PLAGUE DIARY 14: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

The Shocking Miss Pilgrim (1947)
-was apparently a drama until MGM decided to turn it into a musical vehicle for Betty Grable and Dick Haymes. Betty Grable was the World War II pin-up girl who —though she is not Judy Garland (she replaced her in There’s No Business Like Show Business) — is pretty damn pretty, and pretty damn good. Dick Haymes is unobjectionable. What’s fascinating about this film is that in terms of sexual politics, it hasn’t aged as much as one might expect. Believe it or not it’s a movie about the first female typist in 1874, and sadly, for her fans, Grable wears period costumes and rarely shows off her legs. The film has some wit due to George Seaton the writer/director, but mainly due to the fabulous and very irreverent Ira Gershwin (who along with George Gershwin himself) wrote the songs. My favourite moment is when Grable meets her new female flatmate after she first moves to Boston. Grable settles in a boarding house for outcasts (I’ve lived in many, have you? The first boarding house for outcasts that I ever lived in, was also home to Beverly D’Angelo — though I never met her, and we were both practically infants!). Anyway, this woman is ‘rewriting the dictionary,’ and Betty Grable asks why. Grable’s landlady explains that the dictionary lady believes words should ‘sound like what they mean.’ For instance the dictionary lady would say ‘that bag is valoom’ instead of ‘that bag is full. ‘I find this whole concept oddly Shakespearean, and somewhat post-structuralist. And the movie features yet another linguistic oddity. Everyone calls Betty Grable a ‘typewriter’. Yes, it’s very disconcerting. I’m not sure why, had they never heard of the word typist in 1947? Or was it for some reason too suggestive? It’s very surrealistic, like Salvador Dali dancing with a lobster, to hear people say to Betty Grable “Oh hello, you’re the new typewriter’ when she doesn’t look anything like a typewriter at all. But to speak to the modernity of this film, The Shocking Miss Pilgrim is about an conundrum which has still not been solved — women in the workplace. And it does manage ultimately to come down on the right side of things. It certainly wouldn’t satisfy the #Metoo gang, but it’s certainly trying, and I think the film is somewhat wiser that #Metoo (now don’t bite my head off!) if only because it has a sense of humour. (And yes the movie is fundamentally sexist in so many ways, I know.) On the one hand Betty Grable is spouting all these radical feminist views, which would even have been radical when the movie was released in 1947 (but remember the war radicalised people - well I hope the present ‘war’ does too!): “You don’t get equality from brass bands and speeches” says Grable “Women have to earn equality by doing men’s work. They have to go into other fields and compete with men there too.” Which is not bad, feminism-wise. And finally, when Dick Haymes demands she give up her job after they get married (um, doesn’t that still happen today?) she says “Why is it always the women that have to give up their way of working and thinking?” And in the end, Dick Haymes does marry her, even though she runs a typing school. Okay that’s the good stuff. But then there’s all the office guys ogling Bette Grable’s ankles when she reaches to get something on a high shelf. And when they first become romantically involved and Dick Haymes is her boss — they show a headline after they kiss: “Better feeling established between management and labour.” Haha. When it comes to #Metoo, what I think this movie makes clear, and what I think is still the case, is that women and men in the workplace — well we just don’t know what we’re doing, because it’s never happened before — not the way it is now — never ever in human history? And that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t happen. But probably what made me really angry about this movie is that it is part of a long tradition of American movies that encourage people to be different and speak up against authority — for, well, for what? When I was a kid I went to see Mame with my Dad in summer stock in upstate New York. (It was nice of my Dad to try and share my enthusiasm for theatre —sigh!). And there’s that great Jerry Herman song ‘Open A New Window’ which has the lyric: “Travel a new highway / That's never been tried before / Before you find you're a dull fellow / Punching the same clock/ Walking the same tight rope / As everyone on the block.” When I saw that musical with my Dad I loved that song so much. It spoke to me directly. Jerry Herman was gay, and that lyric is as gay as anything you’ll find in La Cage Aux Folles. In The Shocking Miss Pilgrim Betty Grable talks about “stepping out in the face of criticism to do something constructive.” Yes, and every old American movie I ever loved expressed this sentiment; that it was not only okay to be different, it was your duty to speak out even when it was unpopular to do so. And yet when I became someone different — that is specifically when I became a flaming faggot — my very American family rejected me. And all I can say is, and I’m appealing to you here, are we not losing the right to speak out, maybe forever? I know there is Coronavirus and I know it is a very real and present danger — you don’t have to tell me because I keep telling you over and over again that I am a  friggin’ prime target of the disease — as I am an old man — but but but — “Give me liberty or give me death" to quote Patrick Henry in 1775. Perhaps you don’t think it’s liberty to go to a bar or go to a gym. But I’ll tell you what is liberty. The right to expressing a contrary opinion without being demonized or jailed. Which is exactly what Betty Grable is doing in this film. “I’m a woman in 1874 but I can be a typist if I want to!” And similarly, I’m saying: “maybe this method of dealing with Coronavirus is not the right method? Perhaps we are being hysterical? Perhaps the ‘herd’ theory of letting the virus take its toll makes some sense, and is working, in perhaps, Sweden? Perhaps sending children home from school to live with their aged grandparents was not a good idea, medically? Perhaps asking the poor and the mentally ill to just sit at home and enjoy their families is going to cause more medical problems than Coronavirus?” But no, I’m not allowed to say anything of that, in fact I am shamed if I do so. Well I’m just going to repeat Ira Gershwin’s lyrics from the best song in The Shocking Miss Pilgrim, because it’s the screed I’ve been living by all my life  — and as a child I learned it from American musicals like this, and I’ve never forgotten it, so here it is. Say it the next time you and your favourite funnybunny decide to run outside and break quarantine:
“I thought we wouldn’t
Or couldn’t
Certainly shouldn’t
But aren’t you kinda glad we did?”

PLAGUE DIARY 13: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

Three Daring Daughters (1948)
 God save us from ‘The Morgans’ — this frightfully endearing family could give The Von Trapps a run for their money. But the travesty of this movie is the theme song, which -- are you ready -- is called — ‘The Dickey-Bird Song.’ Apparently, it was a huge hit.  (And —in case you haven’t noticed —the song’s title is subtextually simultaneously suggestive of a certain portion of the male anatomy on the one hand, and of a certain area of the female anatomy on the other.) If ‘Dickey-Bird’ doesn’t kill you, then Jane Powell will.  I had mixed her up with Eleanor Powell (of Broadway Melody fame) but that would make her too old to be an agonisingly syrupy ingenue in 1948, and then I realised to my dismay, they were two different people. Do not ever go near a movie with Jane Powell in it.  IMDB says "In 1957 her career in films ended, as she had outgrown her innocent girl-next-door image.” I think the public was just weary of her fierce, numbing, good will. Three Daring Daughters is even worse than The Brain that Wouldn’t Die; because it's too bad to be camp.There is an IMDB review of the movie — from someone who must be so old that even grumpy Trump might grant him a Coronavirus ventilator: "It amazes me that so many people cannot see that the past is different from our debased and decadent present…We would be much better off in a world of this music and these people ….a whole lot better than one in which Saw XXX has an audience.” Well, I would trade one moment of watching someone ponder whether to cut off their own ear than put up with this tedious disingenuous pile of crap. So, the movie is basically The Parent Trap  -- three girls want to get their divorced parents back together, all because Jeannette MacDonald refuses to tell them anything bad about her ex-husband, their father, because she doesn’t want to hurt them. You never find out what their damned father did that was so damned awful anyway, and he never ever appears in the movie. But I have a sneaky suspicion his sin was liking sex, because no one in this film seems possibly capable of ever having it. I mean Jose Iturbi? Jose Iturbi as a love interest? Are you nuts? Yes he has a charming accent. But so did Ricky Ricardo, who also happened to be actually sexy.  So why am I so upset about this  movie? ’ Because like most ‘light-hearted entertainment — it’s not the least bit entertaining. Comedy is dark, and mean, and angry, so how can something be funny if there’s no anger in it? The only funny moment in the film is when Edward Arnold has an inkling Jane Powell feels a song coming on, and  yells “Get away from that piano!” I have written comedies that entertained people, but they were not ‘light-hearted entertainment.' I wrote Drag Queens on Trial about AIDS. A big New York producer was interested in it but said ‘I want to keep the jokes, but sorry New York City is just tired of all the AIDS stuff.” (He was talking about Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, one of the most vile plays ever written, written by a man who hated sex before AIDS came along, a man who decided to make his whole career off an epidemic). Is Netflix funding this whole Coronavirus thing? Is this garbage what people want?  During this time of crisis, when people are ‘dying like flies’? But I have news for you, people are always dying like flies. And if the only way you can deal with it is to watch crap like this, then you have serious problems, buster. What can I say to redeem this film? I know. Jeannette MacDonald’s hat. She wears it basically for the last third of the film, which means  somebody must have known how fabulous that hat was.  How shall I describe Jeannette MacDonald’s feathered hat? Well it’s not a lot of hat, it’s a kind of soft fur ring that surrounds her upper cranium in a semi-circle, and sticking out of the side are two giant feathers which appear to be growing out of her head.  But I believe the costume designer ‘Irene,’ in her wisdom, just knew that the end of the film was so tedious that she wanted to take our minds off of it. Is self-isolation driving people to movies like this? No, please, please use this time creatively instead.  For instance, discover what is fatally wrong with your damn lousy life, and maybe do something about it. I’ve already decided that I don’t need sex as much as I thought I did (I can’t believe I said that).  But I'll probably continue on in similar fashion, because it’s not the sex that drives me out at night. It’s the danger, the strangers, and yes I’ll say it, the lack of intimacy. I am a person who likes social situations where I can be alone. I like to go to parties, and get drunk, and entertain whoever will laugh at my lousy witticisms. I like to go to bars and chat up the bartender — not the guys. I like to direct plays because I get to pretend that I am deeply scarily intimate with the actors — until the rehearsal period is over -- at which point I never have to see them again! And yes, I love promiscuous sex, because I don’t have to actually love that person any more than the specific physical act allows. Why am I telling you all this irredeemable junk about myself? Because in my own personal demented brain-that-won’t-die I imagine that’s what art is, or should be. Take that in your Dickey-Bird, Jane Powell.

PLAGUE DIARY 12: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

Days of Wine and Roses (1962)
“They are not long, the days of wine and roses: / Out of a misty dream / Our path emerges for a while, then closes / Within a dream.” These lines are by Ernest Dowson, a decadent 19th century poet in the Oscar Wilde circle, who died of consumption at the age of 32. In contrast we also have these much more famous lines from Baudelaire: “You have to be always drunk. That’s all there is to it — it’s the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back, and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.”  Dowson’s poem is lovely but I prefer Baudelaire. I was a bit afraid to watch Days of Wine and Roses. But I wanted to. I mean how appropriate was it that TCM had programmed it just a few hours before Donald Trump announced 30 more days of quarantine? There is nothing to be done, in my view, except be drunk. My friend and I have been getting drunk every afternoon for the last two weeks. It’s a break in the day, or a goal of the day; I’m not sure which. I suspect you will not approve. But my therapist told me that I should do whatever I need to do to get through this; and I do respect her advice. I think there is a lesson in this grim little lecture against alcoholism called Days of Wine and Roses (it’s not actually little, it lasts for 2 sometimes tedious hours); but it is not the one you might imagine. Jack Lemmon meets the beautiful Lee Remick at his public relations job, woos her, and marries her. He is already clearly an alcoholic, and his alcoholism is clearly framed by 1960’s martini culture. I remember it — my parents used to partake in it; it was a time when no civilised human being in their right mind ignored ‘the cocktail hour.’ Lee Remick is not an alcoholic at first; but she is addicted to chocolate, and as Jack Klugman makes clear when he appears (yes, this is years before The Odd Couple, but I always found him irritatingly insincere) Remick had an addictive personality, and chocolate was only the start. “There comes time in the life of every alcoholic when the bottle is God,” preaches Klugman. Well no doubt, and I must admit the scenes where Jack Lemmon wrecks his father-in-law's greenhouse looking for a bottle of booze, and then ends up in a straight jacket, are difficult to watch, in just the right way. But I’ve never been fond of a moral lesson. And the lesson of Days of Wine and Roses is that morality is not -- and should never be -- the proper purpose of art. Rather than preach at us about the brevity of drunken joy as Dowson does, why not celebrate the ineluctable human need for rose coloured glasses? As Lee Remick says: “I want things to look pretty.” As someone once said about an alcoholic who I loved very dearly (my mother) ‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed but she was never very comfortable in the real world.” Well we had that in common, my mother and I. It is with admirable restraint that I get drunk every afternoon — and not every night — during this nightmare called ‘social distancing.’  But this writing is my true drunknenness; imagine me indulging in it now, as you read this. All I have to look forward to are those precious moments when I listen to Norma (I’m listening to it now —she’s a pagan princess, and what, after all, exactly, is that?) and disappear into old movies, celebrating my own swirly, girly take on them. You don’t have to agree with my choices, alright? You just have to respect them. Can you do that? We learned this from AIDS. After much finger waving from doctors and straight people we just decided to ignore the whole lot of you and make our own rules. Fellatio, for instance. It used to drive me crazy that AIDS information pamphlets said you could get AIDS from blowjobs. Well of course you can’t. And there was never any medical proof, there was only the perennial ‘well of course anything’s possible.’ But saliva kills HIV (little known fact — why do you suppose they didn’t want you to know it?) At any rate, some of us, like me, decided blowjobs were okay. We each had our own rules during the AIDS epidemic, and we respected everyone’s right to make the rules that worked for them. I have no doubt that for some, perhaps even many, ‘social distancing’  is inspiring (as one online friend earnestly suggested - ‘More time to discover crocheting!’ ) So before you report your neighbours to the police for having more than two people to the house for dinner, remember that we are creatures of feeling and magic and drunkennes and vice. Our bodies may be tied to the so-called real world, but our souls are not. And yes there are other worlds, and who is to say they are not better? And frankly, if you do not believe in those other worlds, it’s your funeral. “There are more things in heaven and earth Horatio….” And I have it on good authority that Shakespeare not only enjoyed a stiff drink now and then, but he liked to disappear on flights of fancy — the only prerequisite being that they had no actual relationship to reality as we know it on the quotidian (which means day to day). When Shakespeare wrote 12th Night (SparksNotes tell us) there was no place named Illyria. Hamlet believed that chameleons did not eat food, but instead, lived on air. Yes yes (boring, snore) people obviously need food and water, and yes, of course, they need their (snooze) friggin’ health. But we also desperately need hope and dreams — which means the fantasy of perfect happiness on earth, which, truth be told, rarely — no, actually, how do I break this to you? — never, ever. happens. Chameleons, Shakespeare said, were “promise-cramm’d.” So are we. Without our starry-eyed drunken dreams — false and illusive as love itself — we too, will starve.

PLAGUE DIARY 11: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

White Heat (1949)
I was sleeping through this one. Then they tell James Cagney his mother is dead. He’s eating  dinner in a prison mess hall in a long row of inmates. There’s a new guy sitting a few seats away. Cagney gets wind of it. He says to the guy beside him: “Ask him how my mother is.” They whisper that question down the line. The new inmate whispers his answer back. It gets whispered down the line. The guy beside Cagney says: “She’s dead.” It takes Cagney a moment to process the information. But then he starts wheezing. And a second or two later he’s screaming. He stands up on the long prison table and then falls on it, moaning, scattering everyone’s food on the floor —until they carry him out of the prison mess — kicking and making inhuman guttural sounds. I remember when my mother was dying. They had been starving her to death, as she had requested not to be kept alive on life support. My mother was an alcoholic, and had not properly been herself for years: even when I used to visit her in the seniors apartment building where she lived, at 11 am in the morning — it would be the vodka talking, not her. (I tried to take away her vodka once. I’ll never forget it. She phoned me. “What are you doing?” I told her that I had asked the liquor delivery company to stop delivering booze. “Why? Why would you do that?” I told her I was afraid that she might drink herself to death. “I know what I’m doing,” she said. That chillingly honest answer shut me up; I cancelled the cancellation. And she was right; I had no right, certainly not at that late date, to interfere. And I was a bad son because I hadn’t caught the problem years before. But she’d done such a good job of bullying my sister and I that we actually believed she was not an alcoholic.)  So when I discovered they had taken her off life support at the hospital, I took a cab there— my mother was addicted to cabs — and vodka  — as am I. When I got there, I told the person at the desk “I came to see my mother. She’s dying.” The person at the desk said “Who are you?” I said, “her son.” She said. “I’ll have to check  about that.” Then, I turned into my mother. It was instinctual. It was kind of a last tribute to her. You see, my mother refused to take no for an answer. I remember talking to a gay man who worked with her once; he called her a bitch. I knew she was. She demanded the best service, and always treated those she considered ‘the help’  like dirt. But in reality she was no queen. She was born in a small town in Maine, the daughter of an alcoholic, white trash farmer who committed suicide, she was a relatively poor divorcee who ran her own failed corporate headhunting firm. Is that what this was all about? But if she thought she was a failure in her own life you’d never have known it: she walked and talked and acted the part of a big movie star. For awhile she lived at Sutton Place — an apartment hotel. Movie stars used to stay there. Stepping out of a cab at Sutton Place, people mistook her for one. So at the hospital, I went off like my mother used to, I started screaming like James Cagney — “I’m her son! My mother is dying and I have to see my mother! You’ll have to let me see my mother!” It was crazy, the person behind the desk was as intimidated as anyone in the service industry who has had to deal with some crazy nut. She went to get the information. I turned to the people around me in the waiting room: “My mother is dying!” I said. “They have to let me see my mother! “ It was quite the performance. Of course, eventually, they did. When I got to her room, my sister was already there. And my mother was already — effectively  — dead. She had, after all, been unconscious for days. So I sat and watched her die. At that particular moment I didn’t really feel anything. Later in the movie, after his mother has been dead for awhile, James Cagney is interrupted talking to himself in the dark: “I’m just walkin’ out here talking to Ma. Does that sound funny to you? All I ever had was Ma. She’s always trying to put me on top — ‘top o’ the world’ she’d say.” At the end of the film, Cagney dies, perched atop a black oil tank shaped like a giant globe, engulfed in flames — “I'm on top of the world, Ma!” He shouts “I’m on top of the world!” The tank explodes. There’s a lot more going on in this movie than Cagney’s relationship with his mother, for instance: car chases galore, prison breaks, Virginia Mayo cooing in Cagney’s ear as a lying gangster's moll who is about as loyal to him as wet mop, and Edmund O’Brian oozing integrity as the cop working undercover to frame Cagney by posing as his best friend — yes there’s all this. But all I cared about was James Cagney’s relationship to his ‘Ma.’  One of the cops says “He’s got a fierce psychopathic relationship with his mother.” Sure, I get that. And I understand why Cagney talks to his mother after she’s dead. I used to believe my mother could read my mind. It wasn’t until I was 18 years old in group therapy at The Hincks that I figured out that we were actually separate people. I told my social worker that I couldn’t say the word ‘fuck.’ She asked me why, and I said “because my mother wouldn’t like it. “ She asked me how my mother would know I said it, and I replied “I just think she would.” The social worker informed me that my mother couldn’t read my mind. It was at that moment I realized. My mother was in my head. I have not this day, been able to get her out. She still visits me in my dreams. I wake up; and I’ve been dreaming of her, and I sincerely believe we were together. In my dreams she’s beautiful (which she was) and not alcoholic (which she wasn’t) and witty (which she was). We have one of those intimate conversations that we used to have; talking to her was like talking to myself. If you’ve never had a relationship like that, you need to have one, now. James Cagney has anxiety attacks in White Heat, and the only one who can talk him down is ‘Ma.’ It was the same with me. Yes, yes — I know now the reason she made me co-dependent on her was because she was needy and I replaced — in her mind — the perfect man that she could never have. I know also that our relationship was actually emotional incest. But don’t blame me for going to sleep during the car chases in this damn gangster movie. Because, like James Cagney — to this day, I always wake up for ‘Ma.’

PLAGUE DIARY 10: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (1962)
Also known as The Head That Wouldn’t Die. He’s a young mad doctor who has been doing transplant experiments. His father warns him: “Don’t play God! The human body is not a jigsaw puzzle for you to experiment on!” The young mad doctor is supposed to marry his beautiful girlfriend but as he’s driving her to his laboratory in the country, he guns it — pedal to metal. They crash. Her body is burned — but he saves the head.  And — are you still with me? — he takes the head back to his laboratory and puts it in a pan attached with telephone cords, and keeps her brain alive. She’s not too happy about this, and yells at his assistant Kurt with the withered hand (it was a botched transplant): “Let me die! Let me die! Let me die!” Oh yes, I forgot, there is a monster locked in the closet constructed from the transplanted body parts of dead people by the young mad doctor, again  — ‘like a jigsaw puzzle.’ The monster keeps banging on the closet door because he wants to get out. Things pick up a bit. The young mad doctor (who is very handsome) goes looking for beautiful bodies to attach to the beautiful head of his ex-girlfriend. He finds an exotic dance club (What is that place? Did they really exist in 1962? I do hope so. It’s kind of a strip club, but there are well-dressed couples out on dates). And a stripper/dancer lures him to her makeup room to have sex. But no — no woman’s body is hot enough enough to attach to his ex-girlfriend’s beautiful head. He finally finds a ‘figure model’ who apparently makes a living from inviting men to her studio to take pictures of her in a bikini (again did these things really happen in the 60s?). He takes the ‘figure model’ back to the laboratory and drugs her and kills her, and is just about to attach his girlfriend’s head to the figure model’s perfect body, when the monster in the closet escapes. A description of the monster? Well, sorry — not much thought was put into his costume —  it must have been pretty much last minute when they ran out of money — he’s obviously a very tall man wearing a rubber mask with fake eyes attached to it. The ‘monster’ brutally kills the handsome young mad doctor. The head just laughs. End of movie. It’s only 1 hour and 20 minutes but it feels like much much longer. Now I know why every good director tell actors to ‘speed up.’ Actors always think they should act in the pauses. This movie is filled with pauses that are nighmarishly long. And it is in these horrific pauses that the actors think they are acting. You can tell because of the intense looks, or the odd twitch. Sometimes they just stand there staring. But I know that they think they are dong Oscar-worthy stuff. This acting is the true horror of a movie which is all about horror.“What is behind that door?” asks the disembodied head. “Horror that no human mind can imagine” answers Kurt, the servant with the withered hand. “Horror has it’s ultimate, and I am beyond that!” exclaims the head. “There is no horror beyond what is behind that door!” warns Kurt. Horror horror horror. You don’t have to tell me. I watch TV. (You can’t avoid it, what else is there to do now.) And it’s everywhere —corona corona corona!!!!!! —and  I just think well, the news, the TV the media, that is our horror. And  Trump is right about the media, it’s full of lies. CNN is showing late night documentaries about Ebola. They keep mentioning the Spanish flu (which killed 100 million people, while in Ontario, corona has killed 19)  and saying there aren’t enough ventilators — not enough ventilators! — doctors, nurses — are scared for their own lives! They are building giant tents to store the bodies that will pile up soon, soon! Any day now! Not since 911 have we seen such horror! Be afraid, be very afraid. Be afraid beyond horror. Why do they insist on us being so afraid? I spent the first twenty-eight years of life being afraid of being gay. I knew I was, and I knew other people knew I was — because of my crazy hands, my effeminate voice, my urge to be onstage, and my well — general vulnerability. This was my nightmare. I used to buy dirty magazines and then sneak out of the house and throw them in the garbage, surreptitiously — a garbage can far from the house — because I thought that someone might find them and somehow know they were mine. I hated myself. I wrote in diaries like this, saying please please don’t let me be gay. I never touched my penis. I didn’t actually masturbate. I used to rub against the bed. But always the nightmare: I will have to get a girlfriend, I will have to get married. I got one, tried to have sex with her. It was easy. I just pictured my own naked ass when I was screwing her — that’s what really turned me on. I tried everything not to be gay. And then I threw a fork at my girlfriend —or in her general direction — and I knew this had to stop. ‘I am really nuts,’I thought. And so I broke up with her, and I was free. I mean I thought I was free. And I thought my life would change. And it did, drastically, but not quite in the way I expected. One particular fear was gone — but then other fears came in: I’m ugly, and no man will ever want to have sex with me. Because suddenly it mattered whether a man was attracted to me, whereas with women I didn’t care. And I tried to pick up men for a whole year — and only managed to kiss them occasionally — and finally, finally, my therapist seduced me. So the fear of never actually having sex with a man was over. I could do it! But I was stuck with my ugly old therapist — because my straight years had taught me you must at least try and start a relationship with every person you have had sex with. Then I met my true love Glenn. Glenn! GLENN! And he was a gorgeous young writer (I think he works as a receptionist for a homeopath now). But as soon as I got him, I was afraid he would break up with me. And he did. So I started going to the baths, because I figured every time I had sex with a man was the last time. I still have to talk myself out of that one. After 28 years of fear over your own sexuality, you have to talk yourself out of being afraid of everything, still. And I have sort of talked myself out of being afraid of AIDS. No, truth told, I have finally refused to be afraid of AIDS now.  (Sorry!) And now Corona?!!!  I have to be afraid of that? All the time again? Why? No. I won’t. I just won’t. But more than that —why do you want me to be afraid? ‘For my own good’ — you say? Or is it to control me? That’s why you wanted me to be afraid before. Sorry I can’t do it. I won’t do it. I can’t be afraid anymore. I’ll wash my hands. But I won’t be afraid.

PLAGUE DIARY 9: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

The Star (1952)
I should have known this movie would be about me. Bette Davis is an ageing star. But it becomes clear only at the end, that she is not a real actress, or an artist. She is a ‘falling star…like the ones who play it 24 hours a day, and like all climbers who reach a precarious pinnacle, they can’t look down, so they fall, still clutching what they have, with fear their only companion.” Well I don’t know if I’m a real writer, still to this day, all I know is I must do it to keep my friggin’ sanity. But I do know that I was once a star. I founded Buddies in Bad Times Theatre and it was only years later that I figured out that I went to all that trouble just to stave off loneliness. Yes — it’s so sad. I didn’t want to run a theatre. I only wanted to put on plays because well — I mean it’s true that I love writing plays and directing them. But writing plays was the only way I was ever able to have people around me — people who I thought at the time were my friends. Of course, most of them weren’t real friends. They merely actors — but only good ones — I had to have really good actors around me, ones that were so entertaining that they really made me believe that I was delightful and they loved me. When I left the theatre company and moved to Hamilton (just outside of Toronto) all my supposed theatre ‘friends’ began to lose interest in me. So I wrote novel after novel about it. Even though I’m no longer a ‘star’ — and I really was one, in Toronto, for a time at the height of my ‘career’— well, I still feel a nostalgia for that time. I feel nostalgia for the sycophants. Can you believe it? For people who sucked up to me so well that I actually believed they were my friends! Bette Davis has one of those sycophantic moments at the beginning of the film when a waitress stops her and asks “Are you Margaret Eliot?” And she bats those big eyes of hers and says ‘Why yes, I am,” and the waitress is all over her, idolising her. Yes things like that used to happen to me — in fact they still occasionally do. And I used to hate those moments but love them at the same time. I do miss it. Being recognised. Although it happened to me recently, in a bad way. I mean all this fame that I once had means that is impossible for me to get laid in the Toronto gay community, unless it’s in the dark (how tragic is that?). Now all the bars are closed due to Coronavirus, so I was having phone sex with this guy and he asked me to come over. I told him my name was Scott. He let me get all the way to his apartment and without letting me take off my coat, and then he said — “Are you Sky?” I said yes. He asked — “Sky Gilbert?” I said yes again. “No, I’m sorry.” That was that. And he ushered me out. I think he knew who I was before I got there. I had emailed him my picture. I think he just wanted to humiliate me. Oh and I must tell you, I just slept with another gay Canadian theatre/movie celebrity — a really big one— at a bathhouse. It was so funny. Suddenly I was in the position of being an adoring fan, as he is actually very much more famous than I ever was. When we were done with — well, what we had to do — I waited until we were done because I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve had sex with people who have interrupted the act with “I’m sorry I can’t go on, I can’t believe I’m having sex with Sky Gilbert” and I really do find that very rude. So I had the good manners to wait until after — what we did — was over, and then I asked. “Aren’t you (fill in the blank)?” He danced around it for awhile, and I recognised that dance because I had polkaed that number so many times before. Finally he admitted who he was, and then as he went out the door, he said “Gee, maybe we should have a PACT meeting!” (PACT is the Professional Association of Canadian Theatres.) I guess I shouldn’t have revealed I was a fan. I think part of it was just the opportunity to be on the other side of that situation, to be the admirer, instead of the star. So you get the idea, I can’t stop dropping famous names (or almost dropping them — I promised him I would never drop his) and I can never stop being a star even though I am now definitely a falling (or fallen) one. But what makes me a star, in my own eyes forever, is, if you haven’t guessed it, my entitlement. And that’s what Bette Davis personifies so beautifully in this film. My real name is Schuyler Lee Gilbert Jr. — my father’s family were pretentious Yankees who came over on the Mayflower, and I was supposed to be the heir to a dynasty — not of money, but — a dynasty of noble lineage — my great uncle (who  had my name) was a war hero, and I’m a direct descendent of Robert E. Lee, blah blah blah. But it wasn’t my father’s fault. It was my mother (more about her later— she’s been dead for six years but she never goes away) who gave me that entitlement. She loved me way too much and convinced me I was destined for great things, and I’m still working it out in therapy. That is — I am just trying to deal with the fact that I am actually an ordinary person. (Or am I?). So Better Davis’s problem in this movie is my problem. You know, on the subject of Bette Davis perfectly embodying entitlement, I must mention that I noticed how much she acts with her whole body. When she walks, it’s either a proud walk, or a discouraged walk, or a petulant walk, or whatever, and when she sits down, or picks up a glass, it’s the same thing. And in this movie she swirls, and prances, and flings herself about, as if she owns everything and deserves everything, and is just too big for ordinary life. I identify. People resent me because I’m entitled, and they are right to do so. At one point Bette Davis goes into a store and steals a bottle of perfume (her favourite brand, ‘Desire Me’) and she brings it home to Sterling Hayden — the ordinary boating guy (I don’t know what to call him — he fixes boats for a living. A boater? But that’s a hat —). Hayden holds the key to her heart because he loves the ‘real’ her, and she shows him the bottle of perfume and says. “I stole this, I don’t know why I — you see I have absolutely never stolen anything in my life.” And she tries to apply the perfume and then realises —“there’s no scent.” It turns out to be a display bottle. It’s the most lovely moment of the film, but the screenwriter had to ruin it by having her go and say “it’s only coloured water.” And Sterling Hayden, nodding sagely just has to reply: “It’s the story of your life, isn’t it?” You can’t blame Sterling Hayden, he is so incredibly gorgeous (why doesn’t he take off his shirt in this movie? — sigh, well he almost does!) and Hayden loves Bette Davis, despite her flaws, and even marries her and adopts her daughter, who is played by Nathalie Wood, by the way. And we all know — with Natalie Wood — there was bound to be trouble.

PLAGUE DIARY 8: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

This Land is Mine (1943)
"They make a desert and they call it peace.”  (Tacitus)
It is morning. A little boy runs out of a building onto a deserted street. Suddenly German tanks roll by; the woman runs out and scoops up her son and stuffs him into the house — safe at last. Charles Laughton is a schoolteacher in a small town somewhere in Europe  under German occupation. He lives with his mother; the irrepressible Una O’Connor, a force of nature. She bangs on the ceiling to wake him up, coddles him, feeds him milk, tells him how helpless he is. He laps it up. Charles Laughton’s face does not simply offer the possibility of being inexpressibly ugly; he is the only actor I have ever seen who actually seems to relish the opportunity. His face is like a naked human body suddenly exposed in a well-lit room on a Wednesday afternoon — ugly shriveled genitals exposed to a harsh, glaring light. One can read every unpleasant emotion a human being might imagine on his fleshy lips, his flabby cheeks, his sweaty, quivering eyes. You just want to cover up the car accident that is is face, and not look. Well, anyway, the plot is very complicated. Let’s just say Laughton is in love with the transcendently beautiful Maureen O’Hara, but he has no chance with her, because he is actually not only ugly, slimy, and fat, but openly a coward. Maureen O’Hara’s brother is a member of the resistance, addicted to sabotage. By the end of the film, through a series of complex incidents (that there is no need to go into here) Laughton is transformed from a cringing piece of frightened raw meat, into an eloquent speechifying hero of the resistance. And Laughton makes us believe the transformation has really happened, and that such an impossible metamorphosis is entirely possible. Of course I don’t mean to compare legally mandated Coronavirus ‘social distancing’— to the German Occupation. And I certainly wouldn’t mean to compare my writing  here to writings banned by the Nazi government —because no one will bother to ban my plague diaries, because no one will read them anyway, and these words will have no effect. No. In This Land is Mine teachers in the German-occupied town actually spend the morning lesson demanding students tear pages out of books. There is no comparison. We certainly don’t do that. After all, we don’t really read books anymore. If we’re bored and want something to occupy our mind, Netflix will recommend Greenhouse Academy (the most popular new Netflix show when quarantining!), or Amazon will suggest a Kindle — we are under absolutely no obligation to do buy them. This Land is Mine is just another lousy World War II propaganda film, anyway, only — Jean Renoir just happened to direct it. Because as Wikipedia suggests, This Land is Mine is propaganda somewhat overly ‘nuanced.” James Morrison says “the film blames the bourgeoisie, a few left-wing intellectuals excepted, for letting Hitler into power in 1933, for surrendering France in 1940, and for collaborating actively, or passively.” Far be it from me to blame the bourgeoisie (as I am one). Or perhaps I am one of those left wing intellectuals to whom Renoir would have given a pass (though my lefty credentials are getting shakier by the syllable). Of course I would never suggest that ‘social distancing’ is a middle class notion. Why wouldn’t the working classes be all for it? Certainly they can ‘social distance’ as well as anybody? Can’t the working classes do yoga? I’ve never heard of such an idea. And wouldn’t it be insulting to working class people to suggest they could not social distance as well as anybody? Doug Ford — our rich, working class premiere — has suggested that construction sites remain open, saying that working men don’t need to labour close to each other, necessarily. Okay, that’s enough for now. I will simply offer you some quotations from This Land is Mine — which is simply a movie that happened to be showing on TCM today. What could be more innocent? (Check the movie listings for Wednesday March 25 — 2 pm. You will find it). These are actual quotations from this dated old movie about Nazism called This Land is Mine that TCM happened to be program: in fact you can read these quotations now, elsewhere, if you go to the film’s IMDB page. Please don’t read any special significance into them:
    “The law has the right to forbid only those things that are harmful to society.”
    “The truth can’t be allowed to live under the occupation, it’s too dangerous. The occupation lives on lies.”
    “We must stop saying that sabotoge is wrong, that it doesn’t pay. Sabotage, though it increases our misery, will shorten our tyranny.”
    “The man who resists secretly, is a coward.”
    “These ideas are a contagion.”
I would agree; yes, ideas in general are a contagion.
    Oh yes, I forgot to tell you, the quote at the top of this movie review is also a quote from This Land is Mine:
    “They make a desert and they call it peace.”

PLAGUE DIARY 7: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

The Rack 1956
No, didn’t make this up. Or rather, I did. Why is Turner Classic Movies able to read my mind? How did they come up with a film that is truly so apropos to my present mental state — and one that would make it necessary for me to write this? Watching The Rack after They Were Expendable is surreal; this movie has no rhythm, no symphonic movements, in fact no music whatsoever. It’s a lesson in bad writing. Rod Serling — who invented The Twilight Zone TV show and wrote many of the most famous episodes (and was one of the pre-eminent teachers in that Trumpian scam institution ‘The Famous Writers School’) wrote this crap. Well of course we all love The Twilight Zone — mainly because it’s only a half hour long and its corny concepts were sometimes truly creepy. And this film is truly creepy because of a stark realism that is only fully realised through Paul Newman’s performance (and especially one speech only). When The Rack (his third movie) came out he was 31, and 2 years later he would star in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Shall we pause here and pay tribute to Paul Newman’s beauty? He has the noble profile of the drawing of a young man in an Arrow Shirt commercial — full straight lips, deeply set bedroom eyes, a perpetual pout, a lean strong body and big firm hands. Besides Newman there is Anne Francis —who I thought I had never seen before (she starred in Forbidden Planet the same year) — a very odd looking, overly earnest actress, with platinum blonde hair, big blue eyes and a frighteningly large forehead. There’s also Walter Pidgeon (who plays Newman’s father). I will get to him later. And then there’s the redoubtable Cloris Leachman (remember her from The Mary Tyler Moore Show?) in a tiny but incredibly juicy part as a harassed housewife whose husband is calling her to bed. The movie had a startling effect on me because of the subject matter (loneliness) and because of Newman’s performance which is so honest it puts the rest of the film to shame. But oh the theme, the stupid corny, pretentious theme that you can see coming at you like a mack truck and when it hits, you just want to sit down and cry. Literally the same theme as Rebel Without a Cause — and the same theme as most movies in the fifties: my father didn’t love me enough! You’d think this theme would affect  me — because my father actually didn’t love me enough. But no, sorry. Newman’s big reveal on the witness stand “my father never kissed me” is followed by his defense attorney’s wrap up (Oh, I forgot to tell you, this is Newman’s court martial — he is accused of betraying his fellow soldiers under torture) “If there is guilt where does it lie? With that small number who defected as Captain Hall did…because he had not been given the warmth to support him along the way?” And then Dad — Walter Pidgeon — feels so guilty he must kiss his son (on the forehead of course) in a conversation in the car (there we go with kisses in cars again) — in a scene that most have been triply awkward because Walter Pidgeon was gay (Scotty Bowers says so, don’t argue with me, just google Scotty Bowers!). One can only wonder what it must have been like for a 61 year old Walter Pidgeon to hold a young Paul Newman in his arms and kiss him? But on this cold night when I’m afraid to look out my window and see the deserted streets and I wonder when  I will see my friends again, and I have to endure you thinking — ‘gee what’s so bad about social isolation?’ What’s so bad about people not being able to see their friends? Well, The Rack knows. The worst kind of torture is that which “twists not the body but the mind.” Paul Newman’s torture was to be left alone: “They made me stay alone / In the dark / I started doing math problems in my head -- singing songs/ They gave me pen and paper / Told me to write but only about myself / I didn’t know what was happening to me / They said they’d leave me alone for the rest of my life / They’d ask me how I liked being alone / Nobody cared for me.” Newman's defense attorney Wendell Corey — who you will recognise as the actor who played every boring character you can’t remember in 50s films and tv shows — sums it all up this way: the torturers knew humans could “endure physical pain but not mental agony.” For all a torturer must do is “find the hidden key, and when they’ve found it, turn that hard.” You see, it isn’t just being locked up during Coronavirus — with your family or without (either way could feel like a prison) and I’m sure it’s not just losing your job (who needs a job, after all), and it’s not just about losing all your money daily in the stock market, or your Olympic career, or your scholarship at school, or your house or your car — not any of that,  and it’s certainly not just about not being able to go out and be with people and hug them and laugh and all that stuff no — when they ‘turn the key’ —is when they somehow just can’t tell us how long this will last. When they refuse to give us any sort of plan. Why do they want it to turn it so badly for us? How did they learn to turn that ‘key’ so well? Do people just know sadism? Or do public servants just have a special talent for it? What compels them to say “We really don’t know? This could go on for months?” Why say that at all, even if it’s true? Doesn’t a dying dog at least deserve hope? Why does the girl at the mall in the security uniform she’s obviously so proud of (Paul Blart: Mall Cop) put up her hand and say ‘Can I help you sir?’ when I enter? Think about it for a moment lady, I’m trying to go into the goddamn mall! And then why does she seem to take such pleasure (and don’t tell me I’m imagining it, I’m friggin’ not)  telling me that every store I want to visit is closed? Just give me an answer. Why? Really, it doesn’t have to be this hard, social distancing; and those who are in charge could have a little more compassion for us all, they really should, and they all know that, don’t they —  so why? My father didn’t love me — or rather he thought he loved something about me, but I was really only the a manifestation of a dream about himself that he could never achieve  — yet, I, unlike Rod Serling, do not blame him. No. I blame human evil.

PLAGUE DIARY 6: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

They Were Expendable (1945)
 I would be lying if I called this a bad film. From the title I thought perhaps it was, but John Ford turned out to be the director. I haven’t watched any John Ford films all the way through, except for The Quiet Man — my mother’s favourite movie — and They Were Expendable also stars John Wayne — who was my father’s favourite actor — so even though I have never seen this particular film, it still holds memories for me. Because Ford is such a consummate artist, every scene is like the movement of a symphony, rising and falling with an ineluctable grace. The subject of the film (and all of Ford’s films) is masculinity — something that has always intimidated me, because I am not masculine and never will be, cannot be, I curse myself for it. (Which is probably why the only John Ford movie I’d seen before this was the one my mother loved so much.) What is masculinity? It is stoicism; that is one thing only — not showing emotion. John Wayne is a perfect John Ford actor because it’s unclear whether or not he can actually act emotion — at least it was unclear to me — until I saw this film. He can; but only through the veil of masculinity — which makes it all the more touching, of course. Shakespeare is onto this — the woman inside the man —  Hamlet is an effeminate male (please stop trying to play him as a warrior, he is the opposite of that!). When Ophelia dies, Laertes cries, and then curses himself, knuckles clenched: “When these are gone, / The woman will be out.” But can you ever really cut the woman out of you, man? They Were Expendable is a series of combat scenes — after all it’s basically a World War II propaganda flick — but between each battle is a moment for men to show emotion. From this film I learned that men are masculine — not because they don’t have emotion — but because they don’t show it. From the moment that Robert Montgomery (15 years older now, I watched him 3 days ago in War Nurse) sees a young recruit shivering, and asks: ‘You got wet clothes underneath that blanket?” and the boy says, innocent, wide-eyed: “No — just scared” and instead of castigating him, or puffing out his chest, Montgomery quietly and somewhat embarrassedly says, so that no one can hear: “You haven’t got a monopoly on that” — well, I was gone. John Ford is admitting at the outset that inside these boys are frightened little girls, but what makes them men is goddamit, they will never admit it.  Like teenage girls, they are terribly fond of a ship’s cat — a black cat called “Good Luck.” When Donna Read asks John Wayne to dance, he responds like a man: “Listen sister, I don’t dance and I can’t take time now to learn.” But he shows up, and the romance, of course, begins. But the moment when the jig was up, when I realised John Ford must have read his Judith Butler — or at least channeled her in 1945 —was when all the guys go to visit their buddy who only has 9 days to live; they’re all cheery, and kid him, competitively, and after they’re gone and he’s alone with Robert Montgomery the dying guy says: “nice act you boys put on.” He knows he’s going to die and so do they, but men are men and must put on a brave face. Masculinity is an act, a performance — albeit a mandatory one — for western males. I wish I understood masculinity, I wish I could play that game, I’ve never been able to play it and I’m sorry, I really am. I didn’t go to Vietnam. I was a kind of involuntary draft dodger (this is an excuse, I know) — my mother who loved me very much scuttled me up here to Canada, knowing that I might not be drafted here, and I wasn’t. What would I have done in Vietnam? Run, cry? Put on a dress and entertain the troops.? I’m not John Wayne, and all I have is this, what I’m offering you now, my emotions. Perhaps you don’t believe that I’m emotional at all, because I’ve been complaining about Coronovirus self-isolation. Perhaps you think I’m a cold hearted fag and the next thing I”m going to do is carelessly name-drop the fact that Cameron Mitchel is in They Were Expendable and I used to be best friends with his daughter Camille (though she had many friends) and Cameron Mitchell was ‘Happy’ in Death of a Salesman (on Broadway and in the movie with Lee J. Cobb) and Camille and I worked at the Shaw festival together nearly forty years ago (she wouldn’t like me giving away the year) and I loved her as only a fag can love a movie star. And when Gina Mallet (the Toronto Star theatre reviewer whose reputation was like her name) gave Camille a terrible review, calling her a ‘cement Lana Turner’ Camille phoned me crying, and asked: “Sky, am I a ‘cement Lana Turner’?” because I knew — as she did — that when you read words like that about yourself in the newspaper they just never go away. Our favourite thing was clearing patios. We would sit out at her hotel on the patio (Camille’s mother was a millionaire and whenever she wanted to go to a hotel she just did) and talk dirty about boys until the rest of the sun-worshipers would, one by one, desert us, and Camille would say — “what about that, we can still sure clear a patio!” Sorry: I just had to do that little song and dance; it’s camp, it’s my act, it’s, ironically the closest thing I have to masculinity because it hides the tears. And I’m afraid that’s all I have to offer you, as Noel Coward said. I have a talent to amuse (or I am deluded enough to imagine I have such a talent) which is why I can’t stop writing these damn old bad movie reviews. And yes I will get to the title of this movie. They Were Expendable. Is anyone expendable? Of course not. Did you think I would say that they were? In war, people were expendable — yes the generals in this movie say that certain PT boat crews were expendable— but the Coronavirus isn’t war, and no one is expendable. But we all die, which means we are all expendable in the eyes of God.

PLAGUE DIARY 5: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

Caged 1950
I knew this movie was very relevant to our situation, so I went to find it on youtube, even though I always mix it up with Snake Pit (with Olivia de Havilland). Well this one has Eleanor Parker — who just does breathy acting for the whole first part until she gets tough and coarse at the end, when she’s better, but — it’s hard to forget all that unconvincing breathy innocence. Well, the movie does have Agnes Moorehead. She is doing something, I’m not quite sure what. She’s a great actress and she always has a plan. As the ‘good’ warden who is trying to improve conditions for prisoners she is, I think, at the very least, attempting something very difficult, trying to play a slightly maddening, clinical, obsessed, exacting person. Which is great, because otherwise the character would be simply a boring saint. And then there’s the amazing Evelyn Harper who plays ‘Matron.’ Evalyn Harper was six foot three and weighed in at two hundred and fifty pounds. She started out in vaudeville as a kid, and graduated into being a strong lady in the circus. Wow. And she’s really good, really mean, got an Oscar nomination for it. But then there is this situation (CAGED!!!) which is far, far too close to our own. Some of the quotes are super applicable. Such as this, from the rich girl who think she’s too privileged to be in prison: ‘Let me out of here! I don’t belong here! I’m Georgia Harrison!’ This quote I reserve for all the middle class hipster ladies who are ostensibly utilising the tremendously life-affirming opportunity of Coronavirus social distancing to exploring yoga, new quinoa recipes, online guitar lessons, and bonding with their children, during this ‘trying time.’ But really they just want to scream: ‘Let me out of here! I don’t belong here! I’m Georgia Harrison!” And then there’s: ‘I’m not like the others” which I think we should give to the virtue-signalling overweight Star Trek nerd who is sitting at home stuffing his face and getting high, no, not on dope, but on all the good he is doing for all the senior citizens in nursing homes — by doing exactly what he’s always wanted to do, block out all social obligations and get fat. And finally, there’s Eleanor Parker pacing by herself in solitary confinement, acting very badly, but offering us this precious gem: “Nothing to be scared of, being alone isn’t so tough! Stop thinking about it!” Is that the key? Should I just stop thinking about it? It sounds so easy. But then I go to my TV and some pinched-faced public health official seems to be giving herself a quiet orgasm, simply by saying, with a Nazi do-gooder fervour: ‘You’d better prepare for this to go on for months and months!’  One of my best female friends said ‘What a bitch, just because you can’t work out  a) the science to solve this or b) a way to get more medical equipment and hospital space — we have to stay at home until we starting eating our own hands?' There is the moment in Caged though, one that even Eleanor Parker can’t ruin (she later went on to play the fabulous Countess or Empress or whatever she was — the bad lady — a foil to all Julie Andrews’ syrupy sweetness in The Sound of Music, so maybe her acting did become at least useful in later years) she finds a cat in the snow, an adorable, triangle-faced calico that is all eyes, and hides it in the prison chest at the foot of her bed. But, tragically —it meows — and Matron hears it, and grabs it away from Eleanor, who promptly initiates a prison riot -- and before you know the cat is a stiff but adorable corpse, and Eleanor moans, tearfully: “All I wanted was the kitten.” Well that’s the way I feel. Jesus — all I wanted was the goddamn kitten. Just to see my friends and get drunk and have sex and see a play and go to a party and just bond with the friggin’ world. Which is what I generally try to do. Small price to pay, eh? Giving all that up, for the good of others? One of the inmates says “In this cage, you get tough, or you get killed.” I guess I better wise up.

PLAGUE DIARY 4: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

Death Takes a Holiday (1934)
Yes, it’s some sort of holiday as the film begins. They are in Europe and there is much laughter and sunlight and flowers. Then they are driving, very fast, in a big, expensive car, and suddenly a shadow comes over the car, and Grazia — a beautiful young woman — is oddly drawn to the shadow. She says “let’s go fast enough to reach the unlimitable.” They crash into a flower vendors cart. They think he’s dead but he’s not.  In fact, no one is hurt. They are off to a villa — where nothing but rich people — with fake English accents — live. It’s based on a bad 1924 Italian play, with a ponderous screenplay by Maxwell Anderson (a very bad American playwright) — despite Frederic March, who does the best he can in the leading role (as Death) and Henry Travers (you will think — where have I seen him before?— well he was the feisty little angel who dares to talk back to God in a much better movie — Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life). Death Takes a Holiday is too preachy by far, it’s kind of a sermon really. The highpoint is a speech by Grazia “There’s something out there I must find first….that I must understand” recited over Chopin’s glorious Etude in E (that Chopin piece is better than anything in this damned film!). Yes. Grazia is in love with death. It’s evident from the beginning, and her romance with death is inevitable. This is certainly not an original notion, but instead somewhat timeworn (Freud). Frederic March, as Death, does indeed decide to take a holiday, and people stop dying, but Death has never lived and doesn’t understand what draws people to life. Of course he falls in love with Grazia — one of the many not-particularly-well-thought-out metaphors in this film. For is that what happens when we die? Has death fallen in love with us? Frederic March tells us not to fear death. And in one of the film’s most preachy — and one of its only quasi-religious moments, he mentions the after-life: “Has it ever occurred to you that death might be simpler than life, and infinitely more kind?” I don’t know if it has occurred to all of us, but it is a pleasant thought, especially for Christians. The closest I get to religion is Bataille, who says that we before we are born we are part of what Amanda in Private Lives calls “a rather gloomy merging into everything” (Elyot says “I hope not, I’m a bad merger”). Only for Bataille, the merging is not gloomy at all, for, before we are born and after we die, we are part of a spirit than contains us all. We can’t imagine what being part of a communal spirit with no individual self-consciousness would be — but deep down we long to find it once again. And that’s why we have sex (orgasm; the little death) and read crime novels, and do dangerous things — like when meet some one we haven’t seen for a long time we just have to hug them, even in the time of Coronavirus. We have a primal need to get close to death-- but not die. In Death Takes a Holiday, Grazia does die. Frederic March puts on his black cloak (he’s been on holiday, transformed into a handsome prince with brooding eyes, and in fact all the women at this fancy villa have fallen in love with him, but they are also scared of him; he’s like the bad boyfriend you can't get rid of) and he envelops Grazia in cloak and the movie is over. It was ponderous, so we’re kind of glad it’s over. But might we wonder just a little bit if all this fear is actually getting us anywhere?  Because, after all, someday, Coronavirus or not, aren’t we all going to die? That is not an excuse for reckless behaviour, or behaviour that puts others in danger; it’s simply a fact. Ever since AIDS I’ve lived my life as if I might die at any moment, but honestly I think that’s what separates the men from the boys and the women from the girls, and really the bourgeoisie from the very poor. If you don’t have money you are a lot closer to sickness and death, and working class people just seem to know that it’s best to live for today, I mean why not, under the circumstances? And nice bourgeois middle class people are always saying ‘you must think of the future and your children’ but some of us don’t have children, or worse yet we may recognise all too well that no matter what we do our children’s lives are going end up being nasty and brutish and short too. I know all this sounds horrible and depressing, but this is a horrible time. Maybe a time to talk about our very real feelings about death. Because death is with us every day — though we like to pretend it’s not — instead of living in fear of Coronavirus because as good bourgeois we have been taught that we will all ‘pass quietly’ in our sleep? And now I’ve gotten preachy too, and I’m not as handsome — or as good an actor — as Frederic March. I’m sitting here in my air b and b in Toronto writing, and watching people out the window — and everyone is rushing by. Rushing to do what? Buy toilet paper? Really?

PLAGUE DIARY 3: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

Gun Crazy (1950)
Which is the way I feel today, honestly. Yes John Dall is probably the worst actor who ever existed anywhere. He played one of the two smart killer homosexuals in Hitchcock’s Rope opposite dreamboat and actual homosexual Farley Granger — even Farley Granger is a better actor than Joh Dall, and that’s not saying much. As soon as I started watching this movie I thought: “I know this actor ruined another movie for me, what was it? Oh yeah, Rope.” But this is Gun Crazy and it is a bad movie treat, it’s sexist in only the incredibly sexy way that film noir can be. Apparently the director Joseph H. Lewis told Peggy Cummins to play her part ‘like a dog in heat.’ (‘Oh thanks, yeah, I’ll give that a try!') Peggy Cummins was too good an actress to obey that asinine directive. In fact she is so good watching her scenes with John Dall is kinda surrealistic as you keep bouncing between ugh, and wow. The movie begins with John Dall’s character — as a boy — being obsessed with guns which we’re supposed to think is okay, because well, boys like guns, right? Oh yes, digression, Russ Tamblyn (who later to grow up to be a teen idol who played the achingly hot Norman Page in Peyton Place - my fave movie of all time) plays one of the boys. So that’s all fine and good, a boy and his bb gun. So we start out all Christmas Story in cute boyhood territory. But then unbeknownst to himself the innocent boy meets a girl who ruins it all because, well, women always ruin it don’t they, with their damned desire? She’s hot for him, so hot — and cool, and calculating, and fiercely manipulative. He doesn’t want to kill anyone, he doesn’t even want to rob banks (now I know why they say this movie was the template for Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde) but every time he vacillates she’s climbing all over him and cooing in his ear. It’s all very Lady Macbeth without the poetry. Dalton Trumbo — who was blacklisted in Hollywood for being a communist — wrote this lousy screenplay under another name. But I wonder sometimes. Will I be blacklisted? For writing this? Because yes I feel kinda gun crazy today and my friend and I were just talking about women and how powerful their vaginas are and I said ‘Well I’m gay…’ and she said “But you know about the power of vaginas — everyone knows…” and I said “Yes…” because it’s true. So my friend has driven me to Toronto in the middle of Coronavirus and we’re having a drink at my air b and b and we’re just going to get drunk and yell about Corona. I guess we’re not supposed to do that, and I’m certainly not supposed to write about it. But Gun Crazy, bad as it is, does have Victor Young’s music and he’s as good as Max Steiner or Alfred Newman. it swells when they are in the car kissing again (what is it about kissing in cars in these movies?) and the theme keeps coming back, it’s like Dr. Zhivago or something. And John Dall, acting anguished, badly, says “Two people dead? Just so we can live without working?” But she kisses him and the angst disappears. My problem is I think I am Peggy Cummins and Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity (do you remember that scene when they go shopping in a grocery store and they wear dark glasses because they don’t want anyone to see them together and they look so damn conspicuous— very Corona-like behaviour). I know you think I’m just a spoiled brat -- but I have an anti-authoritarian personality. And I am not the only one in the world who does, let me tell you. And we anti-authoritarians are completely triggered by this whole self isolation ‘sheltering’ thing. And of course we shouldn’t be, we should just be good corporate citizens — but me and my friends are the type of people who have always done what everyone has told us not to do. And I wanted to resign from being gay eight years ago because being gay wasn’t rebellious enough for me anymore. I can’t help it that’s just the way I am. If someone tells me to do something I do just the opposite, and I’m trying to modify my behaviour, and wash my hands, and that’s why I’m sitting here drinking with my best girlfriend. The way I look at it is -- we both have dangerous vaginas -- but please don’t blame us. We’re like Peggy Cummins — someone gave us this part, and now we just have to play it out as best we can, even if it means acting with John friggin’ Dall.

PLAGUE DIARY 2: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

War Nurse (1930)
I will not make it to the end because a friend interrupted me, but what is it with TCM showing War Nurse and The Body Disappears? Well somebody’s thinking, and therefore so must I. This film has lots to offer. The dialogue is pretty filthy, and there’s Zazu Pitts (who I knew from the 1950s sitcom My Favourite Margie) who has a very funny face. I identify with Zazu because when the nurses first get to the French ‘hospital’ which they have to clean and set up themselves, all of which they do with admirable pluck (War Nurse was co-written by a woman — Becky Gardiner — look her up, she was one of the few female writers in Hollywood ,and most likely knew a lot about pluck) and some girl is screaming about the rats, Zazu makes a funny face and says “I have wonderful pets like that at home, they swarm all over me.” It’s a pre-Hays code move so they can get away with murder. But as a gay man and a slut who somehow lived through the AIDS crisis I’d love to say ‘hey calm down about this Coronavirus shit, I’ve had rats all over me.’ But I know I shouldn’t, so I won’t. But there are incredibly poignant scenes, like when a solder is writhing in agony and a nurse hurries to his side and then goes away to get a doctor, and then the soldier dies, and she just says — ‘Il est parti’ (she’s a French nurse). There are two couples: Robert Montgomery/June Walker (the nice, not too attractive couple), and Robert Ames/Anita Page (the cursed n’er do well blondes). But I am so angry that people are going on about how ‘Coronavirus is like a war!” Well after seeing War Nurse — I have to say, it’s not. Because why did all these nurses go to France? Was it to help, was it heroism, was it goodness of the heart? Were they of-one-mind with all the Coronavirus altruists who say ‘stay at home and stay alive?” No sir— they went to France to get laid. At the beginning of the movie, all the soon-to-be-nurses are sitting decked in furs, smoking and having cocktails (I told you it was pre-Code) and when one of them argues “it’s not our place to go to France,’ another intones: “With five million men out there — it’s our place, darling!” And the central moral dilemma of the movie is whether or not June Walker (who is a nice girl) is going to give in to Robert Montgomery’s advances. She endlessly resists with smart quips until they are in a bombing raid and then finally she relents and kisses him, and does God knows what else. But we know what else. After all, when the ugly ex-teacher nurse with glasses (early on in the film she asks one of the pretty girls ‘do you think they’d take me?’ — and you know it’s a laugh line) refuses to go to the wartime dance in France, one of the other ‘prettier’ girls says “It’s better to walk home alone then never to have been able to take a ride at all.” These are very wise words. I like to think Becky Gardiner wrote them, as they certainly exemplify my philosophy of life. No it was completely different in wartime. The ever present danger meant everyone was devoted to screwing and realising themselves.  All the modern civil rights movements — feminism, anti-racism and gay rights — got their start in World War II. It was the opposite of social distancing. And in World War II everyone was encouraged to get out of the house and go to movies, because the powers-that-be realised everyone needed an escape. A friend of mine told me about her mother who was a little girl during World War II. All she had to look forward to was the movies. But she was a poor kid and didn’t have any money, so she would stand in front of the movie theatre and beg people to give her change. And people would give her money, because she was cute and pitiful. But the movie ended after curfew so these kids ran home along the railway tracks. Yeah. So that’s about as unlike our situation as anything I can think of — the danger of war gives us all permission to only live once and have sex and  escape to the movies. No so much now with coronavirus. I can’t tell you anything more about War Nurse because my friend came over and interrupted the movie. But I looked up the end on Wikipedia. There’s lots of melodrama after the kiss in the car (isn’t there always?). Of course Anita Page doesn’t end up with Robert Ames because they are both bad blondes, so he has to die. But June Walker does end up with Robert Montgomery after he is freed at the last minute from a prisoner of war camp. Is that what is going to happen to us? Will someone free us? That’s what I was talking about with my friend, but then he had to go, and now once again I’m kinda alone, and bored out of my friggin’ mind.

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

The Body Disappears (1941)
I got quite lost after The Body Disappears and almost couldn’t find my way back again; lost in one of those black internet holes where you’ve fallen and you can’t get up and can’t get out. The Body Disappears is a mildly entertaining comedy with two big stars — Edward Everett Horton and Jane Wyman. Of Jane Wyman nothing more needs to be said than that she was achingly beautiful — although she could act too — but I won’t hear anything against beauty in general, there is such a thing and she had it. If you see her, that face that is all eyes and cheekbones, and then the lush curly red hair! I can understand why Ronald Reagan married her. And it’s Edward Everett Horton that led me down the garden path of no Hollywood return. But just to do my duty and speak of the movie itself before I get lost in Wikipedialand, it must be mentioned that Edward Everett Horton’s black assistant in The Body Disappears is Willie Best who was in countless films (11 films in 1939 alone) and his character name is also Willie (by that time he must have been so well known that he could play a character with his own name). In The Body Disappears he plays the classic ‘Stepin’ Fetchit’ role; he is a black actor who specialises in being bug-eyed and tremblingly scared. He really is quite good — but like Edward Everett Horton — was always cast as a regrettable a stereotype. I promise to speak of Edward Everett Horton himself, soon, but first I have to talk about the invisible monkey. It just seems so relevant. In one scene the professor — Edward Everett Horton — is chasing an invisible monkey (he is a professor who can make people invisible and mistakenly gives a soon- to-be-married young man a pill after the young man’s bachelor party — a pill that makes him invisible — not bloody likely, but it’s that kind of film.). And it is an invisible monkey of his own making, or rather Edward Everett Horton made the monkey invisible and he can’t figure out how to unmake him invisible. What could be more relevant to the Coronavirus? I mean really. I can’t help thinking that one way or the other this dilemma is of our own making. Anyway it’s certainly a monkey loose in all our lives, and it may right now be shitting on our floor without us knowing it. And whether we made it  up — because Coronavirus is just some weird variation of the flu that we have ruined our economy for — or it is in fact the new plague everyone seems to think it is — we just can’t find that monkey. As for Edward Everett Horton he is famous for playing gay characters in Fred Astaire films. Well not gay of course openly, but pretty much so, one need only watch him petulantly whine to Eric Blore in The Gay Divorcee “I never ring for crumpets.” In The Body Disappears film he is a professor, which is still, today an effeminate profession in American eyes. But the cul-de-sac that I got lost in was when I went to Edward Everett Horton’s Wikipedia page and that led me to a Wikipedia ‘talk’ page (have you ever seen one of those? They’re crazy—) where they were arguing endlessly about whether Edward Everett Horton was gay or not. And someone mentioned Gavin Gordon who was maybe his lover, so I ended up on youtube looking up Greta Garbo and and Gavin Gordon in Romance (1930, one of the early talkies) and Gavin Gordon is evidently gay, which is probably why he never made it as a leading man. And Greta Garbo is just so — well she’s even beyond Jane Wyman because she’s not only beautiful but absolutely real, at every moment. How did she ever get into a Hollywood movie? She is the opposite of fakery. So as you see I got lost in a Hollywood wormhole there and now am repeating that mistake here, but suffice it to say that Edward Everett was obviously gay and obviously Gavin Gordon’s lover, and why would anyone bother to argue about it? And finally, there was a moment for me in The Body Disappears which was very gay — it was really only a gay moment between myself and the movie — because the invisible man is only completely invisible when he is naked, because when he is dressed you can only see his clothes of course (special effects!) .And at one moment the invisible man who is a rich young athlete — a golfer — is naked and talking to Jane Wyman, and Jane Wyman’s character is being quite clear about how sexy she finds him, and all I could think of was ‘wow, she’s talking to a naked man who she’s attracted to but she can’t see him naked,’ which is an awfully sexy situation, at least to my gay brain. Oh yes and one more thing. On some nerdy film page they say The Body Disappears was a rip off of Topper. And Topper frankly made me the man I am today. It was a 1937 film starring Cary Grant and Constance Bennett about an invisible couple — George and Marion Kerby — who were killed in a car accident, and come as ghosts to live with Cosmo Topper. I used to love the series when I was a child (they did a remake of it for TV 1953-1955, so I was at that time about 3 years old). But I remember it. I remember how witty, carefree, and just plain fun the Kerbys were, and how little they cared about life or death (which I think is somehow relevant to the situation all of us are in right now). And I think that you can now officially stop asking the age old question — because yes, the answer is this: Topper made me gay.

COVID-19 And The New Puritanism

I have a friend who was raised in Mennonite country, and he has been torturing himself over COVID-19. I don’t mean he has the illness; he feels responsible.
 “The guilty voice in my head keeps telling me that COVID-19 is my fault.” “Why is it your fault that people are dying of COVID-19? “God is punishing the world because of all the bad things I did.” (My friend is very kinky and very sexual. A lot like me.)
Well, of course it’s crazy to think that immorality caused COVID-19. Or is it? What is happening now seems to have a lot more to do with virtue signalling than science.
Science can’t tell us how to treat this disease, or how to cure it, or how it is passed on (do we get it from asymptomatic people or not?) But the government denies us testing (sorry, there aren’t enough ‘kits’). But when asked questions like ‘Does the virus evolve and mutate?’ or ‘Once you get it are you immune?’ we get ‘Sorry, but we’re working on that.’ There is no vaccine in sight. And no there is no idea what the real statistics are because increasingly it kinda seems like everybody has it, or could have it.
I’m not blaming the scientists or the medical profession; I just think our cultural emphasis should be on facilitating the work of scientists and doctors, not on social distancing.
We are being told to stay indoors, not to see our friends, not go to see plays, not drink in bars or eat in restaurants, not go to the gym, not go to libraries (where are we supposed to get the books we supposed to read at home?). We are being told not to have pleasure, not to have fun.
Let’s put this all in perspective. In Italy — the country that has been hit hardest by COVID-19 in the west — there have been 2,158 deaths from COVID-19.  In the same country in 2014 there were 20,183 deaths from diabetes.
For those of us who lived through AIDS, all this hysteria this all seems more than ridiculous — it’s insulting. In 1982 — before the syndrome was even identified — there were nearly 500 deaths from AIDS in New York City alone. The men who had it were shunned. And they died in agony, demonised — helpless and abandoned. As another one of my friends said ‘Remember AIDS, when we were afraid to touch our friends for fear we might die? But we still hugged. And we still did other things…as safely as we knew how.’ Why? Because we knew that loving each other was an important part of staying alive.
Now all of us face a hugely less dangerous challenge than AIDS, and yet we have decided to punish ourselves by not having fun — and oh, by the way, destroying our economy at the same time. I have no doubt that international travel and large gatherings of people should be cancelled — and people should certainly practice the recommended hygiene. But what we are seeing is virtue signalling on a nightmarish scale. It started with Wet'suwet'en blockades and is climaxing with COVID-19. People can’t stop talking about how virtuous they are, and about how much they care about the ‘vulnerable’ — making sure to remind us that they are not vulnerable themselves. This is about showing off—  not about protecting ourselves from disease. How many emails have I received from places like the Pickle Barrel assuring me that they are concerned about COVID-19? (Do I care?) Everyone wants to show that they care about the older and the vulnerable. But while scientists fumble around from lack of funding and support, we are denying ourselves fun. Well I am one of the older, vulnerable people. My ancestors came over on the Mayflower. In fact I come from a long line of humourless, music-abjuring, self-flagellating puritans but I’m not going to deny myself that soul-nurturing essence called human pleasure — because I know that to do so might make me more ill than touching my face.
Okay, yes I am a ‘bad.’ I will continue hugging my friends, kissing them, and maybe even….’other things.’
Arrest me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_AyuhbnPOI&feature=emb_title&app=desktop

Goodbye! — from an old one to the young

With this Coronavirus thing a lot of us old ones won’t be around much longer. I can’t speak for everyone, and don’t intend to do so here. But a lot of us will be sorry to go.

Here are a few bits of advice. I know — it’s tough to listen. We left you with climate change, populism and economic stagnation, so what do we know?

All that aside (is it possible to put that aside?) here is some advice that I think  is important for you to know.

1. READ

This means books. Remember, you don’t read real books online — usually just bestsellers or blogs. Real books were, many of them, written a long time ago. A lot of real books were written by white men — Shakespeare, Proust, Tennessee Williams, to name a few. But there’s also Virginia Woolf and Emma Goldman, to name even fewer (Emma Goldman is VERY important!) and Amiri Baraka (just to name a fabulous non-white one). READ THEM. I know it may seem like a waste of time, at first. But if you sit down, turn the light on, and concentrate, it will open another world.

2. DON’T IGNORE HISTORY

It’s boring, I know. But people made a lot of mistakes in the past. You could learn a lot from a particularly significant historical mistake: The Holocaust. It’s something horrifying that you must never forget. You need to understand history, but if you absolutely don’t care, then just remember this. All of history can be summed up in a single phrase: ‘human beings are capable of limitless evil, and often in the name of the noblest of causes.’ 

Please, please don’t forget that, ever.

3. SEX

Have it. Every consensual sexual act is an act of love. I know a lot of you aren’t having much sex anymore; declining birth rates in the west tell us this. And I know that sex is messy, inconvenient, and often embarrassing. It’s tough to get naked and mix it up with another living breathing human — but you can’t pretend that what goes on ‘down there’ is not important! You have a physical body. It has desires! (Ones you don’t even know about!) If you shame yourself for your desires, you do so at your peril.

4. LOVE PEOPLE AND TOUCH THEM

This is perhaps the hardest one. Have any kind of love, anywhere with anyone. Even if you feel particularly unloveable — join the club. Like the Beatles said — ‘all you need is love.’ You will die without it.

5. AND, FINALLY….HUMAN BEINGS ARE IMPERFECT: AND IT IS THAT IMPERFECTION THAT MAKES THEM BEAUTIFUL!

Yes, computers are more efficient. Yes, every day we replace more and more bodies and minds with cyborgian parts. I also understand that human beings are extremely flawed; they have flawed bodies and flawed minds. But it is those flaws that bring us closer to ‘The Goddess. ’ Or  whatever it is you believe in. 

Thanks. I just had to get this stuff off my chest.

The New Censorship

The new censorship is subtle. It’s not about governments banning work. True, the Globe and Mail reported that the Arts Council of England  revealed last year that it presently adjudicates applicants according to “relevance not excellence.” But the government does not need to get involved in actual censorship, either officially or unofficially. The notion of prioritising ideas over form has been internalised by artists — and specifically by critics — and is now treated as de rigeur. We now create and judge art only for its content

Unfortunately, it no longer matters how a play, novel, or poem presents itself; beauty is dismissed as a bourgeois value. Now all that matters is the clearly communicated message that the work of art contains. Tragically, this notion runs contrary to the very nature of art, which since the time of the Greek sophists, has been more concerned with creating imaginary worlds than with teaching a moral or political lesson. 

Adorno (a 20th century Marxist philosopher) was once famously paraphrased as saying that ‘there can be no art after The Holocaust.’ This statement has been widely misquoted and misinterpreted. What Adorno meant was that a play or novel that dealt with extermination of the Jews did a particular disservice to that horror if the play or novel was explicitly about The Holocaust — because the resulting art would be merely ‘sad’ or ‘horrifying.’ This would be an inadequate response to the human capacity for evil. Does that mean that artists should not, or cannot, respond to wrongdoing? Does it mean that art should not be political? No. It means that art must make it’s statement through form. Adorno spoke of Beckett, in this respect. He theorised that Waiting for Godot — through it’s poetic dialogue, and hopeless, aimless characters — says more about The Holocaust, than any play which refers specifically to the events of World War II.

It’s great to come out of a musical humming the title song; but I’m afraid it is not so great to come out of a play with a clearly articulated message for changing the world. Why? First of all; just because you ‘saw it in a play’ doesn’t mean you are going to do anything but repeat the ideas in tweets and Facebook posts that constitute a self-perpetuating, self-congratulating ‘virtue signal.’ But, frankly, preaching is best left to the pulpit — and the pulpit does it much better. These days the pulpit has been replaced by social justice speeches and political platforms. Plays, novels, poems, and paintings should — instead of telling us how to change the world — raise questions and stir emotions. I mean contradictory emotions and contradictory ideas; difficult emotions, and difficult ideas. Ideas must be in plays but plays must not be about ideas.

Why take my word for it? Because my opinion is backed up by the history of art — and by common sense. It’s fine for people to get angry about ideas and promote them; but art is not a soapbox. If we make it into that kind of place, then we lose what art is and should be, a special, sacred, holy communication with the human spirit.

I know that sounds high-falutin’. 

Sorry. 

It is. 

 However, the government does not need to get involved in actual censorship, either officially or unofficially. The notion of prioritising ideas over form has been internalised by artists — and specifically by critics — and is now treated as de rigeur. We now create and judge art only for its content

Unfortunately, it no longer matters how a play, novel, or poem presents itself; beauty is dismissed as a bourgeois value. Now all that matters is the clearly communicated message that the work of art contains. Tragically, this notion runs contrary to the very nature of art, which since the time of the Greek sophists, has been more concerned with creating imaginary worlds than with teaching a moral or political lesson. 

Adorno (a 20th century Marxist philosopher) was once famously paraphrased as saying that ‘there can be no art after The Holocaust.’ This statement has been widely misquoted and misinterpreted. What Adorno meant was that a play or novel that dealt with extermination of the Jews did a particular disservice to that horror if the play or novel was explicitly about The Holocaust — because the resulting art would be merely ‘sad’ or ‘horrifying.’ This would be an inadequate response to the human capacity for evil. Does that mean that artists should not, or cannot, respond to wrongdoing? Does it mean that art should not be political? No. It means that art must make it’s statement through form. Adorno spoke of Beckett, in this respect. He theorised that Waiting for Godot — through it’s poetic dialogue, and hopeless, aimless characters — says more about The Holocaust, than any play which refers specifically to the events of World War II.

It’s great to come out of a musical humming the title song; but I’m afraid it is not so great to come out of a play with a clearly articulated message for changing the world. Why? First of all; just because you ‘saw it in a play’ doesn’t mean you are going to do anything but repeat the ideas in tweets and Facebook posts that constitute a self-perpetuating, self-congratulating ‘virtue signal.’ But, frankly, preaching is best left to the pulpit — and the pulpit does it much better. These days the pulpit has been replaced by social justice speeches and political platforms. Plays, novels, poems, and paintings should — instead of telling us how to change the world — raise questions and stir emotions. I mean contradictory emotions and contradictory ideas; difficult emotions, and difficult ideas. Ideas must be in plays but plays must not be about ideas.

Why take my word for it? Because my opinion is backed up by the history of art — and by common sense. It’s fine for people to get angry about ideas and promote them; but art is not a soapbox. If we make it into that kind of place, then we lose what art is and should be, a special, sacred, holy communication with the human spirit.

I know that sounds high-falutin’. 

Sorry. 

It is.