Natalie Wood: Butterfly with Damaged Wings

 

Let's watch the movie. There is something tentative about her. Not fearful, but uncertain. Playful becomes despondent but then, in a flash, charming. You can feel it in her eyes—those dark eyes that roll emotions so effortlessly, two upturned screens of pain and pleasure.

She ignored her beauty in a way that made her more beautiful, just stroking her hair in place, seemingly confident and caring, yet hesitant, those dark eyes sweeping the room, looking for a way to laugh, to escape. Sometimes a feminine tomboy, then bored of herself, now twirling a dress, a rebel with a cause. But there she is, a million images of her captured at 24 frames a second with James Dean and Steve McQueen and Bob, Ted and Alice.

With a wavering hand, she holds out an invitation to you, then snaps it back, suddenly afraid and confused. You’re just another stranger who wants… who desires...

Consider her mother, Maria Zakharenko: During a film, when 8-year-old Natalie couldn't cry on cue, her mother ripped off a butterfly’s wings to provoke tears. (As an adult, Natalie often wore a butterfly necklace). A 16-year-old Wood was raped by a Hollywood star while her mother waited in a car outside, subsequently telling her to "suck it up". Her mother, O her mother…

There is psychoanalysis, seven days a week, for more than eight years, even stipulating in her film contracts time to attend sessions. The aesthetics of damage.

Terrified of open water, she succumbs. Santa Catalina Island, hugging the California coastline with the endless Pacific rolling behind. In darkness, she drifts beneath and above, not alone for the Garibaldi fish keep close, wrapping her warm in a long, gold winding sheet.

"At night,” she once said, “when the sky is full of stars and the sea is still you get the wonderful sensation that you are floating in space."

As you leave the movie theatre, a thought occurs, out out of nowhere: they say that a butterfly can still float beautifully with damaged wings.

Peter Fonda: You Can Ride but You Can’t Hide

 

It’s impossible to imagine anyone else in the role. Captain America of 1969. Easy Rider— (the original title? - ‘The Loners’. Not the same vibe. Not at all.)

And there’s Peter Fonda, tall, slim, taciturn, burdened, already laboring under the weight of precognition: he sees his fate, as he does that of his buddy, Billy (Dennis Hopper). And he gleans, throughout their motorcycle voyage, the fate of his generation. You can ride but you can’t hide.

It is this pervading doom—in a biker movie of all places—that becalms Fonda’s performance, raising it to perfection. He need not have made another film, so discreetly did he meld his own being to a narrative. The planes of his face, the wind-swept hair, the billowing, floral-print pullover, it all made sense. This is a complete person. Here, inside this film, forever, is where he belongs.

Easy Rider, even with its twangy rock/folk soundtrack and intimations of freedom, cannot dispel an irony of optimistic malaise.

So there he goes, riding for a lost generation of drugs and war and music, all swirling up in acid-drenched sunshine dreams, or riding a moonlit undiscovered highway, you know the one that takes you far, far beyond the vanishing point.

 

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