PLAGUE DIARY 28: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

Dark Victory (1939)
It’s fantastical, impossible. The maid pulls the curtains— but Judith’s blind, and almost dead. It’s a parable, it’s a tragedy; tragedies are made to teach us how to die. And no one can do it as beautifully as Bette Davis; the angels are singing, she has puppy dog eyes and voluminous feathery hair, and she drapes herself artfully over the bed and then her big, pitiful, unmatchable peepers slowly close. The lights dim. It’s easy to make fun; she has ‘Glioma.’  “How will it come?" "Quietly peacefully. God’s last small mercy.” “Will she have no warning?” “There may be a moment towards the end…a dimming of vision…then in a few hours perhaps three or four…” According to Wikipedia, the actual final stages of glioma blastema (which is a cancer), involve pain, nausea, constipation, delirium, and dyspnea (‘air hunger’ or shortness of breath.) George Brent — the  doctor who is also in love with Bette Davis — says: ‘She must not know.” But Bette Davis figures it out just before having lunch with him. She peers over the menu employing the tone of stinging, arch, sarcasm that made her famous: “I think I’ll have an order of prognosis negative!” Then she bullies him away so she can get drunk with Ronald Reagan (yes Ronald Reagan is in this movie), and ends up singing  — along with the lounge act — her favourite song: ‘Give Me Time.’’ I”m not kidding. This is unabashed melodrama, the purpose is to squeeze every bathetic tear from every sad pore in in your rapidly aging, abject body. But George Brent tells her: “We live our lives so we can meet death — whenever it comes — beautifully and finely.” You might be moved to clap, or to call it claptrap. Or as Oscar Wilde says: “The good ended happily and the bad unhappily, that’s what fiction means.” Is it inappropriate for me to make a plea for this particular brand of some would say, garbage? To praise a fiction, in all its glory, even when we know it’s fiction and are ever so glad it is? On the one hand this movie isn’t meant just to while away the hour; on the other hand it’s NOT Hamlet or Oedipus Rex, is it? It’s Judith Traherne, a young selfish socialite whose life is filled with “horses, dogs, shooting, yachting, travel, parties, gossip.” You may not be surprised to hear that her life is much like mine. Indeed, I am Judith Traherne, especially in those moments of tragic irony, when she thinks she is going to live but we all know she is going to die. She’s living her life carelessly, joyfully and selfishly, all the while “with that thing growing behind her” — that will soon rip out her soul by the roots. For at least six months thirty years ago, I was plagued with daily anxiety attacks. I thought I was going to die all the time. I remember one friend’s discomfiting lecture: “Booze, poppers, you won’t live long, do you think you’ll Iive to a ripe old age? Get with the program!” I almost have survived to that ripe old age. But I still live like Judith Traherne in her tragic irony phase — always with the knowledge that I may die tomorrow. And the doctors on TV have been saying, over and over: ‘When they get on the respirators, it’s pretty much done.' Can you believe that? Just imagine sitting at home watching CNN and every day some smug doctor reminds you that those much vaunted respirators — the ones which Governor Cuomo just must have — well if you get on one,  you'll die soon after. How very Judith Traherne: “I’m sorry we recommend you go on a respirator“ “No, no not the respirator please - anything but that!” Camp is our special weapon, it’s the gay M-15, and we can blast away all of your humourless, hypocritical, heterosexual moralism that threatens to kill us every day — especially during COVID-19. Do you know about the drag queens that invade Fire island? I did it once with a coked up friend. My sister made us matching Scarlett O’Hara costumes. We were both very large somewhat hairy guys, and my friend (sorry, we had a fight, I can’t remember his name) and I, drove down to New York City (he was a masseur and assured me ‘I only bring off the sexy clients’). And he kept saying: ‘I can guarantee there won't be any other identical six-foot drag queens on that boat!’ And for sure, there weren't. And a lot of cute gay men fawned over us when we got there, because, sure enough, we were the only giant, twin Scarlet O’Hara’s there. But because (blank— what was his name?) was a coke addict the most memorable moment was when we got lost on our way and he started shrieking ‘We'll be killed by black thugs” And I was like — ‘Are you REALLY Scarlett O’Hara, or what?’ The drag queens invade fire island every year (it’s a tradition) but at the height of the AIDS epidemic the boys were visited by a very special gaggle of guy/gals, dressed in full, old-lady, Italian, mourning drag. Were they making fun of AIDS? On the contrary: they were saying ‘I have the right to mourn too, and I will be mourning the rest of my life for my man, he means more to me than your man ever meant to you  — you sanctimonious, grim, old, Italian lady, even if -- as I say this -- I’m getting blown by someone in backroom!’ Camp is dead serious — and this movie is dead serious — because we laugh. Camp is defiance against death, pain and the whole damn thing. In Love's Labour's Lost Rosalind tells Byron that she can only marry him if he will spend a year in hospitals making dying people laugh. That is for all of you who think we should take  COVID-19 seriously. Since when should we take death seriously? Elyot in Private Lives says: "it’s all a laughable trick done with lights and mirrors." And to make fun of Judith Tranherne’s desperate denial, her impossible symptoms and the uncanny synchronicity of peparing to die in her pretty Vermont garden on a sunny spring day, just before she says goodbye to her loyal dogs ,and her maid — before collapsing so gracefully on that grand bed (again, why does the maid pull those curtains?…) There shall be no respect, no silence, no pious righteousness for Judith Traherne. And absolutely no praise and no blame. For this is dying. And the only thing to do is laugh.