Something That May Shock and Discredit You
Page 12
Most Columbo murderers fall into one of two categories. They’re either profoundly irritated at his quiet, relentless presence, or they are overwhelmed with relief when he turns up and they can stop trying to run for cover, and find excuses to spend more time with him. He is a rumpled little conscience in an overcoat who dogs their footsteps almost from the moment the murder is completed. There’s a moral lightness and an untroubled heart at the core of him, an innate goodness that resonates outward and either puts people immediately at ease or deeply unsettles them, according to the state of their own conscience. Columbo is perhaps the only fictional detective one can imagine sleeping soundly at night. William Shatner plays the second kind of murderer. The sight of Columbo is an enormous relief to him, a source of joy and freedom from something terrible, and he spends the majority of the second act smiling ruefully at Peter Falk as if to say, “Isn’t this all a little ridiculous? Aren’t I more than a little ridiculous? Do you want to have lunch with me anyway?” and breaking my heart in the meantime. William Shatner could put a promise into a smile like nobody’s business.
There is a website called Shatner’s Toupee that—surprisingly uncruelly, given its name—celebrates the quality of sheepishness that Shatner brings to Columbo. (Sheepishness [n.]: “Affected by or showing embarrassment caused by consciousness of a fault.”) Shatner on-screen is always affected, always conscious of the embarrassment he causes others, always conscious of his faults; sheepishness is the fastest way to convince me something or someone is worth loving. Hello, yes I’m very aware that I’m like this, I’m sorry.
It’s a very good episode, especially if you are interested, as I am, in watching the breakdown and failure of boyish charm. The last of Shatner’s boyishness had left him by about 1976, and “Fade in to Murder” pays it appropriate tribute. His last line to Falk, after a brief and gentle confrontation, is very endearing, and very boyish, and very sad: “Lieutenant,” he says, “you’d be doing me an enormous favor if you stopped calling me ‘Sir.’ ” There is no shit-eating in his grin then.
Please don’t mistake that ending, or Bill’s performance, for sadness. There is no possibility for true sadness in any performance of Bill Shatner’s. I don’t mean he is not capable of displaying sadness, merely that the gigantic reality of his underlying joy can never truly be compromised. Ward Fowler may go to prison, but Columbo has seen him first, and that is something no one can take away from him.
A while back I was at a conference in Tennessee with a bunch of medievalists trying to explain something about boyishness, and what it feels like to want to resist it and to drown in it at the same time. We were talking about Apollo and Hyacinthus (I am often, almost always, trying to talk about Apollo and Hyacinthus), and I was trying to figure out why exactly it felt so important to me, once again to explain the connection between the death of Hyacinthus and Ultimate Frisbee. Not because that was funny, but because it seemed very important to identify just what kind of beautiful boy he had been (Are you up? If so, do you want to play Frisbee and die for each other?). “There is a certain type of beautiful boy who plays Ultimate Frisbee and invites you to come watch his game,” I said, “not because he is vain and self-centered, although he maybe is, but because it is the only way he knows how to invite someone to share in his particular joy, and I think maybe the only thing I have ever wanted is to be a very beautiful, very dead, gentle boy that everyone gathers around and looks at.” William Shatner was, in his prime, a very beautiful, very gentle boy, although being dead had very little to do with his particular type of boyishness. It was a type of boyishness that drew scrutiny and criticism in a manner much like girlishness, and that seemed to require a constant public apology from him for aging.
I am also firmly of the belief that Captain James T. Kirk was, and is, at every age and in every incarnation, a beautiful lesbian; I fear that now I will be called upon to explain myself and that I will be unable to do so. I can only repeat myself with increasing fervor: James T. Kirk is a beautiful lesbian, do not ask me any follow-up questions. Like Goldwater, in your heart you know I’m right. There is plenty of stupid, surface-level evidence I could marshal forth in defense of my argument—people criticized Shatner for his weight, and women are often criticized for their weight; Shatner was beautiful in a way that women are generally beautiful; James T. Kirk lives with her longtime girlfriend (Spock) and her ex-girlfriend (Bones) in a benevolent feelings-and-sex-triad and generally observed the campsite rule when it came to bringing short-term partners around; James T. Kirk is vulnerable and anxious and riddled with sincerity and in love with her car; James T. Kirk wears motorcycle boots and seems to spend a lot of time on her hair, doesn’t want kids and rereads Dickens and doesn’t feel comfortable showing her feelings in front of anyone she’s known less than ten years but that doesn’t mean she won’t do it—but those things aren’t really what make James T. Kirk a beautiful lesbian, I don’t think. (It should perhaps go without saying that the contemporary interpreter of Kirk, Chris Pine, is also a beautiful lesbian, but that doesn’t have anything to do with my feelings for William Shatner, so we’re not going to address that any further here.)
I tried to explain to those same medievalists the strange reaction I have every time I read anything more than one hundred years old. “I feel a profound sense of triumph and superiority over the author,” I said, “because they are foolish enough to be dead, while I am young and gloriously alive. Not because I think their ideas are outdated or anything like that. It has nothing to do with how they think, or how we see the world differently. It is visceral, it is personal, it is gleeful, and it is triumphant. I have the good sense to still be living, while they have very foolishly died, and it always takes me at least ten minutes to stop crowing over my victory and pay attention to what I am reading.” No one else at the table, it turned out, felt quite the same way when reading something by a dead author, but that does not mean I am alone.
William Shatner would have made an excellent Maggie the Cat, because he is alive, no matter how many discuses you try to throw at him, no matter how easily the rest of us get distracted by his hairline or his age. He is beautiful, and alive, and not dead, and I don’t think I’ve done a very good job explaining anything today.
INTERLUDE XI Rilke Takes a Turn
We cannot fathom his mysterious head
Through the veiled eyes no flickering ray is sent;
But from his torso gleaming light is shed
As from a candelabrum; inward bent
His glance there glows and lingers. Otherwise
The round breast would not bind you with its grace,
Nor could the soft-curved circle of the thighs
Steal the arc whence issues a new race.
Nor could this stark and stunted stone display
Vibrance beneath the shoulders heavy bar,
Nor shine like fur upon a beast of prey,
Nor break forth from its lines like a great star—
There is no spot that does not bind you fast
And transport you back. You should have taken
a left turn at Albuquerque.
Hey, Doc, you’ve got a slight problem.
Just between the two of us, it’s duck-hunting season.
Have you ever had the feeling you were being watched?
Like the eyes of strange things are upon you?
Look, out there in the audience. My,
I bet you monsters lead interesting lives.
I said to my girlfriend just the other day—Gee,
I’ll bet monsters are interesting,
I said. The places you must go and the places
you must see, my stars! And I’ll bet
you meet a lot of interesting people, too. I’m always
interested in meeting interesting people. You should have taken
a left turn at Albuquerque.
CHAPTER 12 Duckie from Pretty in Pink Is Also a Beautiful Lesbian and I Can Prove It with the Intensity of My Feelings
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I’m not especially interested in parsing out which of the fictional teenagers should have dated the other fictional teenagers in the movie Pretty in Pink; I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about who I should have dated in high school, and I see no reason not to apply the same general air of resignation to Andie, Blane, Steff, and Duckie. They’re all in high school! They can date everyone in a variety of constellations; they have time for whatever.
I don’t know if you care about John Hughes movies. You may not. It may interest you to know that almost every John Hughes movie is about lesbians except for, perhaps unsurprisingly, Some Kind of Wonderful. At any rate, Pretty in Pink is—correctly, I think—the most beloved of the second-tier Hughes. If you care about any ending to a John Hughes movie, it is probably this one. Here is how the movie ends: Andie (Molly Ringwald) gets together with Blane (Andrew McCarthy), supposedly because the original ending, where she gets together with Duckie (Jon Cryer), didn’t test well with audiences.
They would have been a nice couple in a lot of ways. Remarkably ill-suited in others. It would have made him very happy to get to kiss her, and I would have enjoyed seeing him become very happy. (I have no opinion whatsoever on Steff, the character played by James Spader, an insouciance that has always surprised me. I often feel like I ought to have more of a response to James Spader, especially 1980s-era James Spader, but I cannot help how I feel. I do like that he married William Shatner on Boston Legal, so I suppose I am inclined to be warmly disposed toward him as a result of the Shatner spillover. And yet.) My primary concern is rescuing Duckie from the slag heap of history, not in determining whether he “ought” to have dated Andie at the end. Most of the Duckie discourse in recent years has centered around whether he is an example of the Nice Guy™, and if so, whether we should all be mad at him for it. My answer is no, for at least two reasons:
Duckie seems wholly uninterested in any sort of niceness throughout the course of the movie.
Duckie is a lesbian.
Listen, having that one pompadour haircut with a forehead curl, relentless and furiously pining for your best friend, wearing circular sunglasses, hanging out at someone else’s job because you don’t have anywhere better to be, and being one of the poorest kids in school aren’t necessary preconditions for lesbianism, but, like, add ’em all up and, baby, you’ve got a stew going.
There are exactly two Modes of Gay Feeling, no more and no less. Mode of Gay Feeling the first is Total Domination, How Dare You, I Will Never Die, It Is Impossible for Me to Die, I Thrive On Being Misunderstood. It’s all carefully balanced hats and perfectly styled teddy boy hair and pastel lapels and either having no sex at all or the kind of sex you can’t tell your friends about because they’re going to get worried for you, and it’s wonderful and it’s exhausting, and you’re funnier than anybody else both because you have to be and because it makes sense and more than a little because you are firmly convinced that a movie crew is always just out of sight recording your entire life and you are playing to the cheap seats, every minute.
Here is the other Mode of Gay Feeling: You still look fantastic, but your stomach hurts and you will never get out of bed. You have learned that rolling your sleeves up over your forearms is very useful to you, sexually speaking, but the person you love and the people you sleep with have absolutely nothing in common, including what they think of your forearms.
I’m not suggesting that Duckie was a lesbian in order to justify whether it was right of him to assume that his being very in love with Andie in any way created an obligation in her to return his feelings; assuredly it wasn’t! Assuredly it isn’t! And yet: how many times in my own life have I thought, wrongly, The feelings I feel now toward the object of my affections are so blindingly obvious that it is as if I am carrying around the beaming lantern from a lighthouse inside of my chest. How could anyone not notice? When of course no one has noticed.
I’m not saying lesbians have a monopoly on silence, either, not even in the 1980s; there are straight boys who love straight women, probably, and are still reluctant to speak on the subject. But that would have been a good reason, I think, for Duckie not to say anything, yet to feel furious anyhow for not having been understood. It is a hard thing to want to be interpreted and not offer anyone a key to the translation.
Is there anything gayer than refusing to ask someone out, then holding them personally responsible for the silent, ever-increasing intensity of your feelings until they tell you casually they’re going on a date with someone who asked them out, then exploding with despair? Almost certainly, but no one will tell me what it is.
“I would’ve died for you” is a complete non sequitur of a response to the sentence “I am going on a date with a boy named Blane,” but it’s also the only honest thing one can say in response. I mean, one shouldn’t say it at all, but if one is going to, seventeen is the last acceptable age. This sentiment, by the way, is at least 25 percent of the reason why Bruno Mars is also a lesbian; if you are not a lesbian at the beginning of writing a song as histrionic and self-pitying as “Grenade,” you certainly are by the end of it. (I don’t know if Bruno Mars actually wrote the song “Grenade.” Don’t crowd me, kid, I’m just getting warmed up.)
The fact that Duckie’s most memorable scene involves fervent, furious lip-synching feels almost too on the nose. She bursts into the record store where Andie and the wonderful Iona (Annie Potts) work, disrupting everything, but she does so in perfect silence. It’s a beautiful performance of total frustration—she’s exhausted by the end of it, drooping and spent—and she doesn’t sing a single word, doesn’t make a single sound. She throws herself to the ground over and over, and she also wears a bolo tie. Of course one can certainly watch Duckie in that scene (and Andie’s resultant confusion and panic) as the tantrum of a boy who has mistaken owning a lot of hats for emotional sensitivity, who demands too much time and energy and attention from the women around him, you absolutely can. Probably John Hughes did.
You can also watch that scene as the tantrum of a lesbian who has mistaken owning a lot of hats for emotional sensitivity, who demands too much from others; just because I think Duckie is a lesbian doesn’t mean that she is making excellent and healthy choices. Duckie twitches around afterward like a hummingbird, as if her hands stopped moving around in emphatic gestures for even a second they might betray her into giving something away. But I recommend watching that scene, focusing as much as you can on Iona’s face throughout. She sees something she recognizes, wants to hail in direct acknowledgment, and also challenge. I think that thing she recognizes is a particular sort of lesbian sadness, and I want to recognize it, too, even though it’s not exactly mine.
Before I started testosterone I bought myself a lot of cheap accessories, both as a distraction and at least partly in the hope they would weigh me down and provide me with an actual, physical sense of being grounded. I went into a secondhand store on my way to the supermarket and I hailed the woman behind the front desk. “I want to buy at least eight silver rings from you,” I said, and did exactly that. It was absolutely wonderful, and she was as happy for me as I was.
There was a ninth ring that I did not buy, because things were getting a little ridiculous, and the woman behind the counter said, “Tell you what. I’ll put it to the side, and if you can’t stop thinking about it, you come back.” There are so many things I can’t stop thinking about! And so many places I find myself going back to! Aren’t things getting a little ridiculous?
My girlfriend, Grace, before she was my girlfriend, was working on an article about George Eliot and texted me something Jane Carlyle once wrote about Eliot:
I hope to know someday if the person I am addressing bears any resemblance in external things to the idea I have conceived of [them] in my mind.… How ridiculous all this may read beside the reality.
I texted back, “I identify strongly with ending the description of a fervent, cherished wish with ‘how ridiculous.’ I love you, Jane Carlyle. Also I just
bought eight rings.”
“It really is pretty sweet,” my friend texted back, “given how awful she was.”
Duckie might have been awful but I can forgive her, because she was awfully sweet, too, and I wish I could do more to help her.
INTERLUDE XII I Have a Friend Who Thinks Umbrellas Are Enemies of the Collective Good, and I Have a Sneaking Suspicion They May Be Right
She’s from England, I mean England England; it’s true to say that she’s from the UK, and it’s also true to say that she’s from England—both things are true of her—and I had no idea she felt that way about umbrellas until the first time we got caught in the rain together and I offered to share my umbrella with her and she said, “I don’t believe in umbrellas.”
Which no one had ever said to me before, and it made me a little worried because I realized I was going to have trouble guessing things she would want to hear me say and then saying them, not necessarily because I meant them but because I wanted to please, which was something I did a lot without admitting it to myself. I was surprised and I said, “What’s not to believe in?”
She said: “An umbrella keeps you dry by diverting all the water to roll away from you and onto other people. It’s an enemy of the collective good and I’d rather just wear a raincoat.” So we didn’t share an umbrella that day, or any day thereafter, even though we’ve been caught in the rain an awful lot since then.
A couple of things have changed since I wrote this title; she’s no longer my friend-who-goes-by-they but my girlfriend-who-goes-by-she. We live together, and shortly after we moved in I found an umbrella in the front hall closet. When I asked her about it, she said, “I think I got it from my last roommate,” then pursed her lips together and added, “Needless to say, you’ve never seen me use it,” which is another thing that’s true about her.