Roman Polanski's "Bitter Moon"

A couple of years ago I sat in the first lecture of a course about Roman Polanski in the Tel-Aviv university, given by a much beloved but very pompous professor. He began by listing all of Polanski's films, and I fell into his silly little trap by raising my hand and pointing out that he had left out "Bitter Moon". His well-rehearsed answer was "I've left it out, because it isn't worth talking about, and I'd rather forget that it was ever made".
Then he spent a month talking about "The Tenant".

"Bitter Moon" - in French, "Lunes de Fiel", meaning "Moon of Gall", as opposed to "Lunes de Miel" which means "Moon of Honey" i.e. "Honeymoon" - is one of the most underrated films in history. Just as the wonderful "Starship Troopers" is mistaken for a cheesy action film, when it is in fact an earth-shattering social commentary, so "Bitter Moon" is mistaken for a romantic drama gone wrong, when it is in fact a grotesque indictment of the modern ideas of romantic love.

As I read some of the reviews for this film, my hands start to shake with anger. The consensus seems to be that Polanski started out with the intention to describe a moving love affair, then got lost in his stupid desire to create provocations by inserting as much soft-core porn as he could get away with. They mock the cliche lines that Peter Coyote's character speaks with a straight face: "Have you ever truly idolized a woman? Nothing can be obscene in such love. Everything that occurs in between it becomes a sacrament." and nobody knows what the hell Hugh Grant and Kristin Scott Thomas' characters are doing there. Roger Ebert is the only one who seems to have some kind of idea of what this film is really about. So, listen carefully, I'm only going to explain this once:

Oscar and Mimi are living out the romantic fantasy of romantic Parisian romance that we've been conditioned to want and fantasize about. He is a brooding American writer who lives in Paris and expects to become the next Henry Miller or Ernest Hemingway. He meets a divine creature on the bus and falls in love at first sight, but doesn't get to speak to her. After looking for her for months and almost giving up, he finally runs into her by mistake, and this "written in the stars" affair can finally begin. Of course she remembers him, of course she has also fallen in love with him at first sight. As they crash into each-other's arms with phrases like "I might have been Adam with the taste of apple fresh in my mouth. I was looking at all the beauty in the world, embodied in a single female form.", they reach the point where Meg Ryan films usually end, and step into uncharted territory. What happens next, or rather what doesn't happen, is that they never reach the comfortable, "boring" stage of the love affair. They never learn to enjoy eating breakfast together without tearing their clothes off and licking milk off each-other. They giggle and kiss while shopping for sex toys, but they will never giggle and kiss while shopping for groceries.

And so the grotesque part of the story begins - how far can you go on desire alone? At what point does sexual exploration become a silly cartoon? What do you do when a person kneels at your feet and tells you "You can do anything you want to me, just don't send me away"? How does it feel to go in an instant from being all-powerful to being completely powerless? And after all the battles have been won and lost, how do you spend eternity? Perhaps by poisoning the lives of a young couple you meet along the way, by mocking their seemingly boring and lustless relationship, and forcing your personal hell on them.

Just like Mimi and Oscar's love, Roman Polanski the masterpiece director is gone now, and it's too late to hug his ankles and cry "Please don't go, I'll do anything!". Instead, we can quote another cliche and say "We'll always have Paris", we'll always have "Chinatown", "Rosemary's Baby", and "Bitter Moon".

Good Night - a self portrait

The Millemium Trilogy

This is what it feels like to read Stieg Larsson's Millenium Trilogy:

The first book is fascinating, though vulgar, and you fall completely in love with Lisbeth Salander. The second one is exciting, though far-fetched. By the middle of the third one, you just want all the characters to take their women's rights, their journalistic integrity, their hyperactive libidos and their overblown IQ and end it all in a nearby fjord.

I shudder to think what the other seven books would've been like.

Tron Legacy

For the life of me I can't understand why, in this age of over-population, the majority of texts our mainstream culture manages to produce still preach the doctrine of reproduction above, and instead, of all other acts of creation.

Kevin Flynn has attempted the god-like act of creating an entire alternative universe from scratch, and he expects to get results from it that will benefit our world as well - something about perfecting the human genome, eliminating disease and so on that I didn't entirely follow. But oh no! He has been swallowed up, literally, by his work, and can't spend time with his son. How unfortunate. Too late he realizes that the only perfection he should've ever attempted is the one that hides inside this child. All his ideas about making the world better for the kid to grow up in - too bad, he should've scrapped those the moment the stick turned blue.

 Well, I'm sorry, but screw you, Mr. Kosinski, and screw you, eight (!) people it took to write this script, and screw you (passionately and at length, and sleep for a while and wake up and then screw you again, but always with contraceptives), Mr. Bridges, but being able to create something other than offspring is what separates us from the animals. It's one of the few good things that separate us from the animals. If you don't mind, some of us would like to keep that option open.

Substance - a self portrait

OK, one more. This one is really cool:

"Which represents good and which represents evil --" he asked me, "the rifle or the rubbery, jiggling, giggling bag of bones we call the body?"
I said that the rifle was evil and the body was good.
"But don't you know that this rifle was designed to be used by Americans defending their homes and honor against wicked enemies?" he said.
So I said a lot depended on whose body and whose rifle we were talking about, that either one of them could be good or evil.
"And who renders the final decision on that?" he said.
"God?" I said.
"I mean here on Earth," he said.
"I don't know," I said.
"Painters -- and storytellers, including poets and playwrights and historians," he said. "They are the justices of the Supreme Court of Good and Evil, of which I am now a member, and to which you may belong someday!"
How was that for delusions of moral grandeur!
Yes, and now that I think about it: maybe the most admirable thing about the Abstract Expressionist painters, since so much senseless bloodshed had been caused by cockeyed history lessons, was their refusal to serve on such a court.

From Kurt Vonnegut's "Bluebeard"

At the very end, her brain-surgeon husband couldn't talk anymore, but he could still scrawl short messages with his left hand, although he was normally right handed. His left hand was all he had left that still worked a little bit.
According to Circe, this was his ultimate communiqué: "I was a radio repairman."
"Either his damaged brain believed that this was a literal truth," she said, "or he had come to the conclusion that all the brains he had operated on were basically just receivers of signals from someplace else. Do you get the concept?"
"I think I do," I said.
"Just because music comes from a little box we call a radio," she said, and here she came over and rapped me on my pate with her knuckles as though it were a radio, "that doesn't mean there's a symphony orchestra inside."
"What's that got to do with Father and Terry Kitchen?" I said.
"Maybe, when they suddenly started doing something they'd never done before, and their personalities changed, too --" she said, "maybe they had started picking up signals from another station, which had very different ideas about what they should say and do."

* * *

I have since tried out this human-beings-as-nothing-but-radio-receivers theory on Paul Slazinger, and he toyed with it some. "So Green River Cemetery is full of busted radios," he mused, "and the transmitters they were tuned to still go on and on."
"That's the theory," I said.
He said that all he'd been able to receive in his own head for the past twenty years was static and what sounded like weather reports in some foreign language he'd never heard before. He said, too, that toward the end of his marriage to Barbira Mencken, the actress, she acted "as though she was wearing headphones and listening to the 1812 Overture in stereo. That's when she was becoming a real actress, and not just another pretty girl onstage that everybody liked a lot. She wasn't even 'Barbara' anymore. All of a sudden she was 'Bar-beer-ah!' "
He said that the first he heard of the name change was during the divorce proceedings, when her lawyer referred to her as "Barbira," and spelled it for the court stenographer.
Out in the courthouse corridor afterwards, Slazinger asked her: "Whatever happened to Barbara?"
She said Barbara was dead!
So Slazinger said to her: "Then what on Earth did we waste all this money on lawyers for?"
¬
* * *

I said that I had seen the same sort of thing happen to Terry Kitchen the first time he played with a spray rig, shooting bursts of red automobile paint at an old piece of beaverboard he'd leaned against the potato barn. All of a sudden, he, too, was like somebody listening through headphones to a perfectly wonderful radio station I couldn't hear.
Red was the only color he had to play with. We'd gotten two cans of the red paint along with the spray rig, which we'd bought from an automobile repair shop in Montauk a couple of hours before. "Just look at it! Just look at it!" he'd say, after every burst.
"He'd just about given up on being a painter, and was going into law practice with his father before we got that spray rig," I said.
"Barbira was just about to give up being an actress and have a baby instead," said Slazinger. "And then she got the part of Tennessee Williams's sister in The Glass Menagerie."

* * *

Actually, now that I think back: Terry Kitchen went through a radical personality change the moment he saw the spray rig for sale, and not when he fired those first bursts of red at the beaverboard. I happened to spot the rig, and said that it was probably war surplus, since it was identical with rigs I had used in the Army for camouflage.
"Buy it for me," he said.
"What for?" I said.
"Buy it for me," he said again. He had to have it, and he wouldn't even have known what it was if I hadn't told him.
He never had any money, although he was from a very rich old family, and the only money I had was supposed to go for a crib and a youth bed for the house I'd bought in Springs. I was in the process of moving my family, much against their will, from the city to the country.
"Buy it for me," he said again.
And I said, "O.K., take it easy. O.K., O.K."


This is a very Vonneguty month for me :)

Something Positive

Stephen Fry has over two million followers on Twitter. Sarah Palin, whos every tweet is widely discussed in American media, has over three hundred thousand. To me , this means that people prefer nice and intelligent over mean and ignorant. And that helps me sleep better.

"Galapagos" read by Jonathan Davis

I'm listening to the "Galapagos" audiobook, read by someone named Jonathan Davis, who uses such a heart-breakingly melancholy voice that he makes me want to curl up under the covers in a fetal position and wail like a wounded baby seal. Very appropriate for the subject matter.

Jon Stewart's interview with Marion Jones

I saw this interview almost a month ago, and I'm still pretty broken-hearted about it. I'm not a big lover of sports, but I remember watching Marion Jones in the 2000 olympics and being completely won over by her. She was so amazing and so charming, and so far ahead of everyone else in every race, it was like watching a new species of human being revealing itself for the first time. Looking through 10 years' perspective and loss of innocence, it's pretty clear that she's on performance-enhancing drugs, but back then it was impossible to imagine anything dishonest behind that adorable face, that wonderful childish excitement. I may be a sucker for a pretty woman, but remembering that glowing victory I do believe her that she didn't know about the drugs.
Whatever happened, I'm appalled that they sent her to prison for it. Prison? For cheating in a sports event? People really do take sports way too seriously, I mean really!

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Marion Jones
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

P.S.
It reminds me of something Kurt Vonnegut says in his introduction to "Bluebeard" (one of the best books I know) -
May I say, too, that much of what I put in this book was inspired by the grotesque prices paid for works of art during the past century. Tremendous concentrations of paper wealth have made it possible for a few persons or institutions to endow certain sorts of human playfulness with inappropriate and hence distressing seriousness. I think not only of the mudpies of art, but of children's games as well -- running, jumping, catching, throwing.
Or dancing.
Or singing songs.