PLAGUE DIARY 17: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

Bachelor Mother 1939
I’ve never understood heterosexuality, so I don’t understand the popularity of this dull movie.  Ginger Rogers and David Niven are very attractive; Ginger Rogers is more so. David Niven is too effeminate for me —I like effeminate men, but I like them to be just a little bit dirty, and David Niven is just so, well, annoyingly clean. The film ends with a lie, and Rogers is winking at the audience as she kisses him, and perhaps that’s the key. She’s tricked the playboy into marriage, I mean, what could be more appealing than that? Isn’t that the essence of the heterosexual dilemma, the basis of all Bernard Shaw’s plays, the woman is seen as hell-bent on taming the man — and ultimately proves (surprise!) to have the mysterious power to do so — due to some primal urge to mate and procreate.  And the man, unbeknownst to himself after all, wants to be tamed, no matter how unfettered his previous promiscuity. Ginger Rogers finds a baby on a doorstep, and through comic mischance, is mistaken for the mother. Her boss David Niven thinks she is an unwed mother. This is the joke that seduced audiences then, and perhaps would still do so now. I find this sort of innocent-yet-oh-so-naughty comedy repellently coy. We're supposed to love this movie because it's not the much nastier movie that just beneath the surface. For with high Victorian nonchalance this movie endlessly flirts with the notion that Ginger Rogers (unimaginable!) is an irresponsible unwed mother. When Rogers drops the baby off with David Niven she says ‘He got me into this and he can get me out,’ merely meaning that he fired her and left her destitute, not meaning that he made her pregnant. When Rogers enters a dancing contest (well she has to dance in the damned movie, this is Ginger Rogers after all) David Niven scolds her:“Why — a mother who has just abandoned her child going to the Blue Slipper!” But the cozy middle class audience is merely titillated by being just this close to being scandalized. I do hate that. So let’s pretend this is another movie. The movie Ladybird — directed by Ken Loach — is the real movie behind this one, it’s the story of a working class woman who abuses her children. You have perhaps never heard of Ken Loach, but you have heard of Ginger Rogers (I would imagine) and this is just a symptom of what is wrong with nearly everything. Loach is one of the best directors in the world, but his films are deep, dark, political examinations of working class life. Loach loves working class people but presents them as appalling figures, warts and all. Watching Ladybird is like watching an autopsy or a slow motion vomit; she is a one woman suicide/murder machine. Yes she’s alcoholic and a druggie and yes each of her (I can’t remember is it 5 or is it 6?) roustabout, layabout, no-good rotten boyfriends is as sexy as hell. The social worker keeps warning her that her children will be taken away. And the viewer begins, despite him or herself, begins to ask the unaskable question; should some women be sterilised? But no one could do that to Ladybird. You just have to love her, you really do, she’s vulnerable and she loves her children to death -- just sometimes well, leaves them alone all night, and forgets to feed them. So what to do? As with life —- we don’t know what to do with Ladybird, because life is intolerable, because people are intolerable. But we just carry on, don’t we? We must carry on (Why? Not sure.) Well I’ll tell you a secret. I only carry on because of this, because of being able to watch a movie, even a bad one like this. One of the reasons I’m writing endlessly these endless movie reviews is because I can’t stand my life or myself. I mean I should be looking inward, shouldn’t I? Like my yoga addicted friends? (I can go on about them because none of them will ever read this — after all, they are so bloody content with themselves where do they have the time?!)  I can’t look inside myself because all I will see is a very selfish petulant old, fairy, who can’t get hard-ons anymore, and who is only loved by one or two people (God bless them) who can somehow manage to put up with him (we mustn’t ask why he is loved, therein lies the danger). So if I can’t look inward, I can instead watch old movies like this and create -- whatever this is -- I guess an attempt at writing. Because even this very bad movie has its moments. Like when Ginger Rogers and David Niven go out on New Years Eve. They are just beginning to fall in love; we’ve all been there, it’s a place we want to return to again and again. She is wearing one of those hats by ‘ Irene.’ Irene’s hats seem to save all these bad movies at the climax, when the director realises how bad his creation is, so he calls up Irene. It’s hardly a hat really — much like the feathered concoction in Three Daring Daughters — it’s  — a kind of shawl made out of veil material, so, well — it is a veil,  one that seems to sparkle on it’s own, and she wears it with a gold lamay dress, and when surrounding her head, it frames her face like a shimmering shroud, thus making Ginger Rogers resemble a kind of glamorous madonna. This is precisely what she plays in this film, as she is not a mother at all, but a movie star pretending to be someone who is not really a mother. And finally why can’t I stop writing these reviews? Why can’t I stop writing this particular review? Even when it’s stopped being a review I ramble on (it’s going to be very long, I see that now). Because the one thing I fear in life is boredom. It’s terribly bourgeois of me but I can’t imagine anything more fatal than that. That’s why I have anxiety issues actually, I prefer them. There are three kinds of octopi, apparently: depressed octopuses, angry octopuses and frightened octopuses. (Which one are you?) And I am a frightened octopus. I would rather be frightened to death — which I am all the time really — than bored. So I make up stories to relieve the boredom. But they frighten me too, and also they get me into trouble.  I went by Buddies in Bad Times Theatre today — the theatre I founded many years ago. It was after a woman almost slugged me on the street. She was standing in the middle of the sidewalk, with a huge backpack, which is, in my view -- especially these days -- an aggressive act. I was walking angrily with my earphones on and brushed her, or let’s say, to be completely accurate, yes I bumped her backpack slightly. She started yelling at me, and her friends were like ‘pay attention to her’ and I did, that is I turned around and said '-- Well, I said I was sorry’ (which I had, but it might have been under my breath -- or it might as well have been very loud because I was wearing headphones). Well she was a Ladybird kind of character, which just proves I may rhapsodise about someone in a movie  but I am terrified to meet them in real life. Because this woman was more of a fierce bird than she was a lady, and she really wanted to knock my block off. But I continued on to Buddies, thinking that I would look at the street sign that has my name on it — because yes, a few years ago they named a street after me in Toronto, and I’m very of proud of that -- and ashamed to be proud of it -- at the same time. I always imagine the street sign with my name on it will be torn down because so many people hate me. I saw that it wasn’t, and gaily approached it — only to discover that someone had painted me out of the mural on the wall. Yes there is a mural on the back wall of Buddies in Bad Times Theatre that someone painted a long time ago, and it’s a painting of a photograph of me and some other people. I was in drag in the painting. Well someone has left the other figures alone but deliberately painted over me, and put someone else there, someone they think is more suitable. (I can still see the faint shadow of my blonde wig slightly above the figure that now replaces me.) This isn't  about posterity — god no, after all, I’m probably the only one who knows the painting was there (except for the person who decided to paint over it). And when I see that kind of  naked nastiness and hate I turn into a very depressed octopus — but only for a moment really, and then I just pick myself up, brush myself off -- as the song says -- and start all over again. There’s a story for you. Perhaps it will take your mind of things, if only for a moment. Maybe you’ll see yourself in it, Maybe you won’t, As long as you don’t find a moral lesson in it. Because there isn’t any. I promise.