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Cynthia Gorney and Stephen Harrigan

the breakfast table
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from: Stephen Harrigan

Our Movie Is Better Than Your Movie

Posted Wednesday, July 21, 1999, at 11:52 AM ET

Dear Cynthia,

Genghis Blues hasn't turned up here yet, but it will. Austin is a documentary town. In fact, the pride of Austin these days--along with Lance Armstrong, George W. Bush, Kelly Willis, and the seemingly late and only somewhat lamented Madalyn Murray O'Hair (whose caustic atheism might be a good topic for us this week)--is a guy named S.R. Bindler, the auteur of Hands on a Hard Body, which is the greatest documentary ever made. Have you heard of this movie in Oakland? I know it's been shown in New York and other supposed cultural capitals, but only Austin seems to have really clasped it to its bosom. It's been showing for a year solid, to packed houses, at the Dobie theater here. Hands is the story of an annual contest held at a car dealership in Longview, Texas, in which the prize is a brand-new Nissan "hard-body" pickup. How do you win it? By standing around longer than anybody else without taking your hands off the truck. I know, I know, a movie about a bunch of people standing around and touching a truck sounds, in the mere telling, as boring as a documentary about paint scraping, but trust me on this one, Cynthia. Those Tuvan throat-singers have nothing on these Longview pickup contestants. If it's not showing in Oakland, catch a plane to Austin. We can put you up in the spare bedroom.

There were a lot of things in the paper we could talk about today: Cuban refugees being bombarded by fire hoses and pepper spray to prevent them from planting a foot on the Florida coastline; the statement of Carleton S. Fiorina, the new female CEO of Hewlett-Packard, that there is no "glass ceiling" after all; the tragic failure of Olestra to perform as hoped in the marketplace (remember that American Pie-style neologism Olestra gave rise to last year--"anal leakage"?); Natalie Angier's story in the New York Times today about why she hates vacations.

But let's turn our attention for a moment to mother crocodiles. I was watching a documentary about the domestic lives of saltwater crocodiles on Animal Planet last night and was deeply struck by the image of a mother crocodile rescuing her newly hatched offspring from some threat or other (I think it was rising water, but I tuned in too late to know for sure). It was an amazing thing to see: the mother "salty" clawing at the mound of the nest to release the hatchlings, then patiently, hour by hour, seizing each baby crocodile in her mouth, trudging back down to the shoreline and gently releasing it into the water. What was so remarkable to me was that this seemed to be not an act of instinct on her part but a conscious decision--that she was "aware" in much the same the way that a human mother might be in removing her own children from a scene of danger. This documentary, along with other recent discoveries about animals--that dolphins, for instance, engage in undolphinly activities such as rape, kidnapping, and wanton brutality--led me to ponder how defiantly we humans have always refused to believe in the interior lives of other creatures, and how we are only now slowly beginning to understand that those lives may be as complex and--in some cosmic sense--as worthy as our own.

To which the only proper response, during the high holy days of the Woodstock anniversary, is "far out."

Back to you,
Steve

the breakfast table
entries
12345678910111213141516
from: Stephen Harrigan

Our Movie Is Better Than Your Movie

Posted Wednesday, July 21, 1999, at 11:52 AM ET
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Cynthia Gorney, a reporter for the Washington Post from 1975 to 1991, will join the faculty at U.C. Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism this fall. She is the author of Articles of Faith: A Frontline History of the Abortion Wars (click here to buy the book). Stephen Harrigan is an occasional columnist for Slate, as well as a screenwriter and novelist. His recent books include Water and Light: A Diver's Journey to a Coral Reef (click here to buy the book).
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