PLAGUE DIARY 74: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

Frankie and Johnny (1966)
“Several retakes were required, because Elvis' form fitting slacks were judged to be too revealing, but the cost of re-filming crowd scenes was considered to be too expensive, and so Elvis and his bulge were occasionally left intact.” Yes, I noticed. Elvis’s pants are very tight,  in some — not all — of his scenes. As Noel Coward once remarked: “For God's sake, go and tell that young man to take that Rockingham tea service out of his tights!” Elvis’ bulge is not consistent; or let’s say when it is there — it is absolutely consistent, one can pretty clearly see everything, and that’s very pleasing. But in other scenes there is no bulge at all. After reading the IMDB notes above I understood why. It’s comforting to know that I didn’t imagine ‘that thing’ — there, resting gently beneath the thin material of his left pant leg. Let’s face it, ‘that thing’ was the problem. And I’m afraid to say (as I know this is heresy) that I think ‘that thing'  — was more prodigious than his talent, or rather, ‘that thing’ WAS his talent. He is quite an adequate performer. But I like Garland or Jagger, performers who displayed an embarrassing, frightening emotional exhibitionism; Elvis does the opposite, holds himself back. But this, I think, is sexier. When he’s singing, his posture, his very demeanour, says: “I’m not actually going to ‘let loose,’ I’m just giving you a peek — everything I’m doing has quotations around it — I’m ‘singing,’ and ‘dancing’ and ‘emoting’ and I know that  turns you on, but I won’t give my all, here, I’m saving that for later, afterwards, in the dressing room.” There’s something teasing and tantalising about his presence; and I don’t resent it, I think that’s what gives elderly matrons permission to love him to death. They wouldn’t watch a porn movie, they would deny any curiosity about what’s in those pants, but they know what he’s strutting, so they go on about his singing voice which (heresy I know) isn’t actually that fabulous. There’s nothing wrong with all this, really, it’s just Elvis’ particularly appeal, and it's attractive to both sexes. The men —  like elderly matrons — would not wish to watch a porn movie with Elvis in it, but nevertheless enjoy imagining that women want them in the same way they do him. After all, Elvis is effortlessly sexy — he lets his cheekbones, hair and those fleshy, pouty, baby-fat lips do all the work (the Rockingham tea service in his pants is just an added bonus). Elvis gave America permission to enjoy black music, because he was the whitest boy who ever lived. And he did his duty, volunteered for the army — and came back alive, and cuter than ever. There was something wholesome about him; he was the straight Liberace, and you’ve got to love him for that. And Elvis was as black as America could handle at that particular time. Speaking of which, last night we watched historic race riots across the USA; and I think they are just what America needs right now. On the one hand this is television as historic as it gets, like O.J. Simpson’s unforgettable 1993 car chase in that Ford Bronco. (I saw that at a very gay party, in very gay San Francisco, with Daniel MacIvor, and I was dressed in a kind of sailor outfit. We were there to see a movie that I had created and he starred in. I remember Daniel saying something to the effect that viewing this car chase was an historic moment, one we would never forget. I am less conscious of such things, and that’s why I am making note of the present moment, now). These riots symbolize —or excuse me, simply are — the end of America. The cat is out of the bag, racism can’t hide under the couch, and the poor and disenfranchised just won’t take it anymore. But to imagine this has nothing to do with COVID-19 is naive. The people who are looting these buildings are also the people who have not been able to enter a store for last two months during  the pandemic. They know very well that when this COVID-19 lifts and these stores eventually open (the big chains, the rest will die) that  they will not be able to afford to buy anything, because the lock down has destroyed their livelihoods and hence their lives. And lo and behold, the looters are mask-less. No, they are not socially distancing, no. These are the poor, after all. For the ones who march so self-righteously, wearing masks  are — many of them — white, respectable, and middle class, or black, respectable and middle-class. But the mask-less looters are the real victims of this pandemic, and they will be the victims of the depression which follows it, even though they are more liable to die of COVID-19 than the middle classes (who are just too busy baking pies and practicing meditation to die). They couldn’t care less about ‘putting others first,’ they just need to get their hands on that flat screen TV. You see, COVID-19 is a disease created by the middle classes, for the middle classes. The rich will ignore it, and the poor will succumb to it, but it is the middle classes who will proudly wear it as a banner — just as they wave their cellphones about in public places, performing loud annoying conversations about love (women) or big job deals (men). The horror of what happened to George Floyd is simultaneously unimaginable and imaginable in this mad, crumbling, 21st century America; and the middle class protesters speak to that. But the looters and rioters speak of something else. They say ‘We will not stay at home.’  This stirs an old coot like moi even more than the nether regions of Elvis, though Elvis was a man who had the courage to be a male sex object in a culture that was terrified of him. Call me old fashioned, but I must reserve my highest praise for those who dare.

PLAGUE DIARY 73: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

A Kiss Before Dying (1965)
An odd morning, and an unsettling film. Too much excitement in my life right now, organising a reading online of one of my plays, feeling like a bit of a traitor for doing that, theatre should not be online, I don’t want to have any part of that — but I want my play read aloud. Then A Kiss Before Dying led me down a bit of a wormhole. It’s a movie that — under present circumstances — is spookily prescient for all of us. I don’t want to sound too pretentious, but when I start a play or a novel or pretty well any writing, there’s something weird going on because I often feel I am writing my future, due to the number of times my own work has come to predict incidents in my life. Which brings me to Robert Wagner and A Kiss Before Dying. It’s a damn good film — if you can handle all the mediocre acting. It must have been cast by the ubiquitous  Hollywood agent Henry Willson, as two of his protégées — Jeffrey Hunter and Robert Wagner — star. Though they are passable actors, for me there’s nothing special about them except their beauty. Virginia Leith — who plays the rich sister that Robert Wagner does not successfully kill — was also the disembodied head in The Brain that Wouldn’t Die. (It’s hard to look at her without thinking of that.) Only Joanne Woodward and Mary Astor acquit themselves well. Mary Astor is a surprising gift — she would have been nearly 60 when the movie was made, but she is still majestic and awe inspiring, and possessed of the same strength and honesty that was so appealing in The Maltese Falcon — and of the kind of beauty that radiates from inside. Joanne Woodward is almost as good as Shelley Winters in An American Tragedy — playing the requisite role of the not too attractive rich girl who has snagged herself a gift in the slender, smooth-limbed Wagner. She actually plays Dorothy (Dory) as if she were an annoying goof, and you feel Dory is the type of person who might drive you crazy after 5 minutes -- as she has no self esteem and is constantly whining in a ‘don’t you like me?” sort of way. Since Woodward portrays Wagner’s pregnant girlfriend, you completely understand why he wants to throw her off a building. Still, the moment when Wagner does so is still incredibly chilling — especially in the light of present news stories about him. But after Woodward is dead there are only boring actors left really, and it’s all about the police tracking down Wagner before he kills Woodward’s sister Virginia Leith. Ira Levin’s obsession with unwanted pregnancy seems to foreshadow Roe vs. Wade; this movie seems like a dry run for Rosemary’s Baby. The women in these movies are treated as containers for babies. Did seeing Rosemary’s Baby influence people to pass abortion laws? Or was it just a prescient prophecy written by a writer with his ear to the collective unconscious? One can’t answer that unless one believes art is magic — which brings me to Robert Wagner and this film. Now I was never very fond of Natalie Wood as an actress, but I always found her death suspicious. And just recently —  i.e. this month — Vanity Fair has been digging for dirt, and several people are stepping forward with evidence to  suggest there were bruises, she was in a fight, there were overheard harsh words — (we know that already as Christopher Walken, who was strangely also on the boat, heard them). Perhaps we will never know, but the fact is that Robert Wagner waited more than two hours to report his ex-wife’s death. This seems at the least a mini-crime, if not a confession of guilt. To see him prancing around in A Kiss Before Dying, so sleek and slender, and then solemnly kill people — seems to indicate something. Perhaps it's related to the ‘nothingness’ of his screen presence - which gives us absolutely no insight into the mind of a criminal (as does the tortured Iago). He simply has the efficient stealth of a psychopath. It’s probably just his lousy acting, and lack of a centre— perhaps as a person.  But if art is what I think it is, then Wagner is guilty of the murder of his ex-wife in real life. Did Ira Levin (and the the director Gerd Oswald) know when they cast him that he would some day kill Natalie Wood? But I’m talking about something else. Art has a strange power, and we shouldn’t fool with it. I remember when Maggie Huculak asked me to remove the peacock feathers off the set of my production of my Playmurder production so many years ago -- as peacock feathers are unlucky -- I didn’t argue, I just obeyed. Oscar Wilde in The Decay of Lying (my Bible) says no one knew about the fogs of London until Whistler painted them. His theory has been confirmed by a vanload of post-structuralists; our reality is created in our minds before it exists in the real. When I first wrote Drag Queens on Trial I was not a drag queen, I had to get the actors to explain drag to me. I thought I was only interested in drag as a metaphor -- but maybe I was being driven by something else. Similarly, I wasn’t gay when I wrote City Nights, a play that has a long scene with two quarreling superficial homosexuals, (one of them played by not-yet-a-famous-Canadian-designer Glenn Davidson ) and I soon turned into a quarreling homosexual myself. My book Sad Old Faggot turned out to be autobiographical, and I’ve written another novel (just killed by the pandemic) which successfully predicted my excommunication from Buddies way before it happened. I think that’s what artists do; they create reality. And I’m not saying I am such an artist, just that I’m trying -- perhaps clumsily -- to be one. We ignore art at our peril. Perhaps when we talk of censorship, i.e. excising bad words or evil concepts, it’s simply beside the point, what we are really afraid of is arts power to -- not only read our minds -- but create them. Wilde didn’t believe that there were no 'misty days in London when you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face' before Whistler painted fogs, what he meant was that the notion, then the obsession, then the paradigm of 'foggy London' did not exist before that. It’s clearer when we think of Foucault’s observation that it was only after Tissot coined the term masturbation that people began masturbating. You’ll be pleased to know that for years people were touching themselves ‘down there’ and thought nothing of it, until it became a ‘thing.’ And yes, without Outbreak, Deranged and Panic in the Streets (interesting title for today) we would not have the present state of affairs.  It’s something to think about. Or maybe not, because up there in your head, you  may be creating, perhaps without knowing it, what will happen tomorrow.

PLAGUE DIARY 72: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

A Stolen Life (1946)
A perfect ‘woman’s film’—  or a perfect film for anyone, if men would only come clean about their feelings. The following fantasy obviously obsessed women in the 50s (and I think it does now): if I wasn’t beautiful, would you still love me? Or (to put it in another way)  can the unattractive girl get the man? Well of course she can. A Stolen Life tells us yes, yes yes!; it’s the neoplatonic idea that love comes to those with inner beauty — which radiates, eventually, to the outside. Bette Davis is insanely adept at playing twin sisters. She manages to impersonate two very different but very identical women without overplaying their personalities. Pat is wilful and passionate and a bit cruel — i.e. the Bette Davis we’ve come to know and love, whereas Kate is the inner Bette — kind and a bit unsure of herself. The wilful sister marries the man they both love — the perfect lighthouse keeper (Glenn Ford, looking fine, but as if he knows he’s in a ‘woman’s film’). Co-incidentally, sexy Pat then drowns on a boat ride with her quieter sister, who then decides to take on her sister’s identity.  However that doesn’t fool Glenn, really, but it’s fine, because the unprepossessing sister deserves him. In the midst of it all these captivating plot reversals the less attractive Bette Davis has a flirtation with a tortured rude young painter (Dane Clark) who tells her she’s a cold potato and therefore not a real artist. Glenn Ford describes the difference between the two women like this: Kate is “the cake without the icing.” But from the way the men look at Pat it’s clear that the cake is what some women call ‘the divine feminine’ — a connection to sort of animal magnetism that draws all creatures male. It’s terribly engrossing and all has very little relation to reality. But a conversation between Glenn Ford and Bette Davis caught my ear. They are chatting during a heavy fog at the lighthouse (which is where they fall in love for the first time). Bette’s speech is worth quoting in full: “It’s like the end of the world. I don’t think I’d be frightened if it were. I wonder what people would do if the world were to end like this. Then they’d have time to say all the things they always wanted to say. And they’d have the courage to say them.” As we are ‘kind of’ at the end of the world right now — if we are to believe the pundits on CNN — one would think the same logic applies. (I see no reason  — at last for the space of this blog— not to take it for granted that COVID-19 means the end of the world. It would be a relief to just relax into into it, rather than battle the apocalypse — which I’ve been doing lately with little success). So the fiction we are presented with is that COVID-19 is the end of the world as we know it, and now must be the time when we, at last, can deeply communicate, confess, tell all, relate. That is what I am trying to do in this blog. But this doesn’t count because I am not speaking to a live human. (Unless of course you are there. Or am I imagining that too?.) So here we are, at home with our ‘loved ones.’ So now’s the time for profound chat. Or is it? Perhaps we need some help with this end of the world feeling. There are race riots in The States — might that help? I had a drink with a woman and her daughter — and another woman from next door who dropped by. They are all very attractive — two of them 40ish and one 23. All were breaking up with their partners. With two of them this appeared to be COVID-19 related. One  (and she was kind of a performer herself, in that she kind of performed her pain at high volume) said she was a horrible person because she had driven away a nice guy, and that’s her m. o. — she starts fights and alienates good men. But then she mentioned they used to go out to bars and restaurants before COVID-19, so the pandemic  put a lot of strain on their relationship — as they were not able to go out anymore. And it struck me that it it’s not possible to really look at any relationship during COVID-19, as we have not yet entered the ‘new normal.’ The 22 year old’s boyfriend had finally decided to dump her because she was not Jewish— which is hardly the fault of COVID-19. But then again maybe it is, because as I pointed out, why did her family decide to ban her unJewishness from their household at this particular time? All of which brings me to the point of this blog— can we really treat this as an end of the world moment? Perhaps we should take this question to the powers that be at CNN — tell them if they want want people to ‘have the courage to finally say the things they’ve always wanted to say to each other,’ this had better really be the end of the world, and not some cheap imitation. Then there are those who take the oppoiste tack: ‘look at all the good that will eventually come from COVID-19!” I wish I could say they annoy me because they are being callous in these tragic times, but, so far, I have only known one family that has suffered from COVID-19, and they said it was as if they all had ‘a tickle in their throat’ — so I’m not going to go on about the unbearableness of it all. No, I say it because — first of all — do you think people are going to stop polluting the planet or flying planes because they learned from COVID-19 to make the world cleaner and safer? Not likely. Although I do think we will finally transition to a cashless society. But does that make it better? Well perhaps for the megacorporations, and for 20 year olds who rather just tap their cellphones in the vague direction of the cash register and run. Speaking of which, maybe the brilliance of COVID-19 is that we will at last become one with our computers. We will download our souls into them when we die. And to prepare, we will imbed them in our brains when we are alive (like the computer chips in cats). And computers will always give us the stuff we want. We won’t even have to tell them (like we do humans, I mean what a waste of time!). Because computers will just know. How’s that? What a nice outcome from COVID-19, eh? Like Bette Davis, I am compliant (when I am not my wilful twin sister) willing to agree to almost anything, except the much vaunted forthcoming end of sex. But we’ll talk about that later, I’m sure. I mean I will talk about that later, all by myself. Sorry, I thought, for a moment, that you were really here.

PLAGUE DIARY 71: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

The Woman in the Window (1945)
It’s about the chilling dangers of fantasy. So many films were about this; even Coward’s Brief Encounter is framed in that way. In Coward’s famous film a married woman falls in love with a handsome doctor, yearning for a passionate affair. She decides against it, and her dream of love (accompanied by Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto #2) fades into the distance along with her would-be-paramour’s railway train. She is left only with floral pillows, phonograph records, and a warm fire. The moral is clear: stay at home. This ‘pandemic’ didn’t come from nowhere; it required a perfect storm to create it— conditions for this particularly attractive and horrifying little garden to prosper. Today’s ads — for everything from real estate to poached eggs -- all urge us to ‘stay at home.’ But we’ve been telling ourselves to ‘stay at home’ since Eve took a bite out of the apple. The Woman in the Window has an ‘Eve’ complex — but film noir is the only place we get to see powerful women take control. The district Attorney, when considering Joan Bennet as suspect, says “She's got something on her conscience, but what woman hasn’t?” This misogyny — though blatant and repellent — is not what interests me here. What interests me is the much more serious implication in films like this — and The Bible — that Eve is evil because she is connected with a dangerous knowledge originating in a fantasy of pleasure. Edward G. Robinson is a happily married professor saying goodbye to his wife and children. He chats with his professor friends at his ‘club’; they discuss the ridiculous spectacle of older men who are attracted to younger women. There is much good-natured chuckling,  but it’s clear Edward G, is much too old to fool around. He settles into his club chair to read ‘The Song of Solomon.’ On his way out of the club Edward G. happens to see a portrait of a beautiful woman in a shop. The painting comes to life; Joan Bennett — the woman in the portrait — is reflected in the window. She lures him to her apartment, which is filled with various painted and sculpted representations of herself. An unidentified man breaks into the room and attacks Edward G.. Edward G. kills him, and he and Joan cover up the murder. They escape discovery. But it’s too late — Edward G. has committed suicide from guilt. Or has he? Actually it was all a dream, brought on by reading ‘The Song of Solomon. Edward G. gazes at Joan Bennett’s painting in the window one final time: a prostitute sashays up to him and asks for a light. He flees in terror. This is a movie about staying home — but worse than that, it’s a movie about the dangers of fantasy. When the professors joke about the painting they are doing what everyone does at one time or the other — objectifying the object of their affection, fantasizing, dreaming. This is the source of all art — it’s what the 'The Song of Solomon' is — and that's probably the only biblically-sanctioned sex fantasy in literature. But The Woman in the Window disallows even that. It amazes me that some straight women feel betrayed when their husbands look at porn. Do you actually believe you can own someone else’s imagination, or that to do so is desirable for them, or you? Fantasies are sacrosanct. They are not good or evil; they are merely symptomatic. For instance, we all nurture the fantasy of schadenfreude. Those hiding inside — safe from COVID-19 — are right now enjoying the fantasy that those pariahs who parade about about in public parks — and swim about at Ozark pool parties —  may die a gruesome death from COVID-19 — their lungs riddled with tumours. Well that’s fine. That’s natural. We all have fantasies that the people we hate (usually people who are having a better time than us )  have self-immolated through spontaneous combustion. It’s called having a fantasy, and that’s natural, and if it’s not healthy, then at least it’s healthy to admit we have them. On the other hand there are those who like to torture people and kill them. But they are not the only people who had fantasies of torturing and killing people -- everyone does --  they are just the psycho/sociopaths who actually do it. I’m a porn addict. I’m not particularly happy about that. The explanation is simple; for the first 28 years of my life I was closeted and my only outlet was magazines. I lived in a rooming house in downtown Toronto, and after I ‘used’ the photographs, I would sneak out, late at night, run to a public garbage bin, and throw the porn  (my guilty co-conspirator) into the garbage. I made sure the garbage  was far from the house; as  I was terrified someone would find it and somehow know I lived in that house and  had hid it. Don’t ask me to defend pornography; but I won’t say it’s anything worse than The Woman in the Window, which is in it’s own way, a kind of sentimental pornography, a romanticisation of family done in the Victorian manner (i.e. you spend the whole movie watching a sinful femme fatale seduce a married man, and then congratulate yourself when he runs from a prostitute at the end.) I wish I could understand this kind of hypocrisy, but I’ve based my entire life on not being hypocritical; the irony of throwing those magazines in the garbage every night (and then going out to buy new ones the next day) was not lost on me. When I learn a lesson, I learn it well; I am a bad boy and I will not lie. But all fantasy is good, even if it’s an evil, sexual fantasy, just as all art is good, even if it’s evil art. The only problem is when we mix art up with life. If you don’t know the difference between art and life, then just remember that what you would rather not be doing -- is probably what life is. This lock down is nearing its end (though Doug Ford has sentenced us to one more week); I suddenly feel the need to imagine what it would be like when it’s over. (Dangerous, I know!) Of course I am permitted to fantasize. But I mustn’t. Because whatever it is -- it’s bound to be a disappointment, compared to what I imagine it will be. I imagine it will be like Eisenstaedt’s  famous photo of the sailor sweeping the girl into his arms for a romantic kiss on VJ Day in Times Square. But the young woman who was the likely subject of that kiss has now stated that it was not consensual, and many now see the photo as exemplifying rape. But come on. I mean, come on. You have to admit that's one damn good photo, isn’t it?

PLAGUE DIARY 70: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

The Wild One (1953)
“This is a shocking story. It could never take place in most American towns. But it did in this one. It is a public challenge not to let it happen again.” This is the pompous start to a pompous, boring, infuriating movie. This movie is horrible because we are horrible. In fact it’s not a movie, it’s an essay. The Wild One stars Marlon Brando, who is looking a bit pudgy two years after Streetcar. He chose his own outfit, which, from looking at the real pictures of the so-called ‘Hollister Riot’ (on which this film is ostensibly based)  -- appears quite accurate, it may in fact be the only thing accurate about this film. The Wild One is about Marlon Brando as iconic representation of the exemplary juvenile delinquent: silent, brooding, angry, inarticulate, abused: he is the fault of all of us, and everyone’s problem. The famous line (which producer Stanley Kramer apparently overheard when eavesdropping on some bikers) occurs when Brando is asked: “What are you rebelling against?” Brando replies: “What have you got?” It’s a great line, probably because it was real. But it’s the only thing in this film that is. I’m sure it’s possible that some of the infamous 'juvenile delinquents' so popular in the 50s were created by fathers who mistreated them. After all, Brando, when he is being beaten by the police, says: “My old man used to hit harder than that.” Okay, we get it: if only his father had understood him. Well if only  all our fathers had understood us -- but they didn’t -- and most of us didn’t turn out to be Marlon Brando. I’m not convinced there was ever such a thing as ‘juvenile delinquents.’ I went to public school in a Buffalo suburb in the early 60s and one day there was a rumour there was a going to be a ‘rumble.’ Apparently there was, and somebody produced a knife. But as far as I remember no one was hurt. What I’m saying is that there may have been troubled youths, or abused youths, or misunderstood young men, and they will always be around, and always have been, but that’s no reason to make a fetish out of them. And if you do, you are making it up for one reason and one reason only, to make money. Because there was no ‘Hollister Riot.’ Apparently a bunch of bikers partied in a town in southern California in 1947 and  well — they didn’t wreck the town. In fact they didn’t do significant damage, and no one was hurt. Yes they were a ‘wild’ bunch of guys. But the media blew it up —way our of proportion — and somebody wrote a short story magnifying it, and bingo! -- there’s The Wild One. Someone also staged a photograph of a drunken 'Hollister Riot' biker that appeared in newspapers all across the country (they had to prop the guy up and spread bottles and garbage around him to make it look super-dissipated). The Wild One was part of the hysteria (sound familiar?) about biker gangs that swept the country in the early 50s; and the public ate it up. Believe me, I’ve got no reason to defend biker gangs, and I’m sure there are some really criminal ones, but the American Motorcyclist Association that gathered in Hollister was not one of them. I knew something was up when I saw these supposedly terrifying bikers go ‘out of control’ in this movie. Um, they block traffic (I know, horrifying), flirt with girls (shocking), ride pogo sticks in the middle of the street (I kid you not — is that not appalling?), turn over garbage cans (I’ve seen raccoons do worse) and yes they dress up in women’s clothes -- one of the scary bikers puts a mop over his head and says ‘Hey, I’m a girl!’ Was this the most insane orgy of violence they could come up with? If these are supposed to be decadent shenanigans, then nobody who made this move has ever been decadent or been ‘shenagged.’ No, worse, this movie is a lie which does not tell the truth. At one point some old codger is looking at the out of control young whippersnappers and he muses “Everything today is pictures, pictures and noise, nobody knows how to talk, they just grunt at each other.” How prescient. Now I will be the old fogy that is out of touch and dead eventually (that one gets hit by a motorcycle at the end of the film) and say that what we are living in right now has nothing to do with COVID-19 or public health, or even grandma and grandpa — who I’m not entirely sure really want you to ‘protect them,’ as I’m sure some of them are quite happy to die and let you take over, as that is the natural order of things, always was, and always will be. No, this COVID-19 fiasco is about the media and nothing else — all noise and pictures. Pictures of ventilators, pictures of people wearing masks, pictures of young children’s inflamed limbs, pictures of crying widows, of Anderson Cooper being concerned, public health officials being concerned, Doug Ford being concerned, and worried, and sad, and 'think of the children!' -- even though children have absolutely nothing to do with any of this. It’s not a plot, it’s not a conspiracy, no one is behind it, it’s what they used to call THE SINGULARITY which simply means that we have built a machine, and it’s called the digital world, and it is now taking over our lives, and there’s nothing we can do about it unless everybody dumps their damn computers in the river. Can I tell you one thing? Just as one example? If you get this disease you will probably not die and you will be completely immune from it forever after that. How do I know? Because that’s what Anders Tegnell -- the Swedish genius who managed to keep Sweden out of lockdown during COVID-19 -- says. If our bodies can’t build up an immunity to this disease then it will be the first COVID strain in which that craziness has occurred. So why are they telling us these lies? The answer is so mundane. It’s simply because: never before in the history of mankind was there such an efficient way of delivering lies, and never was it so profitable to do so. I really wish it was more complicated than that; but it all started with The Wild One (Elivis Presley’s gyrating hips came the year after) and we are now hooked. Hooked on our own deception.  

PLAGUE DIARY 69: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

Indiscretion of an American Wife (1953)
I wanted to watch it without boning up first;  for I sensed this thing had a checkered history. It was commissioned by Selznick to showcase his wife Jennifer Jones, but fortunately Italian post neo-realist director Vittorio de Sica wanted to make it art. The casting is good, because Jennifer Jones is a spoiled woman playing one, and Montgomery Clift — who was kind of nutty as a fruitcake — is playing his own truth too. One online wiseguy calls it “a melodramatic, boring and dated romance.” Well, it’s certainly dated. Clift slaps Jones when she threatens to leave him, after going on about how American women are “too emancipated.” Jones and Clift had a rocky ride on set. When she discovered Clift was gay she “became so overwrought she stuffed a mink jacket down the toilet of a portable dressing room.” After filming Jones gave Clift a briefcase. He said: "It's beautiful, but it doesn't quite work - like Jennifer.” This film was made three years before the accident that slightly wrecked Clift’s face, so not only is he haunting, but movie-star-handsome. Jones calls him a lost child — and there are many children in the film. One of my favourite scenes is when Jones gives three little boys chocolate and then watches them eat — their frightened innocence is what we see in Clift’s eyes. He is desperate throughout, as he is chasing her (although at the beginning they seem literally ready to devour each other; I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a naked expression of lovelorn lust portrayed on screen). The disparity in their deeper feelings is clear in a line for Clift (most likely written by Truman Capote): “When I saw you, I knew what morning was.” But let’s not talk about the love affair — that was Selznick’s concern — but instead the movie de Sica shot around it. Indiscretion of an American Wife was originally titled Terminal Station and it’s just as much about that, as ‘love.’ Sure, there’s Jones and Clift, but there is the world that surrounds them, teaming with life. Four fat priests appear, and one says to the ticket agent --‘Four tickets, please.’ Later they appear again and the same fat priest says to a waiter -- “Four cups of tea.” Nuns keep wandering in and out, wearing large white hats (as in The Flying Nun). A bunch of political-looking young men with armbands keep bursting into song. At one point three men in top hats appear, followed by someone carrying a large Italian flag. At another point a line of deaf children converse in sign language with their teacher. Finally Jones tries to help a fainting woman — the mother of the three boys — who is accompanied by her coal miner husband. As Jones leaves the family, the fainting wife says “I’ll pray Madonna for you” and the husband says “She — good wife, good mother, always her family, never her” — words which would weigh heavily on a guilty housewife (or someone venturing out during COVID-19). Sure, Clift almost gets run over by a train, and he and Jones get arrested for necking in a dark railway car (that scene is spooky and sexy beyond belief). But it’s the ambiance, the ebb and flow of need, the joy — or just sheer necessity— that is constantly rushing by — or getting crushed in the crowd — that gives Indiscretion of an American Housewife it’s truth.  De Sica does everything to distract us from the love story in order to drag us into it. Like a magician he  waves one hand saying 'look over here,’ and we do, and thus he is able to pull a rabbit out of a hat. The rabbit in this case is our suspension of disbelief; by consistently surrounding the melodramatic with the mundane, he convinces us of its reality. So what’s the point? Just to show us what he sees, I suspect. I’ve been writing movie reviews for nearly two and a half months, ranting about COVID-19 — and occasionally spilling the beans about my personal life. What’s the point of that? For me, it’s all about confession. Confessing is endemic to me. Whether I confessed to my mother that I hated God, or that I was a homosexual, or that I had just pulled by pants down and danced around a partly constructed house with my 9 year old friend Robert Steck in Buffalo in 1961 —she forgave me. But then I had to stop burdening her with my confessions, because I loved her  — and her blessings — too much. Then I began to confess to the world. Now I always receive forgiveness, even when there is none. Just the act of confession itself precipitates release, for when my mother stopped forgiving me, I just forgave myself; and I now just imagine you forgive me too. Most of the time my confessions are met with awe or shocked curiosity (‘You’ve actually slept with more than 1000 men? How did that happen?') Part of it is a dare; a demand for love in even the most dire circumstances; when I fear there is very little in me to love at all.  Part of it is in defence of confession as salvation: as a redemption for the world. But another reason for all this confessing is — I think — to sustain me though the biggest lie of all — imagining that no one will ever read this. Of course they won’t (there I go again!) but it seems that the more I reveal, and the more embarrassing my revelations are -- the more certain I am that you are there. I can, in this way conjure you. Because this social distancing is killing us. Doug Ford is talking about extending our prison time because a bunch of kids got frisky and had too much fun last Saturday in Toronto’s Trinity Bellwoods Park. Well if you really cared Doug, why didn't the police arrest somebody? We’ve been isolated in this dreary sameness until our eyes have glazed over and we can’t tell one day from the next; the routine is crushing us like a boulder, I need something, anything that’s different from yesterday, please! What other awful stuff about myself can I tell you  — that I haven’t already told you — to keep us both occupied? Think of me like Montgomery Clift, peering at you from inside his perpetually wounded face — pleading — won’t you just love me a little bit? Under the circumstances, we can hardly blame Jennifer Jones for the cardinal sin of putting the love of her husband and child before her own happiness (after all, that new hypocritical requisite is the official moral code of COVID19!). But surely we also can’t blame Clift for trying.

PLAGUE DIARY 68: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

Till the End of Time (1946)
All the leads were Marines, but it was overshadowed by The Best Years of Our Lives. Guy Madison plays Cliff Harper. Okay, we must stop here. He’s a tall blonde, with twinkling eyes and a full, eminently kissable, pair of lips. He’s absolutely juicy. At times, it was impossible to watch the film because of Madison’s beauty. And also because he can’t act. I was unsurprised to learn he was discovered by talent agent Henry Willson (recently portrayed by Jim Parsons in the Ryan Murphy’s Hollywood) who also discovered Troy Donahue, Rock Hudson, Tab Hunter, John Saxon (and many more). Each one of those actors absolutely steals every scene with their skin, eyes, and hair, and none of them can act. In Hollywood, Willson is depicted as a tragic (but very human) old drag queen, but I think he must be praised for bringing a gay sensibility to film. These spine tingling dunderheads are alarmingly attractive — Guy Madison of course has a bathing suit scene, and is often depicted in bed, with his furry chest and downy limbs exposed, his tender young face pressed adorably into a pillow. His stunned stunningness demanded a queer aesthetic from heterosexual director Edward Dmytryk (I know he was heterosexual because he met his future wife — the diminutive Jean Porter — making this film). The camera can do nothing but adore Madison in precisely the way it adores empty-headed female actresses Joan Crawford, Kim Novak, and Lana Turner (to name a few). It doesn’t help that the dialogue is, at times, ridiculous. Just before Madison kisses  Dorothy Maguire (who is nothing but touching and coherent) for the first time, he says: “I saw you and funny things happened.” I kid you not. My super-active erotic imagination was already working hard on imagining the poor young buck fending off an emerging erection. Still confused by such strange, new, bodily sensations, he searches his tiny brain: “It isn’t love. What is it?” Maguire, helpful and somewhat quicker of mind, offers some alternatives: “Growing up? Eighteen months in the Pacific? Juke box joint? And a room that’s not too crowded?” At all these moments Guy Madison is simply there — not even a deer in the headlights — just there; he reads as registering nothing, literally as having no emotion or thoughts, as an utter zero. On the other hand, this makes him incredibly appealing to me. Now, I also find John Garfield attractive, but I am honestly distracted by his prodigious acting talent — and I even forget Marlon Brando’s lips occasionally (in Streetcar) when he’s going crazy with anger or working class pomposity. It’s kind of like when you’re in love with a new acquaintance, and you figure out the only way to become un-in-love is to get to know him. Perfectly formed bad actors catch us at precisely the point when we can steal a glimpse behind the mask that is their visage, and understand they are vulnerable people struggling, quite helplessly, to express a depth of emotion they simply do not possess. It is somewhat like having sex with them. We can peer inside and watch them searching for a missing profundity — and we not only sympathise, but we intimately know them, in the biblical sense. There’s nothing else really to go on about here, because if you have seen The Best Years of Our Lives you know it -- it’s basically standard ‘back from war’ fare. The guys have trouble adjusting — one has no legs, another has the shakes, and Robert Mitchum has a plate in his head. (Mitchum is a case in point — because although as perfect as Guy Madison — he can act, so our interest in him is differently directed; we actually hear what he says.) I don’t mean to be cold and callous, but I am. I wasn’t touched by any of this, and as I have already said, I am a coward, but really it’s not that. I can’t imagine what men like this  have gone through, but I am not of the opinion that they should have gone through it, or that we should congratulate ourselves for living in a world where such things happen to anybody. There is one other line that stuck in my head. Near the end Madison says “I’ve been scrounged. I’m robbed of three and a half years — somebody stole my time.” This is odd syntactically; I don’t think the word 'scrounged' is correctly utilized. Google says it means to “seek to obtain (something, typically food or money) at the expense, or through the generosity of, others, or by stealth.” Dare I say the screenwriter might have made an error? Have these proud, bold, young wounded warriors been robbed of time by ‘stealth?’ For that would mean they have been robbed unjustly (they certainly have not been robbed by anyone’s generosity or at anyone's expense). Well we all have been scrounged for the last three months — as it is going on three months that we have been under lock down. Agreed, it’s not eighteen months, and it’s most decidedly not a war, because I have learned something on this American Memorial Day (I’m not mentioning Canadian Victoria Day because we were robbed of that by stealth, we were scrounged.) All old war movies offer the same message, that whatever the horrors of war, wars are also teeming with life. Yes hurried, frenzied, anguished, final days for some - but they are also times when people really live. That is something we cannot do during this ‘pandemic.’ And I would be proud to give up three months of my life — or longer — if I actually thought it was doing anybody any good. Jesus Christ during my life I could actually have had a successful career and made some friggin’ money if I hadn’t come out of the closet. (There I said it.) So don’t tell me I’ve never made a sacrifice. But what I’m not pleased to do is to give up even five minutes of my life for the pious lie that is COVID-19. More trope than disease, it demands we forever dive into the digital world, disappear into our families, and most of all, embrace victimhood. A fully orchestrated, lush Chopin’s Polonaise sweeps in every time Guy Madison sees -- or even thinks -- of Dorothy Maguire in Till the End of Time. It’s a tacky rewrite of a timeless classic transformed into a pop song. But I was immune to it here. I couldn’t care less about whether I’ve got COVID-19 antibodies, but after watching so many movies out of loneliness, fear of impending madness, and sheer desperation -- yes, I do fear one thing that is much, much more frightening — and that is -- because of this damn COVID-19 -- I will become immune to bad old movies.

PLAGUE DIARY 67: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

Reunion in France (1942)
It was released the same year as Casablanca, but it’s not Casablanca. The director is Jules Dassin  and it also stars John Wayne. Legend has it Crawford tried to seduce Wayne on the set, but he didn’t comply. It’s fun watching her lock him in her apartment, thinking of that. Wayne is a young American airman who has found himself in Nazi occupied France. Crawford is engaged to Philip Dorn, a French businessman who appears to be collaborating with the Nazis, but turns out finally not to be. When she first appears, Crawford is me (in drag — and badly acted). She's a selfish rich woman, bullying the employees at her favourite dress store; they roll their eyes at her and sigh — but she’s so self-obsessed she doesn’t notice. She doesn’t want war or understand it, like Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind she is petulant about her superficial life being interrupted. Later Philip Dorn calls her “spoiled, selfish and incredibly romantic” (Again, not unlike myself.) You think she will not be redeemed, but then the Germans attack Belgium and suddenly she’s angry at Dorn for not taking a stand. In her angry, feisty moments, I like Crawford. It’s what she’s best at, and probably who she was. But when Wayne appears, the jig is up, because all her posing and eyelash batting just withers in front of his plain, handsome, soft-spoken honesty. I’ve seen very little of the young John Wayne (here he was 35). He was born Marion Morrison and you can see the ‘Marion’ in him, because he was extremely beautiful, the eyes are exotic and gentle. And when he tries to seduce her one wishes to be in Joan Crawford’s place. True, everything he says has a bit of a swagger — even if he’s standing still. This is something Wayne later turned into caricature — what I like to call the ‘effortlessly masculine.’ But here it just seems to be who he is, and there’s nothing quite like a man who can’t help being butch. It’s a shame really, because Dassin is a very good director, and this could have been Casablanca-ish if Crawford hadn’t ruined it all. Everyone else is quite engaging— and then Crawford opens her mouth and her own ego falls out, making a resounding thump as it hits the floor. I don’t know how to explain exactly what is wrong with her acting; it will always fascinate me. It only works in a melodrama (like Mildred Pierce) in which she is at the centre, one needs to think that she is full of hidden secrets and tiny tragedies, of remorse and unexplored virtue, but in an ordinary thriller that isn’t built round her, her own frustration at not being the belle of the ball just keeps bringing things to a full stop. Please don’t think I detest her. In fact I’m sorry I called Joan Crawford a whore in a previous blog (even though I was quoting Bette Davis): I love whores, and I am one. In fact it’s one of the few things I love about Crawford. But sadly she was a horrible person. Crawford went around trashing this movie after it was released, and trashing John Wayne - saying ‘he’s no good if he’s not on a horse’ — that sort of thing, and saying the movie was badly written, which it’s not, except when she’s breathily panting the lines, or tossing her head about with firm resolve. So what is all this about Joan Crawled ‘being me’? Well I must explain and perhaps try to drag myself out of the pit I fell into in the last blog (if you happen to be reading them in order — there’s my egotism rearing it’s ugly head again!). Anyway yes I am a coward, and a girl who is in love with her own imagined talent, and I imagine myself to be Dana Wynter (that’s with a ‘y'; mind you not an ‘i’) rushing towards windows in white pyjamas. (What’s so lovely about white pyjamas is their sheer impracticality. I’ll never forget it when I told my mother I had bought black sheets, for the very gay bed, in my very gay apartment, and she said" 'Yes, but isn’t that living in a state of denial?') So I want to own my girlyness, once and for all, if for no reason other than for of all the little boys growing up out there who are girls inside. And no I’m not talking about trans people — nothing against them — but this is something else. This is very specifically about being attached to your penis (literally and figuratively) but being a vulnerable girl inside a hulking body, and then desiring men to boot. If you are like that, you can be tragic Quentin Crisp and decide you will always be in love with the type of ‘effortlessly masculine’ man who would never ever look at you — but that’s not my. M. O.. No,  I’ve always loved lithe, effeminate boys who are sometimes actually capable of loving me. But anyway, I want to celebrate my inner girl, because there are so many gay men out there who have that secret inside, and it’s a very special secret, and since you’re never going to grow up to be a news anchor, or the host of late night talk show, and if you do get to be a university professor, people will condescend to you with enormous generosity of spirit and say “Good for you!” So you might as well give into it. It’s called vulnerability. No it’s more than — it’s indulging your feelings. We are indulgent, us girly men, we like to cry, and moan, and hope, and anticipate, and jump up and down when we get excited (which looks particularly ridiculous on us, I know). But we have a service to provide (not just fellatio, tho -- that’s just a 'perk'), We facilitate feelings in ourselves and others. It’s like Laertes says when he cries over Ophelia's death in Hamlet ‘and now the woman is out of me’ (or something to that effect). All of Shakespeare’s heroes were girly boys, they wallowed in feeling, and were not in any way stoic, even when they were (Othello), and if the whole world was brave it would be a sad world locked inside that male armour, that valiant chest, those bulging arms, those massive thighs — which we all of us girly boys like to kiss — because that armour can be tough to carry around all the time. .Joan Crawford and I — we facilitate emotion; we are lost in our own private world of human feeling, of imagined mischance and glistening tears. We give you permission. And you know what? Big boy, big man, bull dyke, screwed up woman, maybe you should just let it go. Go on, go on, do it now, you deserve it. Come on. You’ll thank yourself after, and maybe you’ll thank me too. Just let the woman out; why not? It's divine really, and it is the most profound and appropriate response one can have to love and death and the whole damn thing-- because I don't have to tell you that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Think of what is lost. Think of everything you have ever lost. Because it's all lost, basically, or it will be, someday. Remember Paris? (Okay go ahead! Play it again Sam!) So why not go on, and well -- have a good cry?

PLAGUE DIARY 66: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

D-Day the Sixth of June (1956)
This is a war film for women. Dana Wynter is in love with Robert Taylor (who is wearing too much eye makeup because he is really too old for the part) but she is married to Richard Todd. Both men are on a battleship headed for Dieppe and death. Fortunately Richard Todd is killed, so Dana can now be with with the man she loves. “You’ll never know how much I love you” is playing behind them (they’ve removed some of Taylor’s eyeliner —because he’s supposed to be sick— and it’s a flattering shot, so he almost looks kissable). But, amazingly, Dana doesn’t tell him her husband is dead. So he goes back to his wife in the USA. It’s all pretty heartbreaking, but that’s war, which is a lot better than COVID-19 —because, as couldn’t possibly be more clear than in movies like this — war gives people permission for infidelity. Someone muses: “What are we going to do when the whistle blows, and the war’s over, and we all have to go home to our own husbands and our own wives?” Dana Wynter’s peerless, martyred nobility means she must sacrifice her one true love in order to save her own true love’s marriage. This redeems her. What about me? Well I don’t understand how men can be brave, how they can run up a hill with guns cocked and literally hurl themselves into the face of death. I stayed home for the Vietnam War. True, some thought it was a worthless cause. But what about Hitler? Neil Manly (yes that was his name) punched me when I was eight years old; I didn’t fight back then and I haven’t fought back since. You should stop reading this now, because it’s just  a depressing spiral of self castigation. By any masculine standard I am as useless as tits on a bull; actually I am the dictionary definition actually of that very thing. All that might possibly redeem me is that now and then I try and write something that I hope might divert you;  but how often do I actually succeed?  Okay, here are the facts. A man should be able to make children with a woman.and defend from harm the family he has created. I am not capable of either of those things. So out of my worthlessness I try and create a tower of words and fantasy of something better. Something better? More valuable? More beautiful? The truth is, I wouldn’t be alive to masturbate in my own aesheticism if men hadn’t acted like men — and defended us from the pure evil that was Hitler. So how do I climb out of the catastrophe that is my own selfish, inappropriate, femininity? I know, I could say that war is evil and  created by men who want too much to be men and it’s phallic worship and I’m feminine and the opposite of all that. But let’s face it, I’m no Dana Wynter. In my drag photographs I look like a halfback in a dress. No one is ‘fooled.’ And what about when the good and the innocent must be protected from blatant savage violence and I am simply nowhere to be found? If this whole COVID-19 is a battle then maybe I really am a coward in the face of it, because I’m simply too frightened to stay at home and face my own thoughts. Maybe I’d want to stay home if I was a normal man who had impregnated a woman. But there are no children to dangle on my knee and show-off to others in Facebook videos. So instead I whine and try and convince everyone that COVID-19 is a fake when in reality all I’m really doing is defending my own cowardice, which is the direct result of my own perversion. I’m actually an evil man. Dana Wynter asks: “Are we really sinners by just by being lovers?” And  Robert Taylor says: “You’re probably the most beautiful sinner in the whole wide war.” and she says — “And you’re the most exciting.” But evil is not exciting, and sinners are not beautiful. That’s cheap movie romance and all of my life I’ve fallen for what is again, in fact, not harmless treacle or even bilious bilge but instead a penultimate and putrefying propaganda, pickled in blood. And there is such a thing as the truth, and the truth is I am a useless piece of you-know-what. I should have died when I was born. Instead my lonely, alcoholic mother mistakenly nurtured me to excess, and waited breathlessly for my every precious word, and inculcated in me the bizarre notion that I am special. And as I get older and older it becomes clearer and clearer too everyone else and now me that I am nothing more than a garrulous gasbag obsessed only with endless self-agrandizement.  I don’t deserve to live, so I should by rights — at the very least — just shut up. Dana Wynter is walking between two very long buildings that are makeshift army hospitals. She has very brown hair and very pale white skin. Her name is spelled Wynter, not Winter. She’s thinking about the little holy place she will always have in her heart for Robert Taylor. And as long as nobody knows about it, and as long as she is a good wife, she can think about him in the depth of night, whenever she wants. So when she wakes up in terror, and suddenly remembers there is such a thing as death, all she has to do is remember when she said to Robert Taylor ‘I have a fire in my room’ — which didn’t mean her room actually was on fire, but then, in a way, it did.  I have a place to go, and it’s called my imagination, and even though I tell you a lot, I don’t tell you everything. And in that imaginary place I am Dana Wynter and it’s alright for me to be who I am. It’s that expression on her face when she is waiting for Robert Taylor, and she reaches for the window in those white pajamas, wide-eyed, expectant, simply wishing to believe that everything is for the best.

PLAGUE DIARY 65: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

The Actress (1954)
It’s a joy forever. I wish it had never ended. That’s mainly due to Spencer Tracy; but Ruth Gordon gave him the words. It’s about a young woman’s coming of age and her dream of being an actress (Jean Simmons is radiant as a young Gordon - a role that, oddly, almost went to Debbie Reynolds). Wikipedia muses with a condescending air: “the film ends without the audience seeing Gordon achieve her goals.” Is that why it was a flop? Or maybe because it’s the story of a young woman, not a young man? Or maybe because Simmons rejects a marriage proposal from the lovely Anthony Perkins in order to pursue a career? Hepburn used to say that Tracy’s genius was just to say the lines and mean them. Here Tracy seems to be stumbling over his words, which at first is so real I thought he was having memory issues. Then I realised the character is so intense that his feelings are changing faster than his mouth can speak. At first Tracy is so filled with destructive rage that he curses the foliage: “Why do they call this Elmwood Avenue when it’s full of maple tress?” Then he reveals the story of his own tragic childhood —which if handled by a bad actor and writer would end in the character having a breakdown, or a revelation. Instead Tracy is apologetic, furious — angry in spite of himself. There are so may details, like his annoyance with the cat named Punk who eats the Boston fern, or the moment when he shows Jean Simmons’ girlfriends his telescope, which makes us achingly uncomfortable, as he is the essence of a sad lonely, sweet, boring old man.  Speaking of which, they are torturing this sad, lonely sweet, boring old man right now — I can’t bear to look at the news — saying maybe Ontario needs to go into another lockdown. I live in a town where 26 people have died of COVID-19. (Twenty-six out of a population of five hundred thousand and something?) Jesus. Should I just stop thinking about all this? I saw a sparrow today, flying over and over into its reflection in a window. Is that me? The Actress is about that crucial moment when the child must become.an adult. Jean Simmons must be an actress, not a gym instructor as Spencer Tracy desires (the delicious Mary Wickes appears only briefly —  marching about resolutely and twirling a pair bowling pins — managing to give us all a frightening glimpse of that particular horrifying future). Simmons fears she will never get go to Boston  “I’ll go raving mad, Momma! If I knew one single man who wanted a mistress I’d go in Boston and be a kept woman!” It’s not at all clear that Jean Simmons even knows what a ‘kept woman’ is, but she does know it’s a phrase that her mother certainly doesn’t want to hear. The self-effacing Theresa Wright responds: “For once, for all our sakes consider being normal!” We all went through that, didn’t we? That moment when we finally do something that our parents can’t abide, and, ergo, we grow up? Or did we? I’m not sure, as everybody just seems to love a good old fashioned lockdown. We’re just doing what Daddy Told Us To DO (and here Daddy is Doug Ford, who we all hated before ‘the crisis,’ but now it’s Father Knows Best).  So when Daddy says don’t go out of the house we all smile that martyred smile, deftly lock the door, and suffer. Why? Perhaps we all want a Daddy? Perhaps we all wish to be children again? Well it’s a lot easier to just give in to the patriarchy. Think of the advantages. Sure, it’s frustrating to have that finger wagging at you all the time, but on the other hand it relieves you of all responsibility for your actions. If you ‘re too scared to go to Boston and become an actress, or too scared to come out of the closet —  or to come to out of the house — it’s all okay, you are a good person, because you are doing what your parents told you to do. Obviously infantilism has been bubbling on the cultural stove recently, and it has created the perfect storm for this perfect virus that has gifted us with the abdication of any responsibility for our lives. When Tracy is blocking his daughter's dream he says; “Let’s let’ the cat out, and batten down the hatches, and go do bed.” How lovely is that? Why go out, after all? It’s night time, and it’s scary out there — or it’s day time and if you actually pursue your dream, it might just not come true.  The title of the play that graces the marquee on Jean Simmons’ first trip to Boston is Oliver Goldsmith’s The Mistakes of a Night. I used to live for those mistakes. Today it was sunny and hot, and there were people out on the streets, and I took off my shirt off, and lowered my shorts to where you could see my bumcrack. Yup, I did. Let them laugh, let them scorn me, I might as well be wearing a scarlet letter  —as I wore no mask — only pink sunglasses. Out on the gay street a nice thing happened — some sweet guy had stashed a bottle of beer next to where I was relaxing in the sun and he came to retrieve it, flashing a winning smile: “Thanks for watching it for me.” That gave me hope. Then I went into a dirty sex store — the one that sells  porn videos and vibrating cockrings, (which I do admit I have been missing during this ‘extremely trying time’) and I made the mistake of speaking to the crusty owner. He’s always been a  gloomy, bitter fellow, sure to have a negative word for me. I asked him if the porn video ‘cruising’ booths were open and he snorted: “not until there’s a vaccine.” So we have to wait until Fauci comes up with a cure (again?) before we can suck on somebody’s you-know-what? (I think you are aware of what specific activity I’m referring to. It’s something that your mother told you not to do, only she wasn’t willing to say it out loud either. But if you were like me you knew it was one of the ‘mistakes of the night’ that you could not live without.) Yes I’m desperate, and plan on going out later, lowering my shorts to bumcrack level and cruising Queens Park. Apparently there are sex-hungry men there. I’m going to see if I can get me one. But that’s will not be the only exposing I have done today, as here I have exposed myself as the same sad old man Spencer Tracy give us in The Actress. Because I am that sparrow flying at the mirror that is a window, and I don’t intend to stop.

PLAGUE DIARY 64: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

The Lady in the Lake (1946)
Somebody says to detective Philip Marlow “what you’ve read and you’ve heard is one thing, the real thing is something else.” This is Robert Montgomery’s directorial experiment, generally considered a failure. But like Hitchcock’s Rope it’s a noble one. It seems to forecast modern mock documentaries. The camera is the protagonist, so everyone is talking to the camera and conscious of how they are representing themselves. The acting is great. Montgomery as Marlowe doesn’t act much. But Audrey Trotter does. (Who was she?) Well apparently all she did, basically, was play hard-boiled dames in film noir, and when they went out of fashion so did she; but she’s gorgeous, and she runs away with The Lady in the Lake. Raymond Chandler wrote the script after writing Double Indemnity, but they filed his screenplay in the vertical file -- which pissed him off. I’m writing short sentences here. Keeping to the point. Raymond Chandler is infectious. Robert Montgomery is a detective — and a writer — and when someone asks him — “What would you say your story is full of?”, he says: “short sentences." It’s strange that hard boiled detective novels were considered realistic, and even more strange that the short sentences favoured by Hemingway were considered reportage. They are not. They are as stylistically manipulative as long ones. I can’t stop writing like this. Partially it’s because this is also a film about writing — because Raymond Chandler is a self-conscious writer. His style is so pervasive that you find yourself thinking about it. Then suddenly you are in it. Trotter tries to get Montgomery to explain his motivation for writing his book, and he says — “It was for 500 bucks.” Marlowe, like Raymond Chandler, only writes for money, because after all what are real guys interested in? Only money and dames. I’m reeling because I’ve been watching so many bad movies lately; so I wasn’t prepared for Raymond Chandlers virtuoso style. When Trotter and Montgomery finally kiss, they both close their eyes. This is significant. And Trotter says “Ever since I was a little girl I’ve been reading books about love like this, but I never believed it.” And there’s some sort of religious-choir-movie-stuff playing, and things get more and more intense because Montgomery doesn’t trust Trotter, and why should he? There are so many unanswered questions. And she is flirting with him from the start. And she seems to have flirted with a lot of other people. But she’s a smart  one — that’s the kicker, and at one point she let’s down her hair, literally, and it’s quite a tumble. Anyway, after they get the kissing over with, Audrey says “I’m scared, but it’s wonderful,” which also makes a return as the last line of the film. Chandler is trying to get at something here. Montgomery is attracted to Trotter because she scares him. She might be a killer, and she might be just downright evil, and she might not be in love with him at all. But aren’t we are told by sentimental poets, and bad novelists, and our mothers (sometimes) that love should be exactly the opposite: we should only give our heart to someone who does not frighten us? I’ve had my share of dangerous moments. I met a guy once when I was in drag who told me he had thrown his last ‘girlfriend’ out the window. I dropped him like a hot potato — and have often congratulated myself on the sagacity of my move. I also once did it with a guy who liked to hit me. In the face. I can frankly handle getting hit almost anywhere else but that. And this was a slap. In the face — over and over again. I said 'No thank you.'  I never saw him again. Which was good. Then there was the boy who screwed me up the ass too hard and too long — all the time — and one of my friends volunteered to beat him up. He didn’t want the guy hurting me. So I just broke up with the guy. I was scared of all these guys. Like I’m scared when I go to the darkroom at the bar. Not terrified. “Scared and it’s wonderful"; like Trotter and Montgomery. So is it true love when the person makes us feel secure, or when the person makes us as frightened? The Lady in the Lake has the answer. After they kiss, Trotter says: “this is what the world is really like, isn’t it?” It’s that eye opener that occurs when you fall in love for the first time. It’s why Shakespeare thought true love was the definition of virtue.  I didn’t understand love songs until I fell in love. For 28 years I kissed women. I would listen to those damn corny lyrics and think — what are they gettin’ so upset about? Why are they frettin’ and cryin’ and threaten’ suicide? Then I kissed Glenn and I understood immediately. He was tawny, fawny teenager, and he eventually rejected me sitting on a stone chair, by a stone table at the rear of Toronto Western Hospital. (I can’t go past that building without thinking of him.) He was a brilliant young poet with curly brown hair, and a bold shyness that was mysterious, and insulting. He loved someone else, from the start, but he kept coming back to me. So yes of course I was terrified he would stop loving me. But I learned to love from my mother’s penchant for alcoholics. She once told me how lousy my father was in bed. Apparently he was a ‘premature ejaculator.’ I know you didn’t need to know that. Neither did I. But she told me. Ever since then, I’ve feared being a ‘premature ejaculator.' For years I thought I was one. Then I figured out — hey — I just like orgasms! There could be worse things to like. The title of Philip Marlowe’s novel —the one Montgomery brings to Audrey Trotter before he gets mixed up in lies, and guns, and dames -- is “If I should die before I live.” It’s an interesting concept — especially in these trying times, when kids—  despite the propaganda to the contrary, are unlikely to die of COVID-19, but the rest of us are likely to experience a virtual death, i.e. a death in the virtual world, as increasingly our real lives become extinguished, and we find ourselves sprouting angel wings and floating up to digital heaven. And maybe that’s what’s at the heart of all of this. We’ve spent our lives being told we should all find a nice person, settle down, have kids, get a secure job, buy a house that is identical to everyone else’s, look forward to what’s on Netflix tonight, and never never again be afraid. And most of us do that. Then the ‘virus’ comes along and suddenly we’re afraid. And in a kind of a perverse — but very human way — “it’s wonderful.”

PLAGUE DIARY 63: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

Quality Street (1937)
I quite lost the thread of the plot, and at a certain point I just wasn’t listening. The trick for me was figuring  out what made the original play by J.M. Barrie so popular in it’s heyday in 1902 (before he wrote Peter Pan). Quality Street is, I discovered, more than treacle, though a brand of cookies was named after it. The conceit is this: if you see the man you are in love with ten years after you first met him, and he no longer finds you attractive, then just pretend to be someone else — someone who is much younger and prettier. But then, what if he is actually in love with the older, much less charming woman who is the real you? The problem with this movie is that Katherine Hepburn never thinks that her lover (Franchot Tone) would recognise that she is both Phoebe Throssel and Phoebe's cousin Libby. That's kinda hard to swallow. And why — if he doesn’t love the older you — why not just throw on a pretty bonnet and be the younger you, only remain yourself? What is confounding is why good old-fashioned logic didn’t triumph over the public’s determination to do some wishful thinking. It's because we want to believe the ugly girl is more attractive than the beautiful one. All the ugly girls want that. But is there really such a thing as an ugly girl? I ought to know, I was one. My transformation from plain to gorgeous happened a few years after I came out of the closet. It was a mirror moment. I often used to look at myself in the mirror naked (doesn’t everyone?) But for a long time whenever I looked at myself all I saw was a fat man. It was very depressing, I wanted to give up and almost did. But the looking at myself in the mirror every night was a kind of rigour which proved fruitful: for after many depressing nights, I looked at myself naked in the mirror and suddenly I saw a very tall, handsome, attractive, not-fat man. It was a startling revelation and it changed my life. I realised the logical impossibility, of course, of having lost so much weight in a day. But the mirror could not lie. I was undoubtedly suddenly attractive. How did this happen? No seriously. I mean it. I was suddenly desirable to myself (which was a magical revelation). And then I came to fully understand that of course it was the same man in the mirror on two successive days: I simply was looking at him differently! Then I kept looking at myself naked, again and again, and it became perfectly clear to me that I was actually the one who could decide whether I was attractive or not. To suddenly have that kind of power is mind-boggling. For a few years years after that I landed some very cute boyfriends, because I was able to persuade others just as I was able to persuade myself. This really is the answer to everything, and I should probably put it on a website and make millions as a life coach. Or for once in my life, maybe, write a book that might sell a few copies? Of course it’s not quite as easy as all that, because, truth be told, I’m not certain what precipitated the change. What was the origin of this realization? I guess it was just kind of like, well --seeing God, in a way. Quality Street doesn't appeal to women who are ugly -- because no woman is ugly -- the appeal is for women who think they are ugly. I hope I've made that clear by now in all these  discussions of beauty. (Haven’t you been listening? Or taking notes?). Beauty is not skin deep, it is the product of a wilful, Vulcan, mind meld, of a belief system that is frantically, passionately, and inspiringly out of control. Have you not looked closely at some of the worlds most beautiful women? Barbra Streisand, for instance. She’s cross-eyed and her nose is monstrous. I mean sure she’s got big boobs — and she’s so talented it’s crazy — but look at that kisser! So it is obvious that somewhere, deep down. Barbra Streisand is convinced that she is attractive, or else she couldn’t pull it off. Because she is undoubtedly beautiful. I know a couple of women like that who, if you examine them technically are kinda funny looking, but they are nevertheless, considered great beauties. Maria Callas is kind of like that. In some photos she’s got the big nose disease, but you know she's kind of ordering you to find her sexy. I have met many men like that too (and I’m so glad to have made that discovery at this late age!). I mean the number of clueless and unsexy, yet incredibly beautiful, young men I have tumbled into bed with only to have a lousy friggin' time. Yes, I’m serious. You can bully people into finding you attractive, you can simply order them to desire you. It doesn’t work though, unless you really believe you are attractive — if you don’t believe it then it doesn't work. And yes, Katherine Hepburn is Katherine Hepburn, but she is really skinny, and has no discernible tits at all, really, and Tracy’s famous line (from Pat and Mike): “Not much meat on her, but what's there is cherce” sounds to me a bit like a press agent's way of dealing with the Katherine Hepburn skinny problem. But we all know that Katherine Hepburn, tits or no tits, knew she was gorgeous -- or probably — and more significantly —  didn’t care one way or the other. And that is a kind of belief. I know it sounds like I’m saying it all boils down to (yawn) positive thinking — and it does in a way. But hopefully it should be a relief now to discover that you, too, can be beautiful (in case you hadn’t thought of it before!). Actually you can be anything you want to be. Demented people believe they are The King of Persia — and some of them are completely happy until some doctor or other dedicates themselves to convincing them of the truth. I do not recommend the truth, because generally speaking, it’s not much fun. For instance I imagined that I was inspired tonite, and that I would be capable of writing something worthwhile, when in actuality I am feeling the world creeping in (I’m feeling a little post COVID-19) and I actually don't want it to, because that’s interrupting my relationship with the blank page; and me and it were getting along fine, thankyou. But I’ll tell you one thing I did find out writing this blog. The words created this; not me. That’s something I truly believe. When the words start writing all I have to do is just let them do their thing. I don’t even have to think. The words think. Because words have thoughts. Thoughts don’t have words -- it’s the other way around, actually. (Just a thought.)

PLAGUE DIARY 62: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

I Was an American Spy (1951)
It’s a case of reality being rather more exciting than fantasy in this terribly bland film about a remarkable woman. Claire Phillips was a real American spy in the Philippines during World War II,  given the Medal of Freedom for her “distinct contribution to American prisoners of war.” But despite the many possibilities this film offers for film noir schlock, director Lesley Selander takes advantage of none. A film as badly directed as this makes one realise how important a good director is. Here's a woman who not only survived savage beatings, and water torture, but performed fan dances in her own nightclub where she masqueraded as a singer as a front for spying. Her code name was ‘High Pockets’ from her habit of storing  information in her bra. She has some good lines. When a fat Japanese businessman slaps her, she says: “I’m no Madame Butterfly.” After her lover is shot for trying to drink contaminated water, she shoots a Japanese soldier, vowing: “They’re going to pay from now on.” There is no shortage of potential drama here, but what we would kill for is a scene shot through a Venetian blind, cigarette smoke, or moonlight piercing darkness of any kind. The person I really feel bad for is Ann Dvorak, as this was her ‘penultimate’ film. She was 40, and she started her movie career at age 4. She can definitely act. “I want to go back to the stage,” she once said: “The trouble with Hollywood is everybody is crazy for money.” I too want to go back to the stage. It’s been more than two months. Now the dusk has finally settled and I’m sitting here in the dark. The cat is on my lap, and all is right with the world -- that is -- at least we're all inside -- where we're supposed to be. What do I have to complain about? I have food, a job, and my husband doesn't beat me, and I don’t (as of yet) have the dreaded COVID-19. (In fact I don’t know a soul who has it. Oh yeah sorry, there was a man I met twice at an academic conference who just died.) I’m just a spoiled middle class brat; but nevertheless I'm going to tell you what made me cry today. Boys playing basketball. My friend drove me to Toronto because she’s looking to move to there. When I met her at her home in Hamilton, I could tell she wasn’t sure if she had the guts to leave the house. We were both pretty down. Yes I admit it, I see her regularly although she’s not a blood relation (sorry, cardinal sin). The point is, she is now part of my routine. She is my best friend and I love her more than anything, because we are both angry, fierce, demented freaks, and we’ve both vowed never to be beaten by COVID-19. (I don’t mean the disease — I mean the measures put in place to protect us.) But some days I arrive and she’s slumped in a chair, and she says ‘I just can’t take it anymore.’ Well today I began to doubt our friendship. Could I possibly be tired of my best friend? And then I realised it was because every natural closeness between two human beings needs other human beings to facilitate it. Am I wrong? Are there those of you out there who can love another person day after day and not see anyone else? Is my love for my best friend somehow wanting because of our mutual need to have social intercourse with the rest of the world? Maybe  there is a perfect love out there — somewhere — between two people who don’t need anyone else (or is that just a line from Love is A Many Splendored Thing?). Finally she grabbed her stuff; ’Let’s go, we’re going to drive to ‘friggin’ Toronto’ — and we got in her Volkswagen bug, and we did. It was about seeing people. New people. Others. We got on the highway and there were cars, and actually a traffic jam, and we were like — wow! a traffic jam! That’s fabulous! When we got into Toronto we couldn’t take our eyes off the people. We started off in Parkdale which is a lot like where we live (Hamilton) only there were more destitute people than where we live — and in their desperation and anger I found hope, because they are the only ones telling it like it is. Sure they’ve got it a lot harder than the yoga practitioners living in their brick and planter mansions, but they also don’t have time or energy to pretend they adore this whole damn shitty fiasco. And then it just became a thing, a thing of watching people, everywhere, running, walking, biking, exercising. And some teenage girls in groups touching each other. No friggin' social distancing. Oh we were very bad. And the boys were playing basketball in the park — and I just lost it. I know it sounds incredibly stupid, but it was so goddamn ordinary, they were just having good old-fashioned fun. I don’t think I’ve ever written anything as corny and mundane as this. I’ve never been inspired by simple humanity. Maybe it’s because tonight I had to watch this dumb uninspiring movie about a remarkable woman — a movie that a director somehow couldn’t make into art. And I don’t see how I can make this into art either. I’m trying to make you identify with what I’m saying and trying not to sound like a spoiled brat. I am spoiled, but, but,  BUT — listen to me — needing to see a new face, and to talk to a new person, and needing to have a new experience -- is not spoiled (even though I might be)! Does that make sense? Because if there’s nothing new: then that’s what prison is. Ann Dvorak ends up in prison in this lousy movie that doesn’t for one moment convince you that she really was noble, or that she really suffered. They stick a rubber hose down her throat and you’re still not moved, because it’s so badly done. The reviews for this movie said it “handles its more brutal scenes with a marked degree of tastefulness.” Maybe that’s the problem. So I have the bad taste to call social distancing a senseless, very personal violence that eats away at you slowly, rubber hose or no rubber hose. (Okay, sorry!) At one point the evil Japanese are talking about what they are going to do when they take over the United States of America — “the first thing we are going to do is kill the umpires” and they laugh their evil Japanese laughs, and to 1951 viewers this would be the nightmare: the prime atrocity committed by vile foreigners would be to take over America and destroy baseball. Well congratulations, it’s COVID-19 and we’ve done just that. And that’s why I cried when I saw those boys in the park doing what boys were meant to do in parks — and by that I mean, just playing a game.

PLAGUE DIARY 61: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

Good News (1947)
June Allyson makes quite an elderly university student, she made this film when she was 30 years old, only Mel Torme was close to college age — 23. They cut him out of a couple of songs because he’s funny lookin’ —even though he has the voice and musicianship of an angel. When Peter Lawford and June Allyson are fighting over a French lesson, Mel just happens sing ‘The Best Things in Life Are Free’ in the next room, and Lawford starts singing it to June Allyson in French, and unless you have a heart of stone, you will melt. It’s a very silly movie that now and then lives up to its silliness — as when June Allyson is trying to convince Pat Marshall (the vain, pretentious gold-digger) that Peter Lawford is not worth chasing, and she puts on a performance with the cook (the staunch Connie Gilchrist, reliable as ever) and announces “the pickle king has gone bankrupt due to a cucumber blight.” I think it’s probably Betty Comden and Adolph Green that made this sometimes unbearably light bit of confectionary edible (as they wrote the screenplay). According to Wikipedia, Good News is a remake of 1930 pre-Code movie filled with “sexual innuendo and lewd suggestive humour.” Since this movie is basically a sanitised remake of one that I wish I'd seen -- and beause this project was originally intended for her and Mickey Rooney -- I’m going to use it as an excuse to talk about a star who June Allyson was essentially a sanitised version of — Judy Garland. Everything Judy Garland should have been, June Allyson was. (After all, she lived to be 88.) But we loved Judy because of what she wasn’t. What great performers bring to us are their damaged selves, which doesn’t require that they be especially damaged, because we are all damaged. The only difference between them and us is that they need to show us that damage for some reason. This is emotional exhibitionism — and it attracts like a car accident. We are all characters in J. B. Ballard’s Crash —symphorophiliacs —  i.e.we have a fetishistic sexual obsession with car crashes. You may deny any desire to stage a car crash and wank off -- as symphorphiliacs do -- but the fact is you  craned you neck and slowed down the car, didn't you? Just to have a look? No need to be ashamed; it’s human, we are all just a little bit interested in death, because of our own. And why shouldn’t we be? What we want most is to get as close as we can to death without actually dying. The moment Garland appears, it only takes a second to realise she is a taut wire stretched to it’s limit that may, at any moment, break. We all know what it is like to feel like that occasionally, (if you don’t that’s your problem). But Garland knew what it was like to live like that all the time. But more than that, she desperately wanted to lay it all before us — to say 'See, look here, look at my ugliness, my idiocy, my pain.' I am not one of those who feels sorry for her, though I know I’m supposed to. And that’s not because I think she didn’t suffer, but because those who pity her are enjoying just the tiniest bit of schadenfreude — ‘That’s not me! I’m not a drug addict, my weight didn’t go up and down like a yoyo, I'm not married to some idiot half my age, I don’t collapse onstage in an drug induced stupor after abusing the audience.' I know you don’t do any of those things, but why is that something to be proud of? Your pity just tells me seeing her makes you feel pleased with yourself that you haven’t succumbed to the disease of living. You have been lucky, or you have been stupid enough to keep a distance from life — and anything that might harm you. Which brings us to Sweden. I mean, we haven’t heard very much about Sweden lately, have we? I wonder why? How is Sweden like Judy Garland? Well those of us who say we don’t care much for what’s going on in Sweden will be there, gobbling it up, when the country goes down. Sweden, in case you didn’t notice, has done the exact opposite of what we have done, in terms of COVID-19. There is no discernible lock down (no huge gatherings, no high schools or universities open, that’s pretty much it). Their leading epidemiologist Anders Tegnell says COVID-19 is a highly infections disease that is not particularly lethal (a fact) and that the best thing to do is to let it play out in the population (another fact) and ultimately, just as many people will die in Sweden as will die in countries that have lockdowns (also a fact). So far he is right, and since he is dealing in facts not fear, I so no reason to get in a huff about it. But that doesn’t stop people from eagerly waiting for masses of Swedish people to die of COVID-19 — and if they do, many will be dancing in the streets (wearing face masks, of course). I know this from being an AIDS radical in the 90s. I and several others dared to suggest that HIV was not the cause of AIDS. Then the head spokesperson of our group Rob Johnston — who was a kind of a perfectly beautiful good man — died (of what? not sure…) and people were happy and wrote bitter celebratory epitaphs for him. The problem was clearly only this: if we didn’t believe in AIDS in exactly the way they did, then people hated us, because they suspected we were  having more fun than them, so it was only right and just that we should die ugly, painful deaths. But you see there are 'no innocent victims.’ We are either all of innocent, or all of us guilty — and not only just because nobody gets out of this game alive. Have you not seen it happen? When Aunt Mildred dies people start clucking and saying ‘Well you know, she didn’t take care of herself and she was rather overweight, she really brought it on herself.’ Well, it’s natural, we feel safe when we do that, so it’s human, but it’s also despicable. When Liza Minnelli first sang ‘Cabaret’ — I saw her do it on the tonite show (she was auditioning on every talk show in town to play Sally Bowles in the movie) it sent shivers down my spine, because of the way she said ‘old chum!’ No one else said the word ‘chum!’ like that. They just sang ‘chum’ — and there was no sadness in it, no regret. She spoke it, with a painful longing. Because there is always sadness in that word 'chum.' And I think now of all the friends I am going to lose over COVID-19; because they will know that I managed to have fun, that I didn’t stop living from fear. Later in life when people were worried about her health (and they had good reason to worry) Liza changed the lyrics of 'Cabaret' from “And when I go, I'm going like Elsie’” to “And when I go, I’m NOT going like Elsie.” Shame on you Liza. And on everyone who judges another’s life.

PLAGUE DIARY 60: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

Captain Bood (1935)
I’m hooked; there’s nothing quite like Errol Flynn. He cast a spell on me. The film begins with the alluring erotic fantasy of Flynn sold as slave. He’s innocent of all wrongdoing, simply a doctor arrested for treating a traitor: he defends himself referring to the Hippocratic Oath “My business was with his wounds, not his politics.” (Something to ponder in these ‘trying times,’ eh?). He is sold to Colonel Bishop at Port Royal in The Caribbean, but only has eyes for Olivia de Havilland — playing the colonel’s daughter Arabella (“I think of you as the woman who owns me - her slave.”) It’s delectable watching Olivia de Havilland pretend she is not attracted to Errol Flynn. Eventually he leads a slave rebellion, conquers a Spanish ship, morphs into a pirate named Captain Blood, captures de Haviiland, makes her his slave, defeats a French attack on Port Royal, and is appointed the new English governor. However he is —most significantly — able to triumph over his Prince Valiant haircut, because with his rugged jawline and feminine, laughing eyes he is beyond worthy of worship. But it’s his boyish vulnerability that reels us in; he seems completely tender and malleable, like fresh clay, or glass under fire. At the end he discovers Olivia de Haviland loves him (though he is a pirate, he has made it clear that he does not rape women) and shouts “She loves me!’ three times, with all the spontaneous joy of a little boy who has just discovered his own hand is in the cookie jar. Male performers are rarely able to open their heart to us; Flynn invites us in. Flynn’s first wife (Lyly Damita) was 5 years older than he was. Well, yes, one certainly wants to be his mother. Okay, yes, I have read his Wikipedia bio. Not only was Errol Flynn accused of raping several women, and throwing a stage manager down the stairs, but, after he died, it was discovered he may have been a spy and a traitor. I’m sorry. I can’t go on. Alright. I will. There’s also some business about him having two way mirrors installed in his mansion — because he was a voyeur — and also, perhaps, being a drug addict. Okay, enough. I’m in denial and I have a right to be -- because Errol Flynn enchanted me in Captain Blood, as I’m sure he enchanted millions of people, and they were not the least bit interested in the truth about him, and would  actually have been offended to hear it. The 20th century has seen the rise of the anti-hero, and lately this has led to the demonisation of fiction; the novel is apparently dead. We are supposedly obsessed with ‘the real.’ But we’re not. We will never give up heroes, fiction, and lies. And it’s not a matter of asking anyone’s permission. We will have them, despite the human cost, so wake up and smell the romance. It’s only The American Left’s pigheaded denial of the concept of hero worship that is right now ensuring Donald J. Trump will be president forever. Trump is a hero. Some actually believe he is the second coming. But I don’t wish to speak about whether or not he is in reality a good man — that is completely irrelevant; as irrelevant as digging up the dirt on Errol Flynn. We love these men because they must be perfect, and we are convinced they can do things we could never do. Flynn leaps over the railing of his own pirate ship and lands on his feet on another, and commences fencing with some hapless Frenchman, his pale thin chest slightly bared and his long muscular legs manoeuvering a fighting dance. There’s no stopping him; or our adoration; we need to imagine people who are unstoppable, and almost magical in their power. I used to imagine I was“Howard Roark” (from Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead  — but also — unbeknownst to myself — I wished to be raped by him as “Dominique Francon” was in the novel — willingly raped, flirting for rape  —‘Could you come by my room later and fix the crack in my marble fireplace?’ — consensual rape — written by a woman, for women, and women loved it.) Errol Flynn could easily rape Olivia de Haviliand, but he’s a helluva nice pirate. We need these fictions, we always will, and the stunning stupidity of The American Left pitting Hilary Clinton — who will never be anyone’s hero — against Donald J. Trump — who even for those who don’t like him, is as entertaining as The Kentucky Derby /  your favourite pornography / and someone telling you about the tragic end of someone you always hated — all rolled up into a giant sunburned butterball. Martin Luther King said ‘I have a dream.” If he had said ‘I have a reality’ we wouldn’t have listened. Obama went on about hope, and he has a perfect wife, and two perfect girls, and he’s actually handsome, and doesn’t look bad with his shirt off. It’s all a lie — all politics is a lie — everything is a lie. It’s about satisfying the human need for something that is not real, and takes us beyond the quotidian desert that says: ‘tonight you will not be able to leave the house once again, and you will not be able to see your friends once again, and you must feel guilty — because you didn’t wash your hands enough times today — or perhaps because you didn’t wear a mask in that cab. And now — due to your criminal medical negligence — some poor child will die of the newly invented (possibly COVID-19 related) Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome.’ Dr. X — excuse me, Fauci — says that this is our reality, and we must memorise these facts to save the vulnerable from death But, sorry, human beings are not creatures of fact. Every Public Health Nazi is doing their best to convert us into thoughtful, fact-oriented computrons. But I laugh, I cackle, I say ‘nay!,’ I spit on everyone, and dance an Errol Flynn happy dance with glee. Sorry, but you can’t appeal to the better side of human beings — their logical side — because we don’t have one. We are not essentially logical; we are animals. Yes it would be a better world if we though of others before ourselves, but that will never happen. In fact we don’t even think of ourselves first — all we think about is the fantasy we have of ourselves — and of a life we will never ever have — and that’s what keeps us going.  So all we can do is try and make sure the dream we have is not only big and false, but that it also happens to be one damn, good dream. I advise you not to abandon lies — just find a lie that won’t destroy you. Because you can give up right now trying to interest yourself or anyone else — in the much vaunted, much heralded, much respected — but unfortunately non-existent, boring, ultimately inhuman ‘truth.’

PLAGUE DIARY 59: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

Tea and Sympathy (1956)
“Years from now when you talk about this, and you will, be kind.” This is the famous quote from Tea and Sympathy— a movie that was once a play — and that has not aged particularly well.  It was generally thought that Tea and Sympathy could not be made into a movie because it hints, somewhat circuitously, at homosexuality. But Vincente Minnelli (Judy Garland’s ex-husband at the time) — who was gay — tackled it in technicolour, adding a moralistic ending that admonishes Deborah Kerr’s character for sleeping with a student at the university where her husband teaches — even though she sleeps with him only to rehabilitate him. Deborah Kerr’s character is in love with  John Kerr (who plays the boy; they are not related) but her primary purpose in sleeping with him is to confirm his manliness. The other boys call him “Sister Boy" because he likes to sew, plays a girl in the school play, and is literally ‘light in the loafers.’ I was this boy 15  years after this movie was made. The difference was that I didn’t need Deborah Kerr to rehabilitate me, as I was gay. This film pre-eminently showcases the now trendy idea that sexuality and gender are two separate things. I used to believe this, but no more. Gay men and lesbians have fought valiantly and stupidly to separate gender and sexuality— the result being the ‘trans’ movement — which is somewhat necessary, but less honest. For though a boy like John Kerr in Tea and Sympathy may be feminine and heterosexual, that does not stop people — and will never stop them — from associating male femininity with homosexuality (and masculine women with lesbianism). Why? Well we gay men offer our asses to other men, always have, always will. These are the startling facts about what we do in bed; and they are associated with non-gender conforming ways, so it’s not enough to tell feminine little boys they are not gay, but simply non-gender conforming. That is what my mother told me, so I know. Because I carried my Raggedy Andy doll in my bicycle basket the other boys made fun of me. My mother said: ‘the other boys only laugh at you because they want to do that too.' This was kind, but untrue. Later when I told her I thought I was gay she said that just because I played the piano and was ‘light in the loafers’ (literally, it’s a way of walking) I could still be straight. These are stalling tactics in a homophobic culture, not revelations that confirm that gender and sexuality are not connected. It’s a little difficult for me to buy the last third of this film. John Kerr absolves to visit the town whore (well that’s what she is, she’s the girl that works at the malt shop and sleeps with everyone) Ellie Martin (played by Norma Crane). Ellie is the character in this movie I most identified with. She’s a hard-talking,  cynical smoker, and when she receives John Kerr in her flat (a red bedroom is vaguely visible in the background) she is wearing a low cut dress and evidently wants to get down to business. “Are you going to leave your coat on?” she queries. And when John Kerr hesitates at fulfilling his masculine duties, she says: “Hey, are you here on a bet?” Ellie is a sexual woman, the piece of trash everyone hates -- not like Deborah Kerr who speaks with a British accent, wears pink sweaters and defends John Kerr for not being able to have sex with the town ‘bad girl,’ airily positing: “For him there has to be love.” Anderson is not a great playwright; much here is stolen from A Streetcar Named Desire. Deborah Kerr (like Blanche) was once married to a handsome young man who used — like John Kerr — to “listen to phonograph records alone in the choir room,” and was not traditionally manly but instead “tender and considerate.” But Blanche’s young man in Streetcar is caught kissing another man, and therefore clearly gay -- which was the origin of his tenderness and vulnerability. It’s fascinating that Vincente Minnelli chose to film the final seduction scene in what has been described as.a ‘sylvan glade.’ The first shot is John Kerr reclining dreamily, on his back (as 'odalisque’) in a glistening bower, wearing  a white shirt with rolled up sleeves. It’s all very Midsummer Nights Dream: I was immediately reminded of James Bidgood, a gay photographer in New York City who — if he had been living during COVID-19 — might have to be praised for making productive use of his spare time without leaving his apartment. He invited young men to his little den of iniquity, asked them to get naked, and then photographed them in resplendent overgrown garden settings, bathed in pink and blue and yellow light — as martyrs, fauns and young Gods, The photographs are surrealistic camp, porn, fantasy. Bidgood was a window dresser by trade, and his settings are inspired by the beauty of the boys he photographed. He allows that beauty to transport him to a fantasy world of flowers, fairy trees, asses, penises and the glowing skin of youths who appear untouched, but not by him. Tennessee Williams said (and I am paraphrasing) ‘the only thing that really makes me happy is ejaculating on a beautiful young man’s chest’ — a truly noble sentiment. It should be enshrined above Anderson’s cloying: “when you speak of his, and you will, be kind” For the kindest thing one can do for world is to be inspired by physical beauty and  create it’s visual or written equivalent in art. It is not about making the physical spiritual, but about making the spiritual physical, that is,  making what is tender and kind into something you can touch and feel and kiss and well — spill your load upon. (To coin a phrase.) I’m sorry for lapsing into obscenity. No I’m not. Oh yes, and by the way, this all must all happen in a sylvan glade,  don’t you see?  And the boy must relaxing on a swing, surrounded by twinkling leaves that barely manage to catch the light.