Our splendid son-in-law Zvi Ben-Dor came down from New York to check up on me, to visit Joan in the rehabilitation center, and, no doubt, to report on his findings to his wife, our daughter, who is now in Paris, having flown there after a couple of days in Athens. I thought she was in Los Angeles, but no matter. Zvi is an erudite and eminent historian at NYU. One part of his cultural profile is particularly attractive to me. He is a real movie lover—not just a lover of the cinema, but a lover of seeing new releases, and in general knowing what is going on cinema-wise. So he took me to the movies on Sunday night, at a gargantuan multiplex place on Route One.
The movie, the plot of which I grasped only intermittently and with no final certainty, was at least a third too long; and the whole was a mélange of comedy of (rustic) manners and cowboy Grand Guignol. Its title is Eddington. The film starts out quite slowly and ends—or at least approaches its end--in the godmother of all shootouts (Two Shooters Division). You cannot fault the film for lack of ambition. I think it is trying to crystallize the several crazinesses of the 2020 Covid pandemic, many of which are monsters of the mind as opposed to definite medical pathologies. Eddington is a small place where no cases of Covid have ever appeared but where the imprecise threat of an ever-impending danger has poisoned most minds.
The imaginary village of Eddington, N.M., seems to have a population of about five hundred, around a thousand of whom are woke ‘teen-agers. This fact caused me some confusion at first, but you have to go with the flow. The movie’s plot almost demands a vox populi or Greek chorus, and the ‘teen-agers seem to serve the purpose. In my limited experience it is very difficult to capture in art a convincing picture of protesting crowds, because crowds of fake protestors tend to protest too much. I recently rewatched Doctor Zhivago, in my opinion a nearly perfect cinematic work, and even its protest march seemed formulaic and a bit off. I am a quasi-expert on student demonstrations, and in no real demonstration I have ever seen has absolutely every potential demonstrator been shaking a sign, hopping up and down in rage, frothing at the mouth, and so on. Quite a few are more subdued, and some even rather tentative, sort of waiting to see how things go. They want to be able to say they were there but are more tentative about actually being there in the moment. But I suppose that if you have been hired as an extra, you may feel that earning your pay requires more than just showing up. What it requires is non-stop shouting and menacing body gestures.
I found a special interest in the film’s setting. My Dad grew up in Tucumcari, in eastern New Mexico, in the 1920s. He claimed that the New Mexico state motto—Land of Enchantment—was the most accurate in the forty-eight states. But of course middle age is ever likely to romanticize the geography of its youth. That I know well myself. But there is something about the desert that is always awesome, and the thought that men and women have lived there for centuries, whether in honeycombed cliff-faces or small, flat villages with nothing but a telegraph pole between them and the unrelenting sun or the Arctic winds is perplexing.
The episode of the cinema threatened to end in tragi-comedy. The cinema house is in a shopping mall on Route 1, and coming out of it we turned the wrong direction into the vast parking lot flanking it in both directions. Though approaching ten p.m., the lot was crammed with cars. We searched fruitlessly, incipient panic stirring at least in my throat, for about fifteen minutes before realizing that we must be looking in the wrong place. A nice woman accompanied by three ‘teen-aged offspring came to our rescue. She thought there was something odd about a geezer with a cane stumbling around a dark parking lot. I was in so flustered a state I could scarce remember the make of car we were searching for, but it came to me eventually. She pointed out the faint possibility that we had been looking on the wrong side of the building. So we had! Since then, thinking over the situation, I have been able to find some semi-plausible correspondences between our situation and that of the sadsack rural sheriff played by Joaquin Phoenix. That is more likely to be the result of my fancy than my acuteness of perception.
Zvi promises to do a return trip at the end of the coming week. That is a real bonus, especially as he says that the cinema offerings will be better here at that time. Or maybe he said even better. Zvi is of Iraqi ancestry and of formerly Israeli nationality. Perhaps his Cinemania flows from one of those sources.
I never intended to use this blog as a medium for regular reports on Joan’s health progress, but it actually has proved remarkably effective for that purpose. I would say: so far, slow, perhaps even nearly imperceptible improvement. Readers can demonstrate their charity by investing their own silent faith or hope. Then we have the full Pauline trifecta!
