Age of faith (8/10/98)

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I don’t recall the story about Dangerous Liaisons/Valmont; I think it was just one of those cases where two guys had the same idea at the same time [or, maybe more plausible, ripped off the same spec script without giving credit — I guess it does strain credulity that Frears and Forman should simultaneously have developed an interest in the same eighteenth-century novel] and one beat the other to publication. Cf., as I said, Relic/Mimic; or Deep Impact/Armageddon. — I loved Malkovich in Dangerous Liaisons, in any case; and they said Von Stroheim was The Man You Loved To Hate. — Actually though I think I neglected to mention it I enjoyed The Man In The Iron Mask, at least insofar as I was successful in filtering out Leonardo di Whiningbrat. But, sheesh, Gabriel Byrne as D’Artagnan! Malkovich, Jeremy Irons, and Gerard Depardieu as the aging Musketeers! they should try this again.

I too look forward to Spielberg’s landing at Omaha Beach, though I suspect this will be another one of those cases where I’ll be hardpressed to get through the flick without hurling into my popcorn. — But, you know, the story ought to be told as it really happened, before everyone who remembers it is gone. At this point, strange but true, the Normandy landing is as distant as the Civil War was when Griffith made The Birth of a Nation.

I recall an evening a number of years ago, shortly after I got out of college and came back to Boulder. I was going out for some purpose or another, and had, as usual, packed some books and papers into an Army surplus musette bag with a long strap I’d picked up at a junkstore in Pasadena; and on my way out through the dining room came upon my old man having drinks with one of his old work buddies visiting from Michigan, a guy I knew fairly well from the days before I went off to school, a pleasant enough person but someone I had a tendency to dismiss as inconsequential — as a harmless old faggot, to tell you the truth. So I said hello and we exchanged a few pleasantries and I was about to make my way out. — And then he caught sight of my pack. — To my astonishment, he insisted that I give it to him, and he turned it over and over again in his hands, exclaiming. — And he explained to me that this had been part of the infantryman’s kit when he had been a grunt, and that, in fact [and the hair rose upon the back of my head as he told me this] the bottom of the English Channel is littered with them. Because when the troops crossed over to Normandy, the closer they got to the point at which — seasick, sleepless, terrified — they were going to have to jump out of their tincans into the surf and try to run up onto the beach through a curtain of steel, the more they threw away. Because they knew the most formidable army in the world had had four years to dig in at the top of those bluffs and was waiting for them, and every quantum lighter they could make their burden might make it just a fraction likelier that they’d live long enough to die on dry land. — Dumbstruck with sympathy and admiration, I took the bag back, and I’ve kept it ever since. Nor have I ever been quite so hasty again to judge by appearances.

As for LeeLoo, I suspect her to be some kind of messenger sent by the gods, for a purpose I have yet to fathom. Certainly she cannot be mortal. I note the particulars of each apparition, and study every clue, trying to read the riddle that she poses. As yet the sense eludes me. But I’ll have it yet.

Later.

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Life and times (7/20/98)