(Tech rehearsal for In the Air screening.)

In the Q&A I mention the last film I saw, which was Liza’s new film In the Air. This was a screening for the cast in Portsmouth, Ohio, just last week. The film is a portrait of a deindustrialized steel town in Appalachia and, among other things, it’s about the effect the local circus school has on the community there. One of the things that has really stayed with me was how extraordinary it was to be in same space with the cast, who are all non-actors, while they watched themselves projected on the big screen. And it felt very unusual to see a movie about a place in that exact place. I love going to the movies—I love the whole element of voyeurism. But this was really different. This was more like bearing witness—to the people who were on the screen and in the audience at the same time. I’ve never had a filmgoing experience like that, and I’m not sure I can really quite capture how unique it was. You can read Tom Bridwell’s account here and Liza has posted photos here and here.

Also, I loved answering the question about what movie I’d want to live inside and imagining all the night clubs I’d go to that exist only in films like Piccadilly, Mulholland Drive, Who Killed Teddy Bear, Sweet Charity, The Wrong Man, Pillow Talk, Klute, Taking Off. This is clearly a list to be expanded.

For now, here’s Barbara Stanwyck and Gene Krupa in Ball of Fire playing “Drum Boogie” with matches.

Bea Arthur, star of ‘Golden Girls’ and ‘Maude,’ dies at 86, LA Times
Golden Girl Bloopers, YouTube

In the clip below nearly twenty years have passed, but this appears to be the same house from before and there’s still a French camera crew on hand. Cassavetes is directing a scene from his penultimate film, Love Streams, which, with its dreamy ballet sequence and Diahnne Abbott singing “Kinky Reggae,” maybe is a musical of sorts. After calling it a day, Cassavetes (“Cassavets” in the French pronunciation) and Gena Rowlands linger at the doorway for a few moments before going inside. The voiceover says it’s 3 am.

There’s also an interview with Peter Falk at the end.

Estelle Bennett, a Singer for the Ronettes, Is Dead at 67, NY Times

My review of Sam Staggs’ “Born to Be Hurt: The Untold Story of Imitation of Life” appears in today’s Los Angeles Times. While revisiting Douglas Sirk’s film I poked around the internet a bit, and here are some findings:

Errol Morris speculates about the Ryberg Electronics label on the packing crates that Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner) crouches next to after her boyfriend (Troy Donahue) beats her up.

Corbis captioned this photo “Lana Turner in Imitation in Life,” but the shot really belongs to Juanita Moore.

Here’s Frank O’Hara reading “Poem (Lana Turner Has Collapsed”) at the Lockwood Memorial Library at SUNY-Buffalo on September 25, 1964.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s essay “Six Films by Douglas Sirk” was originally published in Fernsehen und Film in 1971. Its translation later appeared in the New Left Review and it can be yours for £3. It’s worth it. Some excerpts below:

on All That Heaven Allows

Douglas Sirk’s films are descriptive. Very few close-ups. Even in shot-countershot the other person doesn’t appear fully in the frame. The spectator’s intense feeling is not a result of identification, but of montage and music. This is why we come out of these movies feeling somewhat dissatisfied. What we have seen is something of other people. And if there’s anything there which concerns you personally, you are at liberty to acknowledge it or take its meaning with a laugh.
…

Women think in Sirk’s films. Something which has never struck me with other directors. None of them. Usually women are always reacting, doing what women are supposed to do, but in Sirk they think. It’s something that has to be seen. It’s great to see women think. It gives one hope. Honestly.

on Interlude

All Sirkian characters chase an ideal, a longing. The one character who got everything she wanted was destroyed by it. Does this mean that in our society people are only accepted if they are always chasing something, like the dog with its tongue hanging out? Just as long as they stick to the rules which allow them to remain useful. After seeing Douglas Sirk’s films I am more convinced than ever that love is the best, most insidious, most effective instrument of social repression.

on Imitation of Life

It is the mother who is brutal, wanting to possess her child because she loves her. And Sarah Jane defends herself against her mother’s terrorism, against the terrorism of the world. The cruelty is that we can understand them both, both are right and no one will be able to help them. Unless we change the world. At this point all of us in the cinema cried. Because changing the world is so difficult.

(Thank you, Christine and John.)

There’s something about how Sontag thinks of the mind that I found kind of haunting: “I must not do all those things so that I will not know these horrible moments when my mind seems a tangible thing.” That’s her in 1948, age 15, in the midst of some fairly standard teenage angst about contemplating the solar system and its “innumerable galaxies spanned by countless light years” and “infinities of space.” But this idea of the mind as object continues through the years, twisting at times into an anxiety about talking, which she calls leakage: “The leakage of talk. My mind is dribbling out through my mouth.” Later she will declare, “Problem of the emotions is essentially one of drainage.” “Drainage by means of shouting? telling people off?” The interior life and its plumbing surface again and again.

And I was taken with the many character studies. Here’s Anais Nin: “her speech is over-precise—she shines and polishes each syllable with the very tip of her tongue and teeth—one feels that if one were to touch her, she would crumble into silver dust.” Critic Mike Harrington is “a curd-faced bloke.”

I was struck, too, by the sudden and frequent stabs of self-consciousness and doubt: “I acted pretty inanely myself—my sardonic-intellectual snob pose.” Also, I feel affinity for anyone who relies so heavily on em-dashes.

And then there’s the question of being a writer. In 1959, she writes, “The only kind of writer [I] could be is the kind who exposes himself…” I’m fascinated by that “I” that the editor, her son, David Rieff, had to insert in the sentence and the “himself” that Sontag slides into. That particular reflexive pronoun is not so remarkable, I suppose, for 1959, but I paused at it just the same.

Twelve years later, recorded in the documentary Town Bloody Hall about a panel on Women’s Liberation, an extremely toothsome Sontag remonstrates Diana Trilling for allowing Norman Mailer to refer to her as a “lady critic.” Sontag says something along the lines of finding the phrase demeaning. I’m quoting from my spotty memory here: “It just bothers me. I mean why not a ‘woman critic’?” It’s only when shouts come from the voluble crowd that she thinks to rephrase the question: “or why not a ‘critic’?” (In Darryl Pinkney’s essay, “The Books of Lists,” in this week’s New Yorker, he recalls that, “She once berated me when I said that I didn’t mind being called an African-American writer as opposed to a writer who was African-American.”) It’s not so much that I’m trying to chronicle the shifts in what might be called “identity politics,” but that I’m compelled by the seemingly bold act of a woman simply projecting herself into the authority of “the writer” (male) and simultaneously effacing that same self—while thinking of the whole project as an exercise in self-exposure. It seems like a complicated sequence of ballet steps or maybe a room of mirrors.

And the question of Sontag’s sexuality (“Being queer makes me feel more vulnerable”) certainly kept my attention, along with the juicy passages about the women who do her wrong, the sex that is good, and the sex that is bad. And this: “Sex is not a project (unlike writing a book, making a career, raising a child)…. It is not an accumulation.” Which, in turn, makes me think of Sybille Bedford’s excellent line on such matters: “Sex is not a noun like coffee.”

Throughout the whole thing David Rieff’s clear-eyed and tender introduction stayed with me. He is very direct about his own ambivalence about publishing his mother’s journals: “One of the principal dilemmas of all this has been that, at least in her later life, my mother was not in any way a self-revealing person.” (Was she, in the end, the kind of writer who did not expose himself?) There is, too, the strange and somewhat uncomfortable circle that emerges when the outside reader thinks about the son reading the mother’s entries about the son:

I hardly ever dream of David, and don’t think of him much. He has made few inroads on my fantasy-life. When I am with him I adore him completely and without ambivalence. When I go away, as long as I know he’s well taken-care-of, he dwindles very quickly. Of all the people I have loved, he’s least of all a mental object of love, most intensely real.

But what really stayed with me from Rieff’s preface was an echo. He writes:

When my mother was very young, she took a trip to Greece. There she saw a performance of Medea in an amphitheater in southern Peloponnesus. The experience moved her profoundly because as Medea is about to kill her children, a number of people in the audience started yelling, “No, don’t do it, Medea!” “These people had no sense of seeing a work of art,” she told me many times. “It was all real.”

These diaries are real, too. And reading them, I have very much the anxiety that I am responding as those Greek spectators in the mid-1950s did. I want to shout, “Don’t do it” or else “Don’t be so hard on yourself” or “Don’t think so well of yourself” or “Watch out for her, she doesn’t love you.” But of course I am too late: the play has already been performed and its protagonist gone, as are most though not all of the other characters as well.

Watch out for her, she doesn’t love you. That’s not the echo I keep hearing, but I liked Rieff’s warning so much, I wanted to repeat it. No, the echo I keep hearing is that of another child as spectator, Delmore Schwartz’s narrator in “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” who, through his tears, watches the motion picture of his parents’ courtship unspooling before him:

…and it was then that I stood up in the theatre and shouted: Don’t do it. It’s not too late to change your minds, both of you.

For more on the Sontag’s journals see Craig Seligman’s “Sapphic Signals” in Bookforum and Deborah Eisenberg’s “Becoming Susan Sontag” in the New York Review of Books.

Actually my make-up was wind-swept and tear-stained already after being WHIPPED FROM PILLAR TO POST (OMG -What do you think that aphorism is referencing?) by that asshole Jack Frost when I was walking home from my shrink appointment, but DON’T EXPECT COMPLETE TRUTH in this blog and if you’ve got a problem with run-on sentences SCRAM while you have the chance because I may be a big fan of Joan Didion but I AIN’T HER. Got it?

Update: The blog has migrated to justinbond.com.

In her very first stage appearance Doris Day wet herself. It was in her hometown of Cincinnati in 1927. She was five years old and not yet Doris Day. She was still Doris Kappelhoff and the red satin pants that her mother, Alma, had sewn for the kindergarten pageant were quick to betray her.

The rest of my essay, “Miss Lachrymose,” is in this week’s issue of the London Review of Books. (It seems the Globe is intrigued by the reclusive star as well.) You’ll need a subscription to read the whole thing, and you should get one because this issue also features a wonderful piece by Caleb Crain about the nineteenth-century novelist William Wilkie Collins who “grew up to flout English propriety by relishing sauces, wearing bright colors, living in sin, and asking nearly everyone to address him by his middle name.”

Also, to see Doris Day’s shockingly somber rendition of “I’ll Never Stop Loving You,” click here.