THE NAKED ANIMAL

I once heard or read a passage about Aboriginal Australians, who, upon being arrested and jailed for breaking "Australian laws" for the first time around the turn of the nineteenth century, would almost immediately bash their heads against the walls of their cells until they were dead. It took some time for the Australian officials to realize that the Aboriginals had no concept nor language for the past nor the future, so that their entire lives take place only in the immediate present. This is a hard thing for Western minds to understand. This is what people talk about when they say they're "living in the moment." For the Aboriginals, this meant that being locked up was the sum totality of their existence, which was so unbearable that they had to end it without dilly-dallying.

I do not know whether or not this story is apocryphal, but it perfectly describes how I feel when I am sick, which I recently was, with the flu, for over a week. I actually did bash my head against the wall a few times. It made me feel better, rather the same way self-trepanning does, I imagine. A release of pressure. I'm completely irrational when I'm ill, and I can't help myself. Even though I know intellectually that I will get better, and even though I just definitively proved that to myself by bouncing back from death's doorway, I still feel trapped and hopeless when I get ill. Everything is pointless. Nothing is working right. And the whole stinking affair will end in tears or worse. Darkness. Darkness and doom. I get angry when I'm sick. Or perhaps I'm so weak when my skin has turned translucent through fever that I let the anger that is always there seep right out through my distressed pores. Again, it feels good because of the pressure release. And then there's that painfully cathartic moment of acceptance, just as you're about to hit bottom, when you say, OKAY, FUCK IT, I'M ILL AND I GIVE IN TO THE EXPERIENCE. It takes anywhere from 24 to 48 hours for me to reach this point (plenty of time to bash the odd head or two to bits against the proper wall), where I can relax and enjoy the benefits of convalescence; though negative grumbling about my current physical state goes on unabated.

During this particular illness, I watched movie after movie on the very few premium channels we have (TCM, Sundance, IFC, and seven ENCORE movie channels), cobbling together a fever-dream film festival over the several days I had to remain in bed. The Gala Monday Morning Extra-Strength Tylenol Opening Event included Motorcycle Diaries and The Comedian Harmonists, both of which made me bawl--another good pressure release technique. I had for some reason avoided Motorcycle Diaries when it was out, and I'm glad I waited. It was so lush and visceral, especially during the scenes at the leper colony, that it continually rocked me in and out of my body, finally landing like a very heavy weight on my heart. The Comedian Harmonists was no less gut-wrenching, dealing as it did so unwaveringly with the always stomach-turning topic of anti-semitism and the Nazis.

But I've never been one to shy away from intense experiences. In fact, this kind of dark, emotional movie is far more entertaining to me than any comedy. I continued in a dark vein the next day with The White Buffalo, which portrays such a pitch-black vision of the Old West that it makes McCabe and Mrs. Miller look prettified. After that it was The Wild Bunch, one of my all-time favorites--and who could be more dark, and yet more jubilant, than Peckinpah? I wallowed in the deep human twist of it all.

That evening, I went classic with Ball of Fire and Born Yesterday. The latter I'd seen several times, always wondering how Judy Holliday beat out both Bette Davis for All About Eve and Gloria Swanson for Sunset Boulevard (a later fever-dream film fest fave)for the Oscar that year. Besides the fact that Born Yesterday was full of deeply felt schmaltz about American values in a year (1950) when the Red Scare was running at full tilt, I couldn't figure it out. That night, though, I had a revelation. She won that award for one scene--one scene in which she plays gin rummy with Broderick Crawford, which can be best likened to a fine, idiosyncratic rendition of an intricate jazz tune. Watching her brilliantly rattle off a fugue of tics and rituals that obviously make her experience of an otherwise boring game complete had me on the edge of the bed with delight, and I finally saw how she snagged the voters' hearts away from Bette and Gloria. There was sheer acting bliss contained in the gin rummy scene--a potent concoction, especially to fellow actors.

The next day I continued my fascination with the macho set (J. Lee Thompson, Sam Peckinpah, etc.) with John Huston's African Queen. I really do love that movie, and I always forget how good it really is, how finely tuned and subtle Bogart is, and how utterly believable Hepburn is. Plus, there you've got two people holding your fascination the entire time by themselves, and it made me stop and think: Would I want to spend an entire trip down an African river with anyone in the movies these days? I think I'd end up feeding myself to the crocodiles before the end of the first reel. I flipped sensibilities from ultra-rugged, roughly emotional to roughly intellectual, ultra-smart with Childstar, a beguiling indie from Canada (with a truly moving Jennifer Jason Leigh as a completely amoral Hollywood mother) that starts out with a set of cliches and goes about stripping them down to their human cores in the most entertaining way possible. Highly recommended. Another flip of the genre switch took me to Shampoo (on TCM!), which somehow perfectly evokes my childhood even though there aren't any children in it (unless you count Carrie Fisher's precocious teenage seductress). You can almost SMELL 1975 when you watch Shampoo, even though it's supposedly set in 1968. It's funny how movies that are trying to evoke a year in the recent past always end up PERFECTLY illustrating the very year they were made, instead. No one makes movies with that much pure, casual truth in them anymore.

By Thursday, I had come out of my fever, and was dealing in its place with a fuzzy head and stuffed-up chest. Cable rewarded me with Five Easy Pieces one of my favorite Nicholson movies, also notable because the first 40 minutes of it was filmed in my hometown Bakersfield and environs, with plenty of recognizable landmarks and locations. Karen Black made a perfect know-nothing, white-trash creampuff with a heart of Black Hills gold, and the utterly weird and hilarious scene during which Helena Kallianotes (as a hitchhiker in Nicholson's car) delivers a meandering monologue about "filth" while Toni Basil chimes in with non sequiturs now and then is a cockeyed classic. No one makes movies that center around such basically unappealing characters anymore, either, and that's a shame. I'm so sick of having to LIKE and RESPECT every protagonist in every film--they stuff that shit down your throat, don't they?

Friday evening belonged to Sunset Boulevard, which sucked me in for the umpteenth time because of the almost hypnotic quality of its finely mechanized script and perfectly orchestrated movement from scene to scene. That thing purrs like the engine of a...well, of an Isetta-Freschini! (And as Norma Desmond points out, they don't make cars like that anymore, either.)

Saturday, I was well enough to become engulfed in a make-up day of running errands that had piled up the previous week. Oh Joy. Now you're well--please apply nose to grindstone immediately! By Sunday morning I was already sick of being back in the land of the living, so I pounced upon the remote control, hungrily searching out something to fill in the mid-morning hours while I decided what to do with myself for the rest of the day. I happened upon The Turning Point, and you may laugh, but that one made me bawl just as hard as any of the deeper, more brooding movies I'd watched. Perhaps it was the fact that I'm hitting my mid-life crisis point myself, still quite unwilling to give up the dreams of my youth. More on that in my next post.

Yup, I turn 40 on Friday. Whoop-dee-doodle-now. By that time I hope to be running at 100 percent once more (this damned flu does want to hang on and on in its little post-fever ways), and altogether UNinclined to bash my head against a wall until I expire.

Dreamtime is once again upon me. What will its unforeseen tangents and vortices present me with next as I row ever-so gently down the stream?

Categories: illness, healing, film