“Montgomery Clift’s life had a Hollywood ending as well.”
“The thing is, that movie last night is a completely different movie when you watch it by yourself. Why is that? Movies are supposed to be watched with other people, aren’t they? Isn’t that part of the point of movies — you know, one of those social ritual things, with everyone watching? It never occurred to me a movie might be different when you don’t watch it with anyone else. And that movie,” she says, “that’s one fucked-up—”
“Stop,” says Vikar.
“—movie, but not in a completely bad way. That’s a movie you see alone and it gets into you — I’ve been up all night. I said it was silly when we saw it together, but that was way off. There’s nothing silly about that movie. Twisted and deeply fucked up, yeah—”
“Stop.”
“—but silly, no. Too twisted not to be private, you know? I mean, five hundred or a thousand people or however many it is in a theater — what are they going to do with a movie like that? There’s too much common sense floating around the room, and what you have to do with a movie like that is give up your common sense, which is easier to do when it’s just you alone. It just seems … radical, any movie that, like, demands your privacy, because it’s, you know … a movie like that makes common sense completely beside the point, and you’re one on one with it, in the living room by yourself rather than the theater with all those people, and watching it is like being naked and you can’t be naked like that with strangers, you can’t even stand the idea of it, and you know that after you’re finished with it, much more with a movie like that than any stupid horror flick, some deep dark shit is going to be waiting at the bottom of the stairs … so I just couldn’t sleep. That movie’s like a ghost. Watch it alone and you become the thing or person it haunts. Last night, the movie became mine and no one else’s. Not even yours, Vikar.” She says, “It may be the greatest thing I’ve ever seen. It may almost be as great as the X album or ‘Aerosol Burns’ or Germfree Adolescents.”
125.
Vikar says, “Once Cassavetes told me about seeing A Place in the Sun when it came out. He hated it so much that he went back and saw it the next day and then every day for a week, until he realized he loved it.”
“Who’s Cassavetes?”
“He is to movies what the Sound is to music.”
“Isn’t that weird when that happens?” says Zazi. “It’s like the first time I heard the second Pere Ubu album and thought it just blew completely, I thought anyone who liked it must be stupid and full of shit — and then for about a year it was practically the only album I listened to. It was the only album that made any sense at all. So why does that happen? The music hasn’t changed. The movie hasn’t changed. It’s still the same exact movie, but it’s like it sets something in motion, some understanding you didn’t know you could understand, it’s like a virus that had to get inside you and take hold and maybe you shrug it off — but when you don’t, it kills you in a way, not necessarily in a bad way because maybe it kills something that’s been holding you down or back, because when you hear a really really great record or see a really great movie, you feel alive in a way you didn’t before, everything looks different, like what they say when you’re in love or something — though I wouldn’t know — but everything is new and it gets into your dreams.”
“Yes,” says Vikar, “someone dies when the movies get into your dreams.”
124.
“Maybe not the absolute pinnacle of Hawks’ work,” Viking Man says, “that would be Red River, of course, but nonetheless a brilliant distillation of themes that Hawks understands to his core.”
Vikar, Viking Man and Zazi are watching a Western on television one night.
“In some ways,” Viking Man continues, “if Red River is his masterpiece, then Rio Bravo,” indicating the TV, “is Hawks at his most quintessential, although of all directors Hawks may most defy the very notion of quintessence, inspired renaissance man of film that he was. If nothing else, you might say this is existential in its exploration of courage and professionalism even at its most futile, practically Hemingwayesque in its understanding of masculinity’s values and rituals, and Hawks knew Hem of course, having directed To Have and Have Not. Dean Martin has always been completely underrated in this — this was around the time he was doing first-rate work in Some Came Running, The Young Lions … for a guy who cultivated, maybe a little too well, his image as a fuck-up … sorry, Zulu …”
“I’m shocked, shocked that there’s bad language going on in this house,” says Zazi.
“The opening scene, where Dino fishes the coin out of the spittoon, with all the piss and phlegm, is silent, you may have noticed, all action, everything expressed in action. Someone once called it a kind of American kabuki, and Angie Dickinson is the modern incarnation of the definitive Hawks woman.”
Half an hour passes in silence, and it’s during a scene when John Wayne goes to visit Angie Dickinson up in her hotel room that Zazi says, “I hate to disturb the rapture with an emperor’s-new-clothes-like moment, but this really isn’t a very good movie.”
For a moment Viking Man is speechless. “Zulu,” he finally gathers his wits to respond, “the genius of Rio Bravo is in its unprepossessing tone, the leisurely unfolding of familiar motifs in narrative and character interplay.”
“Oh, is that it?” Zazi says. “I thought it was basically wankers on parade. A kind of, you know, pointless exercise in guyness. Really, don’t you have to have a dick to—”
“Stop,” says Vikar.
“—to even pretend this is a good movie? A testosterone level somewhere north of growing hair on your back?”
“They learn young, don’t they, vicar?” Viking Man snarls. He gets up to leave. “The woman is fifteen years old — or,” he says to Zazi, “however old you are — and she’s already busting our balls.”
“Perhaps this is one of those movies you hate now and you’ll wind up loving,” Vikar says to Zazi.
“But that’s it, I don’t hate it. I don’t feel anything about it one way or the other. You know this isn’t A Place in the Sun, Vik. I mean, you said yourself,” she says to Viking Man, “that basically what makes this movie so fucking—”
“Stop.”
“—great is its comfort level. There is no comfort level in A Place in the Sun. No movie worth hating or loving has a comfort level.”
“Well,” Viking Man says, “you’ve wrecked it, Zulu.” He actually sounds annoyed. “You’ve gone and fucking wrecked Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo. When did you turn into Pauline Fucking Kael? Remind me not to see Red River with you.”
“Is it Hemingwayesque in its understanding of masculine values and rituals?” says Zazi.
“Montgomery Clift is in Red River,” says Vikar.
“Then I might actually want to see it,” says Zazi.
“Not with me,” says Viking Man, and storms out of the house.
“Jeez, I’m sorry,” Zazi calls after him.