Lord, I’m slow writing back to you. This is almost the Dinner Table. Maybe I’m freaked out because I have to review the new DePalma and Halloween movies for today (more likely tomorrow!) for Slate, and unlike Nell Minow–CEO-slayer, movie critic, super-mom, Breakfast-table whiz–I have the physical and mental stamina of someone twice my age. Maybe I’ll try out a few Halloween leads on you:
“Just when you thought it was safe to sleep with your babysitter–” OK, scratch that.
“When last we saw Michael Myers, he had been shot 30 times, incinerated, impaled–” Don’t know where that one’s going.
“Ever feel like seeing a really juicy hack-’em-up?”
See people think writers are in control of what they write, but I never know what the hell I’m going to say until I write it.
Let’s pick up some leftover crumbs from yesterday’s table: Maybe listen to Dr. Laura before you defend her. A born-again Orthodox Jew, she seems to have acquired Old Testament intolerance with no Talmudic largeness of spirit. In theory she’s a healthy idea, in practice she’s as healing as an Iron Maiden. Her most powerful lesson is that when you think that you’re right and that someone else is wrong, you’re entitled to abuse them.
Yesterday’s Daily News featured a spare, chilling account by a mother whose son was diagnosed a paranoid-schizophrenic in his late 30s, lost his wife and family, and, after embarking on what seemed a successful drug treatment, stopped taking his medicine, trashed his apartment and (as of 1983) was never seen by anyone who knew him again. Michael Laudor, the schizophrenic Yale Law School graduate accused in the stabbing death of his pregnant fiancee (and who, apparently, still has no idea she’s dead), could be found competent to stand trial on charges of second-degree murder. Prosecutors will likely seek the death penalty for “Rusty” Weston, the clinically diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic who allegedly murdered two guards in the nation’s Capitol. I hate to ask this, but here goes: Will we as a society soon decide that anyone diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic and subsequently discharged from an institution must have their blood levels monitored daily or weekly to ensure that they’re taking their medicine?
Your discussion of mental illness in movies struck a chord. Few aspects of the 60s seem as egregiously bogus as the R.D. Laing-ish fantasy that it’s the crazy ones who are the most sane, as depicted in Man of La Mancha, King of Hearts, etc. Yes, those windmills might be giants, but Cervantes was pretty careful to show that they weren’t. Some of the most disturbing works of art portray madness as double-edged. My favorite film of last year, Robert Duvall’s The Apostle (did you see it?), makes its evangelist protagonist a man of real stature, a source of inspiration–and also manic and homicidal. We could talk endlessly about the potential of antidepressants and other psychoactive medications to nip future works of art in the bud. I’ve just finished Maynard Solomon’s biography of Beethoven and Jonathan Carr’s of Mahler. Both men (especially nutso Beethoven) were desperately unhappy, even delusional, and it’s a safe bet that neither would have been driven to produce the works that console us in our most desperate hours if they’d been popping Zoloft or Lithium. (Chekhov, whom I’ve always considered the exception to the great-artists-are-unhappy-people rule, emerges a far more tortured character in Donald Rayfield’s astonishing new biography.)
Speaking of mandates, I’ve never owned a Playboy, and have maybe only two or three times in my life set foot in a porn shop. (Really; for better–or probably worse–I always got my jollies from horror movies.) Yet it has always been important to me that I could go to one of those places if I felt like it. The news of New York mayor Rudy Giuliani’s campaign against XXX bookstores–part of the “Disneyfication” of New York that could well reach its tentacles all the way to Coney Island–has made me want to become a regular customer. A Daily News editorial reads, in part, “If you say the customers are not sleazoids but upstanding citizens with a healthy attitude about sex, ask yourself if you would want your sister to marry one. If your sister already is married to one, you–and she–have our sympathies.”
I don’t know who wrote that editorial (maybe Mort Zuckerman himself wrote it), but if that person has ever set foot in or purchased XXX magazines or paraphernalia or rented or watched an X-rated video, he or she should be “impeached,” or its journalistic equivalent.
And speaking of hypocrisy, news comes that Spike Lee has just bought a 7.5 million dollar townhouse in Manhattan, forsaking at last his beloved Brooklyn. That’s not just movie money that bought that townhouse–it’s advertising money. I suspect I was derelict when I praised Lee’s He Got Game, which satirized the corporate appetite for co-opting young African-American basketball players, without mentioning that Lee himself has been co-opted, and is a greedy cog in the same machine.
I’m glad that you too liked Ever After, but I still feel that the movie is a little too down to earth. I didn’t mean that I missed the coach and pumpkin specifically–I missed images that had the same kind of archetypal resonance. And I was brought up short by the vehemence of the prince’s rejection of our heroine when he discovers she’s a servant. It was obviously required by the narrative, but it wasn’t too well prepared for psychologically. Thank goodness Leonardo da Vinci was such a mensch!
Shari Lewis’s daughter Mallory Tarcher said on NPR this morning that children who are told of her death can write letters of condolence to to Lamb Chop, Charlie Horse, and Hush Puppy. My heart breaks for my own baby daughter, who won’t be lucky, as I was, to grow up with Lamb Chop as a sibling.
