Auntie Mame (1958)

Directed by Morton DaCosta. Starring Rosalind Russell.

“Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death.”

I associate Auntie Mame with Christmas. It’s an absurd and delightful sign of the season that brings me as much joy as that talking snowman and island of misfit toys did when I was a child. Rosalind Russell is an endearing master of ceremonies in this over-the-top Technicolor escapade.

I also associate Auntie Mame with my favorite bartender, Randy Hedrick (RIP). I first met Randy in 1999 in Boston at the Lenox Hotel bar Anago. Anago was a rather swanky place for riff-raff like me to be hanging out in. Randy had previously been employed at Jack Lynch’s Webster Lounge, a less tony establishment that existed in a strange place on the edge of a parking garage overlooking the expressway. I never went there but my drinking buddies Bob and Nat were regulars there and followed Randy to Anago when Jack Lynch’s closed. When I started hanging around with those two degenerates, I also started visiting Randy on a regular basis. He made a fine cocktail. He knew what you drank and how you liked it. Like Auntie Mame, he was good looking, witty, and charming as hell. Naturally, he loved Auntie Mame and quoted the film all the time as he danced behind the bar from cocktail to cocktail.

One of my favorite holiday memories was orchestrated by Randy. On a cold night in December, Bob, Nat, and I decided to head to Anago. Uncharacteristically, we called ahead to tell Randy that we were coming and that we would like to request eggnog as our drink of the evening. Anago was not a large bar, there were maybe 8 or 10 seats at the bar and it was usually full, especially during the holidays. When we arrived, there were three empty seats, each with a glass of eggnog waiting. When we three ragamuffins made our entrance and were shown to our beverages all the fancy heads turned. It was an absurd and delightful event – a memory of a man and a time that I hold dear.

Jeanne Dielman 23, Quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles (1975)

Directed by Chantal Ackerman.

How could you know? You're not a woman. Lights out?

I was recently reading about Samuel Clemens and how he came to his more well-known sobriquet of Mark Twain. It was applied to him by the steamboat captain, John Bixby, with whom he apprenticed. ‘Mark Twain’ is a river term for measuring water depth, meaning two fathoms deep (that’s twelve feet for all you landlubbers out there). Bixby taught Twain the need to read surface for indications of depth; how small perturbations might infer large submerged truths. So it is with Jeanne Dielman.

I had never heard of this film but it kept appearing in those ubiquitous “best films of all-time” lists – which of course I look at. Touted as an experimental feminist classic and coming in at three hours and twenty-one minutes running time, I was saving it for a wretched afternoon when I would have no interest in going outside. After watching this claustrophobia-inducing film, I felt a need to be out on a mountain breathing in the fresh air and taking in the long view. Or, if I couldn’t go outside, I wanted to make a mess, to have an orgasm, to drink a glass of whiskey, and dance like a fool. Jeanne Dielman’s life is order personified. The film is shot in tight spaces, so many grids, so many doors opening and closing, so many lights being turned on and turned off. So much time spent inside - indoors and inside the head, arranging and ordering. So little pleasure taken.

It is a long film, but it is completely mesmerizing. The way that such small details, presented in the context of the mundane, work to instill anxiety in the viewer is fascinating. A dropped brush, an over-cooked potato, a missing button. The meat kneading scene sent me over the edge. The pace of the film allows time for the quiet details to speak. I began to detest this woman that I felt sorry for at first. The absurdism is an acquiescent Tati, the melodrama a blanched Sirk. It is a three hour still life that slowly crumbles before your eyes. Did the potato fiasco push her over the edge? Ackerman was twenty-five when she made this film. I wonder what she thought of it as she approached the age of Jeanne Dielman?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pSNOEYSIlg

Badlands (1973)

Directed by Terrence Malick. With Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen.

At this moment, I didn't feel shame or fear, but just kind of blah, like when you're sitting there and all the water's run out of the bathtub.

I was so happy when I got an e-mail from Criterion Channel announcing that Badlands would be streaming in December. This film has legendary status in my memory and I have been eager to watch it again. It has not fallen from its legendary status after a second viewing. This is great storytelling, great acting, great filmmaking.

I have been thinking a lot about how stories get attached to landscapes. In my mind, South Dakota is forever attached to this film, this story, this couple – Holly and Kit. There’s also Kansas and In Cold Blood. Is there something about the endless plains that inspires murderous sprees? Toward the end of Badlands, when Kit has stopped running and is waiting for the law to catch up with him, he builds a cairn at the side of the road. The cairn is a holdover from the ‘old world’ – a monument and a waymarker, a collection of traveler’s stories. When the arresting officers finally take him, he points it out to them, certain that they will want to return to the exact spot later to tell their own story. He’s built a monument to himself or to his story and their stories. I think of maps as a way to connect stories, waymarkers for meaning-making. Each point or line on a map is a story, has a story, relates a story, collects more stories, connects to another story. Maps are lyrical. Maps are songs. Badlands is a lyrical film. It is a murder ballad. A holdover from the ‘old world’. It is a cairn, a commemoration, and a marker, a story to which we gravitate, a fairy tale, a myth, a legend. It tells us something about how we navigate our world.