Natalie Wood: Butterfly with Damaged Wings

 

There was often 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.

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 of nowhere: they say that a butterfly can still float beautifully with damaged wings. How is that possible?

Sharon Tate: How to Enter the Mystic

She appears delicate. Her skin, almost translucent. Feminine and maternal. There is an innocence in the deep-set eyes, watchful but wistful, perhaps a playful turn of the lips. We uncover a realism in her persona that makes her noticed. Uncommon. She is unexpectedly nervous.

Her films are forgettable. She needed more time. But her future, and motherhood, ended in a slash of violence decreed by a mentally ill man, trying to raise awareness for his demons.

Her name endures with the crime of her demise. Or does it? There’s more. Others have met terrible exits. Somehow, she’s the fleeting nymph under a diamond sky, dancing unchained from Time. Somehow the crypt has no purchase. It makes little sense. But immortality has nothing to do with material gain. Unveiling that ruse is the first step to entering the mystic.

Perhaps her soul was more powerful than others, far from madding Manson and the broken Polanski. There is no conclusion to her tale. Her film will never read ‘The End’. She always leaves the frame before forfeiting her freedom.

Perhaps people like Sharon Tate hold furtive, flickering candles, wayward ghosts who light the way out of forgotten caverns.

Past is prologue, and prologue just may be that wind-swept bikini-clad woman on a blue-sky Malibu beach, out of touch but never out of reach, leaving no footprints as the pounding white surf pulls her far down the coastline.

 

#sharontate #charlesmanson #romanpolanski #film #hollywood #tarantino #beachboys #crime

Ian Fleming: Master of the Sex/Death Ratio

 

Author Ian Fleming (1908-64) lived with the insouciance and bad behaviour reserved for those who have resigned themselves to an early death. Menefreghismo is an Italian noun which connotes one’s approach to life; it translates– roughly – as ‘don’t give a shit’. It’s hard to discern what held Fleming’s interest, but he certainly lived with a free form, unbridled, if not erotic, passion that seems awkward to a modern sensibility.

And that’s where James Bond comes in. Menefreghismo.

Ursula Andress & the ratio

Although about one half of the Bond novels were published in the 1960s, their genealogical roots are embedded in 50’s, and even earlier. That’s why a female character can be named ‘Pussy Galore’. Not a big deal at the time.

And that’s why James Bond, in books and films, was successful. Fleming knew how to balance the critical sex/death ratio like few authors before—or since. He was so good at it—and it is the ratio that gives the early films their life. When, later, the ratio became unstable, so began the era of Bad Bonds.

The ratio is based on the notion that the proximity of death heightens sexual tension—and, importantly, vice-versa. That’s one reason why you will never see a child in a Bond film—for a child is the strongest representation of Life we have. It just messes with the balance.

The ratio is based on post-WW II notions of masculinity and femininity. Small wonder Fleming was among John F. Kennedy's favorite authors. Times change. JB (James Bond) got the JB (Jason Bourne) reboot in Casino Royale (2006). Now it was mostly about hand-to-hand fighting, lightning cuts, and constant close-ups. However, the ratio did appear, however warily, when needed.

Ian Fleming died as he lived, fully aware that the ratio was unlivable. But longevity was never the point for Fleming, or Bond. It was to greet Death at his own door, look in his eyes, and say, ‘Your move’.

 

#ianfleming #jamesbond #ursulaandress #drno #diamondsareforever #danielcraig #seanconnery #1960s #popculture #popularculture #film #casinoroyale

Kubrick’s Killer Decade

The Kubrick glare

When you watch a Stanley Kubrick film, it’s often easy to discern an active intelligence at work – a variation on what Hemingway called the iceberg theory: there’s something going on that can felt but not seen or heard. It’s in the lighting, the framing, the timing, the editing – it’s everywhere. But with few exceptions, Kubrick is heavy.   

From about 1960 to 1970, film director Stanley Kubrick could do no wrong. He fed off the sixties zeitgeist with vampiric cunning—intellectual, cynic, craftsman, always detached, always so mindful of the light.

His best films are about death—or seen through a different lens—about life’s absurdity. He didn’t create heroes or happy endings. His films are scripted thesis.< Does thought drive emotion, or vice-versa?> Stanley’s films are top-heavy with thought—but unlike the grumpy Jean-Luc Godard, who enjoyed his salad days at about the same time, Kubrick never hits you on the head with a book.

"How you doing HAL?"

If you’re looking for the key to Stan’s mind, you might find it at the bottom of a magician’s trunk, or hidden under a chess board. The general sterility of his sets tricks you into believing ‘here’s a serious artist’ , but it is indeed a trick. Above all else, he is a humanist, and like others of his ilk, wasn’t too crazy about humans, at least their bodies.

So—similar to Hitchcock, actors never did that well in his films. Only two or three performances stand out. It’s no coincidence that his most memorable character is a computer.

Here’s killer Kubrick:

- Lolita (1962)
- Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
- 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
- A Clockwork Orange (1971)

After ‘Clockwork’, one got the feeling that Kubrick wasn’t making the films that he wanted to – he was just keeping the wheels in motion with goofy stuff like ‘Barry Lyndon’ and ‘The Shining’. His final film, ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ is disturbing, given that the same talent once gave us ‘2001’.

The Composer & Composition

Today, Kubrick enjoys legions of diehard fans that have sanctified every frame of his opus. He was the kind of guy who could inspire such devotion. Only an artist who tells the Truth, his own Big Truth in his own Time, ever reaches that rarified stratum where angels dispense the mixed blessing of immortality.

And what is Kubrick's Big Truth? It's plays on the other side of the screen.