PLAGUE DIARY 93: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

Niagara (1953)
It’s trying to be Hitchcock. Yes there is a climactic run up a stairway (stolen from Vertigo) but there is no suspense, no rhythm — nor are there interesting camera shots, just the thunder of the ‘threatening falls.’ And yes, Joseph Cotton goes over the falls at the end; big deal. We don’t care for him anyway, and it’s not his fault, because he’s just out of the nuthouse. But what makes him nuts? This is never clear; insane is a euphemism for undesirable and unexplainable, and because of the inhumanness of Cotton’s character, inhuman. Jean Peters is the ‘nice’ girl married to the annoyingly normal Max Showalter. They are the Cutlers — and the opposite of Marilyn Monroe and Joseph Cotton. They came to Niagara not to screw or see the falls, but to read books and meet his boss. Jean Peters is fine (they almost cast Ann Baxter — thank God they didn’t) but the Cutlers are so infuriatingly normal that you want to kill them, though they are meant to be endearing. When they meet Joseph Cotton, they are quite confused by his anger, and when Cotton speaks in an unhinged way about the fury of logs going down the river, Peters says: “I’m one of those logs that just hangs around in the calm.” (And that is why we are living in this torturous unendurable lockdown, because everybody is a friggin’ ‘calm log.’) But what’s really despicable about all this is the misuse of Marilyn Monroe. It’s horrifying seeing her,--in her first starring role -- forced to play the femme fatale — when she is the epitome of sexual innocence. Her every move says: “I’m sweet as a lamb and hot as hell” and that, of course, is why we love her. After Marilyn waddles by in some skintight number, Showalter asks Peters “Why can’t you get a dress like that?” and she answers: “If you want a dress like that you have to start working on it at age 13.” At one point Showalter tries to get her to pose for the camera in a sexy bathing suit, and Peters can’t. “Just inhale,” he says. But Marilyn says it right out, tormenting her wildly jealous husband — “I’m meeting somebody—  just anybody handy — as long as he’s a man.” (I guess that’s what they call a ‘handyman?’) Cotton says — “She’s a tramp. I’ll tell you now so you won’t have to ask.” And indeed Marilyn ends up the way all tramps end up, dead. Well I’m tired of this normalcy, whether it’s new or old. But let’s call it what it is — not the ‘new normal’— but puritanism. I’ll tell you now how I started writing this blog, I wrote a very innocent essay — not part of this series — simply a journalistic style piece about COVID-19 — called COVID-19 and the New Puritanism. You can look it up if you want to, it’s at the very beginning of all these blogs (in March). I sent it to Toronto theatre critic, J. Kelly Nestruck. He sent me an email saying: “Shame on you Sky, for writing this.” Well thanks J. Kelly. You inspired me to sit down every day and bring on shame, scorn, approbation and perhaps even an assassination attempt or two, by writing what are now 93 blogs, all swirling around the subject of COVID-19 and puritanism. But this particular battle for the human soul has been going on for awhile. My friend Sally says: “It’s the cavaliers against the roundheads all over again.” It started with woke-ness and will end with everyone shutting up because they’re afraid they’ve all said the wrong thing. (And I mean artists most of all.) This so-called ‘pandemic’ is about puritanism — always has been and always will be — how could it be about anything else? In Vancouver tonight, anti-racist protestors are singing and dancing at a beach-side festival, getting juiced up, and coming on to each other. I hope the orgy goes on long into the night. But in Ontario, we have been told by Fatty Ford that —although we might be able to open up bars someday soon -- inside said bars, we won’t be allowed to sing and dance. (Yup. What is this, Footloose?) The message is clear, and it’s a puritan one: if you are a good person with an important politically and morally approved philosophy, then you can do whatever the frig’ you want. If, however, you have no socially improving didactic to offer, but instead merely wish to celebrate love, sex, your body, its urges — or just the hope that you might get laid tonite — well no, sorry we gotta shut that down. Ever since those freaks in hair shirts got drummed out of England in the 1500s and spread to our hapless continent we’ve had to put up with those who shake their fingers and think they know better. The ones I love most are ‘The Shakers.’ Remember them? They were a protestant sect that banned sex (oddly, their ranks have thinned somewhat). The Shakers used to gather once a month to shake their booty in wild and epileptic fashion. They also invented the hammer, which shows you that repression is good for something. (That is, if you like hammers.) But the COVID-19 lockdown is the triumph of the no-fun puritan thought police. Next they’ll be telling us that some thoughts are loud and spread particles that kill people.  But it won’t work. It never works. I remember years ago when Christopher Newton visited my house in Toronto. He was gazing despondently at my landlord’s lawn. It was planted with spurge. Spurge is supposed to spread like grass. It didn’t. Christopher — a gardener — frowned and observed, sadly: ‘spurge never works.’ Neither does puritanism — because it is not human. Marilyn Monroes is humanity. Humanity is in her ass — as it shakes like Jello when she prances with unbridled joy down a busy street, turning heads, busting eyeglasses, inflaming genitalia. It’s in her hands, as she tries valiantly to cover her humungous breasts with a sheer wrap composed of nothing. Her hair is blonder than blonde, and her lips redder than an orangutan’s butt.  How do I break the news to you? That’s a blowjob walk, and those are blowjob lips, and blowjob eyes, and yes, Marilyn has a blowjob way of talking. Yes it’s obscene — and she’s obscene, and she should be banned. So I hope you’re happy — all you puritans — because she ends up dead at the end of Niagara, and she ended up dead in real life too, and you know what? You killed her. Protest that accusation all you want. (Perhaps that’s why they call you ‘protestants’?) But you puritans doth protest too much. And I assure you, that — though I often do — I am not, in this particular moment, overstating the case.