October 15, 1986 [True Stories]

David Byrne in his movie True Stories--wearing a cowboy hat a little too big for him, driving a car too big for anybody, in a landscape even bigger--seems somewhere in the vicinity of Pee-Wee Herman, with a little Harry Langdon around the eyes--but he's as thin as a skittish lizard, and about as easy to lay your hands on. Everyone's wondering if he's making fun of "people like us who will answer the telephone" and "growing big as a house"--you know, the kind "with the television always on." He sees an invented mysticism in these lives, but he scatters them across a dry-scrub plain, where they land in little barren boxes and call it home. It's a National Enquirer world of the true-but-false, and Byrne blandly displays the Woman Who Never Leaves Her Bed and the Man Who Advertises for a Wife alongside voodoo cures and Puzzling Evidence.

But the music's good, and the performers are more than game--the show all but stolen by a big guy, John Goodman as Louis, with his snazzy outfits and dogged optimism--and that's the kind of thing that wipes the sneer off David's face: the mystery of the everyday--or whatever it is that keeps Louis from feeling foolish. In the end, I don't blame Byrne: I smirk a little at them myself--then feel bad, if only because I go home and the television's on, as usual.

August 11, 1986 [Stand by Me]

Little Rob in our neighborhood wanders over to any dad--head under the hood, yanking on a lawnmower, smoking on the front lawn with other men. Rob's looking for his father--his own divorced his wife, and Rob lives with her and his grandmother, her Italian better than her English, her hands full with a wired little monkey of a grandson: I've never seen anything climb a tree faster than Rob, especially when a dog barks suddenly--he's a nervous little guy. But I've seen him settle disputes among the kids, the only grownup in the bunch.

He made us a little metal catch-all dish at the park's day camp: smoky turquoise and green and cobalt blue, with little sparks of gold where he'd randomly hammered at it to chart a lopsided starry sky glazed like an archaeological find, a small treasure we keep on the shelf above the kitchen sink and fill with loose buttons and paper clips and spare change and a stray baby tooth. My son admires him, I think: somehow free without a father, and old in his head--but his older brother is a real hoodlum, gone for days sometimes, tolerant of the little kids but a little scary. Not his brother's friend, even though I've heard that the mere mention of his name sends schoolyard bullies packing.

I saw Rob and my son and another boy walking up the street, their arms around each others' shoulders, like the boys in Stand by Me who go over the river and through the woods to see the dead boy, not such a long walk after all to the lonely place where they end up.

December 20, 1985 [Brazil]

[scroll down for a little music to read by--the Editor]

Where is Brazil? From the bureaucrat-hero's veranda, the buildings swooping in diagonal shadows as De Niro's rogue duct-man sails on his tether, it looks like Wil Eisner's cityscapes in The Spirit, cold and haunted, with secrets in every little yellow square peppered on the leaning blank walls.

At work, Jonathan Pryce's Sam Lowry (a Terry Gilliam fool-your-friends jumping spider if there ever was one, animated stammer in every gangly limb) dives into the past, pneumatic tubes conveying space-age missives, tinny Westerns blazing intermittently on old-timey TVs with magnifiers, the paper flying nowhere--or wrongwise, Orwell's organized chaos.

But this is a Terry Gilliam movie, so if you want to get to the real world you have to dream, as Lowry does, Maxfield Parrish golden clouds rising in soft focus as he rides the sky--or stomps through endless streets, confronting Samurai-terrorists--his efforts to assert quiet strength and sexy rescue bound and gagged as Michael Palin draws on every bad Monty Python impulse to grind things down into sausages, as efficient and Mad as Ian Holm's Kurtzmann, founder of the Usual Gang of Idiots, but evil.

It's a beautiful, hilarious, horrible Brazil--but that tune is still catchy: I can hear it above the forced laughter of the powerful and doomed--who themselves are plugging their ears while Buttles and Tuttles creak behind their leather gags.

---

June 13, 1986 [Mona Lisa, The Long Good Friday]

I've seen Bob Hoskins play two types of gangsters, and he pretty much covers all the kinds the movies need. A few years back in The Long Good Friday he was the Kingpin--although still a bit of a blockhead, confident that his holdings--and his chin-thrust bearing--would carry the day. He was this close to being in an American gangster picture--but his New York mafia would-be partners saw in England what Michael Corleone saw in Havana: the unmitigated zeal of revolutionaries, willing to do anything but lose--and they hurried back to the Five Boroughs, leaving Bob's top-o-the-world bully-boy on his own, flummoxed by the IRA so willing to adjust the profit motive to suit larger, more explosive ideals.

As affable, lonely George in Mona Lisa, he still hasn't quite caught up with the conversation--but here at least he's ready to roll with the punches--even though Michael Caine knows how to hit, hard. George thinks he's in love--not the worst assumption, given the high-class charms of the call girl he drives around. But she has lived her own life, and it doesn't include his. As he stands there with his flowers--almost pathetic, just on the verge--he gets a whole lot smarter than his Long Good Friday counterpart and wakes up--or at least settles in--and decides his loneliness is his own after all, not something any slender lady--no matter how much she may need rescuing--has given him, or can take away. I admire the barrel-chested little bull and the way he turns aside just enough to go home.

September 22, 1985 [Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters]

I fished out of the drawer some haiku that Pete had brought home from school last month or so--a poetic form that children love: as small as they are, and floating like they do toward the hope of completion. But haiku promises that things don't finish, they suspend, taking some shape for a moment. Is there a poet alive who has not tried to pick up something important with this tiny beak that dips below the surface, and hoped to bring up something essential?

--more than one thing: The essential juxtapostion of haiku, a moment of clarity as the one thing meets another. Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters feels like this. Mishima's intensely internal life cleaves like a desperate lover to his body, compelling him to sculpt himself on the outside as thoroughly as he has labored on his art. And it drives him to colors so bright and violent--like the ones Paul Schrader uses to illustrate Mishima's stories--that they pass into nothing, like a bird flying over a pond, dashing down to feed and disappearing.

August 12, 1985 [Pee-Wee's Big Adventure]

Imagine if Fellini had been asked to direct a children's film--no, wait: What if Salvador Dali had been born a middle-class American '50s kid? Or hold on: Doesn't Pee-Wee look like gross-out camp director John Waters? Then again, isn't Pee-Wee his own self, somehow closer to a cheerful sitcom child--Rusty Williams or Opie Taylor or Richie Petrie--or the Crown Prince himself, Beaver Cleaver--oh, the rollicking sound of his name, like all of them somehow miniature adults who will always reject puberty in favor of one more scoot around the block on the best bike ever?

Pee-Wee knows those boys--and grows down to be just like them, except without any last-minute smiling obedience. No, Pee-Wee's life is action-packed, a persona without a performer--Paul Reubens gone for good beneath his ventriloquist's-dummy disguise--an actor acting in a movie in a movie about movies. Director Tim Burton accepts Pee-Wee with alarming openness and allows the little fellow to sputter and sproing with stiff-limbed grace, the audience laughing or not--and Burton and Pee-Wee don't care, they just want enough pepper gum and plastic dinosaurs to keep things moving (Spencer Gifts their apparent corporate sponsor)--and to keep us guessing about this postmodern Little Tramp wearing just about as much makeup as the original--but again, without the aspirations of adulthood. Pee-Wee insists to Dottie, "I like you! LIKE!" and giggles to himself as he beats a hasty retreat, once more deflecting commitment to one side or the other--child/adult, male/female, human/cartoon. He wears a suit but looks good in a dress, plays with toys but is best portrayed by James Brolin--and treats his drive-in celebrity like a Bonomo Turkish Taffy: something to be smacked on the sidewalk and shared with the other kids.

When I saw the video of his comedy club show, I knew that Pee-Wee understood post-World-War-II America in an important way: shaped by educational film strips and cool toys, sustained by wishes and songs everybody knows--and willing to take itself apart without tearing the slightest corner, each tab and slot intact, just in case it needs to be put back together again some day.

April 23, 1985 [The Company of Wolves]

Watching The Company of Wolves, I was pretty sure I was supposed to be thinking of Bruno Bettelheim and his book The Uses of Enchantment: the Grimm tale as instruction, an opportunity for the child to learn that the evolved Little Pig is safer than his primitive, less reality-principled house-of-straw counterpart. Or better yet: Little Red Riding Hood eager to be eaten up by her wolfish father--who has already obliterated the sexless grandmother, paving a toothy way for Red's own bold consumption of her virginity. This is the movie's pleasures, all laid out, so to speak, in a hairy, gooey splendor worthy of An American Werewolf in London's or The Howling's agonizing prosthetic enlargements.

But I shuffled Bettelheim off to the side: all I could think of was a short story by Shirley Jackson--that mad old suburbanite, raising little demons and rummaging around in the battered box for the unlucky winner of a pile of thrown stones. Thirty or more years ago, I think: "The Witch," about a little boy bored in a train and a nice old man with a cigar who delights the child with a little story of his own, about pinching his sister's head off and tearing her to pieces. The boy's mother steps in and banishes the smiling old devil--always courteous, soft-spoken, matter-of-fact--no dripping, fur-sprouting special effects necessary, just a smile and a story. The little boy understands, though, decides the old man was probably a witch, and promptly resumes his boredom.

I think this is where The Company of Wolves works best, with the grownup willing to tell a story, the grandmother eager to lay it on thick, leaving out no gory detail, delighted she can give her granddaughter the opportunity to eat and be eaten. But in the end I don't believe the not-so-little girl learns anything; the fairy tale is not school but an experience, like a long train ride with witches.

January 21, 1985 [Blood Simple]

There's something Darwinian about Blood Simple--even the title itself: the more blood you slog through--and the more it's someone else's--the crazier you get. Judicious decisions don't matter any more--it's all instincts--but they're all bad. In fact, everyone in the movie is bad--and while most of them grin and bear it, use it to get what they think they want, like the clueless Ray says, once you shoot at someone, you have to shoot to kill. And in this movie--which feels like something made in the early '50s, one of those pictures set where the sidewalk ends (because that's where the gutter begins)--shooting is just the start of it. The rest is having to dig the grave and get sprayed with blood and listen to the wet wheezing sounds coming out of the other guy. Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom couldn't put it any plainer.

As the double crossers themselves get crossed, and each character fumbles the chance to evolve the hell away from disaster--with Dan Hedaya's Marty and M. Emmet Walsh's private eye leading the pack of fools, each of them in a hell the other one helps to make--Blood Simple dashes all hopes of nature's careful economy. Evolution becomes rushed piecework, the seams of your ape-suit holding just long enough for you to show up at your own funeral--where your sleeves slowly tear off the shoulders as you settle into the cheap lining of the half-hearted coffin thrown together at the last minute.