April 6, 1992 [Delicatessen]

Delicatessen led me down to my basement--a terrible mess, an impenetrable personal archeology that goes back to childhood--and all of it encrusted with dust and rust and cobwebs, as though Delicatessen's prop-master had spent loving weeks down there, floating every dust-mote just so, aesthetically skewing each peeling magazine and long-forgotten student paper--with a mechanical bank and a Magic 8-Ball, a set of surveyor's tools and a tin box for Egyptian cigarettes someone else smoked decades ago--and on and on, mildewed books and bins full of toys and clothes and intimations--not of Wordsworthian immortality but its comforting opposite, the way of all flesh and flotsam.

Because there on the French screen the future stood like a circus clown about to juggle improbabilities--but scary and lost, the poor little handyman--poised somewhere between Emmett Kelly and a small frog (no insult intended)--fattened up for the post-apocalyptic menu.  And just like my basement the little man remains, his rhythm as perfect as his lithe frame and pushed-in face--and I remember him as the thug who hated everything in Diva--except now he is the closest thing to love in this hilarious and cruel movie, Chaplinesque without insulting Charlie.  Each cartoon bounce and Keystone Cop skitter warmed me against the cold of the world he had to live in--darker than the corner where our first-born's crib stood in neat pieces suitable for kindling and spiders.

March 25, 1992 [Raise the Red Lantern]

I have a vague childhood memory of hiding under the bedcovers to weather some household storm--and it must have been a big one because I never fell for that kid cliché--especially when it came to monsters: How could I plan my escape if I couldn’t see them?  But that time I had seen enough, I suppose, and gave in to the impulse to turn everything into pale thin cloud cover, a blank nothing to keep out Something.

Raise the Red Lantern billows a sheet against the world--but it’s the world that’s made safe--or at least blind, so that the lush slavery and personal politics within can push on without a sound, the snow and sun and black night the second set of bedclothes, a double cocoon where beautiful things with short lives and stingers can lie and crack open and spread wings--not to fly away, but to hover over one another, the concubines circling like queen wasps, too many for the hive.

And off in the distance is the rich man who spit out golden wax and built it all: the closed indulgent empire with its unnatural rules followed like laws of nature by queens who believe they rule.  The young college student we follow beats her wings against the soft walls--and I watch her from my own little cell, years ago--not so many, I guess, the moment still in my head as I sit and read subtitles and watch beautiful Women in Chains plot and scheme and despair, cons whose pleas of innocence are neither denied nor heard beneath muffled silk.

March 16, 1992 [Howard’s End]

I don’t need everyone in the movie to keep saying they want to live at Howard’s End: I’m ready to go there, right now, and close the door quietly behind me and watch the dust float. What storms compel me to seek that low-ceilinged shelter--with the slightly mad housekeeper gliding along the periphery, the little rooms peeking into one another, the tame British wilderness crowding its soft shoulder against every eave, ivy and tree branch touching like loving friends against a slight chill outside--the weather welcome, though, because that means a cheery fire and the kettle on?  After all, death and shame and greed and stupidity also crowd those little rooms--the sword waiting for just the right flanks to send packing, weak hearts or not.

What else is there, though? They all live there, one time or another, and have to walk where they all walk--and I have to follow them--and it's more than the same old Anglophilia that I jump into feet first, eager to follow the old woman as she moves one more time through the tall grass--mowed at the end of the picture, her ghost as welcome as the rich man’s humbled face, Anthony Hopkins holding his head and clearing it--yes, a little befuddled at the end, no longer a Lion of Commerce (too many losses, too many failed houses); but the sun makes an appearance and the clouds’ shadows seem cheerful as they glide on the field, the alternating light and dark natural and reassuring.

Again, it's more than those reassurances: While the ironies of the novel (at least I think they were ironies) are softened a bit, the new century does its hard work, watches the old class system not merely fade but reinvent itself as a man sitting on the grass and being forgiven by the freer spirits of the twentieth century--to whom Howard’s End is still promised. And while Romantic sunrises never work out, I confess I walk toward them, like poor Leonard Bast, because after all the two families behave as they should, whether we like it or not, with just enough foolishness and fond love to get them and keep them together.