I said, “I got something I want to show you,” and went over to the DVD player.
In a very fragile voice, a voice that wants trouble from no one, a voice that expects perfect strangers to slap you in the face, he said, “I don’t think I can watch a movie right now, Dad.”
“I know you can’t. So I’m just going to play you one scene. It’s from an Italian movie. My mother’s favourite. She used to play the soundtrack over and over at our summer cottage. I’d come up from the dock and hear this music coming from our house and I’d know my mother’d be sitting on the screened-in deck, drinking gin and tonic and listening to this record. I always think about her when I hear this music. It always makes me happy, I don’t know why. It must have been a good summer.
“Anyway, I’m going to show you the very last scene in the movie. I think you’ll figure out why pretty fast. This guy—he’s played by Marcello Mastroianni—has been drinking and whoring and generally pissing his life away night after night; and he ends up on a beach at sunrise with a bunch of party-goers. You reminded me of it with that business about the pizza boxes lying all over Choo-choo’s apartment.
“So there he is on the beach, hungover, still in his party clothes, and he hears a young girl calling him. He looks over, sees her but he can’t hear what she’s saying. She’s so beautiful, so pure, it’s like she’s the embodiment of the sea and the bright morning, maybe even the embodiment of his own childhood. I want you to watch this scene and remember: This guy, this party guy, his life has already peaked, he’s on the way downhill; he knows it, the girl on the beach knows it. But you, your life, it’s just starting, it’s all ahead of you. It’s yours to throw away.”
I put on Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) and jumped to the last scene, Mastroianni walking ankle deep in the sand, the girl fifty yards away calling to him across a little patch of water. He shrugs, makes a gesture with his hands: I don’t understand, it says. He starts to walk away, his friends are waiting. He waves goodbye to the girl, this funny little wave, his fingers sort of bent. It’s as if his hand is somehow curdled. He’s curdled. The girl watches him walk away; she’s still smiling, first with kindness, with understanding, but then with firmness. She seems to be saying, Okay, if that’s the way you want it. But then very slowly she turns her glance straight into the camera. And you, the glance says to the audience, what about your life?
“The one thing I want to say to you about cocaine,” I said, “is that it always ends up this way.”
We watched It’s aWonderful Life (1946) the next morning. I knew he’d hate it at first, the overenergized acting, its falseness, James Stewart’s self-conscious adorableness. Jesse wouldn’t buy any of that. Particularly in that state, seeing the world like some kind of—what did we call it at his age—oh yes, seeing the world like some kind of “cosmic bargain basement.”
But when the movie turns dark, and James Stewart darkens with it (how disturbing he is, like somebody throwing a drink in somebody’s face at your parents’ party), I knew Jesse would be hooked, in spite of himself. He’d have to know how it ends, he’d have to know for his own sake because, by that time, the story on the screen would have become his story. And can anyone, even a depressed teenager with a cocaine and tequila hangover, resist the film’s final moments?
He got a job washing dishes in a restaurant up on St. Clair Avenue, just on the lip of the neighbourhood I grew up in. The prep chef, a tall boy with red cheeks, got it for him. Jack somebody. A “rapper.” (Everybody, it seemed, “rapped.”) I still don’t know his last name but sometimes after the night shift, they’d turn up at our house in Chinatown; you could hear them riffing and riming and “being bad” in the basement. Unimaginably violent, vulgar (not to mention borrowed) lyrics. You’ve got to start somewhere, I suppose. No point in playing them “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”
I didn’t think he’d last four days as a dishwasher. Un plongeur. Not that he was a quitter or a sissy, but that job—the lowest on the unforgiving restaurant ladder, eight hours of dirty dishes and encrusted pots—I just couldn’t imagine him getting out of bed, getting dressed, going on the subway to do that till midnight.
But I was, as you often are with your children, wrong again. You’d think you know them better than anyone else, all those years up and down the stairs, tucking them in, sad, happy, carefree, worried—but you don’t. In the end they always have something in their pocket you never imagined.
Six weeks later, I could barely believe it, he got up one afternoon, bounced into the kitchen with that heavy-footed, happy walk of his and said, “I got a promotion.” Jack, it turned out, had quit to cook in another restaurant and he, Jesse, was the new prep chef. Something in me relaxed about him. Hard to say what it was. Simply the knowledge, I guess, that when he had to, he could do even the shittiest job and make a go of it. (Unlike his father.)
Winter came down, early darkness smudged the windows. In the middle of the night, I noticed a fine dusting of snow on the roofs; it made the houses look a bit fairy-taleish, like pastries in a store window. If a pedestrian had approached my basement windows after midnight, he might have heard the angry voices of two tall boys, chefs by day, rappers by night, giving voice to the indignities of growing up in the ghetto, shooting heroin, robbing stores, selling guns; daddy a dealer, mommy a crack whore. A perfect portrait of his childhood! (Jack’s father was a born-again Christian and conscientious churchgoer.)
From where I stood at the top of the basement stairs (partially eavesdropping), I couldn’t help but notice they were starting to sound sort of—I don’t know—cool. They had good chemistry, those gangly boys in their loose-fitting clothes. God, I thought, maybe he’s got talent.
One clear, chilly night, an aura of excitement issued from the basement. Loud music, strident voices. Corrupted Nostalgia (as they now called themselves) exploded up the stairs in baseball hats, bandanas, floppy pants, sunglasses and oversized, hooded sweatshirts. Two very bad dudes on their way to their first gig.
Could I come along?
Not a chance. Not even remotely a chance.
Out they went, somewhere, Jesse’s head thrown back like a black man dealing with an L.A. cop.
And very quickly, it seemed, they performed again; and then again and again; grubby clubs with low ceilings and unenforced smoking regulations.
“What do you think of our lyrics?” Jesse asked one day. “I know you’ve been listening.”
For weeks I’d known this was coming. I closed my eyes (metaphorically) and jumped in the water. “I think they’re excellent.” (Just water the plant and keep the T.S. Eliot to yourself.)
“Really?” His brown eyes moving over my face, looking for a fault line.
“May I make a suggestion?” I said.
His face darkened with suspicion. Watch your step now. This is the stuff people remember—and write about—fifty years later. I said, “Maybe you should try to write about something a little closer to your own life.”
“Like what?”
I pretended to reflect for a moment. (I’d rehearsed this part.) “Something you feel strongly about.”
“For example.”
“Like, say, um—Rebecca Ng.”
“What?”
“Write about Rebecca.”
“Dad.” This in the tone of voice one reserves for a drunken uncle who wants to take the family car out for a midnight “spin.”
“You know what Henry Miller said, Jesse. If you want to get over a woman, turn her into literature.”
A few weeks later, I happened by the top of the stairs when he and Jack were discussing where they were going to play that night. An after-midnight show (along with a half-dozen other acts) at a place I went to thirty years ago to look for girls.
I waited until just after eleven-thirty, then I slipped out into the frosty air. Cut across the park (I felt like a thief), through Chinatown (garbage night, cats everywhere), then up the street until I was almost at the door of the club. A dozen young
men waited out front smoking cigarettes, blasting lungfuls of smoke into the night air, laughing boisterously. And spitting. They were all spitting.
And suddenly there he was, a head taller than most of his friends. I slid into a coffee shop across the street where I could keep an eye on things unrecognized. It was Saturday night in Chinatown; electric-green dragons, exploding cats, all-night eateries with that ugly fluorescent lighting. Across the street, the city’s miserable milled about in blankets in front of the Scott Mission.
Five minutes went by; then fifteen; one of the boys bent over; he appeared to be talking to someone on the stairs, just inside the club. Then Jack emerged. Such a fresh-faced kid. He looked like a choirboy. All heads pointed toward him. Frosty breath. Shivers. Then suddenly the whole bunch of them rushed inside, the last boy flicking his cigarette butt in a long, graceful arc into the traffic.
I waited till the coast was clear and then nipped across the busy street. I went up the stairs cautiously; you could feel the air change; it got warmer, smellier (like puppies and stale beer) with each step. I heard recorded music from a backroom. They hadn’t gone on yet. Stay out front till they start; then slip in. I got to the top of the stairs and turned the corner; a young man on a pay phone looked up and caught me right between the eyes. It was Jesse.
“I’ll call you back,” he said into the receiver and hung up. “Dad,” he said, as if he was hailing me. He came toward me smiling, his body blocking the way into the hall. I peeked over his shoulder.
“Is that the place?” I said.
“You can’t come in tonight, Dad. Some night, but not tonight.”
He turned me around very gently and we started down the stairs.
“I think the Rolling Stones played there,” I said, looking hopefully over my shoulder, his strong arm (how powerful he is!) leading me downwards, ever downwards, until we got to the sidewalk.
“Can’t I just stay for one song?” I pleaded.
“I love you, Dad, but tonight’s not your night,” he said. (Hadn’t I heard that last bit in On the Waterfront, Brando talking to his brother in the back of the cab?) “Some other time, I promise,” he said.
Slipping quietly into bed twenty minutes later, I heard my wife turn over in the darkness. “You got caught, eh?” she said.
11
It was a chance remark that Jesse made one night; we were walking home from dinner and lingered for a moment in front of a one-storey, wonky house where we’d lived when he was still a child with purple hair and a little stick girlfriend down the street.
“Do you ever stop here?” I asked.
“No. I don’t really like it since other people started living in it. It always feels a bit invaded.”
The house hadn’t changed at all, not a right angle to it, a beat-up picket fence out front. “I never realized how small it was,” he said.
We stayed a while longer, talking about his mom and that time he got arrested for spray-painting the wall of the school across the street; and then, warmed by all this, we drifted southward toward home.
That night, still under the spell of our conversation, I nipped into the video store and rented American Graffiti (1973). I didn’t tell him what it was, I knew he’d protest or want to look at the DVDand then find something about the package he didn’t like or that made the movie seem “too old-fashioned.” I hadn’t seen it in twenty years and worried that its charm and lightness had aged badly. I was mistaken. It’s an entrancing film, profound in a way that initially escaped me. (Good movies are more intellectual than I used to think, at least the process by which they come into being.)
American Graffiti isn’t just about a bunch of kids on a Saturday night. When a very young Richard Dreyfuss drops in on the local radio station, there’s a gorgeous moment when he catches Wolfman Jack doing his gravel-voiced routine. Dreyfuss suddenly understands what the centre of the universe really is: it’s not a place, it’s the embodiment of a desire to never miss out on anything—not somewhere you can go, in other words, but rather a place you want to be. And I loved the speech the hot rodder gives, about how it used to take a full tank of gas to “do” the town strip but now it’s over in five minutes. Without knowing it, he’s talking about the end of childhood. The world has shrunk while you were looking the other way. (Like the wonky house had for Jesse.)
I didn’t want to wear out my welcome by talking about Proust and American Graffiti , but how else can you look at that beautiful girl in the Thunderbird who keeps appearing and disappearing at the edge of Dreyfuss’s vision, except as an example of the Proustian contemplation that possession and desire are mutually exclusive, that for the girl to be the girl, she must always be pulling away?
“Do you think that’s true, Dad, that you can’t have a woman and want her at the same time?” Jesse said.
“No, I don’t. But I used to when I was your age. I could never take anyone seriously for long if they liked me too much.”
“What changed?”
“My capacity for gratitude, for one,” I said.
He contemplated the empty television screen gloomily. “Rebecca Ng is like the girl in the Thunderbird, isn’t she?”
“Yeah, but you have to remember that it cuts both ways. It’s like your old girlfriend Claire Brinkman, the one on the in-line skates. How do you think she saw you after you broke up?”
“Like a guy in a Thunderbird?”
“Probably.”
“But doesn’t that imply, Dad, that if I hadn’t broken up with her, she wouldn’t have liked me so much?”
“It implies that your unavailability may have made her like you a lot more than she might have normally.”
Another thoughtful pause. “I don’t think Rebecca Ng cares whether I’m available or not.”
“Let’s hope not,” I said, and turned our attention to other things.
I asked David Cronenberg one time if he had any “guilty pleasures” at the movies—things he knew were trash but loved anyway. I set the framework for his reply by admitting a weakness for Pretty Woman (1990) with Julia Roberts. It doesn’t have a believable moment in it, but it’s a disarmingly effective piece of storytelling, one pleasant scene spilling into the next, and very hard to turn away from once it has you in its idiot grasp.
“Christian television,” Cronenberg answered without hesitation. There was something about a puffy-faced southern evangelist working a crowd that mesmerized him.
Fearing that the film club was getting a little starchy (we’d done five nouvelle vague films in a row), I drew up a list of guilty pleasures for our first week in February. I also wanted to steer Jesse away from the vulgarity of not being able to have a good time at a cheesy movie. You have to learn to give yourself over to these things.
We started with Rocky III (1982). I pointed out the cheap but irresistible excitement of the sweating Mr. T doing sit-ups and pull-ups in his foul little crawl space. No mushroom carpets and faggy lattes for him! Followed by Gene Hackman’s 1975 film noir Night Moves , which features an eighteen-year-old Melanie Griffith as a lecherous nymphet. Watching her from a distance, her “older” boyfriend says to Hackman, “There ought to be a law.” To which the deadpan Hackman replies, “There is.”
Then on to La Femme Nikita (1990). A ridiculous movie about a beautiful junkie turned government hit man. Yet there’s something about this film—it has a certain epsilon-minus appeal, probably because it’s so terrific to look at. Luc Besson was a hotshot young French director who seemed to understand in his blood cells where to put the camera, who went for the bang-bang of a visual experience and did it with such verve that you forgave him the dumbness and implausibility of the story.
Watch how the film begins, three guys coming up the street, dragging one of their pals. It’s like a rock-video, lysergic-acid hallucination of Gary Cooper’s High Noon. And talk about a shoot-’em-up: watch the gunfight in the drugstore: you can practically feel the wind from the bullets yourself.
But La Femme Nikita was just
a warm-up. Now we were ready for it, the king of guilty pleasures, a real piece of trash that makes you ashamed for people to see it in your house. Prurient, inept and ugly-minded, Showgirls (1995) is a take-no-prisoners film. It leaves the audience shaking its head with incredulity: what, we ask, could possibly come next in this tale of a young girl who leaves home (and what a home!) to make it in Las Vegas as a showgirl. There’s lots of skin for those who care but by the end of the film, you don’t. You can’t.
“Showgirls,” I said to Jesse, “is something of a cinematic oddity, a guilty pleasure without a single good performance.”
When Showgirls opened, it was greeted by howls of disbelief and derision from critics and the public alike. It scup-pered the career of its star, Elizabeth Berkley, before it even started; veteran actor Kyle MacLachlan (Blue Velvet, 1986) disgraced himself with a leering, moustache-twirling performance as the “director of entertainment.” Overnight Showgirls leapt to the top of everyone’s worst-film-of-1995 list. Screenings went interactive, with strangers shouting rude remarks at the screen.
But the ultimate compliment came from New York’s gay community where drag queens put on re-enactments of the movie, lip-synching the words while the original masterpiece played out behind them on a giant screen. It was simply the most fun since Mommie Dearest (1981).
I asked Jesse to count the number of times Ms. Berkley runs from a room, indignant. I brought his attention to a scene where she pulls a switchblade on a cabdriver. A very special bit of acting.
“Instructive terribleness,” Jesse said. His vocabulary was improving.
“Showgirls,” I concluded, “is a film that makes a proctologist of us all. Some people may insist that Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) is the worst film ever made, but that’s inherited thinking. This one gets my vote.”
Somewhere around the time when Miss Berkley was licking a steel pole in a strip joint, I realized that I had given Showgirls a longer introduction than The 400 Blows and the whole French New Wave.
The Film Club Page 12
