Watched 2046 yesterday. (http://www.sonyclassics.com/2046/ ) The movie theater was a cool dark place to hide out of the scalding sun.
Such a sad film, stylishly beautiful, at once claustrophobic and Hopper-esque in its isolation. It was a piece about the wound that cannot be healed, a topic I’ve been dealing with for some time. About the secrets of one’s past that prevent from accepting anything of substance, after that initial loss of something so worthy. A slow demise of hearts pointlessly disconnected because of the supreme inability to love anyone but that first secret someone. Most depressingly, but honestly, it painted out in beautiful colors and shapes the incredible repetition of error in the ones who choose to continue with their secrets, and the rippling effect on everyone touched by that sad falseness.
There was a style of 60s fashion that I think was fantasy rather than anything we ever had, but it was amazing. It glimmered. And there was beauty galore in every kind of woman. The docile romantic writer, the hard-hearted hellkitten, the demure black spider, the innocent and rash child, the calculating dragonlady, the spent and demolished alcoholic. A dark, dark afternoon I spent in it all, like the dank smell of walking into an old ripe barroom.
After all this weight of sadness, I had had but one relief note of lightheartedness.
Outside in the lobby were four small old Asian ladies — perhaps in their late fifties, perhaps 60s. They’d arrived before anyone else, eager to see all those famous lady stars. They had bubble-coifed hair and open toed shoes with errantly shaped, possibly painful toes hanging out (an early life of those beautiful pointed shoes shown in the movie must have done it to them, I thought). They had sweater vests and too much makeup and looked so much more like effort than beauty, but they were happy together, having a day out with the girls.
They were chatting away together, in English — perhaps they were all from that generation that had learned to speak only English to fit in socially in a tight 1950s America. Then they really surprised me. In the lobby, they walked up to an easel with a huge posterboard of Margaret Cho — one of my favorite people on the planet but also one of the most radical ones left on it. Margaret supports gay marriage, among other topics that set flame wars ablaze on the net and in her life. I wondered what they would say, seeing her in Che Guevara revolutionary beret and gunbelt in an only slightly comic powerstance. I wondered if they would not know of her? Find something disparaging to say? Think her sleazy humour was a disgrace to Korean culture? Instead, one leaned in close to read some of the script beneath it.
“Look at Margaret!,” she said. “How much weight she’s lost! She looks great!” Another of them chimed in, “I just love when she does her mother, it’s so funny…. ”
Well that just proved one of my earlier points with Asian moms. Lose weight and you’ve got the world at your feet.
But it pays even better to be funny. And it pays best of all to know who you are in this world, and love wholeheartedly like you know who you are, such that everyone knows exactly who you are, regardless of your secrets. And when they love you, you know it’s real.
Entries (RSS)