Nitpick: The Miracle is That He’s Kissing the Old Apple

First, a fun fact about Glenn Ford, the original Dude, courtesy of the New York Times:

By 1965, his star power [no pun intended] had enabled him to build a luxurious home home in Beverly Hills featuring an atrium over which hung a 900-pound artificial sun. Mr. Ford could switch it on whenever he wanted to feel drenched with light.

I suppose an atrium with artificial sun is even better than one that lets in actual sun.

Nits I picked:

• Joy Boy’s the narrator at the beginning. It’s Peter Falk’s voice that tells us that “By the second year, the club was a sensation,” and that Queenie was “pretty good.” Why doesn’t Joy Boy give us a grumpy epilogue in which his heart either implodes or grows grows three sizes?
• Best quote from that VO: “The dude kisses the old apple, but I know better. I kiss the iron doors.”
• Weird things happening with literacy. Apple Annie’s pretty damn eloquent in her letters, but the high society recruits can’t read. Also, literacy humor: chauffeur guy says “If I could write, I’d be in the navy.”
• They don’t seem to know what to do with Bette Davis’ character, whose transition from curmudgeonly weirdo drunk to lovely maternal figure boggles the mind.
• Bizarre portrayal of alcoholism. So real in the hovel, when she’s reading the letter. So strong a theme throughout. Her alcoholism seems to have something to do with her witchy Sybilness:
  

  “Because the little people like you. You can’t see ‘em. They live in dreams.”

  Once she’s gone ladylike, she reaches for the bottle just once. Yes, at breaking point, but honestly. So much less complex. Not a single attempt at doubletalk? Not one attempted hustle? At least the Judge gets to play “billiards.” For a screwball comedy, there are lots of missed opportunities.

• Why all the love for Apple Annie from the other “godfathers”? I guess it’s kind of like those “Adopt a Child” campaign, except that the poor are all chipping in to buy stuff for one girl.
• Kind of unforgivable that the “godfathers” never even get to meet her (not counting the deaf woman who gives her a flower). Unless I missed something—they were riding in a cab at the end, but I didn’t get why.
• The poster—at the 12 minute mark—of Queenie. Fascinating. Not a nit. Just surprising.
• Poor Herbie. The only one deprived of a happy ending, and just because he stole her letters for her.
• Gayness: Yes, there’s Pierre. But what do we make of the fact that Hutchings and the Judge are clearly falling in love? Also, aww, Hutchings.
• Constant allusions to Cinderella and Snow White. Is this supposed to be the witch from Snow White redone as Cinderella? The Dude snatches Queenie’s shoe during the fight, Apple Annie’s obvious, Hutchings “likes Cinderella stories.” We’re getting beaten over the head with something. Is that something really respect for the desires of the poor and aged?
• Is this why, even though the focus keeps sliding away from Apple Annie’s story once she gets into the Marberry, the camera keeps trying to yank us back? This is the point, it insists. The whole plot seems to be trying its darndest to honor an old woman’s life ambition. Nice. But 1) it remains a subplot, 2) it’s a clear instrument of the Dude’s growth, 3) it’s doing weird work trying to restore family values to a nutty cast, and 4) it explains why Joy Boy can’t possibly be narrating the thing. Why on earth would Capra start us off with him as the storyteller?
• Like this list, and as you point out, the movie is SO LONG. I enjoyed it, but it’s something like 140 minutes.

Where Are The Miracles?

1.) The other best part of the strangest goat-belly compared fight scene ever? That after harshly throwing her on the bed (really, not okay–way to hard for a comedy), he says “Queenie! You have one thing coming to me!” and then he rolls her off the bed and they start making out (as you aptly described). I assume he means sex since she has been holding out on him for two years apparently? Maybe because she didn’t want to mix her body in with the debt she was paying off? And even more odd–she looks like she was somehow slipped a muscle relaxer once off the bed–or are we supposed to assume that his kisses are soooooo good that they have the same effect as Valium?

2.) What is wrong with Ann Margaret’s voice? She can’t say her fiance’s family name without slurring, and then the rest of the time she sounds like she is five-year-old. Also–if you had never ever seen your mother before, don’t you think there would be some deeper conversation going on, like “who is my father?” or something?

3.) Bette Davis can’t behave destitute. Her posture is too good.

4.) Was the pacing strangely slow for a comedy? It took forever for the shenanigans to begin. I really wanted the whole movie to be about Queenie in the nightclub. My favorite scene is her jumping around in that silver costume.

5.) David Foster Wallace died. I don’t know where this fits in, but it marked my night. I just watched a Charlie Rose clip from ten years ago, and it all fits strangely into our conversations earlier today. Thoughts?

CF

Pocketful of Miracles: Instant Replay of Two Scenes

Just to start us off, two scenes that seemed especially noteworthy:

Winning the Prize for Weirdest Exchange:

Joy Boy: “Why should Steve Darcey give the New York territory to Dave the Dude?”
Darcey: “You his mouthpiece?’
Joy Boy: “Call me his doormat.”
…
The Dude: “All my friends are nine feet tall and all my friends make very bad doormats.”
Darcey (rants for a bit, then): “You’re a big fish in the little pond, but all of a sudden all the little ponds are drying up. That’s where the king comes in… I’m gonna push some of you poor little gaspin’ sharks back into the water. My water. Gonna cover the whole country. Deep water.”
The Dude: “Deep, huh? How deep?”


Standout Crazy-Ass Scene: the fight. (to which I must add [!!!] [??] and yowZA).

• 0:39: Joy Boy’s trying to hire the agent to protect the Dude.
• 0:40: Cop Guy: “Mr. B has a touch of malgamary?”
• 0:41: The Dude runs in, grabs her by the arm and throws her on the bed, all the while brandishing a rolled-up piece of newspaper.
• They wrestle in a totally unsexy but realistic way, she rolls off the bed. He grabs her shirt and tears it off.
• “You ain’t walkin’ out on me, Queenie,” Dave the Dude says. “I’m Dave the Dude!”
• “I ain’t walkin’…” as she crawls away from him to the chair.
• He grabs her shoe. Flash of knicker.
• She gets up and heaves an enormous eggplant-shaped lamp at him.
• Agent guy collects the coins that come out of the slot machine in his hat, plops it on his head.
• Joy Boy yells at him. He lifts his hat and the coins spill out.
• Are we supposed to think Joy Boy’s comment that “they’re just playing house” means this is normal?
• “You owe me one thing, Queenie, and I’m gonna collect, you hear me?” Then he says something about her head that I can’t catch.
• 0:42–She runs back to the bed and he literally jumps up into the air and on top of her. He’s airborne for a brief moment. He looks like a gazelle.
• They roll off and out of view.
• Silence.
• Joy Boy walks in, says, “Isn’t this place like the inside of a goat’s stomach?”

Maybe the weirdest bedroom scene I’ve ever seen.

Fondly,
Millicent

Are we Ali Baba or the Thieves?

Dear CF,

Intimate terms with the object. This helps. Maybe this is what distinguishes the explorers of yore—Lewis and Clark, Columbus, Ponce de Leon et al.—from the new ones. They (we?) don’t really want to bring back potatoes and spices and the Hottentot Venus. Quite the contrary—it’s more about hoarding. This is a different impulse, a quest for private communion. Except that “communion” might be the wrong word, since there’s nothing common about it, and the worst outcome is really that the beloved object will become mainstream. At best, we’re like Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. We might share with those who know enough to know that there is a code.

I get the impulse to ferociously protect one’s private bond with something. In my case, though, it’s almost a defensive move, because I’m wounded when someone I show it to doesn’t like it. What puzzles me about the Firecrackers is that the object with which they’re intimate is lessened when someone whose opinion they don’t respect does. According to your lover analogy, this would be something like harlotry. Loverly jealousy?

I think you’re dead right about the demographic problem: is it that “communion” has become distasteful because we understand advertising too well? Is it that, in liking the same thing as someone we don’t like, we watch marketing boxes converge, so that we’re all in the same target audience? Is it that we want to “go off the grid” like Freegans do, to cheat The Demographic the way our parents fought The Man?

Obvious point about nonconformist conformity: Our parents became The Man, and it’s the tragedy of a lifetime when we’re catapulted out of our rugged individualism and pegged squarely into a round demographic hole.

It reminds me of John Marcher in Henry James’ “Beast in the Jungle.” Do you know this story? He goes through his whole life hubristic, complacent, a ruminant dilettante filled with an almost religious certainty that something remarkable is going to happen to him. His life will be defined by an Event, what James’ father called a “Vastation.” Marcher subjects May Bartram, the woman in love with him, to a lifetime of audiencehood. She’s his chief witness, the only person to whom he confessed his secret belief, and she honors him by believing it, and she waits with him her whole life.

He’s a believer in Destiny, in Greatness, in the fact that he has been uniquely Marked. His tragedy—the revelation, at the end—is that nothing ever happens to him. The whole Greek tragedy he built himself has no oracle. There’s no destiny, there’s no Event, there’s just a long life unpunctuated by anything except empty nouns, somethings, successive clauses, unseized opportunities.

God. “Pocketful of Miracles” it is. I need them.

Fondly,
Millicent

Jaded Robots, Let’s Just Watch Something With Dancing

Some thoughts.

1.) I need to find out who Tucker Max is or Tucker Carlson, or whatever his name is.  I keep getting his name confused with that teeny bop movie that came awhile ago, called something like “Tucker so and so must die.”

2.) As we are talking about the firecracker–the need to know and judge the artifacts of our world, I got to chomping on why I get so defensive about the cultural things I love–the way I can get nauseated and sweaty when somebody else claims ownership or appreciation of something that I am a strong fan of.  I get hotly protective when somebody starts yapping about something that particularly touched my life, and yet I know many of these things touch many peoples lives, and are classics.  But, it’s always important to my sense of self and ego that it touched me more specially than anybody else–that it was mine.  I think this comes from what we want from our inspirations.  We love them–love them to the point where our chests feel like bursting and we are so happy to have this beautiful thing in our lives, it hurts, it makes our life better, beautiful even.  We have found love.  And we want it to love us back, to be monogamous, and to appreciate and receive our specific attentions.  And so, it hurts when we find out our lover has been giving itself away to any other stranger that stumbled into its pages, harmonies, films, etc.

And then the other panic arises–the one that screams that as a lover, and mind, you are not individual, but actually part of a huge demographic that goes gaga in the exact same way you do. We are no longer on intimate terms with the object, but now part of a throng.  There is no way to be loved distinctly back.

I like the idea here that if I could let the ego go (which I can’t–it’s ferocious) and share the appreciation with others, it would be a more creative and restorative approach to these cultural artifacts that wind me up so much.  To share the work of the lover with the other lovers might ultimately be more rewarding than trying to squeeze something from the thing itself (to be the most authentic fan, to get noticed, to work with, to have holy communion with, I don’t know).  I also like the idea that the more fans that attach to these things the wider the door for appreciation becomes–expansive instead of the grabby.  Artistic and creative instead of all-knowing and approval seeking.   It’s the old possession versus creation aspect of love–lover and beloved.

But how did I get here? I meant to talk about other things.  I think it is because the cultural denizens (am I using this word correctly?) I have met always outrage me when they hate something because it is popular, and then I go and do the same thing about something else.  They love their mantle of cultural explorer and use up many calories defending it.  Chunklet (a music/culture mishmash rooted in Georgia) has this great character called Jaded Robot that represents that kind of unimpressed guy voice which covers that entire field of blazing opinions without actually engaging.  The faux sophisticate. I don’t think this is what our firecracker friends are, but it is part of the conversation, no?

Okay–back to business: do you still have Netflix? If so, I offer “Pocketful of Miracles” as our cinematic jaunt.  Bette Davis plays a homeless woman, and it looks like there is a grand charade where everybody has to pretend they are royalty.  If no Netflix, we will reconfigure our plan of idle attack.

As for your firecracker–yes, gunpowder.  Some of them are for real–and here I wonder if the attention to the cultural artifacts is from the access to definition it offers–the control of identity and place and knowledge of the world that such cataloging offers?

I have yammered so long, but your thoughts made me pause, and made me ache a little bit, and made me want some silly movie to watch (I wonder, is this our own way of engaging in this judgy judgy game, or since we do it with play in mind, are we the lovelier animal in all ways?)  The answer is yes, methinks.

Why did I stop numbering my thoughts halfway through?

Yours,

CF

The Post-Mortem

Dear one,



How to explain the death of a powerful crush? Curiously enough (or not curiously at all), I too talked to a beloved mutual friend about firecrackers, only in a romantical connection—-namely, the problem of love/hating them.



The Firecracker (Male) is exciting. He takes you to unexpected places and shows a different way of rubbing elbows with the world. His gift is his uniqueness and his insistence on that uniqueness–his cultivation of what you rightly identify as sophistication or indie-intellect. It’s a beautiful facade; the boy equivalent of makeup or a Joan-Holloway-type foundation garment. The problem is that the structures underlying all this are only informed by real passion (in our metaphor, a flawless complexion? a perfect torso?) half the time. The rest of the time this creature’s life is governed by the need to feed the monsters of exclusivity and rarefied taste.



Having written that, I think it’s wrong. I wish it were really just a question of authenticity vs. pretension. I don’t think it is. I used to think that the virulent strain of contempt displayed by the urban sophisticate was all bluster. It was a comfort to think that no one really cared all that much, that these determined forays into the unvisited corners of the internet (or the record store, or the video rental place) were fact-gathering missions. These are our modern-day explorers, the people who dig up the crazy and funny and arcane and present it to you. They’re the docents of the world, and I love their investigative powers and their passion and their insistence on finding the out-of-the-way thing.


The fact is, though, that what drives that kind of research is avoidance–or hatred–or judgment–of the in-the-way thing, otherwise they probably wouldn’t bother.


Now I know we’re all guilty of these sorts of judgments, but the fact is that as much as I hate Tucker Max, I don’t despise his readers. I don’t find them stupid and blinkered, and I can’t despise the structures that produced them. And he’s a more pernicious influence than, say, Napoleon Dynamite. Or Sleepless in Seattle. It’s like hating someone for eating junk food. Sure, you could make better choices, but I have a hard time getting really worked up about the fact that the Moldy Peaches song at the end of Juno shows up three times earlier.


But they do get worked up, even when they’re not creating anything in their own right. How right you are to point out that people get inarticulate when asked to explain their opinions. Is it too embarrassing? Does it expose the wiring too crudely? Is it that they really haven’t thought about it? You say you find this exhausting–I wish you would say more. I hunger for that kind of explanation; I want so badly to understand the steps of reasoning, the premises, the aesthetic underpinnings. I want this education because in its absence I find the Firecrackers paralyzing. I find them toxic.


And yet I’m drawn to them like sodium to chloride. Married one, in fact.


The end of my story is that I WISH it were pretentiousness. I could overlook that. The shock of my marriage was that it wasn’t–Firecrackers are actually filled with gunpowder, not bathhouse salts that gently scrub your impurities away and reveal your better self. There’s a kickback, there’s blue flame. They’re the .44, not our .22 Gunnie.


Our friend observed, and I think she’s right, that the truly interesting Firecracker is so because the “interesting” choice is always the one that permits the attachments of the world to fall away like a shiny piece of tinfoil wrapping a tuna sandwich. In this respect I agree wholeheartedly with your account of wickedness as the easiest path to Firecrackerness. Whether wickedness, mania, etc., masks a lack of talent or is a necessary evil for it, I wouldn’t like to say.


This actually reminds me of the idea of the Calvinist elect–a certain predestined few are Chosen, so everyone must behave as if they were. If not, they betray that they are not. You yourself have taught me to accept, grudgingly, that some of the Firecrackers are indeed Chosen People.


My fantasy, I suppose, is an inclusive Firecracker.


My crush was not one.


I feel I’ve been of very little comfort to you in dealing with your own Firecrackers. I wish for you matches and a long wick.


Let’s stay in the sixties. I leave you to choose our first film, and I promise to watch it within a day. Today, even!


Fondly,
Millicent

Armor, Spanx, and Stupid Codpieces

Good morning sleepyhead,

I might be the sleepyhead.  You might have already danced with veils and coined scarves.  I wonder what early morning belly dancing could do for a day?

Spanx! I love them because they make certain clothes possible–the things that sit in my closet and wait and wait to not worry about jiggle.  And then, voila, with Spanx everything is possible! I wear them when I need a little armor.  The bad news is, they do feel damn good to take off at the end of the day, and they remind me of my mother, or more, me turning into my mother.

I feel a bit daft, or maybe it’s because I’m just getting through my first cup of the best part of waking up, but why is the crush over?  Was the constant judging done by these men a turn off? Which did you take shelter in, their concrete opinions, or the lone voice of the person who disagreed?

So this actually doesn’t apply at all, but it reminds me again of Orwell’s frustration with Dali–that people leave taste to waves of morality or sophistication, and rely on both to carry them off as well-informed and smart. He doesn’t have the answer for his own dislike for Dali, but he just wants us to engage with our opinions instead of nonchalantly offering them as a distinction of intelligence of upright servitude.  I like to hate on things as much as anybody else (probably more so), and the work Orwell is requesting sounds tiring.  I admire that you are more involved with the examination than the group zing of instant judgment and glee at the weakness of taste in others.

Ooh! Your glower, and I do imagine you glowering, at the judgy-judginess of these fellows (if I have understood correctly) directly ties to my dilemma with that certain sample of the male population I was fuming at yesterday.  They hold out their opinions like codpieces.  You can’t have a conversation with a codpiece.

For an upcoming Netflix/Hulu escapade, should we try to stay in the sixties?  There is something delicious about looking at the products of the time, while chewing over Madmen and pretending that Draper and boys (and Peggy!), could have whipped the thing up to sell us candy pink stoves.

Also, I had a dream last night that I was back at the spa, in my towel, looking for the steam rooms and the cups of salt.  I didn’t actually find them, but I knew they were around there somewhere.

To the wonders of salt! Salut!

Yours,

CF