THREE WESTERNS: Blackthorn, Rank, Buck

REMARKS ON WESTERN MOVIES:  BLACKTHORN, RANK & BUCK

The aesthetic of Blackthorn, a sequel to the story of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, is more Henry Farny than Charlie Russell.  Long pale vistas with a dark strand of far away travelers. Or possibly a man on horseback coming down a mountain trail full of shale.  It’s not as “pretty” but far more striking.  Figures struggling across a salt flat, silhouettes on the horizon.  And that’s kind of the story of the whole film.  Classic, but not what we’re used to -- renewed.

Sam Shepard, who plays Cassidy has an “earned” face and an easy seat in the saddle that come from being there, doing that.  Nicolaj Coster-Waldau looks so much like the young Shepard that they must have gone out with a genome card to look for him.  Instead of the distraction of someone “being” the young version who is only vaguely reminiscent, we have the first jolt of “how did they DO that?” and then it was fine.  Every actor in this film, including all the indigenous people going about their business, are really fine.

The plot is the usual Western one: survival.  And for the last few decades the specific problem of survival in old age.  These are not the geezers of the early Westerns, kind of eccentric and laughable with funny voices.  These are the erect and dignified men they always were, just a little tired.  They make us distrust this handsome younger Spanish fellow with the mustache.  He thinks too much.

The second film I want to bring up is about young men with maybe a ten year -- if that -- career as bull riders:  “Rank.”  The title is a double-meaning.  It’s a documentary about a hyped version of something that was once real.  First, rodeo made wine from the grape juice of ranch life; then came the brandy of national competitions, professionalized and glitzy.  And finally this kind of rocket fuel made by skimming off only the bull-riding competition.  These men are all young, they enter walking among literal fireworks playing around their feet (no horses), patriotic displays (SEALS rappelling down from choppers), and brass bands.  

In crisp new pearl-snap shirts, body-armor vests, and fringy chaps with Christian symbols on them, this is a whole different thing than veteran Freckles Brown taking one last turn on ol’ unridden Tornado.  This is not Robert Mitchum in “The Lusty Men.”  This is out of the extreme sports world with guys who take as much care with their rosin-soaked glove attachment to the bull harness as a ballerina twisting her carefully broken-in pink satin toe in the rosin box:  everything depends upon that one connection to a whirling world.  Except that no one ever gave a ballerina a million dollars and a massive gold belt buckle for being the best dancer in the world.  The final irony is that the World’s Best Professional Bull Rider turns out to be from Brazil.  Repeatedly.

The third movie is also documentary:  “Buck” which is about Buck Branaman, the real “horse-whisperer” who coached Robert Redford for the movie of that name.  This one is about the two sides of the American West: men so twisted by the drive to survive and their own failure to understand anything but raw force, that they beat their own children nearly to death -- opposed to the small-town Montana coach, sheriff, and ranch couple who stepped in to rescue Buck and his brother when they were still young enough to turn in a different direction.  Their mother had died before she could find a way to take the boys and get out.  Even after the boys had gone to the foster family that raised two dozen boys from similar situations, Buck’s dad lay on his belly up in the hills, watching him through the scope on his rifle.  He declared that when they were eighteen, he would kill them.  I don’t know why he would wait.

Rescued together, the two boys turned out differently.  Not THAT differently.  They are peaceful men and both are horse-whisperers.  There are a LOT of whisperers in the West and they are often survivors.  I expect that Sam Shepard himself is more of a whisperer than a bull-rider.  On purpose.  Check out his writing.

“Buck” is also a documentary, but something happened that couldn’t have been planned.  The concept was to film Buck doing one of his innumerable horse clinics at which he addresses horses with problems and shows the owners how to figure them out and solve them.  This time a young woman brought a horse that had been oxygen-deprived at birth.  The mare died and the colt was not breathing at first but was revived.  It was never quite right.

So Buck began to work with the animal, an unaltered stallion.  It seemed spoiled and a little erratic.  Then suddenly it went into a rage and attacked the man who normally worked with it.  The tape nearly showed a man being killed.  Buck finally eased the horse into its trailer, using two long limber sticks with flags on the end -- slowly and carefully hazing him along.  Before that, held in a corral, the crazed studhorse would lunge over the man-high rails in an attempt to bite anyone who walked near.  

The young woman then confessed about the damage she had sustained, the eighteen other uncut stallions she had on her ranch, and other things Buck should have known about beforehand.  He addressed her in no uncertain terms, saying she was endangering herself and others, that she was irresponsible, that it was no kindness to the animals, reminding her again and again that it was HERSELF she was punishing.  He did not say what was perfectly obvious and what she sort of knew before showing up with her killer horse: it would have to be put down.  No human miracle could save a horse like that.  She was near being a murderer with her fantasies.

This is not a safe world.  People who work with big animals know that, both in the old days when horses were still cowboy transportation or now in the rodeo ring where the these bull riders have FOUR clowns -- who don’t even bother to be funny, because their job is saving lives.  We romanticize the danger so we can enjoy the adrenaline rush.  Admit it:  this was a MUCH more interesting documentary with a rank horse in it that Buck could not save.

Many of us hope to learn about animals (including people) who are uncontrollable and dangerous, even to their own families.  But some of us get off on it.  The more shooting, the more fist-fights, the better.  It is the survivors -- and there are lots of them in the West -- who must teach the sensationalists how to tell when the line is crossed.  Marked by scars, usually.

"UNTOLD SCANDAL": A REVIEW/REFLECTION

Some slippery and rather dangerous subjects have been floating around in my head, but couldn’t be addressed without exposing fragile people or causing unwarranted gossip.  But there’s always a way and last night my movie provided it.  The movie “Untold Scandal” (“Joseon nmnyeo sangyeooljisa”) is a 2003 South Korean film.  It is a translation from “Les Liasions dangereuses” which is a novel Choderlos de Laclos that has been restaged and refilmed repeatedly.  The appeal is that it shows how the deep personal framing of intimacy can be a vulnerability that attracts those who feed on control, seeing it as power.

The plot assumptions depend upon letters, in this case tabloid-sized rice paper with elegant columns of brushed ideograms.  There are two sets of lovers, one young and one old, and one “empress” manipulator who ends up in this version as anguished as her victims.  Much of the appeal is in the gorgeous  Korean material culture, esp. the costumes.  http://www.lifeinkorea.com/culture/clothes/clothes.cfm  The story needs to be in a patterned and rigorous society where the rules can only be tolerated by a second level of “unrule” that is just as patterned but defiantly subversive.  It is the interplay of compliance versus corruption that makes hypocrisy and nakedness compelling as both romance and philosophy.

If this isn’t the ground of theatre, I don’t know what is.  The rigors of what is composed onstage with the underlying emotional stress of the offstage company has been best laid out in ballet movies.  One could include “Black Swan.” Sometimes the situation is funny, as in “Day for Night,” a Truffault movie about actors making a film.

But schools, armies, governments, small towns -- the potential is everywhere because inner states of yearning and fulfilled intimacy are so often shaped to the point of deformation by conventional society, which functions through power and especially control.  Power over the young, the female, the lower class, the innocent and so on.  The dynamics are near-universal.  Think of the series called “In Treatment” in which the vulnerability of the clients is brought to the powerful psychotherapist who is secretly riven by his own issues.  Like Lady Jo, he ends up nearly destroyed by his love for his clients and his desire to help them in what he hopes, unlike Lady Jo, is a benign way.

And on the other hand, the vulnerable, the flawed, the needy, look for a powerful patron to control their lives for them, to be responsible for them and “take them away” from all troubles.  If the arrangement doesn’t work or even leads to disaster, in the mind of the supplicant it is all the fault of the powerful person who was supposedly in control.  It becomes a betrayal, even a sin.

And this is the power of the underdog, the one that Perls says “always wins.”  The prostitute, the boy or girl of the streets, the slave, the crippled -- seem to lose and yet, as in “Untold Scandal,” the karma of the oppressor seeks the tyrant out and at the very least they are scorned.  From the lofty vantage point of the writer or observer, control freaks are losers who may pay a terrible price -- hung by their heels.

These stories are obviously meant to be cautionary tales but, just as obviously, they are exciting and memorable, particularly if the struggle is beautiful and full of surprises.  http://www.talktalk.co.uk/events/2005/untoldscandal/    The English versions are lovely, but this one is exotic and, one could argue, timely politically.  In fact, maybe the real value of such tales is that after watching them we can more easily recognize the same patterns in the lives around us.  The coach who seduces the student, the politician who has a mistress or two on the side, the Mormon whose fifth wife is fifteen years old.  But what about the seemingly wicked who turn out to have been using their power for good:  the brothel madam who protects her whores, the mafia don who saves widows, the drug dealer who sends ghetto kids to college.  

If a human being survives by constantly taking in information about the world, (mostly through the senses) sorting of what we see, hear and so on; and if that human being needs principles and clues about the life around them so as to make good decisions about how to proceed, then this whole category of stories is valuable, not at all pornographic or frivolous.  The tales are particularly useful if they frame the totally foreign and unknown (sci-fi counts) in the familiar forces of every human relationship, particularly those of families.  (All the main characters in “Untold Scandal” appear to be cousins.)

I’m hearing from my aging acting class cohort that they feel “real” acting training has now gone by the wayside -- that youngsters no longer care and no longer even bother to learn their lines.  They seem to have none of the “heart” the old-timers remember.  It is the young who are corrupt and frivolous, looking for power without vulnerability.  This cries out for a novel or movie to stage the puzzle.

No longer is the “action” in the rigid world of major ballet companies nor Broadway production nor even the labyrinths of Hollywood or television.  I’ve been lucky to have seen some of the real action: ensemble repertory theatres where the actors don’t just learn lines but possibly write them, where the actors do trapeze work and juggle.  Where the social advocacy is stronger than personal genius.  A friend sent me a YouTube vid she considered horrifying:  It was a Chinese production of “Swan Lake” in which the prima ballerina swan posed en pointe on top of the prince’s head.   I’m just enough of an appreciator of the deviant to have found it quite wonderful, as much fun as the male version of “Swan Lake” -- was it “Drake Lake”?

The trouble is that for people who have thought the world of rigid conformity was the only one in existence and so have suffered in order to fit themselves into it, the only way to justify themselves is to impose that same order on everyone else, thus forcing the strong among them to form a new and defiant order under the surface, secretly, and inevitably both disruptive and renewing.  Or the young may fly in hopes that somewhere there is a place for them.  The most dangerous liaison of all is the one that reveals alternative worlds.

"RABBIT-PROOF FENCE":Review

For many years I’ve heard about “Rabbit Proof Fence” but never got around to watching it, though I’m especially fond of Australian films and, of course, attuned to the theme because it is just like the same situation here in the US and also in Canada. The simplicity and beauty, the care with which the film is made, mark it as exceptional and classic. I’m glad I didn’t see it until the invention of the DVD commentary, because this one was a proper narrative, very valuable. It was not silliness or false praise, but truly illumined the film. Phillip Noyce describes what powers great art: emotional connection and fearless exploration, two of the most human elements.

Branagh’s character, A.O. Neville, was one of those unfortunate Brit managers who had to deal with forcing all involved parties up against something impossible. He thought he was “saving” “Stone Age” people by bringing them into 20th century Brit culture, which is one definition of Empire. As someone here in Valier remarked to me about Blackfeet, “it was all right to take the land away from them because they weren’t using it.” As a famous US military educator of Indians often said, “We will kill the Indian but save the man.” To do our work.

This film was part of the exploding realization that Western culture is not only damaging to the poor people, but also twists up the psyches of those who believe they are privileged, and gradually destroys the planet we all share. Australian aborigines, judged by their ability to live in the outback with only a walking stick spear and a boomerang, should have been our role models all along. It was in the Sixties that thoughtful people began to realize that a rich spiritual life is more valuable than oil. (I did not say religion and I did not say church.)

Thinking Darwinian meant that the Western world could see that evolution “rose” up through plants which are at the mercy of their environment, through animals that could travel to a better place, and then to humans who could stay where they were and force the place to accommodate them. It also fueled the domestication of animals into breeds, mostly successful at first. But now notoriously degenerated into the incestuous damage of inbreeding dogs for the sake of their appearance until they are grotesque sufferers from deformations that make them hardly able to breathe or walk. Properly managed, Angus or Hereford cows are an achievement. Improperly managed, we have a generation of self-destroying racehorses. This obsession with manipulating heredity became entwined with the inheritance of wealth and contempt for anyone not wealthy.

Weren’t aborigines simply more animal than the rest of us, to be helped to evolve into us? Well, not QUITE us, of course. Human enough to evoke compassion, but not human enough to be themselves. Good servant material, as the lower classes always had been. The result (I will say as I write on Good Friday) was the crucifixion of their culture and their lives. Branagh as actor is an enlightened man and famous enough that his presence helped finance the film. He did not play Neville as a monster or a dummie, but as a real person in a job he didn’t choose, trying to protect people by playing God. No consciousness at all of the evil he was doing.

Phillip Noyce carefully explains how he found the three girl actors, how they were coached and “handled,” though none of it would have worked if they hadn’t been such radiant personalities in the first place. The girls had an “acting coach” who operated much like Robert Chew for “The Wire,” a person of their own culture who also was skillful in the craft. Everlyn Sampl, the oldest girl, is still acting. There’s a clip of her on a Australian soap at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gFwlCRjFkI

But to be frank, the person whose story really touched me the most deeply was Moodoo, the tracker, played by David Gulpilil, whom we first met in “Walkabout,” the proud and anguished young man who ends in suicide. This is SO close to the situation of some Native Americans and also some blacks. David has a website. http://www.gulpilil.com/ He also has some of the same troubles all indigenous peoples seem to have with alcohol and domestic violence -- symptoms of pain in every culture.

But he genuinely IS a tracker and kept proving to Noyce that he COULD track the girls, even with socks over their shoes, brushing out their tracks, walking backwards and wading in streams, even though the script called for him to be baffled. He indulged Noyce at the director’s request. Then when Noyce edited the shots of David’s face into the film, he discovered that David, on his own, had woven a bit of subtext into the film: Moodoo did not want to catch the girls. He would have liked to have taken his own daughter out of that place and could only admire the girls’ feat, but couldn’t imitate them because of his own obligations.

Making this sort of movie always kicks up a lot of controversy and some expected the aboriginal community to protest that they were once again being exploited by a white man, but it fizzled -- no doubt due to the very high quality of the movie and the constant consultation with tribal people. Noyce himself is a white native of Australia who grew up in contact with aboriginals. The British handling of indigenous peoples has always been more paternalistic than that of Americans (Brit reservations were closed), and the people themselves have picked up the self-protection of guarding boundaries so one can go to the community in the movie but only with permission from the people themselves. They have been quick to capitalize on the fame of the movie and no one should begrudge them that. Their tolerance has led to both “Whale Rider” and the pop Tom Selleck “Western” called “Quigley Down Under” which employed a very long list of aboriginals.

So -- if I can be indulged enough to stick with the Good Friday imagery, after repression of peoples comes first invisibility -- apparently no one in the tomb -- and then the resurrection, which is a kind of transformation. “Rabbitproof Fence” is part of that process, envisioning. The real work comes later, as when Jesus returned reincarnated to prepare breakfast on the shore for the disciple fishermen returning from a night’s effort.

"THOSE WHO LOVE ME CAN TAKE THE TRAIN": A Review

“Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train,” is a French film that takes off from a remark by someone who asked to buried in a family plot away from Paris, which friends complained would make it hard to visit his grave. But the tone and content are transformed by expanding the thought to an enactment that becomes a “roman” (a novel) about a train (chemin de fer) and adds the trope of a big old disintegrating house.

Rather off-puttingly, the film leaps into a crowded train station with confused people trying to find the cars reserved for their traveling group. They are types, but also individuals. “Where’s Frederic?” they ask. A missing son. “Do you know Claire’s secrets?” She’s an addict, but has other secrets as well. There are two fat old women, one who does her best to get things organized and one who thinks only of mythologizing herself. And the men -- they revolve mostly around two figures: the publisher who is objective, stoic in the face of gut-ripping developments, always truth-telling; and the waif, a rent-boy, instantly loveable even for the film viewer.

Traveling on the road alongside the train is a private car where the coffin rests behind the driver, the dead man’s nurse and drug source, an addict himself, of course. It takes a while to figure all this out, though there is a guiding “voice over” taped interview and occasional glimpses of the dead man in his studio, still alive. One of those powerful, grandiose narcissistic artists -- not quite so good as Francis Bacon, we’re told. The studio is dominated by a huge truncated bit of ancient marble, a nude man with no legs or arms or head. Still really alive is the artist’s twin, who is quite different, the one who stayed in Limoges to run the family business, which was shoes -- not china. He wasn’t good at the business part.

In short, this is just the sort of movie I really like. Ambiguous, complex, full of old tropes renewed, clichés made unique. It has a good deal of cynical bite to it. I know a few of these types and love some of them.

Once the train arrives in the station (by now the car with the dead man has run off the road and is stranded in a field of grain) there is another swirl of local relatives, not so different from the “Parisiennes” after all. Car doors slam and slam and slam. An amazing cemetery, mile after mile, then a brief interment. All that remains is passing the “stormy night” in the decrepit house.

“Frederic” is found, at an awkward transgender stage that is deeply absorbing for both the characters and the viewer. All through, “her” behavior is wildly appealing but by the end we are looking at her literally stripped. She has comforted others, delighted in the old twin’s endless stash of fabulously sexual shoes (prick heels, insides smooth as vaginas -- slip in your foot, my dear), and advised the pregnant recovering addict who will soon reunite with her husband, dopey as he is.

All through, even while the group discovers the old man’s hoard of dry bread he keeps to feed ducks and converts it into French toast (oh, the metaphor of it all!), the poker-faced editor watches and the boy with the beautiful suffering face revolves around him. The boy is HIV-positive and the older man knows it. At this event they realize they share a lover. (The boy may be the only one who truly and innocently loved that demanding, twisted old man. But now, in grief, he reaches out.) How can this possibly turn out happily?

In the end, there is only resignation and the passing landscape. The iron snake of desire curves through all our lives, coming and going. Buddhists advise us to avoid pain by letting desire go, but standing at the station is no way to live.

Recently I reconnected with a friend from undergrad years (’57-’61) and found him also in a mood to reflect on the group that traveled together for four years. If you’re up on theatre, you’d recognize some names, both Broadway and Hollywood. The guys in our little circle were mostly gay, but I’m told they never talked about it even though they roomed with each other. I knew it. Never gave it a second thought. I was in an extended latency period. All had platonic female friends and often lived with them in friendships that have endured for decades. Some have married and had children, others not. Some are in same sex marriages. He says, “Love goes deeper, into your heart of hearts, soul of soul -- sort of like nudity on stage. In acting school we were taught to bare our SOULS -- which is more difficult.” And, he advises, “Potency wanes, desire never.”

We were repressed, I suppose, but we forget today how dangerous sex was before the pill and when a reputation, conformity, was sometimes all we had. There were suicides. Acting -- or even preparation for acting -- is no way to be stable. It is psychotherapy with no analyst, no small safe room. It is trapeze work without a net -- just upturned eyes, watching, gasping. The two suicides we’ve identified were both jumpers. Our caution has mostly protected the gays among us from AIDS. The women who have died so far have been cancer deaths. But have we missed out? Would our talents have grown more vivid, larger, if we hadn’t been so cautious? Did we squander our genius?

But the fact that we were so repressed and yet so self-analyzed, so acting out but mostly onstage, has given us all a kind of protection from soul death. It has also somehow compressed us, made us more sturdy. Maybe we have a sense that there are many acts in a lifetime, unlike the traditional three in a play, and that developments might be completely unexpected. There might be footnotes.

In “Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train” one of the last scenes is the transgender person in the bathtub. By now the water in the old house has gone cold and even the cold water has run out. The tough alpha guy answers the phone wearing only a towel. He is asked by his lover to enter a sort of marriage to “raise” the HIV-pos waif. He refuses. He has run out of courage. The transgender person, who has bravely suggested that she is pregnant with her new self, also runs out of courage and sobs on the edge of the tub. Will they find new courage? The tough Alpha male with all his resources and the vulnerable new woman who is her own tender creation? I sure hope so. I forget they’re fiction.

SOLDIER'S GIRL: Review and Reflection

Gender binaries have become so troublesome that social philosophers have begun to reflect on them.  When I say “trouble,” I mean murder.  People are murdered because they don’t fit our notions of gender binaries.  I’m pondering “Soldier’s Girl,” which is a movie version of a real event in which a soldier was bludgeoned to death as he slept -- by his fellow soldier, his dorm mate.  The killer administered capital punishment for loving a person who crossed the binary division -- not just a cross dresser but a transsexual person in the process of going from male to female.  Post-surgery, the relationship would no longer have been “homosexual.”

This script is exemplary in its clarity, its foreshadowing of what we know will happen, and its simplicity in presenting a convincing love story.  Calpurnia (Lee Pace) is elegant, played with dignified grace by a male actor in prosthetic breasts and a wig.  She is not a campy over-the-top swish figure like the announcer at the competition she’s in, but a calm, generous, balanced person whose femininity is more Grace Kelly than Cher.  (Actually, she has shoulders like Linda Evans.  I wonder whether a genital eversion amounts to as much plastic surgery as Cher has had.  Chas (formerly Chastity) Bono knows for sure.)

Barry (Troy Garity) is a simple guy -- not too swift and not very experienced.  I kept thinking about Pierre in the Audrey Hepburn version of “War and Peace,” and found out why when I went to imdb.com -- Henry Fonda played Pierre and Fonda was this actor’s grandfather.  Garity looks like his father, Tom Hayden.  It’s Calpurnia who is reminiscent of Jane Fonda, his mother.

Leggo words, assembled from particles, are unfortunate predeterminers.  “Homosexual” is as misleading as “atheist.”  Both are stuck together from pre-existing concepts and both over-control the discussions.  It is possible to be homosexual while being strongly “male” and possible to be deeply religious while not believing in God (theism).

Gender identity emerges from the interaction of a number of continuums.  To which of the binary are you assigned physiologically?  Even without discussing the chromosomal variations (not just xx and xy, but also xxx or xyy or broken versions with incomplete or doubled sections (sextions?) of chromosomes) and all the bodily and temperamental variations a person can be born with or develop at puberty or have traumatically imposed, common sense and ordinary experience shows that a male can be anywhere on the continuum of “maleness” in terms of size, aggression, and so on.  He can be Conan the Barbarian but if his sperm isn’t dynamic and fertile -- is he a male?  The same for a female.  She can be the most curvaceous and alluring woman of all time, but can she produce healthy babies?  Which criteria are you choosing?  

The aspect that crushes all the life out of discussion is desire in the sense of lust.  Whom do you want to have sex with?  Someone the same sex or someone of the opposite sex?  But those aren’t the only choices or even the controlling choices.  In this movie it is clear that Barry loves elegance, high class presentation, kindness, and Calpurnia does, too, so they meet there, escaping the accusation of "low class."  They are both genuine in the sense of character and they meet there in honesty and acceptance.  She is knowing and he is innocent so opposites can also meet.  These two are not game players.

So what about authenticity and truth?  Who is putting on more of a show in drag, the singers at Visions or the soldiers in camo fatigues at the base?  Is the announcer at the competition more of a cross-dresser than the female sentry at the gate in the beginning of the film?

Our culture makes a binary of gender identity more than others do.  The Navajo defined many roles, some depending on what one wants to do -- the things normally done by women because they are anchored by babies or the things normally done by men who go out to hunt.  In many cultures the priestly/sacred/holy people are not gender-assigned or are considered both.  But they cannot be menstruating women.  It’s the baby part that’s the big divider.  But even then, an assigned nurturer is also a mother even if male.

Simpler animals sometimes have the ability to change back and forth between male and female, maybe depending on the ecology or maybe on whether there’s a shortage of one or the other.  Some animals carry both genders and can fertilize themselves.  There is probably not a lot of pillow talk in those species (angleworms), but people do talk to themselves. (jokes)  Androgeny and/or bisexuality are quiet values in some human contexts.  Think Teresias.

No one understands how it is that an apparent man can be innerly and utterly convinced of being a woman or vice versa.  It is easy to understand that some people don’t fit into the culture’s idea of what they ought to be and how that stigma can cause them to be targets.  Ugly women, pretty men.  Brainy women, ineffective men.

How did the sexual identity of “whom do you desire” get to be so important in our lives?  Haven’t there always been people who liked their own sex better than the opposite one?  (“Liked” being a euphemism for wanting to fuck.  Why so many euphemisms now that kids use the “f” word as much as combat Marines?  What kind of role swap is that?)  Haven’t there always been people who found elements that deeply touched them and made them yearn for fusion with individuals that were not “appropriate”?  (I hate that prissy word.)  One of my favorite movies is “Carrington,” about a totally mismatched couple who were deeply in love with each other though they fucked nearly everyone in sight and the bedpost as well.  

Why is sex the controlling moral dimension in our lives in a time when we can surgically change our bodies, chemically control our fertility, get professional help with relationships, earn money, co-habit with no license, and die for our country without regard for gender?  Is that why?  Is it all this freedom that makes everyone obsess so much about the subject?

Or is it that sex keeps us from thinking about violence and greed?  It’s not that we’re all so sexually hot or why would there be such a need for Viagra?  Pole-in-the-hole is not all there is to sex.  REAL intercourse in the sense of physical intimacy is skin and brain: a million little physical, mental and emotional transactions of sensation that enmesh and bond and console.  Otherwise, it’s friction followed by a sneeze.

There are some fascinating levels to think about in this film but one of the most absorbing -- if trivial -- is the difference between fiction and reality.  The real Calpurnia is certainly attractive, but in quite a different way from the movie version.  The real one is almost cute, a little touch childlike.  The movie version of the military camp is toned-down with a homogenized (they all look sort of cub-like) cast including tolerant hets, Asians and blacks.  Testimony was that the taunts and harassment of Barry were actually much worse.  Andre Braugher is one of my fav actors and always carries with him a kind of moral force not seen a lot in ordinary life.   Barry’s mother is not as I would have imagined her, but no doubt this murder was an experience that changed her.

It is my hope that this movie will help to change a culture lost in hatred and ignorance.  It’s not the only force for good, but it is a vivid and heart-breaking one.

SPENSER'S GOOD -- JESSE STONE IS BETTER

Spenser (with an “s” like the poet) was always a fav of mine -- what English teacher wouldn’t like him?  (Actually, it was really Hawk I watched for.)  But then I asked Netflix for a list of Ridley Scott movies and here was Jesse Stone, a Tom Selleck incarnation of  a Parker hero and a big success.  So I ordered all the Jesse Stone movies they had and they were great.  By this time I realize I’m really watching for Robert B. Parker.  And that means his books.  So I went over to the Valier library and found a whole shelf.  At least.

I checked out an armload and got to work.  What is it that so captures people about Robert Parker books?  He had a Boston University Ph.D. and taught college for a while, so he was attumed to young people, but he said (and why would I quibble?) that his secret was his long marriage.  Constancy and faithfulness to family (however defined) were key.  Something like that was his practice of writing five pages every day except Sunday, very much like my blogging the same amount every day, including Sunday.  Doesn’t make me better, but it’s a good thing to do.  That practice (I don’t really like to call it a discipline because after you’ve been doing it a while, it becomes a need, an itch, even a craving) increases one’s skill.  One’s writing becomes tighter, more spare, maybe more vivid.  He didn’t really seem to mind a few cliches and neither do I.  He uses a lot of street talk.  Sometimes he sounds like Tim.  Of course, 1986 street talk is a little dated.

By now I’ve read “Taming a Sea-horse” which is 1986 Spenser in which he goes looking for a girl who’s been sucked into prostitution (wrong verb, probably, since she wasn’t very passive -- more of a sucker than a sea horse, certainly no duchess but pretty indiscriminate.), gets threatened, and succeeds -- for what it’s worth.  The five pages a day become short chapters, 35 of them, straightforward, just about ready for a movie shoot as scenes.  “Susan” is there and contributes theory.  I can’t remember what was the cutting edge stuff in 1986.  She thinks hookers and their pimps fall in love.  AIDS doesn’t cross anyone’s mind.

Since Spenser is looking for a prostitute, he ends up where they are.  Here’s one whoremonger’s “sophisticated” outfit:   “. . . if Walt Disney had been obsessed with sex and dominance, and was uncertain of his manhood and had grown up reading the novels of H. Rider Haggard and had the sensibility of a dung beetle, he’d have founded a chain of clubs just like this.”  There’s a complex of stuff in this statement.  On the one hand we all have the satisfaction of what seems like a thorough put-down.  It’s a pretty good “take-down” on childish values, uneducated romance, and hopelessly low motives.  On the other hand, it’s a snob’s opinion.  Isn’t Parker making fun of us, who are reading all this made-up nonsense?  How the heck does HE know what an expensive mob scene is like?  What the movies show?  (How would we know any different?)  We hear a LOT about clothes, nail polish colors, what the characters are eating and drinking, the shops along the sidewalks where Spenser goes.  This seems to be persuasive: a lot of the “New Journalists” seem to think such “factoids” are important.  Product placement.

Jesse Stone is supposed to be darker and more damaged than Spenser.  Tom Selleck plays him as older, which Selleck is, but Parker thought it worked.  Here are the first two paragraphs of the beginning of the first Jesse Stone book, “Night Passage.”

“At the end of the continent, near the foot of Wilshire Boulevard, Jesse Stone stood and leaned on the railing in the darkness above the Santa Monica beach and stared at nothing, while below him the black ocean rolled away toward Japan.

“There was no traffic on Ocean Avenue.  There was the comfortless light of the streetlamps, but they were behind him.  Before him was the uninterrupted darkness above the repetitive murmur of the disdainful sea.”  

Almost sounds as though we might be headed into post-traumatic stress syndrome.  It’s not Mishima, but it’s poetic and existential.  Parker made Selleck promise that none of the scripts (which were considerably changed) would ever drop two premises:  Jesse Stone can NOT quit drinking and he can NOT quit loving his former wife.  The meshing of those two factors is what makes the character tick and keeps him appealing.  He’s actually Matt Dillon on “Gunsmoke.”  He will never turn away from Miss Kitty and he will never sully his badge.

Comparing “Night Passage” the book with the movie is very useful.  Both are fairly straightforward plots with the emphasis on character.  There are passages of lyrical writing.  The movie is beautiful throughout.  (The director was a cameraman in his early years.)  The setting is more-or-less Marblehead, which is picturesque anyway.  In Jesse’s world there are two kinds of women besides his selfish and fickle ex-wife.  One kind is stick-thin but glamorous women who fall into bed before even going on  their first date, and the other is the inappropriate (black, married, too old, too young, too ugly, a nun) but brave and smart helping woman.  The black one does the repartee.  Jesse says, “I know you’re married but if you decide to have an affair, will you let me know?”  She says as her exit line, “I’ll put you on the list.”  (She’s not in the book.) Jesse Stone is his own Hawk.  In the movie he is accompanied everywhere by a dog and lives in a house accessed along a gangway over the water.  Gorgeous moons and sunrises.  

This book has 77 five-page units.  The book version is a lot meaner and dirtier, since the movie was meant for television and needed a more, let’s say, “family” tone.  More bad guys in the movie are just foolish.  The racist posse comitatus is gone.  Tom Selleck is such a big humorous lunk of a guy, he never really gets into dark stuff.  Compare the BBC “Mystery Theatre” series like “Cracker” or “Wire in the Blood.”  Robson Green has very much the same sort of humorous, tolerant, but irremediably damaged sort of persona.  The scripts are mostly taken from the novels of Val McDermid, truly perverse and twisted stuff, but intensely elaborate descriptions of psychosis.  I bought one of her novels, finished it -- gritting my teeth -- and slipped it into the garbage.  By the time Green and his producer work things over, they are slightly improved but Brits have an appetite for ghastly tortures that’s far beyond that of we Disneyfied yanks.

Towards the end Parker was writing Westerns.  Some would say he was writing them all along.  “Appaloosa” strongly echoes “Gunsmoke” on the screen.  I’ll have to round up the book.  In summary, Parker is clearly a genre writer -- never going over the heads of his readers and supplying enough detail for them to fantasize being able to walk into wicked places and “handle themselves.”  But they should not imagine that it is any less imaginary than Greek drama with masks.  The Big Man with the lovable flaw.  We can’t resist.  Shakespeare, after all, was also a genre writer.

SEXUAL "GAME" -- how times change

http://www.youtube.com/user/kanyewestvevo?blend=2amp;ob=4#p/u/0/L7_jYl8A73g

The music video above shows a pop singer, a black man, picking up on the “black swan” trope in a very stylish way.  He’s formally dressed, standing up from an elegant dinner party where his partner was evidently an extravagantly costumed black woman, to go to a white piano where he plinks out a call to a bevy of black cygnets.  The song is evidently a warning to them.  I know next to nothing about pop music or Kanye West etc.  so I can’t tell you more than that.  It appears to me that this vid is about urban surface wealth, ego, and what is being called “game” as in the sex games between men and women now that marriage and stigma are out of the way.  

In fact, it’s a sort of illustration of the recent article in the Atlantic entitled “Hard Core.”   http:://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/hard-core/8327/   Natasha Vargas-Cooper gives us the feminist “facts” about sex with only personal boundaries, and the tough reality that men want only sex and are willing to be aggressive.  In fact, to her this is the essence of maleness, which she approaches through porn, marked as the worst stuff anyone can find on the Internet.  Pretty bad.  Her marker is penetration of a woman’s anus by two men at once.  (It always strikes me that such acts approach anatomical unlikelihood, but what do I know?)  Her bottom line is not that, but the cruelty, banality, and hopelessness of the search for intimacy through sex.  Except that she blames it on the narcissisism of men like the one Kanye is depicting or like the choreographer in “Black Swan.”

Anyway, here’s where I throw in my quick switch.  Last night I watched “Mrs. Henderson Presents” which is about the famous Windmill Theatre in London that featured nude tableaus, which were ruled works of art so long as nobody moved, and which became a symbol of cutting edge defiance in the face of vulnerability during WWII.  This covertly fascinated my father, so there were find-able accounts in our house when I was very young.  It was part of my father’s romance with nudity and innocent sex.  He would have loved this movie.  I did.

The girls were desperate for jobs, barely surviving the Big Depression, and they were nice girls, many from the countryside.  In fact, the DVD extras included a party for those women, now quite old but just as elegant as they ever were and totally unrepentant.  They spoke about how carefully protected they were.   Mrs. Henderson (who died in 1944) is portrayed by Judi Dench whose specialty is a kind of wise-child willingness to be open-eyed.  There is a sub-plot in which one of the girls is not participating in the culture-wide romance bonanza of WWII because she falls deeply in love with men she is fond of and the breakup is far too painful.   Mrs. Henderson tricks her into a relationship with a sweet young man who gets the girl pregnant, then goes back to his previous sweetheart.  She is killed by a bomb, which solves that plot dilemma.

But the REAL dilemma of love at the core of the tale is not even physical, not young, beautiful, nude or even caressing.  It is the meeting of more than minds -- shared enterprise?  World-view?  Soul-mates?  Oh, that’s going too far.  Mrs. Henderson is in love with her impresario, who “stirs her heart” as her wise friend notes, but circumstances like his pre-existing marriage, the class divisions, and even -- to some extent -- her totally committed marriage until the death of her husband, keep them from having anything but a business and friendship relationship.  It’s the TENSION of the yearning against the impossibility and the resulting driving of human emotion to the level of universals beyond social rules that makes this so intensely moving.  

It’s “game,” right enough, but at a far higher level than banging.  Hot, young, fast, and soon-over seems to be today’s style, including some kind of violence, but in the end it's about money.  This is media promotion for sales purposes.   In this context money is not in the Jane Austen bourgeois sense of comfortably stable income, but in the ostentatious nouveau riche sense of no limits -- especially on taste.  The ethic is “Wild Palms,” that deeply silly psuedo-tech series I just watched.  No woman too skinny, no house too vast.  (I DID like the clothes.)  And the ultimate greed is immortality as much as immorality.

That’s fine and maybe it fun to watch sitting here in this little village while the temp sinks below zero, but these are not quite what one had in mind for the behavior one’s own children -- which is, of course, why they’re so attracted to it.  

I do see the kind of greedhead narcissism and wretched excess that Natasha Vargas-Cooper rightly labels pornographic.  A formal Blackfeet Tribal Council member stopped through yesterday and we talked about the just-now-daylighting of sexual abuse of reservation tribal women.  (Again.  It’s something that cycles.  I mean, the abuse is constant -- the media attention cycles.)  He said that in the year he was on the council there were between two and three hundred cases of identified but unaddressed sexual abuse of women out of the population of 8,000 or so.  Probably there were twice as many unreported incidents, muddled up with drunkenness, incest and fatal accidents.

Even the Supreme Court agrees that pornography varies widely from place to place and time to time.  Restrictions are not quite like those on alcohol -- totally banning alcohol is hopeless but alcohol stays the same.  Porn changes all the time, more like designer drugs.  What ends up suppressed is not the porn itself but the stigma, taboo, and black-out over understanding the dynamics of “game.”  Not least among problems is the gap between generations.  Consider Mrs. Henderson counseling the girls in the dressing room by telling stories of her years in India.  

But how can there be anything other than a terrible chasm between the experience of women who would have been disgraced by sex out of wedlock and their choice among the possible mortality of childbirth, the impoverishment of raising children alone, lethal back-alley abortion, and avoiding sex altogether --  and the easy-going “let’s-start-with-sex” attitude of youngsters since the Pill.

It’s strange but true that the boys of Cinematheque who have survived through paid sex put a high value on tenderness and protection -- MORE than a hard core feminist writing for a high end mag in the US.