PLAGUE DIARY 31: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

Sergeant York (1940)
I refuse to review this film; I almost don’t want to tell you anything about it, but suffice to say it’s propaganda, pure and simple. In 1940, I’m sure America needed to persuade all those young men to volunteer to die. World War I produced some of the greatest carnage in human history. And for many the aftermath was to abandon reason and a certain ordered way of life. The anti-logic went like this; if civilisation, learning, and knowledge has brought us to this nightmare, then maybe we shouldn’t be civilised. Ergo: drugs, Dada, the 20s, a nervous fury to live, live live. One could, I suppose, analyse propaganda. If so the primary warning is this; beware of the humble. I know that a propaganda machine named Donald Trump is the opposite of humble, but at least we know what we are getting with him. We must be much more wary of the shy tact of Justin Trudeau, who registers on most everyone’s radar as if he wouldn’t hurt a flea. Gary Cooper’s Sergeant York is so sweet and shy and god-fearin’ that you want to kick him in the nuts. At least I did. He finds God, and soon after, he devours a book of American history and — before you know it — lickety-split — he’s off killing people and winning medals. When offered a monetary reward for his daring deeds, he turns it down. But of course he is rewarded on earth, not just in heaven. To put it in the manner of Sargeant York, I must admit -- 'I can’t abide religion. It sticks in my craw.’ I went to a Buddhist temple once. I tell you all religions are the same. Worshippers who I thought were supposed to be meditating were measuring their karma in coffee spoons: ‘I’ve built up enough karma, I think, so that now I can be more successful in my business or my marriage?’ What? Sargeant York is a selfless, bible-thumping sharp-shooter who wants nothing but to do good, and at the end he gets the ‘bottom-land’ he’s always yearned for. Capitalism eats everything — even religion — and in this movie you understand the real reason to believe in God: because the material rewards are substantial. Okay, enough. Let’s talk about beauty. Let’s talk about Gary Cooper. He was 39 when he starred as Sergeant York, playing opposite that perennial old coot Walter Brennan, who was only 7 years older than him. But that's fiction: we believe Gary Cooper is a young man, there are: those eyes and the delicate lashes, his slim body, the vertical lines of his face, those long graceful fingers. (Yes — according to Marlene Dietrich — he was extremely well-endowed.) Gary Cooper is that kind of marvellous actor who can’t act. What we appreciate is how hard he tries, such earnestness attached to such perfect beauty. And that’s certainly enough. I know Keanu Reeves played Hamlet at the Manitoba Theatre Centre in 1995. Watching that would have been like watching Gary Cooper in this movie. Is it okay to talk about beauty? I’m never sure nowadays. I’d like you to understand what beauty is, first. Beauty is whatever you want it to be, and that’s what makes it truth (in the Keats sense) and not in the sense that you might want it to be. When I tell you that Gary Cooper and Keanu Reeves are beautiful, it’s my job to persuade you of that fact, because without my persuasion, their beauty will vanish into thin air. Several of my own friends are older artists, and a lot of them are talking about dying. Some have told me that they don’t see any reason to live anymore now that they don’t get grants and don’t create. I’ve been trying to help them find a reason to live. I think they have have decided to live, and I think it’s because of beauty. Beauty is the only reason to live. Now you might say — ‘I live for truth, not beauty.’ But if you live for truth in the usual sense, then you live for propaganda, you live for someone’s idea of what is right or wrong, or someone’s idea of what is the origin of the universe, or for someone’s idea of what is the most effective political system. I’m trying to think of the most beautiful thing I have experienced recently, so I can persuade you. But it’s been so long since I’ve been to a dark room at The Eagle! (I’m completely serious.) The urgency of his kisses I suppose. I met a young man there a couple of months ago. It was a poignant encounter, at the end of the night, poignant because it was so urgent, we met about 10 minutes before the lights went on, which is when you are summarily kicked out. But that’s what made it so feverish and intense. I thought that was all it would be, and then a couple of weeks later I was, there, not waiting, just there — happened to be — same time same place. And he turned up again. Full lips, long hair, and I remember touching his body, so slender and small compared to mine, but we just couldn’t stop kissing each other. Is it tawdry and sad to you? And what is tawdry and sad about a young man’s yearning? Ah, I am romanticising it — it was the meeting of two horny bodies in a the filthy back room of a sleazy gay bar, and I’ll probably never see him again. Everything dies, and everything is renewed, but what we had was inured by fantasy. For both of us, I’m sure. I think I was for him a big, protective older ‘daddy,’ and for me he was a drawing by Cocteau, a churlish youth with curly hair painted in black ink on white paper. I think I know what it is about kissing a young man. It’s my own lips I am kissing. I waited so long. I didn’t know what love was. I heard love songs, and I thought they were stupid, I was embarrassed by my difficulty in understanding them, then I met Glenn Cassie, who was a poet with curly hair. They are all poets with curly hair, as far as I am concerned. And I was boy poet with curly hair who wrote tortured journals, telling myself over and over again that desire did not matter, and emotion did not matter, and I didn’t have to follow my feelings just because I felt them. So every time I kiss a beautiful young man I am kissing myself — which sounds like narcissism but it’s actually not. I am rescuing him. Don’t you see? ‘No, no, young man, you don’t have to endure a yearning that is never fulfilled, hiding your desire, cursing yourself. No. Instead throw yourself against it, no directly into it —  be it. I give you all this by kissing you.’ Have I persuaded you of the beauty of that encounter in the most unlikely of places? Doubtless I have not.  (I am using humility there; the rhetor's secret weapon.) Sergeant York is rhetorical beauty — it has only Gary Coopers humility, his earnest bad acting, and his young lean body to convince us, and it works, and I would like to love it, if only we were not being told that what the movie offers us is ‘the truth’ — truth that is very specific, and must last forever. I am offering you something else. I am offering you beauty — which is as truthful as a cloud and as likely to disappear. I make no claims for it other than it may divert you for a second or two, so that, alas, you won’t have to think about death.