Gray morning. It rained in the night. I woke before dawn midway through my spring vacation. What haunts us, I wonder, as I look out across the neighborhood and see house lights casting their yellow glow. Work, time, money? It is that, of course, but it is something else, too. Surely men and women who live outside the reaches of technology, without bosses or jobs (are there such places any more?) wake in the night unable to sleep. The Rat, I think. It is always gnawing at us. We try to feed The Rat.
OK. The Story Continued.
My most productive time that year was in the movie theater. Most of that time was spent alone. Movies seemed to pour like rain from the sky and everything was changing. There were still the traditional war and cowboy movies and plenty of thrillers. John Wayne won the Academy Award that year for his performance in True Grit, beating out both Dustin Hoffman and John Voigt, but it was Midnight Cowboy that won the Best Picture Award, the only X-rated film ever to receive that honor. The juxtaposition of the two things defined the year. Sean Connery was replaced by George Lazenby as James Bond in On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Cowboy movies looked more like Butch Cassady and the Sundance Kid and Paint Your Wagon than The Guns of the Magnificent Seven. And the explicit violence of The Wild Bunch was shocking.
But it wasn't about cowboys and violence that I was really concerned. It was the other thing, the thing that played itself out in a new way in movies now, in films like Age of Consent, and Goodbye, Columbus, Last Summer and Women in Love, and John and Mary and Bob, Carol, Ted and Alice. And of course Fellini's Satyricon. After the riots in Chicago in 1968 where parents saw policemen brutally beating young protesters at the Democratic National
Convention, America's social fabric had finally come apart. Sure, Vietnam had polarized the nation, but Chicago seemed to be the straw. To my horror, my mother had taken to wearing mini-skirts in crazed paisley patterns. The revolution wasn't all good.
But I tried not to think about that as I sat in dark theaters watching revolution unfold on the screen. Even Don Knotts and Tony Randall were trying to be cool in movies like The Love God and Hello Down There. And Omar Sharif and Jack Palance made a movie about the revolutionary Che in a film by that title. Hip new writers were coming to the movies, too, in films like Goodbye, Columbus and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. There were racial films like Medium Cool and Putney Swope, radical films like If and Z.
And it was good to be young as youth gained permission to enter the adult world of sex. I watched Cher play an underaged runaway who gets into sexual trouble in Chastity. Charles Bronson starred in Lola whose tagline read "a middle aged writer of pornographic novels meets and falls in love with a sixteen year old school girl. This alone is cause for concern but when the couple get married and move to America, the trouble (and fun) really begins." Even James Mason invested his own money to make Age of Consent in which he plays a painter who falls in love with his underaged model on an island down under.
And then there was Easy Rider. Somehow in one movie, Fonda combined everything-sex, drugs, revolution, adventure, and the longing to run away. It was all there in one fucked up movie.
That is what I did in my sophomore year. I watched. It wasn't all that, of course. I still secretly got a kick out of Captain Nemo and the Underwater City, much more than I did Hello Dolly which I couldn't watch, or The Sterile Cuckoo. And I saw The Italian Job and Downhill Racer, but it was the weirdness of movies like They Shoot Horses, Don't They that really set me off.
The world was strange. I already knew that, but daily my notions were being reified as I sat in the dark watching the big silver screen.
I couldn't get the Dailymotion video to work but still enjoyed the writing today. I go to sit in dark movie theaters often...it's one of my favorite forms of therapy
ReplyDeleteI don't know why it won't work. It works fine when I check it.
ReplyDeleteMovie theaters are rarely dark any more. They are lit by a thousand lights as people check their text messages. It is a true crime.
It finally started working for me too...great clip, very sensual.
ReplyDeleteYes, I move if a texter happens to sit near me.