countless reasons why his movies aren't any good, reasons that can pretty much be filed under the blanket heading that he wasn't very talented and was too successful too early in his movie career to have any incentive to do anything but repeat himself while allowing such technical skills as he had to visibly deteriorate. But it's the one that made even the head critic of the New York Times ready to take it outside for him, because he knew that John Hughes...understood, dammit!
Did John Hughes have any special relevance to my life, as someone who always saw adolescence as a chance to keep my head low for a few years, get out as fast as possible, and then never speak of it again? Yes, but in a distant sort of way. When kids aren't looking forward to the splendid adolescence or adulthood they're going to have, they sometimes get fixated on the cultural period they happened to just miss out on. For that reason, I and some other geeks of my, well, "generation" have spent a lot of our lives catching up with, and subsequently boring the hell out of everyone else, with the cultural detritus of the 1970s. And for me, a big part of that was the National Lampoon, the beautifully produced, literary yet low-down adult humor magazine that was the place to be for post-counterculture wiseasses from 1970 through 1974. (In a piece on The Simpsons that veered into a mini-essay on the history of the American humor magazine, Comics Journal writer Robert Fiore once suggested that the closest thing we've had in recent years to the Lampoon in its glory period might be South Park.) After the mid-70s, many of the stars of the early years, notably co-founding editor Henry Beard, the late Michael O'Donoghue, Anne Beatts, and the invaluable art director Michael Gross, drifted (or in some case, stormed) off, and the magazine went through a period of flux before bottoming out.
But it was while bottoming out that the Lampoon went Hollywood, first in 1978 with National Lampoon's Animal House. Incredible though it now seems, at the time that movie came out, it benefited some, commercially but especially critically, from the sense that the National Lampoon banner counted for something artistically; it helped promote the idea that the picture itself wasn't just a collection of gross-out skits and bare titty shots but an exercise in satirical nostalgia, a snarly response to American Graffiti. But the Lampoon had trouble following it up, and by the time it had another hit with National Lampoon's Vacation, the magazine itself had no cachet left and people were positioned to recognize that the Lampoon banner, attached to a movie, just meant a loud sitcom with R-rated T-and-A. And Hughes was the genius who wrote Vacation, which was based on an article he published in the magazine during its there-must-be-a-pony-in-here-somewhere period. (He had also ground out scripts for Delta House, a doomed attempt to base an actual family-hour TV sitcom on Animal House, and National Lampoon's Class Reunion, one of the magazine's intended-for-theaters video-dump abominations.) I have no problem with the actual Lampoon having died a more or less natural death, but thanks to the money that Hollywood was able to squeeze out of Vacation and its umpteen sequels, the name of the defunct publication was revived in 2002 as National Lampoon, Inc., a company that licenses the name out so that it can be slathered on cheesy frathouse comedies and the like. The upshot is that writers and artists who did great work for the real Lampoon are now reluctant to include that part of their careers on their resumes, for fear that prospective employers will mistakenly think they had a hand in National Lampoon's Van Wilder or Electric Apricot: Quest for Festeroo. It amused me to discover that some of these products are the work of the artist who, when he made his feature directing debut at 22 with 1985's Better Off Dead, wanted to be called "Savage Steve Holland", and who, shockingly enough, apparently still does. Savage Steve's '80s teen movies were about as bad in every meaningful department as John Hughes's but were supposed to be wild and anarchic instead of moist and full of sympathetic feeling for how hard it is to be of driving age but still able to depend on mom and/or dad for two hots and a cot. Savage Steve's movies bombed, proving yet again that if you have to plans to transcend mediocrity, ya gotta have heart.
For the second time this summer, I am posting here just to point to that yellow "DONATE" button and rattle the begging bowl a little. The last time I did this, it brought in about $500, mostly from modest contributions which sure do add up, and which is a terrific ego boost, and don't think ego boosts don't count for something when you're a man with a college degree who's coming home from job seminars to find messages on the answering machine saying that Con Edison means it this time. I don't know if I can realistically expect any comparable response with such a brief window of time between pledge drives, but with that in mind, I'm bowing to those who may feel squeamish about donating online and, while stressing that PayPal is still preferred, am also inviting old school donations--checks, money orders, well-concealed cash-- to Phil Nugent at 219 Echo Place, Apt 4C, Bronx, NY 10457. If this only gets me only some weird mailing lists, the joke will be on them when I'm cast out of my apartment.
When I was in college, one of my favorite movies was Heartbreakers, a 1984 film starring Peter Coyote as a West Coast painter who's in debt to everyone he knows; I was also a big fan of Henry Miller's early novels and his self-portrait of the artist as a sponging deadbeat. I remember it seemed kind of charming when those guys did it, but bohemianism, which is what we used to call what I believe the kids today are most likely to refer to as "hipster douchebaggery", isn't what it used to be; probably the whole twenty-first century communications angle is draining the warmth from it. The good news is that I am currently one-third of the way towards completion of a ninety-day plan that, if successful, will restore the Phil Nugent experience to one of self-sufficient solvency and The Phil Nugent Experience to a place where no one is asked to do the work of the free market and help shore up what is meant to be a happy carefree world of trivial reminiscences, long-winded ruminations on ephemera, and political views expressed at a pitch best appreciated by hardcore fans of Gilbert Gottfried. In the meantime, we are governed by Daniel Day-Lewis's advice to stay alive, whatever may occur. At least until October.
When Being John Malkovich first made its screenwriter, Charlie Kaufman, a recognizable name in movie circles, that movie's smarts and audacity inspired many a critic to reach, as if in desperation, for that handy and vague descriptive term, "original." Originality, especially in comedy, is an accomplishment that can get you tagged as both a genius and a con man, and hear Kaufman himself tell it, there must be moments when he wishes that more of the public would come around to the opinion of his fictional alter ego in Adaptation that he's really just a hack; then at least maybe the people who don't respond to his work would do so with a little less vitriolic intensity. Of course, young artists looking to make their mark aren't too inclined to think about the down side of being too hip for the room, and watching Cold Souls, the debut feature from writer-director Sophie Barthes, you can see the filmmmaker straining to earn acclaim for her smashing originality. Part of the problem is that part of the reason you're aware of it is that you're likely to think of Kaufman, and of other artists who now seem like obvious influences on both him and Barthes, particularly Woody Allen in the fantasist mode of "The Kugelmass Episode" and The Purple Rose of Cairo. It's a measure of how strong Kaufman's own voice is that, watching Malkovich or The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Synecdoche, NY, or even a half-baked, half-realized Kaufman picture like Human Nature, you don't think about his influences; they've been successfully incorporated into his own way of seeing. One of the crippling weaknesses of Cold Souls is that, for all its considerable wit and intelligence, you're distracted from being pulled into its world because you can't help thinking about who she's been inspired by, and must see herself as competing with. (Barthes has said that the movie was inspired by a dream she had about Woody Allen.) One artist who probably hasn't had a lot of influence on her who may come to mind is Ernest Hemingway, specifically for those letters in which he writes about "getting into the ring" with Mr. Tolstoy.
Cold Souls stars Paul Giamatti as a highly regarded New York actor named Paul Giamatti who is having trouble getting a handle on the role of Uncle Vanya, which he is set to play onstage (with Michael Tucker playing the director). Flailing about, Giamatti stumbles upon a company that has developed a procedure for literally sucking the souls out of people; the souls are then captured in jars and stored in a facility in New Jersey. Cold Souls warms up when David Strathairn appears as the head of the company, one Dr. Flintstein, and delivers a chilled sales spiel on the virtues of taking flight after being held down by a leaden soul--"A twisted soul is like a tumor, better to remove it," he croons--that grows lyrical as he describes the many beautiful physical manifestations of the extracted souls, each one different. Naturally, Giamatti is horrified when he undergoes the procedure and finds that his own soul is a tiny, cololess, slightly dented-looking blob--"a chickpea", he expostulates. His horror at the shabby quality of his soul is nothing compared to his eventual horror at discovering that it's gone missing from the storage facility and that he might not be able to get it back.
When the newly soulless Giamatti reports for rehearsal and shows us what Uncle Vanya looks like with a devil-may-care lout goofing his way through the title role, Cold Souls threatens to take off into the stratosphere, but it's a hollow threat. The movie grows less inspired as its story expands, with Giamatti--who has had the soul of a Russian poet temporarily transplanted into his body to salvage the Vanya gig--lights off for Mother Russia itself to confront a mule (played by Dina Korzun, who played Rip Torn's trophy wife in 40 Shades of Blue) who slips back and forth through U.S. and Russian customs illicitly delivering souls for extraction and her menacing, mobbed-up boss, who has obtained Giamatti's soul as a trinket to bestow upon his soap-opera actress wife (Katheryn Winnick). (The wife, who asked for the soul of "a famous American actor", has been permitted to believe that she's acting with a transplant from Al Pacino.) It sounds pretty wild, but Cold Souls's own soul feels like it's made of cast iron. The cinematography, by Andrij Parekh (whose credits include Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck's Half Nelson and Sugar), is uncannily beautiful but seems meant to set a melancholy, wintry mood not conducive to big yuks.
The fact that there are any yuks at all is largely a tribute to the game cast, especially Giamatti. Giamatti is both a master actor and a fearless comedian, capable of degrading himself with such precision that you can laugh at him without ever cringing for him. Whether he's playing Vanya so wrong that it's funny (and, after the poet's soul has been installed in him, playing it so right that it's funnier still), spending a depressing, soul-free night in a hotel bathroom morosely playing with the waste basket, or just stalking around Moscow fuming while modeling a furry winter hat that looks as if something is hibernating on top of his head, he keeps jolting the movie upright. But his comic possibilities might have been even richer if the movie had allowed for more ambiguity about the actual role of the soul and raised the idea that Giamatti's wild mood swings, depending on whose soul he's carrying around or if he's running on empty, were like the symptoms of a hypochondriac. As it is, Barthes seems to take the notion of a Russian soul a little too seriously, which feeds the movie's moodiness. She's joined the soaring comic imagination of Woody Allen the fantasist to the earthbound dragginess of the guy who made September, and the result is a movie at cross-purposes with itself. It isn't fully enough of one thing long enough to ever become as rich as it ought to be.
1:55: The word "SHERMAN!" appears on the screen to thunderous Max Steinerian accompaniment. Since there is no one in my apartment who might swat me with a rolled-up newspaper, I give in to the temptation to yell at the screen, "Mr. Peabody!"
Sherman's army is marching to Georgia, with deleterious effects on anything they come across that proves to be flammable. While Jan and Marsha labor in the fields, wearing out their dainty fingers to make good on Scarlett's vow to return Tara to its former glory, and Pa hides in the bushes from anyone who might be passing through wearing hospital whites and toting a butterfly net, Scarlett protects her house from home invasion from a Yankee deserter who looks as if he might have been Yosemite Sam's stunt double. This worthy is, in fact, Yakima Canutt, the legendary stunt man, stunt coordinator, and director whose willingness to risk his life whenever cameras were present did so much to enrich meat and potatoes American cinema for some five decades. In fact, he already appeared in the first half of the movie, doubling for Clark Gable, driving that horse through the flames while all of Atlanta came crashing down around his ears. (He lived to be ninety. Go figure.) Here, in one of the more textured character portraits he was given time to deliver in a movie, Yak skulks into the house, spots Scarlett on the stairs, approaches her with what are probably malign intentions, and, in a scene that George A. Romero might not have been ashamed of, takes a gunshot to the face in a startling close-up and gets to add a spectacular tumble down the stairs to his resume. Alerted by the sound of the pistol, the still weak Melanie hauls herself down the stairs, congratulates Scarlett for shooting true, helps her cover up the killing by lying to the other girls and shares Scarlett's exultation at finding money on the corpse. For just a minute there, the movie seems to be flirting with the idea of veering off in a film noir direction, but everyone comes to their sense with the news that the war is over.
2:05: A series of titles informs us that, with peace breaking out, the good people of the South are forced to contend with an enemy "more cruel and vicious" than any ever seen before: carpetbaggers! Their arrival bodes ill for our heroes, and for those hoping for a less self-pitying and deranged version of post-war Southern history, it doesn't bode well for one's blood pressure, either. The sinister forces moving in to torture the losers are represented by an image that would embarrass a third-rate editorial cartoonist: a fat black man who looks like a Reconstruction-era Robin Harris kicking back in a buggy singign "Marching Through Georgia" while the ever-villainous Wilkerson, sitting beside and literally holding the reins, drives their buggy through a crowd of desperate Southerners, violently denying them a ride. "Wail," says one man who's holding up his half-dead comrade after taking the measure of Wilerson and his riverboat-gambler look, "Ah reckon he would rather walk at that."
Wayward men are trying to make it home on foot and are at the mercy of the kindness of strangers, as Vivien Leigh would put it in a later role. Melanie urges Scarlett to greet any stragglers who pass through with open arms and nourishing soup, and suddenly the front porch at Tara's looks like an R. G. Armstrong convention. Scarlett is complaining about how much these fuzz-faced bastards eat when Melanie asks her to be charitable: for all she knows, Ashley might be on the road this minute, begging some strange woman to feed him. At this moment, who should appear lumbering down the driveway but Ashley himself. Melanie spots him and they run towards each other in a scene that reminded me, of all things, of Paul Winfield and Cicely Tyson's reunion in Sounder, though I do not know if any conscious homage was intended by that movie's director, Martin Ritt. (Though if it was, here's to you, Martin, wherever you are. You had quite a pair on you.) The scene cuts away just before, I assume, Scarlett realizes that Melanie can no longer use that excuse as a reason to feed the hungry men and turns the hose on them.
2:10: Pork informs Scarlett that the vile Wilkerson has been going around chortling that the O'Haras have had it, a $300 tax is about to be levied on Tara and Scarlett cannot pay it. Scarlett goes to Ashley and proposes that they chuck the whole sickening situation and run off together to Mexico together. Ashley responds with one of those endless exchanges where he goes for world record in showing how many different ways he can find to talk around the subject of whether he actually loves or doesn't love somebody. I've known of several actual marriages that ran their whole course in less time than it would take Ashley to confirm whether proposing to someone what was on his freaking mind. By the time he and Scarlett come out of their hidey hole and rejoin the rest of the cast, I half expect them to be greeted with the news that nobody wants cotton plantations anymore anyway because synthetic fabrics have been invented.
2:17: Wilkerson arrives at Tara with the white trash Slattery girl in tow. I have to confess, it's probably just that I've been fantasizing about her for so long, but now that I've finally seen her, the white trash Slattery girl is kind of a disappointment. Yet you could argue that it makes it seem all the more gallant of Wilkerson that he's been loyal to her all this time, apparently sticking to her after the miscarriage and all through the war, and now announcing his intention to buy Tara for her as a wedding present, because she has "a hankering" for the place. Scarlett doesn't see it that way, and hits Wilkerson in the face with a well-placed clod of dirt. Guns, dirt clods... you never know what that woman might be packing. Wilkerson rides off in a huff, and Pa, who someone really should have strapped to his bed by now, jumps onto his horse and gives chase. The horse goes for a jump and sends Pa flying; he hits the dirt like a bag of wet cement and dies as his previously hard-to-locate neck is snapped. Knowing that I'm supposed to think that this is somehow Wilkerson's fault only adds to the perverse affection that I have begun to feel for this much-maligned character.
2:20: Scarlett has the inspiration to go down to the "horse jail" where the Yankees are holding Rhett and charm him into laying a quick three hundred smackers on her. But first she has pretty herself up real good, so she decides to make a fancy new dress out of some curtains. I will not dwell on this scene, because Carol Burnett and Bob Mackie got there first.
Scarlett's visit with Rhett, who has been ingratiating himself with his Yankee captors by playing cards with them and losing money extravagantly, goes steamily but not too well. He wastes a lot of killer lines on her--my favorite may be, "You're a heartless creature, but that's part of your charm."--but she's just biding her time to hit him up for some of the money that she figures he won't be needing after the Yankees hang him, and once he gets a feel of her hands and realizes that she's been doing manual labor, he knows that she's in desperate straits and hasn't really dropped in just to coo at him. Angry and frustrated, Scarlett hits the bricks and makes her way through a busy street scene that amounts to the blessedly early climax of the movie's Birth of a Nation phase. She passes some son of a bitch buying up black votes while standing beneath a big sign reading "40 ACRES AND A MULE"--somewhere in a faraway movie revival house, a young Spike Lee reaches for his notebook--and then runs into Frank Kennedy, who is betrothed to her sister, Jan, and who is eager to show his prospective sister-in-law the big store he's successfully managing and brag to her about the fat bankroll he's stashing away. If Frank Tashlin had joined the list of directors who worked on the movie at this exact point, Scarlett's eyes would have lit up in the shape of dollar signs and steam would have whistled out her ears. She urges Frank to go for a ride with her, telling him, "I left my muff at home, so I hope you don't mind if I put my hand in your pocket." I like to think that even Rhett Butler wouldn't have a ready response to that one. I'm not sure that Benny Hill would have had a ready response to that one.
2:30: And so in quick order, Scarlett is married to Frank, the taxes on Tara are paid, and the new Mrs. Kennedy is running the family lumber business with a whip hand. When Ashley makes some gentle noises about going off to New York to rebuild his fortune and get the hell out of this movie, Scarlett throws such a tantrum about the prospect of losing such an obvious choice for the foreman of the mill that Melanie chastises him for being "unchivalrous", and the mousy thing backs right down. In her new role as Atlanta's answer to Eva Peron, Scarlett also installs convict labor at the mill, even though Ashley pouts that they'll be ill-treated and starved and he misses being the benevolent despot over "darkies." This speech gives Ashley the chance to slip in a line mentioning that, even though he had to fight for the pro-slavery cause out of loyalty to his beloved Georgia, he really was always planning to free his own slaves just as soon as his dad died and he made it back home. A reasonable man could forgive him if he'd said that he was going to free them right after his dad died and he made it back home and had one last good home-cooked meal and a foot rub from the slave who most resembled Thandie Newton, but that's not the kind of guy Ashley is.
After an invigorating day spent laying down the law and crushing Ashley's socialist principles, Scarlett steps outside to run into Rhett Butler, who the Yankees finally found just too adorable to hang. She once again makes with the ice-kitten number, while Rhett sticks with his usual tactic of trying to conceal his throbbing lust with a show of brash amusement. "You still think you're the belle of the county, that you're the cutest little trick in show leather, and that every man you meet is dying of love with you," he says, sounding a little too much as if he's reading the jacket copy from the book. Scarlett flounces off and, just to show him who's boss, rides through the shantytown area so she can be attacked by starving men who she manages to escape with the help of Big Sam, one more still-loyal former Tara slave who looks like Michael Clarke Duncan on the skids.
3:40: With Scarlett home safe, the menfolk have scattered and the women, including Melanie and Doc Meade's wife, have settled in for an enjoyable evening of mysteriously glowering at one another. Something, as Bob Dylan used to say, is happening here, but we don't know what it is. Suddenly, Rhett bursts in, half-carrying Ashley, and accompanied by Doc Meade, who's doing the famous drunk act that made him the standout performer at all those Dean Martin roasts. They are soon followed by Victor Fleming's old motorcycle club partner and notorious right-wing loudmouth, Ward Bond, playing a Yankee officer who thinks that Ashley led a raid of local men to clean up that shantytown. Rhett assures Ward that he and Ashley have spent the evening together whoring at Belle Watkins's and Ward, blushing endearingly, charges out of there in a scene that he seems to have decided to play as if he were Friar Lawrence beating cheeks out of the tomb scene. It is of course all a cunning plan to save Ashley, who before taking refuge at Belle's was indeed at the shantytown raid, where he got himself dangerously ventilated. Ever the tactful gentlemen, Rhett gives Scarlett a few minutes to compete with Melanie in slobbering over Ashley's prone form before mentioning that Frank Kennedy, who was also in on the road, is "out on Decatur road, shot through the head." Scarlett takes this news at least as badly as if she'd discovered that there were mice in the food pantry.
2:55: With Frank dead, Scarlett now has but two choices: she can marry the star of the movie, or she can spend the next several scenes in widow's weeds again. Happily, she opts for door number one. Rhett treats her to a lavish honeymoon in New Orleans, but all she wants to do is get back to Tara. Rhett complies, and the next thing you know, damned if she isn't having a baby upstairs. Rhett, too, works fast.
While waiting for the women folk to decide it's okay for him to meet his daughter, Rhett has a scene that's pretty wonderful with Mammy, who he has previously acknowledged didn't like him, and who he has described as one of the few people whose respect he covets. As he plies her with liquor in exchange for compliments about the unprecedented beauty of his child, it becomes clear that he has won her over. This is also the scene where I realized that Mammy had won me over. Watching the rapport here between Clark Gable and Hattie McDaniel, it is easy to believe the story that Gable had a shit fit after finding out that, because of Atlanta's Jim Crow laws, McDaniel and the other black actors wouldn't be allowed to attend the movie's premiere and threatened to sit it out himself. (McDaniel herself is supposed to have talked him down.) Their buddy act is interrupted by Melanie, who tells Rhett that he can go check on his family now. Mammy makes a little speech about what a happy day this is for the household, and Melanie, clutching her hands to her breast, gushes, "Oh, yes, Mammy! The happiest days and those when babies are born!" I like Olivia de Havilland, and I understand her character's function here as a counterweight to Scarlett's hard-headedness and "me want!" drive, but at times like this, it is hard to listen to her without thinking of the P. G. Wodehouse heroine who asked Bertie Wooster if he didn't sometimes think that bunnies must be attendants on the fairy queen. To his credit, Bertie did not in fact think that.
3:07: And so everything seems to have reached a happy simmering boil at Tara. But there is trouble in paradise: even with Mammy's hands of steel, the post-pregnant Scarlett can no longer fit into the size-eighteen-and-a-half-waistline duds. She's a ruined woman with a twenty-inch waistline. (In fact, Michael Sragow reports that fitting into her costumes left Vivien Leigh with an actual seventeen-inch waist, with attendant health problems.) Scarlett informs Rhett that no more children will be entering this world via her tender loins, and just to be extra careful, she's issuing a decree that they will henceforth retire to separate but equal bedrooms. "If I wanted in, no door could keep me out," huffs Rhett, smashing up a piece of the joint to make his point, but he hauls his injured pride over to Belle Watkins's anyway, for some solo marriage counseling. Belle, he tells her and us, is, despite her socially beyond-the-pale status, the emotionally healthier doppleganger of Scarlett, a smart businesswoman who hasn't let her heart grow cold. But when Rhett talks about abandoning his family, Belle counsels him to "think of the child. The child's worth ten of the mother." Rhett salutes her for her sage wisdom and makes his exit, while the camera treats Belle to one last, emotionally conflicted close-up before dropping her from the movie.
This leads to a series of surprisingly winning scenes depicting Rhett's devotion to his daughter, Bonnie. Determined that she grow up to be the jewel in the crown of Southern aristocracy, he sets to work dynamiting his own bad boy reputation, giving lavishly to the local charities and walking the streets doffing his hat to all "the old buffaloes" and "every female dragon of the old guard, even the ones played by Jane Darwell. Soon he's outfitted Bonnie in a riding outfit and has her practicing her equestrian skills with a pony. Mammy appears, with chalk dust rubbed into her eyebrows, so that we will know that some time has passed and the now talkative and pony-riding Bonnie has now simply experienced a freakish mutant growth spurt.
3:15: While Rhett is channeling all his thwarted sexual energy into his dogged pursuit of the Father of the Millennium trophy, Scarlett goes to pay a call on Ashley at the mill and happens to slip into a chaste birthday embrace just as Ashley's seldom seen but still insufferable sister India and Mrs. Meade happen to enter the room. It's about the most innocent thing they've ever done when they were alone together, but because there happened to be witnesses this time, this is when scandal threatens to break out! The best-laid plans, am I right? The incident brings out the aphoristic best in Rhett, who, in response to Scarlett's telling him that he should kill the people whose tongues have been wagging, barks, "I have a strange way of not killing people who tell the truth!" and then demands that she put on her gaudiest dress and rouge herself up good so that he can deliver her to Ashley's party: "I'm not about to deny Miss Melanie the chance to order you out of her house." Miss Melanie wouldn't dream of doing such a thing, of course, and the gossipy scandal is stopped in its tracks when Melanie embraces Scarlett in front of everyone, calls her sister, and tells Ashley to get his useless ass in gear and fetch Scarlett some punch.
So, crisis averted. But when Scarlett gets home, Rhett is doing the back stroke in the liquor cabinet and in a fearsome mood over his wife shutting him out of the bedroom while mooning over Ashley Wilkes. He places his hands on her head while talking soddenly and intensely about how much good it would do him to crack her open like a nut, and Leigh has about as good a moment as she would ever have onscreen when her emotions show the play of fear and guilt before she recovers, regains her haughty mask of composure and says, "Get your hands off me, you drunken fool." Instead, he scoops her up and carries her upstairs to the bedroom. How does it go? After the screen fades to black as he ascends the stairs, there's a cut to Scarlett in bed by herself, and Leigh gets to do a tremendous solo number--about a full minute, with a break in the middle for a brief exchange of dialogue with Hattie McDaniel, of every trick she can pull off to indicate post-coital satisfaction, not excluding a musical interlude. Then Rhett enters and apologizes for his behavior, and after she starts to tell him--"Oh, Rhett!"--that no apology is necessary, she catches herself and instead, with the air of someone who just found out that her dumbass husband bought her an iron for their anniversary, she warbles, "Oh well, nothing you do surprises me."
Okay, here's my verdict as we head into the home stretch: this movie rocks! I can't say that it's not overlong, bloated in places, simplistic, and that in its treatment of slavery and Reconstruction, it's an historical botch and flirts with being a racial abomination. But fuck it, if its attitude towards the pre-war South is sentimental in a lot of ways, its depiction of the pampered, blinkered, war-happy snobbish idiots of the old Confederacy is hardly flattering. And more to the point, to the extent that this is a movie about love-hate, about people mismanaging their romantic lives out of both practical expediency and a misguided view of the person they really are and who their soul mate ought to be, this thing is terrific. For all its soapiness, the complexities of Rhett and Scarlett's relationship might not have embarrassed Preston Sturges. I think that this went right past when I saw some of these scenes when I was a kid, not just because I missed out on the whole canvass, but also because, as silly as it might sound when I say it about a movie that's supposed to be the ultimate in crowd-pleasing old-Hollywood entertainment, I wasn't sophisticated enough to be ready for it. As a kid, I thought that romantic desire was a simple thing, invariably connected to unpolluted feelings of trust and deep affection for another person; Scarlett and Rhett's relationship seemed very strange to me, and could only be understood as something that ebbed and flowed depending on the needs of the plot, because at that time, I couldn't imagine wanting to have a relationship, let alone sex, with someone who I often wanted to see fed into a thresher. As of, oh, the spring of 1992, I've been much better equipped to make sense of this story.
Anyway, since Scarlett doesn't know how to respond to Rhett's obvious need for her to indicate that she and he are in the same marriage, he packs up Bonnie and heads for London, but the woman he hires as nursemaid has a bad case of my Aunt Betty, and Bonnie misses her pony, so back they go to Tara. Scarlett meets them at the top of the stairs; for an instant she looks glad to see Rhett, but he fails to drop to his knees and sing "Greensleeves", so she quickly pulls the drawbridge back up. It turns out that she's pregnant again. As Bart Simpson once said to Homer, you're a machine, Rhett. Thinking that Scarlett doesn't want his child, Rhett tells her to live in hope, "maybe you'll have an accident"; enraged, she lunges at him, loses her balance, and topples down the stairs. This is exactly the kind of chain of events that can give someone a complex.
3:35: Scarlett miscarries, of course, and she and Rhett go to their separate corners to brood and torture themselves. While Scarlett lies abed upstairs pining for Rhett, Rhett himself boozes and tells Melanie, who has come to comfort him, that he's always been crazy with love for Scarlett but that he doesn't think she returns his feelings. To show that he means it, Rhett squirts a few tears, which apparently did not come easy to the self-consciously macho Gable; Sragow reports that he had to pull Gable's performance in this scene out of the star with a pair of tongs. Legend has it that Fleming was brought in to replace George Cukor on the picture because Gable was comfortable with the man's man Fleming and had issues with the "women's director" (and unapologetically gay) George Cukor. If those stories are true, and if Cukor had tried to direct Gable to cry, Gable might have burned the set down.
The next morning, Rhett proposes to Scarlett that they abandon Tara and try to salvage their marriage by moving elsewhere and losing their baggage. That becomes a moot point when Bonnie tries to jump an obstacle with her pony and is killed. (Just before she jumps, Rhett, who's tried to discourage her, calls out, "If you fall off, don't come crying about it to me," which echoes his flip remark just before Scarlett fell down the stairs. Then, right after he says it, Scarlett's face fills the screen as she remembers how her own father died. Fleming and Selznick must have been so concerned about the possible traumatizing effects of the scene that they wanted to make sure there wasn't a village idiot in any theater in the world who wouldn't see the child's death coming.)
The scene that follows has to be one of the smartest in the movie: Mammy summons the dangerously pregnant Melanie and, as they climb the stairs to the room where Rhett has sealed himself up with Bonnie's body, Mammy describes how Rhett then shot the pony, "and for a minute, I thought he was gwine shoot himself"; how Scarlett and Rhett said things to each other "that like to turn my blood cold"; and how Rhett has been refusing to release the body for burial, because Bonnie was so afraid of the dark. It's really a remarkable scene, because it deepens and darkens Rhett's character by heightening things up to a high pitch of melodrama, but by having the events related by Mammy, it telescopes them and spares Gable the risk of looking ridiculous as he tried to play such a demented level of grief. Instead, it called on McDaniel to put everything she had into the speech, and she delivered. She deserved every gilded ounce of her Best Supporting Actress Oscar, "gwines" and all.
After Melanie disappears into the nursery with the unseen Rhett for awhile, she emerges to tell Mammy that "Captain Butler is quite amenable" the burying his child the next day. "Hallelujah!" says Mammy, her eyes looking up to Heaven, "I s'pect the angels fight on your side, Miss Mellie!" God, having His little joke, chooses this moment to have Melanie collapse.
3:45: Everybody gathers at the Wilkes' to wait for their chance to see Melanie kick off. Her tiny son begs for the chance to say goodbye to his mother, but the general consensus is that it's best for her to use up her last breaths with one final tete-a-tete with Scarlett. She urges her to "be kind" to Captain Butler and to keep an eye on Ashley, nudge nudge wink wink. Scarlett gets right to work on that one, watching Ashley break down at the kitchen table over the loss of the woman he loved. Why--why Ashley, says Scarlett, you really did love her, and not me. Why, yes, says Ashley, that's how it was, all right. He sounds as if it had never crossed his mind before that there might be some ambiguity related to this matter. It doesn't really matter, because Scarlett now knows that it's Rhett she really loves, not Ashley's weepy ass, so she goes chasing after him, only to find him packing:
It must be said that this ending did not meet with my grandmother's approval. When she described the ending to me, she assured me that, at some point not farther away than the next morning and perhaps twenty minutes after the closing credits rolled, Rhett got past his bad mood and hotfooted it back to Tara, to apologize to Scarlett for having been so grumpy with her but more convinced than ever that they belonged together and ready to roll up his sleeves and do whatever it took to make it work. She explained that this true ending wasn't in the movie because it had gotten rather late and they had to end it someplace, and since it was perfectly obvious that this was how it was going to turn out, they might as well wrap things up with Rhett's exit before the people who were driving home got any drowsier. As with most things my grandmother said to me, it was hard to detect a flaw in her logic. And in fact, in 1991, Warner Books published a commissioned sequel to Gone with the Wind that confirmed that Rhett and Scarlett did end up getting back together, presumably for ever after, and though it took them a shitload more pages than my grandmother thought it would, I imagine that she would have pointed out that the fact of the sequel necessitated this, since nobody who shelled out good money for the sequel wanted to get home and crack the book open and see that it consisted of the words, "Then he came back and they lived happily ever after, The End. We suggest that you hollow out the remaining blank pages of this book and use it to store your jewelry or ladylike small handgun." My grandmother wasn't just a shrewd judge of movies, she was a freaking prophet.
[Turner Classic Movies recently wrapped up its month-long tribute to the movies of the year 1939 by showing Gone with the Wind, just as I happened to be finishing reading Michael Sragow's big biography of Victor Fleming, who's probably best remembered as the principal director on both GWTW and that other 1939 lollapalooza, The Wizard of Oz. In my house, Gone with the Wind is best remembered as my grandmother's favorite movie, which has always seemed to me like reason enough to think highly of it, though reading the book about Fleming, it did suddenly hit me that, though I've seen bits and pieces of it on TV over the year, I don't think I'd ever actually sat down and, you know, watched the sucker. As it approaches its seventieth birthday--it premiered in Atlanta on December 15, 1939--it seemed time to rectify this.]
0:01: Overture! Max Steiner's overblown musical score comes blaring out of the TV for two minutes--we kick it old school at TCM--and continues to hang heavy in the air as the titles arrive.
0:06: Finally, the movie itself gets under way as the camera gloms onto the green majesty that is Tara, the O'Hara's plantation. Our heroine, the angel face in a hoops skirt known as Scarlett O'Hara (Vivien Leigh), is being entertained by, or rather entertaining herself by toying with, the Tarleton brothers, Stuart and Brent, played by George Reeves, TV's Superman, and some guy who is best remembered for not having been George Reeves. (Although one can discern, from paying close attention, to who is addressed as whom, that Reeves is playing Stuart and Somebody Else is playing Brent, it may be a sign of how far both these young men were expected to go in Hollywood that whoever put together the official version of the film's credits managed to get this wrong.) Superman and his sister are all aglint for talk of the coming war with the North, but Scarlett is bored with their goofy bluster until they offer her a tidbit of juicy gossip: Ashley Wilkes is going to ask his cousin Melanie to marry him. "You know that the Wilkes always marry their cousins!" one of the boys says, inviting a chorus of "Ewwwwwws!" from many a contemporary audience. Scarlett is troubled and distracted by the news that Ashley is seeking the hand of the woman she contemptuously refers to as "that goody-goody."
Tara's chief house slave, Mammy (Hattie McDaniel) makes her entrance, sticking her head out the window to berate Scarlett: "Miz Scarlett, you need to treat them young gentleman rakka rakka rakka don't behave like the white trash frazzin' razzin' grazzin' bohazzin' got to brush yo' teeth and floss after every meal this that an' th' other thing don't be pettin' that dog in yo' good white gloves!" I am reserving judgment on Mammy at this time because I have it on good authority that she grows on you.
0:10: Thomas Mitchell, the celebrated Hollywood character actor who played many a town drunk in his day, makes his first appearance here, a few minutes after the first appearance by his stunt double, who is seen enthusiastically jumping his horse over fences. Dismounting, Mitchell, A.K.A. Pa O'Hara, is greeted by his favorite daughter, who is all upset about the news regarding Ashley, who it seems she had her own cap set for. "Has he been trifling with you?" Pa asks. "Don't be jutting your chin at me." The tender scene of a father comforting his daughter in her moment of romantic pain is slightly undercut by the fact that everything he says sounds like dated slang that would have once gotten the speaker's mouth washed out with soap. Perhaps sensing this, Pa switches gears and, set off by Scarlett's declaration of indifference to the plantation that is her legacy, delivers an impassioned ode to the value of "the land", which is "the only thing worth fighting for, because it's the only thing that lasts." All this is supposed to be built into Scarlett because of the Irish blood that's in her. "Love of the land!" Pa gushes in his Darby O'Gill accent. "There's no getting away from it if you're Irish." The camera cuts away just before Pa reminisces about how he acquired the money to purchase Tara by tricking one of the little people out of his crock of gold and urging Scarlett to accompany him home to unwind with a delicious bowl of Lucky Charms.
0:12: Mrs. O'Hara arrives home and immediately establishes herself as a piece of work. Greeted at the door by her Yankee overseer Wilkerson (Victor Jory, early in his career as Hollywood's go-to guy for orotund villainy), she tells him, with eyes averted, that she has just been to see a Miss Slattery (later described by Pa O'Hara as "the white trash Slattery girl") and that "your child has been born and has mercifully died." She urges Pa to shitcan Wilkerson, an act that will have repercussions later.
0:15: Upstairs, Mammy is wrestling Scarlett into her corset using nothing but brute strength and her bare hands. In the off-season, Mammy tunnels for oil using nothing but a small pail and plastic shovel borrowed from a child's sandbox. She urges Scarlett to eat something before the big party so that when she gets there, she won't be seen throwing back hoeur deurves like a field hand with a tapeworm. Fiddle-dee-dee says Scarlett, Ashley Wilkes told her that he likes a girl with a healthy appetite. "What gentlemen say and what they think are two different things," says Mammy. Scarlett's anorexic body issues and Mammy's sage counsel in the way of society are two themes that we shall revisit many times over the course of the next four hours.
0:17: Now we arrive at the Wikes family plantation, Twelve Oaks. It is quickly established that Scarlett's overabundance of charms and her profligate attitude about using them dazzle any unfortunate packing a Y chromosome have made her unpopular with the other young ladies of the town, including her own sisters Jan (Evelyn Keyes) and Marsha (Anne Rutherford), as well as Ashley Wilkes's tongue-wagging sister, India. While waiting for her chance to snare Ashley (Leslie Howard), she bewitches the Danny Kaye-like Charles Hamilton and the bewhiskered Frank Kennedy, basically for the same reason that the man in the Johnny Cash song shot that man in Reno. But then, as she ascends a staircase, she looks down and is treated to a leering close-up of our hero...
0:20: ...jolly bad boy and irrepressible rapscallion Rhett Butler (Clark Gable). Scarlett notes that the "nasty dog" looks at if her as if "he knows what I look like without my shimmy." Her confidante informs her that Rhett has been shut out of good society in Charleston, is shunned by his own family, and that he once "ruined" a girl by taking her out for an afternoon buggy ride without a chaperone and then refusing to marry her. I don't know if such a character would actually have been allowed to go on living in the antebellum South, but circa 1939, so long as it came packaged with Gable's smile, it must have sounded pretty good. He's a rebel and he's never been any good...
0:30: It is when Ashley wanders off in search of Rhett that Scarlett, whose inability to nap successfully is no surprise given her temperament and the emotionally charged atmosphere, waylays him in the library. She tells him that she loves him and urges him to marry her. He begs her not to say such things, because she will "hate me forever for having heard them." She tells him that she could never hate him. He tells her that though he admires her "passion for living", it would not be enough to make a successful marriage between two people as different as they are, and he intends to marry Melanie. Scarlett reacts by yelling that she will hate him forever, which makes Ashley a regular Nostradamus. He takes his leave, Scarlett picks up a ceramic knick knack and hurls it against a painting on the wall, where it shatters, and Rhett, who has been lying unseen on a divan, jumps up as if to recruit her the Braves. She is of course horrified that he has been there all the time, a witness to her big scene, but Rhett assures her that it was a hell of a show and that he admires her feisty spirit. Unlike Lou Grant, Rhett likes spunk.
Suddenly, all hell breaks loose: war has been declared! All the guys are running around hooping and hollering and carrying on so that, for a minute, I thought they'd just found out that Alan Moore was going to finish Big Numbers. In the frenzy, Danny Kaye sidles up to Scarlett and confesses his love for her; unfortunately for all involved, she happens to be watching Ashley declare his love to Melanie (Olivia de Havilland) at that exact moment, and using the kind of logic normally only found in Ayn Rand heroines, decides that the best way to rub her misery in Ashley's face is to marry this poor idjit. In the supreme sick joke of the movie up to this point, the two couples are wed in a dual ceremony before the men head off to war. A close-up of a letter succinctly and helpfully fills in the information that, true to form, Scarlett's bridegroom succumbed to the measles and then, in his weakened state, died of pneumonia before he could have the honor of being shish kabobbed on some Yankee's bayonet on the field of honor.
0:35: With her husband dead, Scarlett is now the virgin widow Mrs. Hamilton. She's also antsy and bored, so her mother the black widow packs her and Mammy off to Atlanta to visit fussy Aunt Pittypat (Laura Hope Crews), who in her blonde curls bears an amusing resemblance to Angela Lansbury as Sondheim's Mrs. Lovett, the baker of meat pies in Sweeney Todd. She reunites with Melanie, with whom she mans a booth at the big dance to raise money for the Confederate cause. Old Doc Meade (Harry Davenport) takes the stage to announce that the South is winning victory after victory over the cowed and hapless Yankees, and so, mission accomplished, and Dewey defeats Truman and all that. He also reveals that, in the name of charitable contribution, he will be inviting the gentlemen to make cash bids for the chance to dance with the ladies of their choice. It is then that Rhett steps up and bids "one hundred fifty dollars in gold", which was big money in them days, to dance with Scarlett. Doc Meade points out that this would be improper since Scarlett is in mourning, but Scarlett announces that she's just had a breakthrough in her grief counseling and hastens to kick up her heels. But just so Rhett doesn't get the wrong idea, she tells him that she'd "dance with Abe Lincoln himself," hot tamale train or no hot tamale train.
In films made in this period, opportunities for black actors, even very good black actors, were few and far between, which meant that sometimes, the most accomplished performer in a movie might just be the guy in his underwear with tree leaves in his hair telling the white guy in the pith helmet, "Umma gumma blotta rotta." There is just such an incongruous moment here, when the big dance scene is stolen by an uncredited black man with a fiddle who appears in a single shot, stepping into the frame to say "Choose your partners for the Virginia reel!" with a booming-voiced authority that can't help but make you wonder how he'd play King Lear.
0:45: After the dance, Rhett's rascally, stop-and-start courtship of Scarlett continues, as he plies her with the latest fashions from Paris, France. "I'd never dare wear it!" Scarlett gushes over her fancy new bonnet. "You will, though," says the all-seeing Rhett. Their relationship only continues to grew knottier as she gets all hussyish and he responds with the celebrated speech about how she needs to be kissed, and often, and by someone who knows how, only to withdraw after the possibility has been raised that he himself might be up to the task. It is in moments like this that it is apparent just what a good fit this character is for the actor who plays him. I have seen some performances by Clark Gable that I thought were pretty cool and I've seen some performances by Gable, where he was miscast or running on fumes after the mid-point of his career, where he bored and irritated me, but watching him here, and knowing of the deep regard my grandmother had for this movie, I suddenly am forced to confront the possibility that, at some point in her life, something may have made my saintly grandmother horny, and that I think I might know what that thing was. As Ashley Wilkes would say, a part of me is tempted to hate the filmmakers for providing me with this information.
0:55: Ashley returns home for the holidays. To provide a main course for Christmas dinner, the great Eddie "Rochester" Anderson is seen pursuing "the last chicken in Atlanta" through the barnyard, to the strains of bucolic chicken-chasing music. Not for the first time in my life, the thought crosses my mind that being boiled in oil would have been too good for Max Steiner. Dinner goes okay, but the ever-melancholy Ashley makes it clear that things are not going well on the front lines, which are now about three feet from Aunt Pittypat's mailbox. Forty-five years old at the time-- Vivien Leigh and Olivia de Havilland were both barely in their mid-twenties--and coming off his triumphant Henry Higgins in the classic movie version of Shaw's Pygmalion, Leslie Howard famously took on the role of Ashley Wilkes under duress; he had good reason to feel miscast in the part, and one can easily imagine that if an actor felt the he was born to the role of Ashley--described by Ben Hecht, one of the key uncredited personnel on the screenplay, as "a curious fellow I could never understand"--he might feel that his best recourse was suicide. (Hecht wrote in his memoirs that the producer David Selznick "refused flatly to drop [Ashley] out of the movie", explaining that "every literate human in the United States except me had read Mrs. Mitchell's book, and we would have to stick to it.") It must be said that Howard's stoic misery in the role, the stiff-backed joylessness of a professional laboring away inside a part he doesn't want, matches up as well with Ashley's masochistic nobility and devotion to honor as anything might have. (Neither he character nor the actor is where he wants to be most of the time.) There are moments when your heart goes out to him.
1:05: With Ashley back at the front, Scarlett and Melanie throw themselves into their work as nurses at the hospital set up inside a massive church with a bigass stained glass Jesus prominent in the set design. (When the fighting moves closer to home, a barrage takes out Jesus's torso.) Outside, our heroines are approached by local wanton woman Belle Watling (Ona Munson), who has come to offer some funds for the hospital; she explains that she had been by earlier to offer both her money and her two good hands but had been sent away by the stuffy gorgons of Atlanta society, but she has been advised that Miss Melanie is "a real Christian" who will not turn the hose on her. Miss Melanie takes her offerings and thanks her, while Scarlett notes that Belle's coins come wrapped in a handkerchief decorated with Rhett Butler's initials and jumps at the chance to come down all snooty yet again.
She has more pressing concerns on the horizon. Thanks to that fast worker Ashley, Melanie is pregnant and about to become bedridden. The population of Atlanta is evacuating. At the urging of Doc Meade, Scarlett agrees to stay behind and tend to Melanie in her hour of need. But...but...with no one to chaperone them, asks Aunt Pittypat. Dammit, woman, says Doc Meade, "this is war, not a garden party!" Somewhere in a faraway movie theater, the young Mao Zedong jots the line down on his sleeve, thinking that with a little work, it might have possibilities.
1:18: While the Yankees lay siege to Atlanta, Melanie tosses and turns in bed in the throes of approaching labor. Here's the thing about Olivia de Havilland: in most of her movies, she wasn't asked to be much more than a pretty face, but unlike a lot of movie actresses who had that to fall back on, she was perfectly willing to be made up and photgraphed so that she looked like the face on an iodine bottle. Ten years later, that quality, combined with an unusually deep dive in gnarled emotional waters got her a slew of awards, including the Academy Award for Best Actress, for The Heiress, and here, her willingness to look like eight miles of bad road makes for a sight that convincingly propels Scarlett out to look for Doc Meade.
This sets up the movie's big technical feat, the sustained crane shot of Scarlett making her way through a screen full of hundreds of extras representing the enormous alfresco triage station that is now the outskirts of Atlanta. I saw this scene at some point when I was in my late teens and remembering thinking, jeez, show off much? It was a callow reaction; even if the ostentatious nature of the shot is so self-evident that you're more likely to think about what went into making it than to be moved to consider the horrors of war, it was no inconsiderable feat to keep Vivien Leigh in the frame all that time, and no small feat on Leigh's part to stay in character while picking her way through that mob and trying to maintain a steady pace for the cameraman without turning into the bouncing ball. Though it was left for Victor Fleming to execute, the shot itself was conceived by Val Lewton, who at that point in his career was David Selznick's story editor. His son, Val, Jr., insists that the old man wrote it into the treatment as a practical joke, assuming that whoever got the directing assignment would read it, do a double-take, read it again, then tear it out of the book, ball it up, throw it on the ground and stamp on it.
1:20 Having been rebuffed by Doc Meade, who has his hands full of dying men, Scarlett returns to Casa de Pittypat to guide Melanie through labor, with whatever assistance she can wrest from the squeaky-voiced goofball Prissy, played, in her film debut, Butterfly McQueen. This is the moment for Miss McQueen's big "I don't know nothin' 'bout birthin' no babies!" moment, which was so instrumental in contributing to the performer's dubious place in the pop cultural history of African-American imagery. (Years later, McQueen, who died in 1995, would say that the role of Prissy made people think of her as an "Uncle Thomasina.") Screw it, I like McQueen. Prissy is the product of weird circumstances, and the actress uses her childlike voice and trained dancer's physicality to create an arrestingly weird character, unearthly and likable. Unfortunately, Gone with the Wind has always been and always be, whatever its virtues, a movie that does its best to but the most forgiving face possible on slavery; the "darkies", to use the movie's preferred term for the black people in its midst, are well-treated by their owners and, in the special case of Mammy, invited to sort of feel as if they were part of the family. In return, they are invariably loyal and solicitous towards their masters even after slavery is supposedly a thing of the past. In this context, maybe it's a small triumph for McQueen that she managed to indirectly suggest that the people produced by such a system would at least be a little, shall we say, stunted.
1:30: Fetched by Prissy from the Red Horse Saloon, Rhett shows up with a carriage and a stolen horse to set Scarlett, Melanie, Melanie's new baby, and Prissy herself on the road to Tara. This is Gable's big chance for the manly superheroics: he gets to pilot the carriage through seas of crazed men, battling them with his fists while maintaining control of the horse, and hurtling through blazing sets in the minutes before the fires explode an ammunition dump. "Take a good look, my dear," he tells Scarlett, describing the overnight extinguishing of the Old South as "an historical moment, something you can tell your grandchildren about." Then he informs her that she'll have to make it to Tara on her own, because he's going off to join the Confederate army because he just can't lick his deep-seated attraction to hopeless causes. Scarlett, who sure does manage to get in a lot of declarations of undying love and or hatred in the course of a four-hour movie, vows to loathe him until the end of time for deserting them, but he manages to steal his first kiss from her anyway. It's in his description of filming this scene that Michael Sragow cites my favorite example of Victor Fleming's robust but practical-minded way with a melodramatic flourish: when Leigh and Gable went for a second take, he advised Leigh to struggle, but not too hard, because "it takes too long."
1:38: After a brief pass through Twelve Oaks so that we can admire Ashley's father's low-cost but functional tombstone, the weary band finally arrives at Tara. It's still standing, but Mammy informs Scarlett that the place was briefly infested with Yankees, who used it as their command post. The help is all gone except for Mammy and the loyal house servant Pork, who must be loyal as a sumbitch to hang around the people who must have given him that name, and there's nothing to eat but the unpicked radishes in the fields. Ma died as a result of a highly uncharacteristic mission of mercy to help the white trash Slattery girl, and not only has Pa gone completely off his rocker, but the makeup team had moved in to whiten his hair and eyebrows and orange up his complexion, so that he looks less like a man aged beyond his time, which was probably the idea, than the world's tallest Oompa-Loompa. Even Mammy, the closest thing on the plantation to a rock of stablity, is showing signs of losing it: she puts up a good front, but says "gwine" so often that it comes across as an undisguised cry for help. Of all the phoneticisms that caught on among white writers who thought they were trying to convey black speech patterns, "gwine" has to be the most misbegotten. It is possible to say "yassuh" in a way that sounds as if you were aiming at "yes sir." There is simply no way to say "gwine" in a way that sounds as if you meant "going to". Say "gwine" and the only thing it sounds as if you were trying to say is "gwine." Anyway, Scarlett staggers out to the fields, treats herself to a radish, and vows that, as God is her witness, she'll never be hungry again. This movie's been on for a while now. Are you hungry? Delicious snacks and refreshing soft drinks are available in the lobby!
I wasn't planning on posting here this week. (Though I may still be among the guest bloggers at Steve M.'s place if anything happens in the news besides a bunch of idiots screaming that Obama doesn't want you to know what's in Soylent Green, or if I can think of something to say about them besides, "Kill 'em! Kill 'em before they breed!!") But before I switch the lights off, I did just want to expand on my previous post and clarify that I'm only planning a hiatus so that I can recharge my batteries, get my personal life in order, and investigate this "proof-reading" of which you speak. An awful lot of people who reacted to that post took it to me that I was kicking the computer out the window, burning down the blog, and salting the earth on which it stood. Upon reflection, I can understand why long-term readers in particular might have gotten that impression, since they'd had to sit through the occasional maudlin hissy-fit. (Also, my pal David tells me that the clip from Dr. Strangelove may have sent the wrong message. I patiently pointed out to David that the lyrics of that song clearly state that "we will meet again", even if we "don't know where, don't know when." He even more patiently explained to me that the nuclear explosions in that scene cast the literal meaning of the lyrics in an ironic and doubtful light. Go figure.) Right now it's just a hunch, but I'm thinking I'll be back here come October or November, with bells on. There was still a 5% chance that I'd hang myself before fall just to see if maybe Hell is cooler, but that just got blown out of the water by the news that Macy Gray is going to be on the next season of Dancing with the Stars. She is one of the record-smashing ten of sixteen contestants who I've actually heard of before, and she's plenty.
